They tangled about clothes.
Wiebke said, "He wore those cowboy clothes. He had a red jacket. 'He looks just like a trained monkey,' my first husband would say."
They also fought about his music.
"Once, when Dean was practicing, I said, 'I've heard that song thirty times, I'm going into the garden.' Dean became hysterical. He said, 'Patty used to love to hear it a hundred times.' I said, 'Good for Patty. I'm not Patty,'" she said. "But I think he knew his limits," Wiebke added. "He would put on Frank Sinatra and he would say, 'I wish I could do that.'"
Wiebke looked at her box of pictures and documents and in it were bundles of letters tied together with ribbons. She took out a letter that was marked "To be opened in the event of my death."
The letter, written before a trip to the Middle East, described the necessity of his visit to the Third World. It was what a man had to do, said Dean. You could not ask others to put themselves on the line if you did not do the same thing.
"As soon as things were going bad in his personal life, he got on a plane and headed for some revolution. He would go somewhere really stupid and dangerous. He played a kind of Russian roulette," said Wiebke.
In another letter Wiebke showed us, Dean talked of the reconciliation with his father that had occuned when he went home to America in 1978. They had gone fishing together.
"I really feel I have his love and respect now, and that he now loves me more than Vern or Dale, but he never told it to me," Dean wrote.
"Getting his father's attention was the most important thing in Dean's life," Wiebke said, echoing what Dean's mother had told me. "He thought his father was very brave to commit suicide.
Dean saw the movie Whose Life Is It Anyway? He said 'a man has a right to end his life.'" And then it ended. Dean and Wiebke split.
It was a startling change of gear. And Dean told Wiebke he was bringing a red-haired stewardess home to Schmockwitz and would Wiebke please beat it. It was 1978, and Natasha was still a baby.
"Was Renate already in the picture?" I asked.
"He knew Renate. He knew her from the time he came to East Germany," Wiebke said. "There were many women. He used to come here and say, 'Can't you teach these girlfriends of mine to cook?' He had a different girl every weekend to cook, but he liked my goulash."
Wiebke was put out that Dean didn't even bother to help her find a place to live. He had powerful friends on the Central Committee, but he did nothing. He didn't bother with Natasha. When he married Renate and adopted her son, Sasha, he bought him videos of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. For Natasha he bought junk.
"Couldn't he buy Natasha a Donald Duck, too?" Wiebke asked, and added, "Renate could never have a child by Dean. After we had Natasha, he had a vasectomy!"
Wiebke looked over at Natasha who was still on the sofa and had not said a word.
"Would you like to play something for us, darling?" Wiebke asked her little girl. Natasha went to the piano and began. Then she got up abruptly and ran out of the room and Wiebke's mood changed.
"Shall I play for you the song Dean and I made together?" Wiebke asked.
They had gone to Prague together to record it. Dean recorded most of his albums in Prague. Wiebke turned on the record player. The song was called "Together," and it had a spoken interlude.
"Tell me you love me," Dean whispered.
"I love you," Wiebke said.
"Tell me you need me."
"I need you," Wiebke said.
"Tell me you respect me," Dean cooed.
"I respect you."
In spite of Wiebke's feisty style in person, the song was very sentimental, all deeply felt; she had gone all the way to Prague to whisper that she respected Dean on the mushiest of all the tracks he ever put down on wax.
"He didn't even make a special effort to get our song special plays on the radio," Wiebke said.
13
"I'm convinced it was suicide," said Victor Grossman in his flat near the Karl Marx-Allee in East Berlin. The flat was in a postwar apartment building, where, like scabs, the tiny beige tiles had peeled off the facade. Grossman's flat itself was full of books, and there was a yellow plastic shopping bag from Tower Records. Perhaps someone had brought him a present.
The suicide scenario surprised me; it had been mentioned before, but only casually. In East Berlin, Grossman had been close to Dean Reed.
We had had trouble getting to Renate, Dean Reed's widow, and Renate was the key. Leslie Woodhead and I went to see Victor Grossman, who knew her. He agreed to contact Renate. As soon as we arrived, he had called her and now we talked and waited for the telephone to ring.
Good-natured, shrewd, maybe a little vain, Victor had first met Dean at the same documentary film festival in Leipzig where Wiebke met him.
"I was called and asked to help interpret for an American rock and roll singer. It wasn't my sort of thing, but I agreed," said Victor, who was a folk music man himself.
"He was a big surprise for me," said Victor. "I really had never known a rock and roll type, a Colorado cowboy singer, to be an avid leftist. But that's what he was. And we got along very well. It was very unusual for me. And, of course, it was probably interesting for him, too, to meet an American here in East Berlin. We spoke the same language in many ways, and became good friends."
He paused, removed his glasses, and put them back on. "Dean was a star from the moment he arrived. Girls here fall for anything Western. The Golden West, they called it," said Victor. "One girl bragged her Italian lover gave her one hundred lire. She thought that one hundred was a lot of money."
Victor Grossman, in his sixties, wore a plaid shirt and sandals. He was enormously hospitable, but slightly fretful that day we first met. He had not yet booked his summer holiday. If you missed the final booking date, your holiday was kaput, even if there were still vacancies. Victor intended to visit Soviet Georgia with his wife.
In Victor's flat, which he shared with his wife - the kids were grown up with children of their own - back issues of Mother Jones and Rolling Stone were piled knee-high. Galleys of Veil, Bob Woodward's book about the CIA, were sprawled out on a large work table that held a computer. Dictionaries in Russian, German, and English were stacked beside it.
Victor disappeared into the tiny kitchen that was behind a curtain strung on a metal rod.
"Have some cheesecake," he said reappearing, a large metal cake tin between his hands. Shoving aside a pile of manuscripts, he put the cake tenderly on the coffee table.
"Go on, please. My wife made it," Victor said generously.
I ate a lot of cake on the Dean Reed story, especially in East Berlin and Prague. Cake eating, as a ritual, seemed to feature as significantly in the German Democratic Republic as smoking Marlboros did in the Soviet Union, or Kents in Romania. As soon as you arrived - at Wiebke's, at Victor's - the coffeepot was filled and a cake was produced. Victor pushed a large knife into the tin and, getting some leverage on it, gently prized out huge slabs of cheesecake.
In the Seventies, when Dean was a superstar making movies in East Berlin, Victor was involved as his translator, and he could thicken up the story with anecdotal titbits: the ragged gypsy girl Dean befriended on location in Romania; his camaraderie with the stunt men (you got paid by the stunt in Eastern Europe, and Dean saw to it that everyone got an equal piece of the action); the horror of the directors when he insisted on doing his own stunts. In one case, even after he broke his wrist, Dean persisted in climbing a castle wall for a sequence in a film. He demanded that his stunts were filmed in a single shot so that it was clear that Dean himself was performing them. He often spoke of himself in the third person.