Outside the Tivoli Center in Denver on that warm October evening, police cars cruised the area, their windows down, and their radios on. Because of Dean's bust-up with Peter Boyle on the radio and the press it got, there were plenty of cops. Dixie passed the time waiting for Dean by eavesdropping on a couple of police car radios.
Dixie could read police code. She had been to the Miami Convention in 1972 with her husband, who was some kind of player on the Nixon side and had FBI protection. For the hell of it an FBI guy taught Dixie to read the codes.
Half in the shadow, Dixie watched people going in to the show. She let her mind wander on the subject of Dean, recalling there had only been a few guys like him when she was little, real cowboy types. She remembered how Doug Dana once gave her a 1955 Wheat Ridge Annual. It had a picture of Dean in the play Pistol Pete, serenading the girls. The last time she had seen Dean was in 1963, when he attended a Wheat Ridge High reunion. He had been to Hollywood by then and all the kids were really excited.
In between, for more than twenty years, she had kept a scrapbook on him, waiting for him. She thought it was something anyone would do if one of their classmates got to be so famous.
And then, suddenly, right there in Denver at the Tivoli Center she saw him. Bounding out of a car, Dean strode up the steps of the Tivoli Center. Without thinking, Dixie darted out from the shadow into the light.
"Hi, I'm Dixie," she said.
Dean seemed a little nonplussed.
And then he smiled and exclaimed, "Little Dixie! Of course, I remember. Ja," Dean said effusively.
It was weird how he had that little German accent, Dixie thought. It was kind of nice. Dean introduced Dixie to his mother, Mrs. Brown, who had come into town for the film festival. Mrs. Brown didn't seem to remember Dixie, but Dean had had lots of friends as a kid. She greeted Dixie with a smile.
Now, in the lobby of the Brown Palace, Dixie whispered to me, "A lot of people want to harm Dean, you know. But I think I can trust you. Would you like to see where Deano grew up?"
I said yes I wanted to see where Dean had grown up. His mother, Ruth Anna Brown, had told me a lot about his childhood when I'd met her in Hawaii, and I'd seen pictures, but I had not actually seen his boyhood home.
Dixie's friend Greg peeled away to go and sell some real estate; Dixie led Leslie and me out to her pick-up truck, where she told us that she kept a gun in the glove compartment. I made Leslie sit in the middle, next to her.
Dixie drove us to Wheat Ridge, which was now pretty much a suburb of Denver; just off the exit from the freeway, a sign read: WELCOME TO WHEAT RIDGE, COLORADO, CARNATION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. POP. 28,270.
When Dixie and Dean had been kids, Wheat Ridge, like the other small towns at the foot of the mountains, was a rural village where a lot of people still kept horses. Dean sometimes even went courting girls on horseback. Sometimes, Dean galloped over the empty fields to where Dixie waited for him behind her house. She was just a kid, still in pigtails, but she was kind of in love with Dean, the handsome older boy, and he was nice to her in a brotherly way. "Little Dixie," he called her when they rode horseback together.
"Everyone had a horse around here, even me," Dixie said. "And I was raised poor as dirt. Deano thought he was poor. But I was the poor one," she said, as if they had engaged in a "poor" competition.
The anger rose and died away in her. I tried not to look at the glove compartment where the gun was. Leslie listened to Dixie attentively.
What really rankled with Dixie was how, when Dean went to Hollywood, she could not buy his records because her mother was very strict and didn't want her to have any spending money. Her best friend, Karen, could buy Dean's records and that hurt worst of all. Dixie's mother did not approve of Dixie, never did, but her dad was always proud of her and they had had some neat times together when she was growing up. He loved goofy gifts and she always bought him a toy at Christmas, but her father was dead now and all Dixie had was the little house in Wheat Ridge.
"What about Dean's dad?"
"He was something else," she said. "He never got over Dean being a Communist. Cyril taught at the local high school and was a big womanizer. Ruth Anna Brown was one of his students. When Ruth Anna divorced Cyril, Deano was shattered. In those days, people didn't get divorced, you know?"
We drove around Wheat Ridge. Most of the shops had moved out to the big malls and it was only a shabby suburb now. Vacancy signs hung outside the Blue Swan and the Humpty Dumpty Motels. On the roof of Verne's Cocktails, a pink neon martini with an olive in it flickered, or maybe it was a Manhattan with a cherry. Across the street was a plain white church.
"I don't think there was much church-going in Wheat Ridge," Dixie said. Dean's people were not church-goers," she added, although she herself was raised a Catholic. She took a small breath now, and slowed the truck down. She pointed at a two-story bungalo with a front porch and a tidy front yard with a low long shed behind it made of chicken-colored cinder blocks.
"That's where Dean's mom kept her chickens," Dixie said and I stopped the truck.
For a while we sat in the truck outside Dean's house.
Leslie said to Dixie, "What was Dean like in high school?"
"He was very naive in some ways. He was terribly shy with girls. When he went to Hollywood, he was still a virgin. I mean, everybody did it back then," she said. "My homecoming queen in high school was pregnant. Everybody was pregnant."
"Was Dean very political?" Leslie asked.
"Dean was not particularly political in high school, but he was a gung-ho kid. He did track, hence the race against the mule. He was a gymnast and a swimmer. He did it like he did everything. He was a track alcoholic, a music alcoholic, whatever he did, he did with maximum commitment. When I met him later, there were two Deans, the public man and the private one, and he was definitely a political alcoholic."
Then Dixie found a pack of cigarettes in her bag and lit one and took another little breath. She told us how after the showing of American Rebel at the Tivoli Center the night she met him, Dean had invited Dixie back to visit with him at the Westin Hotel. She thought it was so unique that Dean would be her friend, she said. He was the same slim cowboy she had known as a child. He spent the evening with her and sang her three songs so gently. In public he told the same three stories over and over, as if he'd memorized them, but, alone with her, he opened up. When he told her he wanted to think about coming home, he cried.
Cautiously, Leslie shifted the conversation towards Dean's death. Dixie grew wary. It was getting dark. I thought about the gun again. Leslie edged towards me and away from Dixie, pretending to reach over for a pair of gloves he had left on the dashboard. From somewhere police sirens wailed. Alongside the entrance to the freeway was a tangled mess of steel that had once been a car.
The pick-up skidded and Dixie drove badly, as if talking about Dean had drained her and she could no longer concentrate. She announced that she was taking us back to her place, and then she missed the exit that she must have taken every day. Her face glowed in the reflection from the headlights of oncoming cars. My stomach turned over.
"There are so many things I could tell you," she whispered, veering out of lane. "I know I can trust you. I think I can trust you. Can I?"
I nodded in what I hoped was a trustworthy fashion and Dixie smoked a second cigarette and told us she had given money to the Sandinistas because Dean told her it was a righteous thing to do. She let slip that she felt Fidel Castro was the devil incarnate. Her politics seemed to me a kind of American libertarianism that existed where liberalism flipped backwards to meet the right. Colorado had its own peculiar mix of laissez-faire libertarian and far-right zealots.