"My daughter wants to become a singer," Dean told Dixie.
Dixie said she was thinking about his career in America. The conversation had the dreamy quality of two people dawdling down different paths, but hoping to meet up.
"Nothing much is happening," said Dean. "It's not as nice as Colorado. The smog is terrible," he said and added that in California he was down in the dumps.
They talked about the movie Dean was planning to make when he went back to East Germany. Bloody Heart was to be the story of the siege of Wounded Knee, the Indian rebellion that took place in 1973 in South Dakota. Already Dixie had been on the road looking for props that he would need and had found a vintage Marlboro sign and some Indian artifacts.
She said, "I went to South Dakota, smart Aleck. But I didn't know what to take. So I went to Wounded Knee and I went to Pine Ridge and I went to Martin and talked to a kid who didn't know his belly button from lint, and then I came home." She laughed happily at his astonished delight over her trip across South Dakota.
"I would love to spend the night with you tonight," Dean said suddenly.
"If I thought that was true I'd trip over my own two feet," Dixie said.
"I'll be leaving on Monday to go to Minneapolis. I'm not having as good a time as I did in Colorado," he said again, flirting with Dixie, obviously wanting her to say she'd come on to meet him, without having to ask. Finally, he said, "Would you fly out and spend some time with me in Ohio?"
She said she would come to Minneapolis.
Dean went on tour across America with American Rebel, the documentary that had played the Denver film festival. In Minnesota, Dixie met him. It was there they agreed that she could be his only manager instead of some Hollywood guy and help pave the way for his triumphal return to America.
Dean wrote to Dixie while he was sitting at John F. Kennedy Airport waiting for his plane back to Europe. He said he wanted to write to her of his thoughts and emotions and how he felt after spending more time in his homeland than he had for a quarter of a century.
"The trip was the happiest I've ever made to America. I've seen my blue skies again and my battery was recharged." He wrote of how he had seen the mountains and the faces of so many people, and of how he had visited Denver, Los Angeles, and New York. He talked of how all people must have a peaceful future and how he would work towards making it so. He said he felt he would return to his own country and do what he had done in thirty-two other countries.
He vowed to make Bloody Heart an inspirational movie and said he would be back soon. He signed the letter "Dean." Dixie sent him a bumper sticker that read: YOU CAN'T HUG CHILDREN WITH NUCLEAR ARMS.
Dixie tried to call Dean at JFK the afternoon he left. She was afraid of losing track of him. She wanted to beg him to know that not all Americans were Peter Boyle. But she couldn't reach him.
After that, Dixie spent a lot of time with some friends trying to reach a righteous decision about how to help Dean. The afternoon she received his first letter, she was so relieved she cried for six hours.
"I am very happy to be part of your Colorado world and eager to make Colorado another home for you, again!" Dixie wrote to Dean, adding if she ever spoke out of turn or if she stepped on his toes, so to speak, or Renate's or Sasha's, he was to tell her plain.
By the second half of November Dean was back in Germany, and, in the weeks and months that followed, Dixie called and wrote frequently and he responded eagerly.
Often, Dixie's letters ran to six or eight pages, single-spaced. In January of 1986 Dixie wrote to Dean seventeen times. He was astonished and delighted. All the letters were about him.
Almost as soon as Dean left Colorado, Dixie went to work as his Colonel Parker, paving the way for his return. She setup a fan club and had nifty membership certificates printed; Mrs. Brown was made an honorary member and so was Renate; Dixie got bumper stickers printed that read: SO WHO'S DEAN REED?
She wrote to classmates at Wheat Ridge High; she called record companies and checked out which early songs of Dean's had been hits; she commissioned record finders to locate copies of Dean's old records, including one titled "Cannibal Twist"; she drove across the Southwest, looking for props for Dean's movie; she had a lengthy correspondence with the South Dakota police department on the pretext that she was a schoolteacher whose class was interested in such things, and so obtained pictures of South Dakota police uniforms, badges, and cars.
Along with her letters, Dixie sent Dean packages. One contained postcards showing the Denver Mint and panoramic views of Denver. She shipped the movie props via Czechoslovakia, to the DEFA Film Studios in Potsdam. She sent him turquoise jewelry she had purchased in Santa Fe and a denim jacket from Johnny.
Dixie wrote out shipping lists very carefully; in one case at least she painstakingly translated it into German. This list included three music videotapes, one red bandanna, three copper medallions, twelve boy scout pins, one pack Skoal (chewing tobacco), one plastic ring, one 1986 calendar, one empty milk carton from the Wheat Ridge dairy (where Dixie and Dean had worked after school as kids) for a joke, one box of liquorice for Renate (just for fun). For St. Valentine's Day, she sent a cubic-zirconium heart-shaped pendant for Renate.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her progress and how she had picked up material on music videos, their production costs, and even directors in the Denver area; she boned up on music copyright laws and ordered both the Songwriters Market book and a Nashville yellow-page telephone directory.
Her letters were full of good advice and jokes; she was coy, cute, smart, flirtatious, and sassy. She chided and chastised Dean and instructed him to be good to himself. When he was feeling down, he was to look in the mirror and say "I love me." She was bossy, sweet, provocative, spirited, determined, and greedy, but only for love. The letters included sly asides and little drawings - moon faces of herself, smiling or pensive. There was such longing in all of them, and poetry, and the sense that she was blossoming, that her world was enlarged, embellished, and lit up by Dean Reed.
Dixie wrote to Dean of her feelings for Colorado: "the inky blue darkness of the star bedecked night" and "the light blue cloudless sky of morning"; of a delicious Mexican meal she had eaten; of her snowmobile, which was a delight. She tempted him with the pleasures of an American life and wished him "beautiful blue-sky days." She said she hoped Renate would "like our weather, our little towns and big towns, our massive shopping centers filled with people who are rude, kind, happy, sad, little, big, young, and old! In her own way, Dixie was a poet of the banal.
"In case you haven't figured it out, getting a letter from you, or a card, is better than home-made chocolate cake," she wrote to Dean. She wrote that she had even begun German classes and she signed one of her letters "Chow" because it was a word Dean often used. She asked him what it meant.
He wrote back, "It's an international word in Italian for hello and goodbye" and she wrote that that was "neat" and she was relieved to know what it meant because she couldn't find it in her German dictionary.
Dean said her letters were "jewels" and exclaimed on how many she had written. He complimented her on her humor. "I tried to translate some of your jokes for Renate, but it is difficult to translate jokes - that is my problem living in Germany... Humor must be in the native tongue. Ja?'