His letters were typed on a portable typewriter, and he noted his spelling was terrible, but blamed it on the fact that he spoke four languages. He enclosed the address of Mr. Oleg Harjardin, the President of the Soviet Peace Committee, because a friend of Dixie's had requested it.
They wrote about everything. Dean wrote about how his dog bit him, about the Sandinistas, and about his trips to Prague for recording sessions and to Moscow to negotiate money for Bloody Heart, his movie. He wrote Dixie when the Challenger space shuttle blew up in the winter of 1986 that he thought it was a bad omen.
Dean's letters to Dixie covered a lot of territory and revealed not only a man with an enormous appetite for work and for movement, but also a man who, in between the lines, was growing weary of it all. The letters careened between revelations of his philosophy of life, the determination to better the lot of all mankind, and the steely practicalities of the performing life: copyrights, arrangers, engineers, producers, contracts, deadlines.
As they wrote and called each other, in the letters and tapes, you could feel the intimacy build, as if they were locking into some fatal two-step to the exclusion of everyone else.
In the house by the lake in East Germany, Renate began to resent Dixie's barrage of phone calls, but she was always polite when she picked up the phone.
The calls and the letters continued on well into the winter of 1986. The manic reporting of every detail in their lives continued. Dean had begun to focus seriously on his return to America. There was also an ecstatic mention of the possibility of 60 Minutes. The biggest show on American television was interested in Dean! In his mind, Dean fixed his return to America for October, 1987, which was only a year and a half away and 60 Minutes would be terrific publicity.
His return, he said, would be based on the distribution of American Rebel, the documentary, and the release of his new LP in America, which he also intended to call American Rebel. In a letter to Dixie, he discoursed on the meaning of the word "rebel." Dixie looked it up in her Funk and Wagnall's Dictionary and also in her Reader's Digest Family Word Finder.
How to present himself to America, he wondered. There would be a personal tour; his film must be shown in the universities. He, Deano, would appear on television and radio talk shows; there would have to be an advance man to handle Deano's publicity .
He also discussed with Dixie the autobiography he intended to write; the old one was incomplete. Maybe Dixie would write it for him. Yes, why not, and perhaps they could get an advance from a publisher, although maybe that was too optimistic.
She pooh-poohed all that, and told him he should be nicer to himself. He would soon be rich, she kidded, which was just as well, because she might want a new Rolls-Royce in 1987.
He confided in Dixie his dream of founding a social democratic party in America. If there were 260,000,000 Americans and only two percent voted for him that would be considerable.
"My dedication in my life has been to use my fame and talent to fight against injustice wherever and whenever I found it," Dean wrote, then added, "I believe that there is a great commercial hole to be filled in the USA. There is a need for a new singer to fill the void which Pete Seeger used to fill."
Now Dixie had a real purpose. She called Mrs. Brown; she called Tillie Price; she talked to Phil Everly on the phone and Phil did not have the heart to tell her that she had no idea how to be a manager. As she toiled to put Dean back on the American map, she saw the pitfalls everywhere. But she had found a community.
Then relations in the community soured. There was bickering about who owned what bits of film archive in American Rebel. Mrs. Brown said she had given Will Roberts money to accompany Dean to Chile; Will Roberts said he had mortgaged his house to make the film. For Dean's biography, Dixie thought maybe she would write to Yasser Arafat for his thoughts on Dean because, "Wouldn't that fritz Johnny?" She was not happy working with Johnny.
To protect Dean (in case he hit it big), Johnny had had Dean sign a deal with him for residual rights. It would stop people making spin-offs, such as Dean Reed dolls, without Dean's approval. The contract ran until the end of 1988. Dixie didn't like it one bit. Dean said he made the deal because Johnny was "sick and didn't have much of a future," explaining how much it meant to John and Mona when he, Dean, came to visit and gave them his love and trust. Anyhow, Johnny had promised when the day came that Dean signed on with the William Morris Agency in Hollywood, he would tear up that contract right in front of Dean's eyes.
Dixie finally asked Dean to release her from her promise to work with Johnny. His views were on the hard right, she said.
Dean responded that "Johnny was a religious and conservative guy, who, if he did not love Dean, would never be a fan of his life." But Johnny did love Dean, Dean said, and Dean would not release Dixie from her promise. To cheer her up, he sent her Yasser Arafat's headscarf for a present.
Dean left Dixie no choice about Johnny, so she turned on Will Roberts and told Dean that she figured Will was no friend of Dean's and that Will was reluctant to part with his material. Dean wrote to Will that Dixie was his business partner now.
There were insinuations and suspicions, and the various factions took differing views of Dean's future in the United States; no one agreed. At one point Dixie took some friends up to Loveland to check Johnny and Mona were not agents of one kind or another.
"God, Dixie, can't you see we're just poor clods?" Johnny said.
All of them dissected every letter Dean sent, as semioticians might do; they taped his telephone calls, and sent the cassettes round in carefully made packages. They copied the video cassette of Dean's farewell concert in Johnny's basement. They put his bumper stickers on their cars.
In the way that Dean's American friends operated, it was a lot like an underground network in the East. There was the hope, the desperate desire for information, the coveting of news, the fear. Cassettes of Dean's songs were copied over and over, like the magnetizdat which Soviet kids had once made of rock music, passing them along, their amateur quality - where you could hear the laughter in the background - making them more potent. Videos were copied, too, until they were too grainy to look at.
Letters smuggled from one partisan to another were cherished, reread and reread. There were also the aspersions cast on those who seemed to have defected. There were the relationships degraded by desire and need. At one point along the Dean Reed trail, I heard from a musician who had known Dean in Moscow that someone - perhaps it was Mrs. Brown - had heard rumors that I was working for the CIA.
In Colorado, Dean's friends were not hicks. But they had no East Berlin. They could understand only that their friend had become a big star. By the time Dean came home in 1985, for different reasons - Johnny's bad back, Dixie's longings - they inhabited a world that was as flat as the yellow scrublands on the way up to Loveland from Denver. Dean's presence animated it, and they could not bear to let him go.
Their delight seduced him; he was homesick; he saw an opportunity to move on one more time and he was determined to take it because it meant going home.
In trying to solve the mystery of Dean's death, I made a kind of sodden progress and there were times I had the feeling that Dean had existed only in the desires of his friends and archivists. When I heard the stories and read the letters and listened to the taped phone calls, I felt I was hearing versions of what had become a kind of folk tale, passed on from one teller to another.