Dixie saw Dean's return to America in grandiose terms. It would be the return of a great star, of a prodigal son. Dean wrote that he did not want her to be disappointed, that there were people who would be afraid of him because of his politics, and who would not answer her calls or letters.
Buried in Dean's own letters though, was a hard, cold, little core of realism, a chilling premonition that none of it was going to happen. I think that all the way along, Dean knew the truth, but he was a patsy for hope.
The next time I saw Dixie, we had brunch at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. She had promised me more tapes.
She had tapes of all her telephone conversations with Dean, she said, right up until his death. Interesting tapes. Important tapes. She had them at home at Wheat Ridge, she said, then changed her mind and said they were up at her other house in Grand Junction, up in the mountains. It was her safe house.
She teased with promises of information, but it was not intended as a tease and her heart wasn't in it. She seemed frayed and worn with sorrow. Her memories of Dean seemed to detonate in her endlessly like tiny land mines.
In the huge dining room, large people cruised the food, slapping mounds of scrambled eggs on their plates along with dollops of corned beef hash, stacks of pancakes, and bacon and sausage. There was butter and syrup for the pancakes and heavy cream for the coffee.
Small in her chair, Dixie ate her breakfast, absorbed in some private despair.
"Dean was going to have trouble making it back here in the music business. It was all run by Jews. Deano didn't care what a person was, of course, he didn't care if a person was pink, white, black, green, purple."
I wanted the rest of her tapes very badly. I could feel my own desperation grow. I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted those tapes, but Dixie was off on another tangent.
Dean had money in a bank in West Berlin. Emergency money, she said.
"Can you check if there have been any withdrawals since Dean's death? If there haven't, I'll give you the tapes," she asked.
"I'm not sure I understand," I said.
Dixie said softly, "I've been getting strange phone calls. I think someone is speaking Spanish. I think the calls are coming from South America." She tried to drink some coffee, but her hand shook and she put the cup down. "I want to know if there have been any withdrawals recently because if there have it might prove something."
I said, "Prove what?"
Dixie looked expectantly at the door to the restaurant and said, "It will prove that Dean is still alive."
"Dick Cheese, Mr. Cheese."
The public address system at Stapleton Airport in Denver ran through a never-ending loop of names, "Dick Cheese. Mr. Cheese. Brett Falcon. Mr. Falcon. Margaret Bird. Ms. Bird. Wayne Sick. Mr. Sick," and so on, until it looped back and began all over again with Dick Cheese.
It was snowing again in Denver the morning after I saw Dixie, and the planes were delayed. Travelers wandered around the airport looking for something to do, or to buy, or to eat. The airport was huge and so were the people and a lot of them were stuffed into down coats and vests because it was the spring ski season. On their feet they wore huge plastic ski boots in pink and baby blue and they marched around stiff-legged, unable to bend their ankles. As they bought souvenirs and ate soft ice cream, they resembled vacationing families of Yeti with pastel feet.
Among the passengers were young couples, barely out of their teens, their own babies slung casually into backpacks. Returning home, setting off on a journey, they coped with ease. Their ancestors would have come West in covered wagons. Every one at the airport was big, handsome, and healthy, and they were all traveling, because moving on was the American thing to do.
"Dick Cheese."
I was glad to get on the plane back to New York.
20
It took me a long time to get a fix on 60 Minutes and how their story came about and the confusion about the origin of the story made people suspicious; some even suggested that somehow it had something to do with Dean's death.
When I met Bill McClure - a producer for 60 Minutes based in London - in his Knightsbridge office, he told me he hadn't much liked Dean Reed. McClure had lived in Berlin and he knew Europe well.
"A very big fish in a very small pond," McClure said. "Renate was a bona fide star, though." McClure's neck bulged over his collar; he loosened his tie and told me that the original idea had been to do a piece for 60 Minutes on a number of American defectors in Europe, including Dean and Victor Grossman.
McClure thought Dean was a hustler, an opportunist without political conviction, a self-aggrandizing old crooner, with an ego the size of the Berlin Wall.
"Dean Reed was a fake," he said. "And he was approaching fifty and he was frightened." McClure's dislike emanated from every pore.
His animosity, however, I discovered, was at least partly to do with Dean's last-minute decision to defect from the show. McClure had set everything up. He flew Mike Wallace into East Berlin. Then Dean backed off. McClure sat in East Berlin with a crew and with Mike Wallace ready to go and this putz, this cowboy, this fake said he didn't want to do it. McClure's job was on the line.
"Whose version would you believe? Mike Wallace, who gets maybe a million a year, or Bill McClure, who gets maybe fifty grand?" said Erik Durschmied. "Anyway, the show was my idea."
I was feeling trapped again in the adhesive confusions of Dean Reed land, and this went on. for months to come while I tried to follow the way the 60 Minutes story and everything that surrounded it developed.
I met Erik Durschmied at the Intercontinental Hotel where he was staying in New York, and we went out to Murphy's Irish Pub on Second Avenue because he liked the cheeseburgers there.
Durschmied's wife, Annalise, was a long-time friend of Dean's in Europe. Durschmied was a tough little Viennese of about sixty who worked for CBS out of Paris as a cameraman. He was a legendary figure, who had made his reputation working for the BBC as a brilliant reporter-cameraman in places like Indochina. He had thinning hair and a good tweed jacket.
Erik Durschmied ordered a beer and a cheeseburger. At Murphy's, there were checkered cloths on the table and a crowd of men at the bar. Their ties at half-mast, they craned their necks to watch a football game on the TV set that was suspended over the bartender's head.
"Dean hated East Berlin." Durschmied chewed his hamburger methodically and drank some beer.
"Did you like Dean?" I asked.
"Yes, and I'm a black and cynical bastard," he said. "Dean was a feather in the wind. He was naive. But he had enormous charm. Whatever his talent as a musician, his talent for charm was never in any doubt at all."
According to Durschmied, Dean also had a sense of humor, at least about his own films.
"He knew his films were garbage," said Durschmied, "but Dean himself had no taste. He gave us some of those vulgar porcelain statues from Germany. We were touched, of course, so we kept them, but they were junk."
We talked about Dean's womanizing and he agreed that there was plenty of it, but he felt that Dean was also capable of real friendship with a woman, his own wife Annalise, for example. I had met Annalise once in Paris and it occurred to me, that, like Dixie and Wiebke, she was slender, small-boned, blonde, and sexy.
"Would you have gone to bed with Dean?" Durschmied asked suddenly.
His accent grew more Viennese with every beer and a friendly leer spread across his face. There followed an exchange about whether or not I would have slept with Dean Reed, or, indeed, with Elvis Presley. The crowd had grown noisier at the bar. I edged my chair away from Durschmied.