"Would you have gone to bed with Marilyn Monroe?" I said.
"You bet! Just think of being able to tell people." Durschmied wiped some mustard from his chin.
Leaning over the table, Durschmied whispered to me about Dean Reed, who he was, why he had died.
"Remember, it was the American Embassy that got Dean free in Chile when he was arrested there in 1983," Durschmied said. "Why would the embassy bother with some commie type who'd gone over to the other side? Ask yourself why."
"Why?" I said.
Durschmied was silent for a moment and I asked myself what he meant. Was Dean a spy for us? Was that what Durschmied was saying? Was he CIA, the ultimate mole?"
It was a tantalizing idea, the corn-fed blue-eyed boy with his crew-cut and Chevrolet Impala, his mule races and silly songs. Did Paton Price run him? Was the sudden move to Latin America exquisitely planned? Was the socialist rhetoric a perfect cover for an agent? In his tight pants, with the guitar slung over his shoulder, with his merry antics and goodwill, he had certainly converted plenty of Russians to America.
Was Dean Reed, then, the Tab Hunter of the secret world? Was he, as Johnny Rosenburg had once suggested, the best mole our country ever had? But even Johnny didn't believe that and neither did I.
For the hell of it, Durschmied also tried out the notion that Dean Reed was still alive and living in the Soviet Union. I said it seemed unlikely that a six-foot American rock star had gone to ground so easily in Gorbachev's Soviet Union, where Western news crews were now to be seen everywhere. Durschmied giggled. It was provocative stuff, but it was small talk.
"The whole thing is a jigsaw puzzle, and you're looking for a bit of sky when the sailboat is right in front of you," Durschmied added mysteriously.
He clamped his mouth around some French fries and wouldn't say anything about the sailboat, what it was, or where it was. It was clear he didn't know much, but his urgent whispers had a kind of adhesive quality and the spy stories were tempting.
Then he said something really interesting.
"Dean Reed was a man without a language. Without a language. Ja. Like me," Durschmied said.
In the tapes I had with Dean Reed's voice on them, his English was stilted, as if something essential was sometimes missing, and people in Colorado had talked of how he had a little accent when he came to visit.
Durschmied went on. "Look, I was only fifteen or so when I left Austria. All my vocabulary for subjects before fifteen is German. Everything else, which means my entire professional life, my political life, is in English. The same with Dean. His American vocabulary was pre-1961. Everything else was in a foreign language. Spanish. German. His musical life, his political life, his married life, his whole adult construct was foreign."
It was true. Dean spoke English, German, Spanish, and a little Russian. The gaps in his languages matched the gaps in his experience. The old-fashioned slightly stiff English went with the smiling countenance and the belief in peace and freedom. It was always 1962 in Dean's world. The clock in his head had stopped when he left America.
In a letter to Wiebke, Dean had once written that being in America had made him happy because he could speak his own language. This was so astute it turned my head. Dean was not a subtle man, but he had poignantly diagnosed what ailed him: he was a man without a language.
Durschmied got up now and so did I, and we headed out of Murphy's.
"Of course, you know Dean and Renate were planning to go to live in Rome," said Durschmied.
Rome? Rome! No, I didn't know about Rome; there had been no mention at all of Rome. Another alley to follow looking for Dean Reed. Another dead end, I thought.
"Rome?" I said, but Eric Durschmied was half a block ahead of me, singing a Tom Lehrer song in counterpoint to the noises of the New York night.
"They're rioting in Africa, they're starving in Spain," he sang and disappeared around the corner. He never said another word about how the 60 Minutes piece on Dean Reed came about.
In the corridor at the 60 Minutes offices at CBS News on West 57th Street in New York, before I saw Mike Wallace, I heard his voice. It was the same voice that came out of my TV every Sunday night, the voice that had introduced me to Dean Reed in April of 1986.
When I got to his office, Wallace was talking on the phone and he looked up and smiled and raised a hand in greeting. He looked, exactly like Mike Wallace and I was pretty awestruck and more than a little nervous. I was here to interview the most famous and toughest reporter in the country.
He hung up the phone and shook my hand. He said that when they had first met, he thought Dean was a bit of a fraud, but after a while felt that was probably an unjust assessment and that Dean probably did believe the things he talked about. He was naive maybe, but he had conviction and he was charming.
"Was Dean intelligent?" I asked.
"Intelligent enough. He was certainly no dummy, though he had a learned rhetoric and could do the Communist number; but he adjusted his view as we went along. It wasn't merely a kind of parrot repetition; there was some real involvement. Of course, he had done this interview plenty of times and he knew the words and knew how to express himself in those terms," Wallace said.
"Did you like him?"
"Yes, I did. He was politically naive, but he was honest," Wallace said.
On February 9, 1986, Mike Wallace flew into East Berlin. Bill McClure was already there, wringing his hands, wondering if Dean Reed intended to do the interview.
Dean had tentatively agreed to the interview, but he did not like Bill McClure much, so he changed his mind. Dean felt that 60 Minutes, along with his movie Bloody Heart, was his ticket back to America. He had spent some time on a recent trip to Moscow with Oleg Smirnoff rehearsing for the interview, with Oleg playing Mike Wallace.
"Why are you a Communist, Mr. Reed? Why do you believe in the Berlin Wall? Call yourself an American? What about Afghanistan?"
Oleg and Dean trudged around Red Square.
"Hit me harder. Ask me another question." Dean said, "Pretend you're Mike Wallace."
Oleg had no idea what he was doing.
"Hit me again," said Dean, obsessed with 60 Minutes.
Dean called Dixie: "In four days in Moscow I spoke only English," he said. "I was getting ready for Mike Wallace. Johnny has begged me not to do the 60 Minutes interview. Johnny says 60 Minutes goes deep into the past."
Johnny was more worried about 60 Minutes than Dixie. He knew that Dean just did not understand the type of people at 60 Minutes. He did not get that America had no love for communistic people like himself and that the interview would not do him any good.
"These people dig deep into your background," Johnny said on a tape he sent to Dean in East Berlin. "Stay away from 60 Minutes. They're gonna cut you to pieces."
Renate was outraged. "What kind of a friend is this that comes down on you so hard and tells you not to get this publicity!" she said.
Dean and Renate arrived at the Palast Hotel, where VIPs stayed in East Berlin, to meet Mike Wallace, Bill McClure, and Anne de Boismilion, the associate producer who worked for CBS in Paris. A woman from East German television was with them. Dean was fretful but Mike Wallace did not object to Dean's playing hard to get. Unlike Bill McClure, he found it neither objectionable nor manipulative.