Her mother asked Xenia what she wanted for her birthday that year and she said, "I want to meet Dean Reed."
Now she added, "My mom dressed me up like a little doll and took me with her to the Rossiya Hotel where Dean was performing."
"Do you want me to dance with you?" Dean had said to Xenia when they met. "What do you think of me?"
"In my kindergarten, some people think of tables, some of chairs. I think of you," Xenia told Dean.
Showing off, she had begun counting in English for Dean and he laughed and she nearly died of embarrassment.
Xenia's mother Yelena Zagrevskaya was Jo Durden-Smith's girlfriend. After I had seen Xenia's Dean Reed poster we all sat down in the kitchen of the apartment and Yelena's mother made us lunch.
Yelena was a brilliant translator and interpreter. Since our first trip in February of 1988, Jo had been back to Moscow a lot and he had fallen in love with it and with Yelena. In his cowboy boots, his big leather bag flapping on his shoulder, and a cigarette in his hand, Jo had become a familiar figure around Moscow.
Jo was a writer, witty, charming, talented, and skeptical, though when he had left London for America in the 1960s he told a friend, "I have to commit myself to the Revolution." (He subsequently wrote a wonderful book called Who Killed George Jackson? It was about the reality and, most importantly, the illusions of the 1960s in America.)
"The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo often said.
Russia was his new love, his new discovery, the place where the culture was up for grabs and rock and roll was playing in every bar. It wasn't just that Jo liked to be where the action was - which he did - there was something about the Russians that touched him in the way that America had once done. It was nothing at all like the cozy, comfortable, middle-class England that Jo came from and that he loathed.
In Russia Jo could lose himself. He loved it and he loved the people. He loved sitting around all night drinking and smoking and talking philosophy with poets. Most of all he loved the fact that he could claim the place as his own at exactly the moment when you could actually feel history happening. Here it was all over again, the 1960s: the politics; the rock and roll; the shifting values; the wild nights; the fabulous characters; the conflict between old and young; and the booze and parties.
Jo shuttled in and out of Russia. It became more and more exhilarating. Westerners flooded in: movie producers did deals; Western comics did stand-ups in Red Square; businessmen grabbed what they could - I met at least one business guy who felt salvation for the Soviet Union lay in potato chip factories. In Moscow, at least, Glasnost had also begun to liberate the Russians, not just from fear, but from nothingness, from the dead stagnant years.
The drama was all there, and the melodrama and the excitement and the theater, and people bellowed with rage and sometimes with laughter. Even the women who guarded the floor at the Rossiya Hotel were moved by it all and they smiled shyly and hoped you would offer them a lipstick or some pantyhose.
Jo was crazy about it. He was endlessly tolerant of the poets and musicians - I called them the Wispies for their chin beards - who could talk you to death, and for the hoods who could get you diamond earrings cheap, and the famous pianist with a marvelous dacha outside Moscow, who was a connoisseur of seven-star brandies. There was never enough talk, never enough late nights.
With Yelena to translate, Jo now knew his way around Moscow: he could get you into the Bolshoi Ballet through the back door, where a man waited to ply you with cakes and sweet champagne; he knew where to buy a good steak; he knew everyone in Moscow and everyone knew Jo.
Like any number of Westerners before him, George Bernard Shaw and Paul Robeson and folk singers and hippies and artists and spies, Jo was seduced by Russia.
"The Sixties are alive and well and living in Moscow," Jo said and I repeated it portentously to anyone who would listen.
I gave Yelena's mother a box of scented soap and she went into the other room with it and through a half-open door I saw her perusing the label carefully, decoding the legend of this box from New York City.
Like everyone, the family hoarded stuff, and the kitchen where we ate lunch was strewn in profligate disarray with shortbread, Scotch, and Chanel nail polish.
We ate lunch. We ate stroganoff, kasha, pickles, eggplant, cabbage, cookies, chocolate cake, and bread and butter, and drank beer, wine, and whisky and soda.
Xenia ate and then she talked about the last time she had seen Dean Reed. It was in 1986 at the Olympic Velodrome at Krylatoskoye, which was Stas Namin's old discotheque. Suddenly, Stas himself had appeared. He clapped for attention.
"We have a friend here. We have the famous Dean Reed," Stas said.
Xenia went on. "There was an uncomfortable silence and, half a beat too late, the crowd obediently rushed towards Dean, who strode into the spotlight. From his pocket, Dean took pictures of himself and began signing them, handing them out to the dancers in the club, who took them politely."
Sitting on a box that held the equipment that made smoke for the disco, Xenia had watched, a little aloof.
Now she said, "Once he was handsome, and he was trying to keep his romantic American image," she said. "But he realized the game was over. It reminded me of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, The Last Beauty of the Self."
An intense feeling of sadness had come over Xenia. That night in the discotheque Dean reminded her of her grandfather who could not face the truth.
"Grandpa grew up under Stalin. Grandpa was a spy during the War. When he worked for the KGB, he felt it was real and virtuous. If you take their work away, men like this have nothing. In the end, he had nothing to live for. He was just like Dean Reed. Grandpa was a true believer."
That same night in the discotheque Dean asked Xenia, "What do young people really feel?"
"My attitudes had changed, of course," Xenia said. "We are the small brothers and sisters of Boris Grebenshikov. We had all our principles changed. We have none left."
"Why did you keep Dean's poster on your bedroom wall?"
"He was a hero created by publicity and I understood all the power in this country is shit, but I believed that he believed. When I heard he had died, I was not surprised. I thought: everyone has to pay. But the poster was a bright impression of my childhood. Dean was our first American."
Xenia remembered thinking as she looked at Dean that night in the disco that time had passed quickly and he had not noticed and now it was too late.
"I thought he was the saddest man I ever saw," she said. "I saw how all these fake rock and roll teenagers started smiling, as if to say: We don't have anything in common with this silly, pro-Soviet bullshit. But then it betrayed the slavery of the whole thing. They, they started massing around him. They rushed to him, not because they were sympathetic, but because there was this impact. What impressed me was he had this great big pack of photos of himself that he was distributing. And these photos that he was carrying told me a lot about him because it was the Dean Reed who is of no use to anybody. He is just lost."
"Dean bloody Reed," Art Troitsky said that night at the Blue Bird cafe in Moscow.
At the Blue Bird cafe, the musicians, in their wide-boy pinstripes, like visitors from the past, produced the poignant ripple of "Autumn in New York." It had been a famous rock venue and was now a jazz club and the smoke was thick. Crowded around the little tables in the cellar, the jazz fans, like jazz fans everywhere, bobbled their heads knowingly over their black turtleneck sweaters.