Over time the tension grew. When Dixie called, it was often Renate who picked up the telephone. She was always polite.
"He is home, but wait a moment, please," said Renate and went to get Dean.
"I had some problems with Renate today," Dean said to Dixie.
Sensing his bleak mood, Dixie said, "Pick yourself up."
"It's a little bit more difficult. It was your telephone call. She said we talked for one and a half hours. I said it couldn't be. She's jealous sometimes. She's crying now."
"I want to be her friend," said Dixie.
"I know she's scared," said Dean. She's not accustomed to someone sending so many letters back and forth. I tell her very often, but it doesn't help."
"You go on down and put your arm around her, go tell her that we want her," said Dixie but she stayed on the phone.
Dean had asked Dixie to write to Renate and months earlier she had written a letter. She wrote about American customs and how everyone would hug Renate; how Renate would like the climate; how she must not cut her hair because American men liked women with long hair; how she must not be sad.
In March, Renate replied.
She explained how certain conflicts between herself and Dean had come about. She talked, as she often did in those days, about how Dean had gone to America and fallen in love with his homeland, and how much she had missed him, but that she had had no picture of what he was experiencing. She said he had come back to her wanting them to live in America. It felt foreign to Renate. He said he had met a woman - Dixie - who would help him make a career in America.
She spoke frankly to Dixie about how much Dean talked of the United States, and how he spoke to her, Renate, unfairly about East Germany, her homeland.
Renate understood how he longed for his native country. But conflicts arose, and nerves were frayed. Even on a rare evening when Renate and Dean could be alone, he might be thinking of America. She added that she had known Dean since 1973 and that she loved him most deeply.
It was a desperately affecting communication and I felt for Renate who seemed stranded now. But she asked Dixie for a photograph of herself and said she wished for her friendship.
A week later Renate wrote again, a cheery note, thanking Dixie for her friendship and noting that she had a cold and could not kiss Dean.
Dean did talk to Renate about America a lot, about the special smell of Colorado, its blue skies and smiling people, and his longing seemed insatiable.
He seemed like a man sorting through his life, clearing things up, cleaning out the past. He visited Wiebke at her house, where on a hot day in spring she sat in her bikini in the garden, typing translations. Smiling, Dean pushed open the gate.
"I've been thinking things over and I want to leave a present for Natasha," Dean said.
He gave Wiebke 3000 Czech crowns.
"That's very generous, Dean," Wiebke said.
He said he wanted to see Natasha more often now because he was going to the United States in the not-too-distant future.
Dean said, "I want to come back and talk. Maybe I shall come back soon," he said...
"He never came back," said Wiebke. "I wish I had just wrapped away my typewriter and said, 'This is a good time, why don't we talk now?' But the moment passed and we didn't. That's the last time I ever saw him."
Doggedly, Dean continued his work on Bloody Heart, but he also wrote to his high school classmates, who were gathering for a reunion. He told them he missed them and felt it was not fair that he could not be with them at the high school Ole Gym, where they could play basketball. He missed the picnic. He loved hamburgers and potato chips. You could feel how homesick he was. I felt it more than I had ever felt his passion for politics. There was something terribly naked about this peppy communication with his high school classmates.
He wrote of his destiny and how it had taken him to thirty-two countries, that he spoke four languages (English the worst!), sat in prison, fought injustice, made his mistakes, and favored the human race over the arms race. He wished his friends much peace, love, courage, and happiness, and signed it, with an embrace, "Dean 'Slim' Reed."
Bloody Heart was scheduled to begin on Tuesday, June 24 - Tuesday because, as Gerrit List told me, it was bad luck to start a picture on a Monday.
In East Berlin I met Gerrit List, who was a producer and production manager at DEFA and had worked with Dean in East Berlin almost from the time he arrived. I got the impression that he had considerable power inside the film business.
I met him in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, which had become my refuge in East Berlin. List was a middle-aged man in an anorak and the gray leather shoes East German men seemed to wear a lot. He smoked Camels. With Dean, he had made El Cantor in Bulgaria and Sing Cowboy Sing in Romania. List could effectively manage the complicated life of a location; he could work in Soviet Karelia in winter and in Cuba in the tropical summer heat.
Once he had waited patiently in a Cuban port for a ship that was three weeks late because he did not have the hard currency to expedite the baggage by air - that was sometimes the price of working in movies. He had a nice time in that sunny Cuban port, though; "The Bay of Pork," he called it.
It was a Saturday morning when we met, and although he refused even a coffee - I think he wanted to get on with his shopping - he talked freely about Bloody Heart. By June of 1986, there were already ninety people at work on pre-production in Yalta and List was looking forward to the three-month shoot.
"The Crimea looked a hundred percent like South Dakota!" he said with the tidy pride of a good production manager who has accomplished the impossible and reinvented the world: Bulgaria for Chile, the Crimea for South Dakota. "Riga was a very fine studio and I have developed very hearty friendships in the Soviet Union," he added.
It was true. Everyone in Russia liked Gerrit List.
Crossing his plump legs, he exhaled some smoke and I asked him if the trip to America had changed Dean. He nodded. "He was filled with impressions. 'My country is so great. People are so good. Politics are so bad.' He tells me Dixie will organize a concert tour. He says he wants to do it."
Dean wasn't much of a singer, Gerrit List said and confided that he himself was a Dixieland fan.
"Dean just played himself," he said. "In the beginning, some people asked, 'Why does he stay here in the GDR?' I think, and this is only my opinion" - Gerrit List put his hand lightly on his breast - "he stayed for love. For Renate." He added, "In the Soviet Union Dean was like God. Here it was no longer so. A lot of people felt he wasn't so big."
I told Gerrit - he asked me to call him by his first name - that even in the Soviet Union his status had changed, that in the big record store on Kalinin Prospekt in Moscow by 1986 you couldn't find a single Dean Reed album. I mentioned that, at Supraphon in Prague, production of Dean's albums had dwindled almost to nothing. In 1979, 1980, and 1981, ninety thousand copies of his records were issued. With Country Songs, the 1986 album Dean had set so much store by, only a couple of thousand were sold and, after that, nothing. Gerrit List looked sad at all this.
I remembered that Dean had told Mike Wallace that he had espoused the socialist way because it offered, above all, security. Not even the security of socialism could protect him from the defection of his fans or from his own middle age. More than anyone else, Renate knew it.
25
Renate was waiting at the front door of her house, smiling. On the lovely summer's day when I crossed into East Berlin and then driven out to Schmockwitz, the house and the woods looked as they must have looked around the time Dean died.