The sky was blue. Boats bobbed on the lake. There was the sound of lawn mowers and the smell of new cut grass. A large man in short shorts and Dr. Scholl clogs appeared. His name was Hans and he had produced and directed Dean's television shows. He lived just across the lake.
Just then a boat sputtered up to the dock behind the house and Sasha and his friends tumbled out and clattered up the walk into the house. Renate smiled and went to get them a meal. In summer, crowded with children and the windows open, the house felt much less lonely, though it had been summer when Dean died.
Renate cooked for the pack of Sasha's friends and they gorged themselves while I talked to Hans.
Yes, he said, Dean's popularity as a singer was going and he was sad about it. He knew that tastes were changing.
But the kids skidded out to their boat, and Hans went away with a basket of strawberries that Renate had given him to his red Peugeot that matched the fruit, his Dr. Scholl clogs going 'clock, clock, clock' down the garden path. Suddenly it was just the two of us.
Renate told me little things at first. She spoke in English that day and she told me how, when Dean's codirector on Bloody Heart got cancer, the blow was enormous. She showed me Dean's own copy of Bloody Heart; the script was painstakingly annotated in English in his schoolboy handwriting. There were notes about casting, but also notes about the best place to buy plastic cups in West Berlin, and you could feel Dean's immense weariness. He was the star, the director, the writer of Bloody Heart, and, still, he had to get the plastic cups. Real directors didn't buy their own plastic cups.
On the floor several boxes lay half open and Renate sifted through them as she talked. After Dean died, she had received a telephone bill for 2800 marks or fifteen hundred dollars. She said that most of the calls had been to Johnny in Loveland, but I thought they were to Dixie too, and that Renate knew it because her voice was so bitter.
Renate was a realist about what Dean's chances in America might have been. She knew that on the university circuit, with a few songs and the story of his extraordinary life, Dean might have made a small go of it. Dixie and Johnny wanted to turn him into a commercial pop star and take the politics out.
"He was not good in that way," said Renate simply, lighting a cigarette and tossing back her luxuriant black hair, she said suddenly, "It was 60 Minutes. The letters." She foraged in one of the boxes.
The night it was shown, Dean had been in Moscow and Renate couldn't get through to him on the phone and she was frantic. America had just bombed Libya. There was a lot of anti-Arab feeling in America and Dean dancing around with Yasser Arafat would not go down well. She knew what was in the program, even though it was broadcast only in America. My God, she thought.
Dean came home the next day and, when Renate told him that 60 Minutes had been transmitted and what she was feeling, he went crazy. His mood went black. Everything was over, she said. "Kaput," she said now. Renate used the word kaput and put her head in her hands.
Miraculously, it turned out for the best or so it seemed. In May, 60 Minutes sent a videotape of the show to Schmockwitz and Dean watched it and was happy. It was fair-minded, he thought. Dean was quite chipper. Mike Wallace forwarded a few nice letters that viewers had written. Dean wrote to Wallace to thank him and suggest that they work together for world peace.
Dean didn't hear much from Dixie or Johnny for a while and it worried him a little, so he wrote to say he hoped the show had not changed their relationship.
Did he suspect that Dixie was losing heart and Johnny was sitting at home, his butt burned over what he saw as Dean's betrayal? Dean whistled a lot and made plans, Renate said.
It must have been in the week or two before Dean's death that the rest of the mail to 60 Minutes was forwarded to Schmockwitz by the CBS bureau in London.
Renate shuddered, as if death had come into the room, and she wrapped herself with her arms. The letters! Oh God, Renate remembered, the letters.
Every night, glasses slipping down his nose, Dean sat up in bed, reading the letters over and over and over. He read them out loud. He couldn't stop reading the letters that called him a traitor, a terrorist, and a fraud, letters that said keep away from America, no one wants you here, go home to Russia.
Worse still was that not all the letters were inarticulate or written by crackpots or right-wingers. The cruelest letters criticized Dean, not for his politics, but for his hypocrisy, his ego; they called him an opportunistic man of little talent who could only make it east of the Berlin Wall.
Dean wouldn't let go of the letters and Renate literally snatched them from him and tore some of them into little pieces. Even Victor Grossman knew.
"Did Dean plan to defect?" I asked him the day after I saw Renate.
"He didn't have to defect. He had an American passport," Victor said. "He wanted to go home. 60 Minutes was going to change his life, but it all went horribly wrong."
"What went wrong?"
"Dean thought he had done so well on 60 Minutes. Then Dixie - you've met Dixie?"
I said I knew Dixie.
"Dixie wrote to him to say, It's over. You can't come home again. You did so badly on 60 Mmutes, you blew your chances. Dean lay on his bed in a darkened room unable to function," Victor said. "His movies were less popular. This is a country of twelve million people and a lot of them began to dislike Dean. How long, in a small country, how long can you go around performing concerts? Once, twice, but the third time? Also people who were becoming more and more disillusioned with or opposed to the system here naturally didn't like somebody who supported it," Victor went on. "What happened was that fewer and fewer people went to his concerts, and this troubled him greatly, I'm sure. He liked to be the star, and, you know, it's not so nice being a star playing in an empty theater." Victor paused."'By the mid-1980s, Dean heard the doors shutting one at a time," Victor said.
Like Dixie, Johnny phoned Dean regularly to tell him how bad it was for him in America after the 60 Minutes program, after he went on the show and defended the Berlin Wall.
Dean wrote: "Dear Johnny, I realize the problems that are now going through your mind, Johnny. You are in a pickle, as the cowboys would say. You and your friends and family met a guy named Dean Reed after twenty-five years of absence. You and your friends liked what you saw and heard. But then this guy named Deano goes and declares himself a Marxist or Socialist. By his enemies he is called a commie!"
According to his own way of thinking, Johnny felt he was Deano's close good friend, and he worried more and more for him. He was convinced if Dean came back to America after the 60 Minutes broadcast, he would get his head blown off. Johnny spent a whole lot of time in his shed out back of his house in Loveland trying to figure a way to tell Dean what was what.
Mona Rosenburg told me that, just before his disappearance, Dean phoned the house in Loveland very early one morning. She took the call. Dean asked if everything was all right because he hadn't heard a word, he said. Mona said they had all had the flu bad.
Dean said if they were in any kind of trouble, he would come back there and fix it. During the whole conversation Dean acted as though someone was listening in, looking over his shoulder. Something was wrong, Mona felt, but she didn't know what it was.
What did the call mean? Mona didn't know. Maybe Dean was looking for a reason to come back. But it was early in the morning and she was feeling lousy and the line was bad.