Asleep in my room at the Savoy, I dreamed that I heard a loudspeaker blast through the hotel. The hotel management was shouting, howling, and screaming for all of the Jews to assemble in the courtyard. Then I dreamed of a horse that had fallen into a swimming pool. When it was hoisted up, it had no legs.
Chaotic times, strange, terrifying, wonderful. There were people who had no bread and people who talked to you fearlessly about politics and smiled at you in the subways just for the hell of it. I didn't get anywhere with Dean Reed's death, though, just the same rumors and whispers recycled, retailed, cranked up. It was driving me crazy. Back to Berlin.
In Berlin, most of the Wall was already gone, except for a few slabs, one that was a kind of backdrop for a snack bar in the Potsdamerplatz. On the road to the suburbs to see a homicide cop who had some information, or said he did, there were dozens of trashed Trabants, the Cold War cars nobody wanted anymore.
Thomas Sindennann, who had been East Berlin's chief homicide policeman, had sharp eyes and a pointy nose, and he occasionally sniffed when he talked, as if he had an allergy or smelled something bad. Private enterprise had allowed Sindermann to recycle himself as a private eye, a German Sam Spade with a fancy computer in the office in his house. .
I wasn't expecting much. I'd half given up expecting answers about Dean's death, and then, in a matter-of-fact way, Sindermann calmly laid it all out.
In Sindennann's view the confusion surrounding Dean's death was that the Central Committee of the Communist Party got involved instead of the homicide police; but, then, he was a cop. And it was easy for Sindermann in hindsight to see what the problems were, to treat it as a straightforward case. Renate had, of course, been most of all worried about her husband during the events leading up to his death and never suspected a crime. As far as Renate and Gerrit List were concerned there was no reason to suspect anything other than that Dean had disappeared temporarily as he so often had. They had acted the way anyone would have done in their situation.
Sindermann felt the Central Committee had somehow attempted a cover-up; Dean Reed was an important person, Sindennann said, and it had been important to preserve his reputation.
"He was a well-known figure especially for youngsters. He'd been promoted as an idol, an American fighter for Communism. He also starred in films. Their quality was debatable," added Sindermann, with a faint smirk, "but the authorities didn't want to show young people and others that he had problems and had taken his own life."
Finally, according to Sindermann, Dean's death was a suicide. He was sure about it. Then, as if he'd opened the door a crack, more stuff came through and the alleged suicide letter I'd heard about surfaced. How did it happen? Where did it come from? No one was sure, but somehow Leslie Woodhead and I got hold of a copy in time to include it in the BBC documentary we were making.
It was addressed to Eberhart Finch, Dean Reed's friend on the Central Committee, and written in German on the back of Dean's movie script.
We got it translated. The letter said that he, Dean, could not take money for a film that might never be finished and death was the only way out.
To the end, though, he was still Comrade Rockstar. He ended his letter saying, "May all progressive people create a better and more just and more peaceful world, Dean Reed."
Was it authentic? Was it the real thing? I believed it was. And that was it. All the months and years of looking, and then I knew: Dean had killed himself.
Handwriting experts confirmed as best they could - they were dealing with a dead man, after all - that Dean Reed had written the letter. Renate only saw it four years after he died and she suffered terribly. It was as if a hand had reached from the grave to hurt her one last time.
In 1991, Dean's mother took his ashes back to Colorado, and Renate rubbed his name off his gravestone in the little cemetery near their house in East Berlin.
* * *
"I would never have believed the Wall would come down in my lifetime," Johnny Rosenburg wrote to me. "I wonder what Dean would have thought. I sort of feel he would have adjusted real quick and went along with the flow... Why in God's name did he have to die at this point in time? With things changing the way they are, he could have played such an important part in the whole affair. What a waste."
What Johnny couldn't see was that, without the Berlin Wall, Dean Reed had no role. When Dean crossed to the East he seemed seditious, foreign, sexy, American.
The Cold War raged; Dean sang. He was wonderful propaganda, this American true believer they could sell to their own people. Dean was rock and roll and good times; for twenty years behind the Iron Curtain Dean Reed seemed to be a force for life or at least the illusion of it.
As things changed, even in the short time I had been looking for him, Dean Reed seemed to recede towards some far horizon defined by the Cold War.
"There was no profit in a dead man," Vaclav Nectar said in Prague, where a million portraits of Vaclav Havel replaced a million pictures of Vladimir Lenin. In a record store up a cobbled street near Havel's castle, an old lady in carpet slippers searched the bins in vain.
"Dean Reed? I am so sorry, but it was a very long time ago," she said.
Still, the little Dean Reed industry cranked up by Dean's death hummed along. Dean's first wife, Patty, was said to be writing a book and so were half a dozen other people. I heard that Martin Scorsese was interested in making a movie and so was Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police. At some point I read in the Los Angeles Times that Ed Pressman, the producer, was thinking of making a movie about Dean. Alive, Dean couldn't get an agent in Hollywood; dead, he was a hot property.
Nothing happened.
And so it went. A first version of my book was published in England and the documentary for the BBC's Arena was aired, both in 1991. Occasionally, Mona Rosenburg sent me a Christmas card or some of her pickled beets.
And then, about seven years later, my agent and friend Brian Siberell, in Los Angeles, said, "Remember that book of yours, Comrade Rockstar?" And I said, sure, of course I remembered it. And he said, "Mind if I send it around?"
"Why not?" I said, and forgot about it.
A year or so later, I was in a missile silo in Wyoming, working on a BBC documentary about America's Missileers, when my cellphone rang. It was Brian.
"I've sold Comrade Rockstar to Tom Hanks," he said.
On a subsequent trip to California, I went to visit Playtone and met up with Gary Goetzman, who runs the company with Tom Hanks. I was having lunch with Gary, who gives lie to the idea that Hollywood producers are crass or dull - Gary was neither of these, but warm and smart - when a tall man appeared. He put out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Tom." I tried to remain cool.
Tom Hanks sat down and talked about the Cold War and Dean Reed for a while and what thrilled and astonished me, apart from the fact that I was sitting and drinking Cokes with Tom Hanks, was that he got it. He understood the story better than I ever had.
But what did I make of it? What did I make of Dean Reed? The music was nothing special. The movies were silly and the politics naive. I also knew he could not have existed without the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain. He was a tale from the Cold War. It was his frontier.