In the Soviet Union, Dean's official minder was Georgy Arbatov, the director of the Institute for Canada and the United States, and an influential player in Soviet-American policy. I went to see Arbatov, who was a pleasant man in a good suit with a benign face and an avuncular manner. His office was elegant, with a long conference table that shone with polish. A picture of Gorbachev hung on the wall. Through a translator, Arbatov spoke about Dean Reed, and how he was for the Soviets like the Beatles, and how important it had been, his coming.
Until Dean came along, though Arbatov did not spell this out, Russian kids mostly had to settle for folksongs celebrating tractor production or maybe for mustachioed pop stars with plastic smiles. Once in a while a foreign folkie like Pete Seeger might show up. There had been a time when Soviet bureaucrats had tried to offer a bit of modern culture to the kids; somewhere along the line, apparatchiks tried to replace the Twist with new dances for socialist youth. The Moskvich, the Terrikon, and the Herringbon were not a success.
Georgy Arbatov told me that he was convinced the KGB had not killed Dean Reed.
"I know that the KGB had already decided a long time before Dean's death not to interfere in this way, not to practice any terrorist activities," he said. An accident, Arbatov suggested, perhaps Dean's death had been an accident.
What he was saying hit me only after I'd left Arbatov's office, a kind of delayed shock. I wasn't exactly tuned into the activities of the world of covert activity, so only when I was walking through the snow in Moscow did I realize that "terrorist activities" meant state assassination. No longer practiced at this time, Arbatov had said, meaning, of course, it had been practiced and perhaps not so long ago; Arbatov could refer to it casually in the middle of a conversation about Dean Reed and the Beatles and rock and roll. I shivered. My feet were wet. It was freezing out.
No one in Russia had cared who was in charge of Dean, of course, not when he arrived. The lust for Western culture was huge but undiscriminating, and nobody cared if Dean Reed was run, as someone said, by the Communist Party or the Soviet cosmonauts, or a monkey.
Dean's arrival in the Soviet Union had the verve, the heroics, the aspirations of his conquest of South America all over again. Although he would continue to live with Patty in Argentina for a while, then move on to Madrid and to Rome, he went back to the USSR again and again, tempted by the adoration the Russians gave him, seduced by the feeling that he mattered so much.
On his first tour of the Soviet Union, Dean played twenty-eight cities and he sang "Yiddishe Momma" to a little old lady with a round face. Again and again, he went to Russia to record, for concerts, as a peace delegate. He made rock videos, after a fashion: Dean riding his motorbike; Dean clowning in parks, on riverboats, singing "Yesterday" and "Heartbreak Hotel." Everyone I ever met in the Soviet Union remembered Dean. He was as big as Frank Sinatra, people said.
On Go for It, Boys, a televised competition in which young men vied in several categories for the title of "Most Macho Male," Dean appeared as the celebrity host.
And Dean Reed was impressed with what he saw in the Soviet Union. He spoke with the comrades on long plane trips across the country - pictures show his face wreathed in smiles under the big fur hat. He studied Marxism, Leninism. A little boy gave Dean his Pioneer's badge.
There were people everywhere who had met Dean and kept his autograph or his pictures. One of them was named Sasha Gurman. He was from Tblisi and I met him about a year after I went to Moscow, met him in Beverly Hills of all places, on a balmy winter night. He had thick wavy hair and impish eyes, and he was sexy, like a magician, which in a way he was. He was an interpreter, the sort who gets not just the words, but the subtle magic of language. Glasnost had come to Hollywood in the form of Elem Kilmov, the Soviet film director, and Roland Joffe' was giving a dinner for him. Sasha had come to translate.
The sky was a rich tuxedo blue that night, the stars were out, and Beverly Hills was sleek and lush. Drinking it all in, Sasha inspected the crowd on the patio at Roland Joffe's house, where he, a kind of vigorous human sputnik spun off by Glasnost, had put down for the evening.
Ah, Glasnost! It was the fashion in the late 1980s, even in Hollywood. Elem Klimov gave me a button with Gorbachev's face on it. Roland raised his glass.
"We may not share our politics, but we have to share our planet," Roland Joffe' said. (A Russian taxi driver in Los Angeles was more skeptical and when I asked what he thought about Gorby, he shrugged and said, "Same studio, different head.")
Anyway, I cornered Sasha Gurman and said, as I did to every Soviet I met, "Did you hear of Dean Reed?"
"Ah, Dean Reed," Sasha said, and he told me a story.
When he was seven, Sasha's mother asked what he wanted for his birthday. I want to see Dean Reed, he said, and his mother took him to a concert in Tblisi.
The American singing star, was particularly big in Georgia, where his picture was sold alongside that of Joseph Stalin. At the concert, Sasha was taken up on the stage to meet Dean; the singer shook hands with the little boy and then he did one of his stunts: the big, handsome blue-eyed American flipped the child head over heels. He laughed. Then he kissed Sasha and gave him an autographed picture.
For years, Sasha kept the picture of Dean Reed in his school notebook next to a picture of Lenin. By the time Sasha was a teenager, the notebook had come apart but he kept it, the photograph.
In the late 1970s, his mother took him to East Berlin for a holiday. They climbed the television tower at the Alexanderplatz. Sasha looked out. He craned his neck so that he could see over the Wall into West Berlin, where he noted there was enough electricity to fuel a small African nation, enough neon lights to power up his dreams.
He imagined a world populated by tall, blue-eyed American cowboys like Dean Reed who gave little kids a hug and sang them rock and roll.
"That's for me," Sasha said.
8
Back at the National Hotel, after my meetings with Pastoukhov and Arbatov, I looked out the window of my room at a drainpipe. I then went downstairs to the front desk, where a woman who wore two cardigans and spoke soft, old-fashioned English did not smile at me. I asked her for a different room. She told me that, as I was not a head of delegation, I was not entitled to a Class A room. Leslie Woodhead had somehow been anointed as head of our delegation and he had a suite with a view and cranberry-colored velvet drapes.
"But, you see, this is my first trip to your country," I said. "I really want a room with a view of RED SQUARE!"
All around me in the lobby of Moscow's best hotel, tourists shuffled across an expanse of turd-colored linoleum, looking for something to buy. There was nothing in the souvenir shop except wooden dollies, vodka, and crappy fur hats. At the front door, men who resembled Leonid Brezhnev barred the way to Soviet citizens, admitting only foreigners who showed the slab of cardboard that served for a passport to the National.
"Here you may want," said the woman in the two cardigans, "but here you may not necessarily get."
"They have a plan for you," said Art Troitsky, who turned up to meet us at the hotel with his wife Svetlana. Art was chic in the casual black clothing he purchased in Tallinn's street markets, where you could get Western goods. Svetlana was over six feet tall and wore elegant Italian boots. They were so stylish, so foreign-looking that the doorman at the National simply let them in most of the time. Once, though, they had to wait for me to come and get them and they hated it.