Dean's first Czech tour was a "Solidarity with Chile Tour" in 1975. Ironically, as Czechs fled to the West if they could, thousands of Chileans, in flight from the horrors of Pinochet's rule, escaped to Eastern Europe. All over Europe and particularly in Czechoslovakia, Chileans, a few of them Dean's companeros from the old days, lived in exile.
Someone said to me, "Poor bastards, they exchanged Pinochet for Husak." It probably didn't seem that way, though, if you had just avoided having your brains bashed out or worse in a Chilean football stadium. Among this free-floating group of peripatetic exiles, emigres, musicians, and poets, Dean was a drop-in star.
"Am I popular because I fight for peace?" Dean had asked Vaclav Nectar. Vashek did not want to hurt Dean; he would say, "Half like you for that." And Dean would say, "What about the other half?" "Because you're American."
On that tour in 1975, Dean sang "Bye-Bye Love" to rock-starved Czechs. He was sweet with the girls and brazen with the bureaucrats. He stood up for his friends. He spoke his mind. In his white turtleneck, Dean went on television and said: In life you must have love and fun. Fun! It had been a long time since anyone thought about fun, maybe not since 1968; the idea of fun itself was a revolution.
Out of the blue, when we were settled in Vashek's basement, drinking coffee, he said suddenly, "But meeting Dean didn't help me much. But I don't mind, although it aggravated my problems for the next ten years."
With the obsessive recall of the torture victim, Vashek began the long, sad, intricate tale of his relationship with a Mr. Hrabal whom he called the Master of Power. The road to Vashek's particular hell had been paved with good intentions. His life went terribly wrong, and it was full of dark corners and dead ends, like a Czech novel.
After 1968, and already a marked man, Vashek had been called by the state to testify against Marta Kubishova, the heroine of the Prague Spring, the girl who sang at the tanks in the streets and was awarded a Golden Nightingale by Mr. Dubcek. Frantishek Hrabal, as the chief of Pragokoncert, had complete authority over pop music. A former head of disinformation, he was a full KGB Colonel; he was the Master of Power.
"We have people to destroy you," the Master of Power screamed at Vaclav Nectar when he refused to identify Marta Kubishova as the woman in a set of pornographic pictures. Marta and Vashek had worked together in a group called the Golden Kids and they were friends.
Kubishova sued Hrabal for slander. Vashek spoke in her defense again, and his career was finished. So fragile was Vashek afterwards that, on one occasion, after he shouted at the Master of Power, his chief torturer, he committed himself voluntarily to a lunatic asylum.
"I could claim I was briefly deranged and had meant no harm," Vashek said.
There followed an incredibly complicated story about how Dean seemed both to cause trouble for Vaclav Nectar and to bail him out, but I couldn't follow the terrible events that involved apparatchiks and ministers and bad Communist karma. Part of it was to do with Dean's insistence on being paid for his performances in dollars, as I understood it, part to do with Nectar's rebellion against the bureaucracy.
In any case, there were periods when Dean was not allowed to perform in Prague. And it was Vashek who, because he was friends with Dean, suffered most. There were interrogations. Trips were canceled. Vashek was victimized, terrorized, worked over by the secret police. But Vashek never blamed Dean, not even because Dean's righteous outrage seemed to be only about money.
"To Vashek, my brother, friend, and comrade. I love and respect you very much. You are a very special person in my life. Until death us do part. An embrace," Dean wrote in the flyleaf of his autobiography.
Vashek showed me the book. He insisted that the last line was significant. Before he spoke, he put a record on the stereo to muffle our conversation.
He whispered, "With Dean's death my life in fear began," he said and then suddenly stopped.
In the background, the music played dully. Vashek's voice dropped as he spoke of the Czech secret police and an alliance with the East German Stasi and their desire to eliminate Dean Reed because Dean Reed was trouble.
"Dean said too much. He called the officials 'Mafia'. He had many friends among the prostitutes here. Many were informants," Vashek said. Glancing over his shoulder, he added with a meaningful stare, "One of the girls was called Ophelia," he added, and looked at me to make sure I understood he was referring to Dean's death - a murder in his view - by drowning.
Still, well before his death, Dean was finally allowed to perform in Prague again; he sang "Give Peace a Chance" and 4000 people rose to their feet.
"The popularity, doesn't it bother you?" Dean's Czech engineer had asked.
"I need it," Dean would say. "I can't live without it. It is a drug."
15
There seemed to be no way forward. The more informants I talked to, the more the mystery jammed up against itself: Wiebke described a massively moody man whose adrenalin rushes left him too drained to turn on a light switch; Victor thought Dean was a man of profound political naivete and great glamour; and Vaclav Nectar saw him as a brilliant performer and loved him, even though he had somehow ruined Nectar's life. Dictators gave him medals; stunt men, kudos; women adored him; no one could or would really talk about his death.
I had been following his ghost for months by now. Who killed Dean Reed? Who was he? A true believer? An American rock star supplying opium for the socialist masses? Our spy, the best mole America ever had? Theirs?
The Berlin Wall was still up and even when you got to the other side, it was a police state, ruled by the Stasi, a fortress of paranoia. Information about Dean Reed was very hard to come by. I was at a dead end.
East Berlin was a city of dead ends: the Wall that kept people in; the badly drawn map on the greasy visa issued at Checkpoint Charlie, which marked forbidden territory; the midnight curfew for tourists; the worthless money which you could not export; the East Germans, noses pressed against the glass at the hard currency Intershop in the Grand Hotel, gazing at leather coats they could not buy from countries they could not visit; doormen who barred the way to hotels; the official reports of Dean's death which yielded nothing much at all except the German obsession with bureaucratic detail; the lonely house where Dean Reed had lived next to the lake where he died.
It snowed the day that we, Leslie Woodhead and I, finally went back to Schmockwitz, to the house on the wrong side of the Wall, at the end of a country road next to a frozen lake. Victor Grossman was with us; he had agreed to translate. It was March, 1988, four months since we had first come.
The wind howled around the Alexanderplatz as we drove out of Berlin towards Schmockwitz. The earflaps of his Russian hat pulled down over his ears, Victor Grossman sat in the front seat next to Leslie and recited the directions for Schmockwitz. In his lap, Victor held a bag with a couple of avocados that I had brought him. Leslie pretended not to have been down the road the previous November.
As we left the city behind, the snow fell harder. A thick mist came up and the low-lying suburban buildings turned into an endless gray blur. The dismal little East German cars slid and skidded on the highway: none had chains or snow tires. Hairdryers on wheels, Leslie called them The Trabants. I said they were like mobile sardine cans. We passed the time making up names for the Trabis, laughing nervously, not paying attention to the fact that Victor Grossman might have been offended by our jokes. This was his country, his country's cars.