After he had seen Dean on TV in 1984, Johnny had one hell of a time running down Dean's number over there in East Berlin. He called the TV station in Denver. He called NBC in New York. London said they'd get back to him, but he couldn't wait. Up half the night in a growing frenzy, he called in succession: the State Department; the Russian Embassy, who were not very nice; and the East Germans, who were quite nice. Eventually, he got a telephone number in East Berlin. When he heard the operator's voice, he just went bananas. He taped the phone call and now Johnny put a tape into a tape recorder box that sat on the floor near him. He switched it on.
"United States calling for Mr. Dean Reed."
"Yes, this is Dean Reed."
"Dean, this is an old friend of yours back here in the United States. Does the name Johnny Rose ring a bell?"
Dean didn't remember.
Johnny reminded him they recorded on Capitol together, that his birth name had been Rosenburg, but he recorded under Johnny Rose and how they met at Estes Park, where Dean helped him.
Dean remembered. Of course, he remembered. You could almost hear Johnny let out his breath with relief that his old friend remembered him.
Johnny told Dean he had made the TV news back in Colorado. Dean asked if Johnny was still in the singing business. Johnny told him how he underwent surgery in 1981 and couldn't work. They exchanged news about their families and promised to write each other. It was almost crying time for Johnny, as he put it.
"My God, man, keep in touch, write to me," Johnny said.
That's how it got started. The renewed friendship got cranked up as they wrote each other. A while later, Dean told Johnny he was coming back to Colorado for the Denver Film Festival in the fall of 1985. Some fellow called Will Roberts had made a documentary film about Dean: American Rebel was its title. It was more than twenty years since Deano had been back to Colorado, but he was finally coming.
From things Dean was saying in his letters, Johnny could see he was a big star over there in the East. Big like Michael Jackson. That kind of big. Johnny realized that Dean thought a lot of people would know of him in Denver. It worried Johnny considerably.
Johnny said, "In his letters he would say, 'Well, when I get back to Denver, Johnny, maybe we can have a horse parade from the airport to the state capitol, and the governor can be there to greet me.' And I thought, Wait a minute. Nobody knows him. I thought to myself, You're a songwriter, John. You've got to do something here. You've got to tell Dean nobody knows him back in his hometown. Then I thought, Well now, wait a minute. That's a pretty good title for a song. So I sat down and I wrote this song. I called it 'Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown'."
"You think he'll laugh at it?" Johnny had asked Mona when he had finished the song.
Mona said, "So what? You've had people laugh at your songs before."
Johnny sent the song on over to Dean in East Berlin, and Dean flipped for it. Dean sang it at the Youth Festival in Moscow, the summer of 1985. A couple of months later, he called Johnny to say he would arrive on October 16.
Johnny played "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown" for us on the tape recorder. It was really good, a classic country tune.
Johnny remembered everything about that period, and he recorded his and Dean's phone conversations and put his own thoughts down on tape. It was uncanny. It was as if Johnny knew that one day somebody would make the movie.
Johnny picked up the bible with the bronze cross from the table near his chair in his living room in Loveland. I asked him about Dean's death.
"Maybe he was the best mole this country ever came up with," said Johnny Rosenburg. "But me, maybe I'm thinking more with my heart than with my mind when I say, I think he was murdered."
17
"Welcome home, welcome home. My God, man, you kept all your hair. Look at me," Johnny said right off the bat when Dean came off the plane at Stapleton Airport that October day in 1985. He had just burst out of that plane door like the biggest star you ever saw. He looked terrific. He was forty-seven years old.
Dean was in something of a daze, Johnny could tell. There was some press at the airport but not like Johnny would have liked. Dean had written that maybe there could be a horse parade and the mayor could meet him at the capitol. He was used to that level of welcome in Eastern Europe, he said; he loved the fanfare. Johnny had called a few TV stations.
"Guess who's coming to town?" Johnny said.
"Dean WHO?" was what people had usually said back.
Johnny had the date Dean arrived engraved in his head: October 16, 1985. Mona was real excited. Their pictures had hung together on the wall at Johnny's mom's house for as long as she could remember. After staring at Dean's mug on the wall at her in-laws' house for all those years, it was thrilling for Mona to meet him for the first time.
At the airport, Mona got introduced. God, he was a handsome man! she thought when she first laid eyes on Dean. The first thing Johnny noticed was that, to his ear, at least, Dean had developed something of a foreign accent, which the female race, including Mona, found very sexy. But in other ways he hadn't really changed all that much.
But then Dean was swept off down to Denver by the film people who were in town for the documentary film festival.
Mona and Johnny jumped in Johnny's Ford Elite and drove home to Loveland real fast to tape the news coverage. As they ran into the house, they turned the set on. They saw Dean stepping out of his limo at the Westin Hotel downtown.
The day after he arrived in Denver, Dean did a radio show with Peter Boyle. Johnny warned Dean not to go on Boyle's show. Communism was not flavor of the month exactly; no one knew much about this Gorbachev guy; Reagan was talking Evil Empire.
"Don't do it, Dean, you're being set up. Don't do it," said Johnny.
"Johnny," Dean said. "I have played my songs in thirty-two countries and I have risked my life for the things I believe. Why would I worry about one radio talk show guy?"
Dean went ahead with the interview. At their house, Johnny and Mona were listening to the radio.
"It's seven after the hour of nine o'clock on a Friday, the 17th of October, in Denver... you heard it through the grapevine," Boyle's voice came over the radio from the Fairmont Hotel lounge, where he was broadcasting. The music switched over from Martha and the Vandellas to Dean Reed singing, a ballad about Sacco and Vanzetti. Dean called them Nicola and Bart.
Boyle again: "It's twenty minutes after the hour of nine o'clock, 9:20. Remarkable guest in the studio, Peter Boyle on K-BIG AM and FM. That was the voice of Dean Reed. And this is going be a difficult interview. Dean Reed... was born right here in Colorado and now lives in East Berlin. He's back in Denver for the premiere of a documentary film about his life at the festival; he's a big star in Central America; in the Eastern Bloc..."
Johnny and Mona could tell from Boyle's voice that he probably didn't like Dean.
"Do you consider yourself a defector!" Boyle asked Dean on air.
"Not at all, Peter. I consider myself an American patriot," Dean said, his voice firm and cool. "I'm a good American, Peter. I can take a sword 360 degrees around my head and cut no strings. I'm a puppet of no one, Peter."
Boyle egged Dean on, asking him about Communism and if he was some kind of traitor.