Paton Price was a man of impeccable liberal credentials. Although Hollywood had been badly wounded by the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the early fifties, there remained a sturdy left-wing community of which Price was a mainstay. A pacifist, he had gone to jail during World War II. A fierce opponent of segregation and, later, of the Vietnam War, he was a deeply political man.
Anyway, clearly Paton Price was the first to influence Dean Reed's politics.
In the booth at EI Torito, Phil Everly finished his drink and lit up another Marlboro.
"I was about as far away as you can get politically from Dean, I guess," Phil said. "He was a socialist and I'm a Reagan supporter. But it didn't matter. You could talk politics, you know? I respected Dean's political views because Dean had political views that he lived."
In interviews Dean Reed said he considered that the best part of his time in Hollywood was finding Paton Price, that because of Paton he acquired a life-long friend, and because of Paton he kept his integrity.
Price was dead by the time I started looking for people who knew Dean Reed. The only pictures I saw of him were in a filmed interview. He had a tense, intense, intelligent face, a high forehead and a goatee, but he was dying by then and you could see the skull beneath the skin.
He told his classes at Warner Brothers that you could not be a good artist unless you were a good human being. He told them that they had to dedicate their fame, if they were lucky enough to have fame, to make this world a better place to live in. Among his students, along with Dean and Phil Everly, were Jean Seberg, Don Murray, the Smothers Brothers, and Dick Clark. Dick Clark, who had gone on to invent American Bandstand, one of the first rock and roll shows on TV, became a very rich man. I wondered what he thought about Dean now, if he thought of him at all, but I couldn't get hold of him.
In spite of Phil Everly's fond words about Paton Price, there were also those people I met over the months when I went looking for Dean who thought Price was a manipulative man, a mentor and teacher, but also a godfather who pulled Dean's strings.
At Warner Brothers, in his acting class, at his house, which was a kind of salon for his students, Price always undertook to preach his beliefs. Because of Paton's teachings, Dean turned down the chance to star in a TV show that was coming up then; it was called Wanted Dead or Alive. (There was some confusion over whether it was a show called Killer Diller, about a cowboy who would rather sing than fight, but most people thought it was Wanted Dead or Alive.) Dean did not want to carry a gun on screen; instead of Dean, a young unknown named Steve McQueen was cast.
On one occasion, when Dean was having trouble with his lines, Paton apparently told him he was having problems because he was sitting next to an attractive woman and both of them wondering what was under their clothes. Price made both of them strip naked and told them they could now both concentrate on putting some emotion into their acting. It embarrassed the hell out of Dean.
I remembered Dean's mother's bitter words: "Most often, in later years when Dean came on a visit to America, he stayed with Paton and Tillie in Burbank," she had said in Hawaii. "Paton had a lot of influence with Dean. Paton blamed me for the fact Dean was a virgin when he got to Hollywood. Well, just what in the world did he think I could do about that? I think what Paton taught him, was he taught him about sex."
I heard other versions - with Dean's life there were always other versions - about how Price asked Dean to do a love scene with Jean Seberg in class. About how Price felt Dean didn't know what to do and said to him, "You're a virgin, aren't you?" He took him to a brothel and got him the best prostitute, who was black. And afterwards the girl apparently said to Dean, "You're a natural." Or maybe that was only rumor.
Along with Paton Price and his lessons, there were other requirements for the students who were contract players at Warner Brothers. Dean learned to fence and act and wear nice clothes. He and the other kids worked as bit players and walk-ons. When big shots toured the studio, they posed with them. Movie magazines pictured them dressed to the nines, the girls in evening gowns with big skirts, the boys in white dinner jackets, all of them smiling and dancing at restaurants and nightclubs like Chasen's or the Brown Derby. Hollywood wallpaper.
In Hollywood, things were changing. A handsome young truck driver changed his name to Rock Hudson and became a big star, so it could happen to anyone. Universal produced movies made by Ross Hunter where the titles always seemed to appear on padded satin cushions and seemed always to feature Agnes Moorhead and Deborah Rush. On the screen, married couples slept in separate beds and starlets had their dresses glued to their breasts because a starlet was not permitted to show her cleavage, although she could show the mounds on either side. It was the 1950s. The Eisenhower Years.
Did you hear the one about the Eisenhower doll? people would say. You wind it up and it does nothing for eight years. But the country was prosperous, secure and confident, and scared. The McCarthy period had only just ended. Fear of Communism remained; people were actually literally scared of it, especially if they were Catholic. The Church actually instructed them to pray for the souls of the poor commie children. They probably would have worried less if they knew how Nikita Khrushchev felt when he visited California in 1959.
Forbidden to visit Disneyland, the Khrushchevs went to 20th Century Fox. There, they watched a rehearsal of Can Can, disapproved of it, and met the stars and starlets. Among them was Marilyn Monroe. Having learned a few words of Russian from Natalie Wood, Monroe shook Mr. Khrushchev's hand and whispered in his ear:
"We, the workers of 20th Century Fox, rejoice that you have come to visit our Studio and our Country."
As he flew out of Los Angeles, so the apocryphal story went, Khrushchev looked down and saw all the swimming pools.
"Now I know that Communism has failed," he said.
A year later, John F. Kennedy was elected President because, in a way, he looked like a movie star.
Phil Everly ordered another margarita. The smell of Phil's cigarette was drifting my way and I was dying for a smoke. Shaking out the pack, he offered me one. I confessed I had just given it up. Putting the cigarettes away in his pocket, Phil said, "You're crazy if you go back to it."
I played the scene in my head: "Want a cigarette?" someone would say to me. "No thanks," I'd reply. "Wow. You quit. How did you manage?" In reply, I would cast my eyes down and raise my voice.
"You see," I would say, "it was Phil Everly who got me to quit. Of the Everly Brothers."
Phil was a great flirt. I was having a very good time. The margaritas kept coming. Phil was charming. He was smart. He was articulate. He was witty. He had been in the Marines and was a Republican and listened to right-wing talk radio; it was, in fact, the first time I had ever heard of Rush Limbaugh. I was trying to reconcile just how much I liked him with the way I felt about his politics, which only proved how narrow, snotty, and provincial New York liberals could be.
Leslie Woodhead had always loved Phil's music, too. He loved it in the way that Europeans have always loved America for its seeming glory days, for the open road, the neon and the motels and the diners, for Marilyn Monroe and cars with chrome and tail fins, and, most of all, for the music, the early sounds of rock and roll, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers. In a way it was the era that produced Dean Reed.