Tom Hanks as folksinger Dean Reed (Red Elvis)

Subject: Dean Reed (Red Elvis or Communis Johnny Cash)
From: GUEST,Philippa
Date: 29 Oct 04 - 08:27 AM

in the Guardian (UK) newspaper
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1337866,00.html

From the land of the free...
During the cold war, all-American boy Dean Reed was a huge rock'n'roll star - behind the iron curtain. He was mobbed in Moscow; Yasser Arafat was a fan. But in 1986, his body was found in a lake. Was it KGB? CIA? Or did Reed simply feel he had no place in a post-glasnost world? Reggie Nadelson reports

Reggie Nadelson
Friday October 29, 2004

The Guardian

In April 1986, I was at home in New York, half watching 60 Minutes, the CBS news programme, when a piece came on, called The Defector. It was about a pop star named Dean Reed. He was handsome. He was American. He was singing Heartbreak Hotel and Tutti Frutti and he was doing it in the Soviet Union, and this was only the earliest days of glasnost when rockers in Red Square were not at all commonplace. I'd never even heard of him; I sat up.
It turned out that Reed - unknown in the west - had been a big star in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe for two decades; he was called the Red Elvis, the communist Johnny Cash, the man who brought rock 'n' roll to Russia. He made films, "eastern" westerns, as a singing cowboy. If he was American, and was he! - the gorgeous thick blond hair, the fabulous big white teeth, the lithe lean body, the promiscuous smile - he spouted a nifty Soviet party line. It was an astonishing performance. Six weeks later, he was dead.

Reed's body was discovered in a lake in east Berlin near the house where he lived in the suburb of Schmöckwitz. According to Russell Miller, who broke the story in the Sunday Times, there was plenty of secrecy surrounding Reed's death. The Berlin wall was still up; the Stasi still ruled the GDR; news was suppressed and a trickle of fact became a stream of speculation. Was Reed killed by the Stasi? The KGB? The CIA? Neo-Nazis? Accidental death by drowning was the official verdict; no one really believed it.

I set out to discover who killed him and who he was and I seem to have been following Reed's incredible story for half my life now for a book. Tom Hanks bought the rights for a film in which he is to star. When I met him in Los Angeles - me trying to pretend I was completely cool about the fact that I was drinking Coca-Cola and discussing the cold war with Tom Hanks - what was most alluring was that he, too, was so taken with it all. That it was somehow a story that encapsulated a whole era.

Comic, triumphal, tragic, heroic, incredible, Reed was part Forrest Gump, part political hustler, part rock'n'roll star. Hard to believe it's 15 years in November since the Berlin wall fell. Reed left America just as the wall went up and died just before it came down. He was a tale from the cold war, and the wall was his frontier. Crossing it gave him glamour. It made him Comrade Rockstar.

Reed was born in 1938 in Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Denver, Colorado; a place still so provincial it barely had a traffic light, and where practically everyone had a horse. His mother, Ruth Anna, had been a schoolteacher, and now kept chickens and a pig. His father Cyril, also a teacher, was a strict disciplinarian; despite the beatings he inflicted, he was proud of Dean. There were two other boys, Vern and Dale. Dean longed for his father's attention. Cyril became a founder member of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. (Sweet revenge, perhaps, for Dean to become a communist. But that came later.)

It was an all-American childhood: Dean attended military academy; he rode; he swam; he joined the Future Farmers of America; when he was 17, he raced a mule 110 miles for a quarter; the mule lost. "Some people thought it showed his tenacity and grit," his mother told me. "I always thought I had Dean under a magic star."

Reed's ears bugged him, though. They were as big as jug handles. And he was shy and thin. He got a guitar, figuring it would help get him some girls. He was known as "Slim" Reed.

Postwar America was triumphant and remorselessly upbeat, a time when any boy could be president if he tried hard enough, as long as he was white and obeyed the rules. Conformity and fear were mixed with optimism: the cold war was on, anti-communist hysteria raged, kids hid under their desks (duck and cover) during nuclear drills. Only the first squeak of sedition called rock'n'roll arrived with Bill Haley and the Comets' Rock Around the Clock.

Reed finished Wheat Ridge High and went to college, planning a career as a TV weatherman. In 1958, he quit and went to Hollywood. His dad wasn't crazy about the "singing stuff", but Reed thought he was pretty good and wanted a shot at the big time. The trip west became family legend; in a blurred black and white snapshot you could see him, unbearably hopeful in a white Chevrolet Impala convertible, big as a boat. On the road, he gave a man a lift and in return he gave him a name at Capitol Records, and as a result Reed got a recording contract. It was just like the movies, his mother said.

He enrolled at the Warner Brothers Drama School, where the acting class was taught by Paton Price, and among the other students were Don and Phil Everly. Already stars, the Everly Brothers had had hits as early as 1957 with Wake Up, Little Susie; the studios, desperate for another Elvis, recruited every rocker they could find. Phil and Reed became life-long friends.

I met Phil Everly in Burbank. Handsome, with immense southern charm, he recalled how important Price had been. "He was what you might call a life teacher," Everly said. "He was also a surrogate father for Dean."

Price was a critical force in Reed's life. A classic liberal in a Hollywood still beset by recent memories of the House of Un-American Activities nightmare, he told his students you could only be a good artist if you were a good person. Reed lapped it up. For years, Price encouraged Reed's political ventures; a few people thought Price played godfather to Reed for years to come. Reed's mother said: "I think what Paton taught Dean was about sex."

By the early 1960s, Reed - fabulously handsome - was making records, doing bit parts in bad films and showing up on TV. He'd met Patty, who would be his first wife. But he was restless. He wanted more. He heard that one of his tunes, Our Summer Romance, was a hit in Chile. So he went there, barely telling anyone. In Santiago, he found thousands of people waiting for him: "Viva Dean! Viva Dean!"

"He was a naive gringo who had come to 'do' Latin America," said a DJ at a Santiago radio station. Like a character from a movie musical, Dean was called the Magnificent Gringo.

He had the looks. He had the smile. The blue eyes. He had a light blue gabardine suit with very tight pants. But in South America, Reed fell prey to politics. He saw the writing on the wall: it said Yankee Go Home. Like most Americans, in discovering he was not universally loved, he was hurt. But instead of being downhearted, Reed set out to save the world.

"South America changed my life because there one can see the justice and injustice, or poverty and wealth," Reed said in an interview for American Rebel, a documentary about his life. "They are so clear that you must take a stand. I was not a capitalist, nor was I blind. And there I became a revolutionary."

He was unstoppable. He played for rich and poor, protested about Vietnam and nuclear weapons; he went to jail, he hung out with Pablo Neruda, the poet, and Victor Jara, the folk singer, and went up the Amazon with his Indian comrades.

The political limelight did what fame does for other stars: it turned him on. But it was what happened in Helsinki in 1965 that was the real beginning of his life as Comrade Rockstar.

In the mid-1960s, Soviet officials were on the lookout for acceptable entertainers to keep the kids in line. Nikolai Pastoukhov, a Moscow journalist, wasn't expecting much in the way of young blood at the World Peace Conference in Helsinki in 1965. The conference was a mess, Russians and Chinese not speaking, delegates yelling, a fistfight in the offing.

Suddenly a young man jumped on to the podium and started playing his guitar and singing. He made everyone hold hands and sing We Shall Overcome. His name was Dean Reed.

Here was this handsome American who espoused socialism but sang peace songs. Pastoukhov thought Bingo! (Or the Soviet equivalent.) And he helped set Reed's first trip to the USSR in motion.

Reed was 28 in 1966 when he played Moscow's Variety Theatre. He sang folk songs and show tunes like Maria, a big favourite in the Soviet Union. He could do the Twist; he moved like a rock'n'roller.

It was electric. For an encore he sang Ghost Riders in the Sky; it became his signature tune. Eventually, when he started playing countries in what one Soviet journalist called the "socialist camp", Reed sang it for Yasser Arafat, who could be seen on film tapping his fingers.

In reporting Reed's performances, Pravda noted that "Dean Reed left his own country as a sign of protest against the unjust US war in Vietnam." Soon he had a recording contract with Melodiya, the state recording company that had never before issued a rock'n'roll record.

On his first tour of the Soviet Union, Reed played 28 cities. People mobbed him. Still based in Latin America, he went back to the USSR repeatedly, for concerts, as a peace delegate. Everyone I ever met in the Soviet Union remembered Reed; even now, ask any Russian older than 40 and they say, "Ah, yes, Dean-rid. I remember!"

"Dean couldn't go out of the house without being mobbed," said Everly, who had once visited him in east Berlin, where they played a concert together. "Man, he was bigger than Elvis."

Was he talented? He had a pleasant voice, and he could whack away at the guitar; he could act a bit. But it didn't matter. Nobody understood the meaning of Dean Reed, his rise and fall, better than Artemy Troitsky, the Soviet Union's first and best rock critic, author of Back in the USSR.

"No living western performer of rock'n' roll ever came to the Soviet Union," Troitsky said. "Dean Reed was young. He played guitar. He was American. Rock 'n' roll meant a lot to absolutely every Soviet kid. It made them feel free and different from their parents. It was also like a door into another way of life, into the west. We didn't care about politics, but we did care about what an awful thing is official Soviet pop music," Troitsky said. "The west was something good. And Dean Reed wore cowboy boots and he came from the land of the free and the home of the brave and Chuck Berry."

For the next six years, Reed commuted between South America, Europe and the Soviet Union. He made spaghetti westerns, including one with Yul Brynner, was briefly a Maoist in Rome, and recorded in Prague where the best rock musicians in the east worked. Still, he remained largely unknown in the west, hidden behind the Berlin wall. (He kept his US passport; he filed his tax forms with the IRS annually, he wasn't really a defector at all.) If he'd had more real talent as a singer or an actor, maybe it would have been different, maybe he would have been more visible. But his talent was in who he was, an American over there ; his talent was in the curious combination of music and politics, sex, drive, sheer presence.

And maybe he knew it. For all his political naivety, for all his ego, there was a tiny core of self-knowledge. He was a moody man; he could turn on and off like a light switch if things went wrong. Mostly, though, movement was all; it was like a conjuror's trick: it blurred the reality.

By 1971, when he arrived in East Germany, he was a huge star. He started making films there, and met Renate Blume, an East German film star who became his third wife. (After he divorced Patty, he was briefly married to another East German woman.)

They were married in 1983 and settled in a pretty house in Schmöckwitz outside east Berlin; when I visited Blume, she said winningly, "Décor is Biedermeier Cowboy." On one wall hung the American flag Reed had washed in public in Chile in protest at the Vietnam war, - washing out the blood of the Vietnamese symbolically, he had said.

With dark eyes and a direct gaze, Blume was beautiful. "He was my friend, my husband, my compañero," she said.

By and large, life with Reed was good, and by 1985, they were looking forward to making Bloody Heart, together. Reed was to write, direct and star; Blume would play opposite him. It was a love story set against the Indian uprising at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, a perennial favourite of socialist propaganda. But in the autumn of 1985, Reed went to America. Bloody Heart was never made.

"Welcome home, welcome home. My God, man, you kept all your hair," said Johnny Rosenburg, an old friend of Reed's, when Reed stepped off the plane in Denver in October 1985. "He just burst out of that plane door like the biggest star you ever saw."

It was Reed's longest trip home in a quarter of a century. He attended a film festival in Denver where a documentary about his life was shown. He met Dixie Schnebly, a childhood friend, who said she would pave the way for his return to the US as a singing star. And he fell in love with America. With Colorado's blue skies and mountains and sunshine, with his friends' easy ways and their delight in his presence. They encouraged him to think he could return home as a star; by the time he left, his yearning was heartbreaking. Before he went, he gave a little concert in Rosenburg's basement in Loveland, Colorado. It was the only time he ever played in America.

"After his trip to Colorado he missed his homeland very much," said Blume. "He was very homesick. He talked of nothing else."

Meanwhile, in the USSR, things were changing fast. "After glasnost, from 1985 or 1986, local rock'n'roll heroes became available to the public," said Troitsky. "American rock'n'roll, even if it was Prince and not Dean Reed, became less popular. Only in a very provincial, very isolated country, could a figure like Dean Reed become a big star. Gradually, the Soviet Union and eastern Europe got closer to the world community culturally ... in the light of new information, Dean Reed's figure was getting darker and darker."

As things opened up, people began to despise Reed for his relentless support of the system; they saw he had been a creature of officialdom. In the spring of 1986, a rock concert was held in Moscow to benefit the victims of Chernobyl; Reed showed up but no one asked him to play.

Even in East Germany, Reed's audience was disappearing. Victor Grossman, an American writer based in the GDR and a friend of Reed's, said: "People who were becoming disillusioned with the system didn't like somebody who supported it. Fewer people went to his concerts, and it's not so nice being a star playing in an empty theatre. By the mid-1980s, Dean heard the doors shutting one at a time."

Now his best hope lay with 60 Minutes. A big piece on CBS would surely be his return ticket to a career in the US. And in the winter of 1986, Mike Wallace, America's best-known correspondent, flew to east Berlin. The interview was a success. The piece was to go out in the autumn, but instead it was transmitted on April 20 1986 - the night I saw it at home in New York, when 60 million Americans got their first glimpse of Dean Reed.

The piece was not unflattering. But in the interview, Reed said he felt the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was a more moral, more peace-loving man than US president Ronald Reagan, and he also defended the Berlin wall. His friends in America were horrified. The cold war was still on. They knew it was over for Reed in America. Rosenburg said, "The one thing you can't do is defend that wall in this country."

Eventually 60 Minutes forwarded letters to Reed; some called him a traitor; worse, some called him an opportunist who could only make it east of the Berlin wall.

Reed was frantic. But at that time there was still Bloody Heart to look forward to. Reed's film was due to start shooting in June, although there were money problems. On June 12 1986, Reed got a call from his German producer, Gerrit List, who was back from Moscow with news about the financing. Anxiously, Reed said he would drive to List's house that night. He never showed up.

The search for Dean lasted days. At 8.20 in the morning on June 17, his body was discovered in the lake near his house.

For a long time, I was convinced a crime was involved, that Reed, with his ambitions and seditions, and finally his yearnings for America, had attracted the wrong kind of attention. In those cold war days, the spooky scenarios - Stasi, KGB, CIA - were always seductive.

In reality, though, it was probably suicide. With so many doors shutting, Reed felt he was yesterday's man - though there were always, and still are, conflicting views, especially among his friends. "Dean could laugh," Phil Everly said. "A man that laughs doesn't kill himself."

After the fall of the Berlin wall, information became available and I went to see the former GDR's ex-chief homicide detective, Thomas Sindermann. "I was convinced it was suicide," he said. "Reed was promoted as an idol, an American fighter for communism. The authorities didn't want to show young people that he had problems and had taken his own life."

But what convinced me that Reed's death was suicide, or at least a bumbled self-willed accident, was not Sindermann's dry facts, or the coroner's report or even a seemingly authentic suicide note, but something a young Russian writer said.

"Dean's death was not a shock for me," said Xenia Golubovich. "I think he committed suicide because that's what a hero must do. When a human really wants to become something, he does. It demands enormous strength. He died having absolutely ruined himself. Dean, in his way, became what he wanted."

After all these years, Dean Reed's story still haunts me, in part because of the scale - the tragic, comic life, big, overstuffed and rich as a fruitcake. Because, for better or worse, he engaged with the world. He did something. He was truly a tale from the cold war.

Subject: RE: Tom Hanks as Dean Reed (Red Elvis)
From: GUEST,An old guy...
Date: 05 Sep 04 - 11:00 AM

Ernest Gill's account of Dean's life, including his death, is about as far off base as one can get. Problem is, once something is written about a person, it's usually taken as fact by the reader.

For example, Dean's body was NOT found at the bottom of a lake in his car. His body was found wedged under a bridge, fully clothed, wearing 2 heavy coats in the middle of June in Germany.

He NEVER embrassed communism. He believed in socialism. What's the difference? Ask the folks in Canada or England, just to name a couple.

Was he capable of committing suicide? We all are, or have at least contemplated the idea at one time or another. Dean addressed the suicide idea during an interview on ABC World News when he stated that if he couldn't have the one thing he desired the most - a career in the US - he sure wasn't going to commit suicide over it.

As for the statement that the US was upset with his comments on 60 Minutes in the early part of 1986, that is probably true. But they would never have attempted to keep Dean from returning to the US. He had his American passport and could enter the country any time he pleased.

Did Dean commit suicide? I doubt it, but it's easier to accept that theory than to search for the facts. Did he write the suicide note? Sure looks like his handwritting.....all 16 or 17 pages of it. You'd think that writing such a long farewell note you'd eventually talk yourself out of the act.

The truth of how Dean died will probably never be known. But keep the following in mind. "It takes a real profession to cause a death by natural causes."

Subject: RE: Tom Hanks as Dean Reed (Red Elvis)
From: M.Ted
Date: 26 Aug 04 - 02:37 PM

When Dean Reed died, it was officially determined suicide. which is why everyone thought the Secret Police did it. I think that the note is not new, and had been dismissed as a forgery those who believe the KGB killed him--it most likely has been dredged up as part of the advance publicity for this movie--

Dean Reed did show up on the radar--or, more precisely, on CBS Sixty Minutes, in I think, about 1981--He apparently was rather condescending and arrogant, and made quite an impression--

Unfortunately, after his career went into decline, mostly because Communist Block audiences were able to listen to real rock and roll via black market recordings and Western radio--He wanted to come back to the US, and believed that he could start a career here--unfortunately, owing to his 60 Minutes interview, the State Department wasn't exactly eager to let him come back--Those who think that he killed himself tend to think this was the reason--

Let no one be deceived: he was not a "Red Elvis"--he wasn't really even a rock and roller--what he really was was a fifties/early sixties folkie--he played old American songs, like Cindy, and When the Saints Go Marching In, with the usual mix of John Denver tunes, the odd mainsteam pop song,and some original tunes, like Nobody Knows Me Back In My Hometown, and Deano Loves You, Baby--

If he was alive today, he'd probably be a Mudcatter--

Subject: RE: Tom Hanks as Dean Reed (Red Elvis)
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Aug 04 - 04:49 AM

Well Rog, when you think on people like William Worthy, and even in latter days Jane Fonda, it's not surprising that he doesn't show up on the radar. If he had come home to the US, he would have been black listed in those days, and would never have been able to work under his own name. History is written by the victors after all.
Giok

Subject: Tom Hanks as Dean Reed (Red Elvis)
From: Roger the Skiffler
Date: 26 Aug 04 - 04:04 AM

I heard on UK BBC radio yesterday that Tom Hanks was planning to do a film on Dean Reed's fascinating life (see below).
Would such a film attract US audiences in Bush's Middle America??

The mystery of 'Red Elvis'
Virtually unknown in his native United States, folk singer Dean Reed was one of the GDR's biggest celebrities. Ernest Gill investigates the circumstances surrounding his tragic death.




Reed's wholesome good looks wooed GDR audiences.
He was called the "Johnny Cash of Communism" and the "Red Elvis of Red Square". His name was Dean Reed and he was a stunningly-handsome American folk singer and actor in a score of spaghetti Westerns.

Virtually unknown in his native United States, he was one of the East Bloc's biggest celebrities and his tragic death just before the fall of Communism was one of the great mysteries of the Cold War.

His life — and death — are the stuff of such drama that recently it was announced that Tom Hanks and Dreamworks studios had bought the rights from Reed's heirs to do a biographical movie with Hanks playing the guitar-strumming Reed himself.

Now the final scene to that movie will have a new twist amid revelations that Reed committed suicide and was not eliminated by the East German Stasi secret police, as had been assumed for years.

His life ended in a car at the bottom of a lake outside East Berlin. It started on a chicken farm outside Denver in 1938.

In the mid-1950s, when Elvis and Fabian brought sex to rock 'n' roll, Reed parlayed his wholesome, square-jawed, blue-eyed good looks and a sweet singing voice into a singing career.

Strumming his way to Hollywood, he signed a record contract with Capitol Records before he was 20. But in the high-stakes music industry gambling game, he somehow failed to make the charts in the US.


Dean was the propaganda godsend every Communist government coveted.
Yet in another twist, one of many in his life, his first two singles were chart-busters in Latin America. And his third single, "Our Summer Romance", was so popular in South America that the record sent him on a tour there.

More popular than Elvis Presley, he stayed to enjoy his incredible fame in Chile, Peru, Argentina. He made albums, starred in movies and had his own television show in Buenos Aires.

He was known as Mister Simpatia because he worked for free in barrios and prisons and protested against US foreign policy and nuclear bomb tests.

The further to the left that his politics drifted, the more he raised the hackles of authorities in Argentina, who finally deported him in 1966.

Sensing no career opportunities in the Western Hemisphere, Reed settled in Europe, where he made a few largely forgettable spaghetti Westerns in Italy.


Dean Reed was a true believer in Communism.
Anti-Vietnam war sentiment was high in Europe and Dean's stridency soon attracted the attention of Communist officials who invited him on a concert tour of the Soviet Union in 1966.

As far as the Soviets were concerned, Dean was Dylan and Donovan all rolled up into one. They propelled him to mega-stardom through stage, screen and television appearances throughout the Eastern Bloc.

He was the big tall young American who could stand up at peace rallies and lash out at the Vietnam war in a genuine American twang. He was every inch the wholesome man every babushka wanted as a son-in-law. He was the sexy hunk every young woman desired. He was the talented celebrity every young man longed to be.

And he was the propaganda godsend every Communist government coveted. Settling in East Germany, he became one of the highest paid stars there, making movies by the score, largely romantic musical Westerns like the ones Roy Rogers had made a generation earlier.

His last movie, which he starred in and directed in 1981, was entitled "Sing, Cowboy, Sing" (filmed in Roumania). That was about the same time that he married East German actress Renate Blum.

But behind his flashing smile, he was not a happy man. There were rumours that he missed his family back in Colorado. He had marital problems. He regretted his defection to East Germany, a Stalinist regime viewed as hardline even by Kremlin standards.

And he was ageing. At 45 his looks were fading and even the East German propaganda machine had a hard time convincing crowds to turn out for his concerts.


In June 1986, he was found dead in his car at the bottom of a lake outside East Berlin.
Racked with homesickness, grappling with a mid-life crisis, he wrangled permission to go back to Colorado in 1985 to visit his family for the first time in 25 years.

He had dreams of re-launching his career, and told relatives of his plans for making a film about the Wounded Knee incident. His family says he wanted to return to Colorado to live but that he had a few loose ends to tie up first back in East Berlin.

Only a few months later, in June 1986, he was found dead in his car at the bottom of a lake outside East Berlin. Officially, the East German government called it "a tragic accident" and issued a ruling of death by drowning. He was 47.

But his family and friends claimed he had been murdered. His brother Dale Reed, who now lives in Seattle, said it also could have been suicide because Dean suffered for years from what would today be diagnosed as clinical depression.

It turns out Dale was right. A German newspaper last week reported that a farewell letter in Reed's handwriting has been found among documents in a former East German police archive.

Written in characteristically ungrammatical German, the letter said his beloved wife Renate despised him, describing him as "a two-bit Yank crooner", and that she had said he was "not even man enough to kill myself".

In a postscript to East German strongman Erich Honecker, he wrote, "Tell him politics had nothing to do with this. Communism is not perfect, but it is the only hope for solving humanity's great problems."

His brother Dale, who sensed what had really happened, recently told an interviewer his brother would have relished the idea that his life story could be a movie starring a multiple Oscar winner.

"He'd like that, boy," he said. "As long as they tell the truth. Of course, none of us know what his life was like, what the truth is. He lived a very exciting life."

July 2004

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