The mysterious death of the American singer Dean Reed, known as the Red Elvis,
has had conspiracy theorists speculating about the hand of the KGB or the
CIA for 20 years.
Virtually unknown in the West, Reed, 47, was a superstar in the Soviet empire.
Mobbed by Russian fans in Red Square, he danced the twist in Minsk and
topped the charts in Bulgaria and Hungary. Then in June 1986 he was found
drowned in a lake in East Berlin, where he had lived since 1971.
Now a documentary that had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival last night
suggests that Reed was not the victim of the spy services of East or West,
nor of a tragic accident — the version peddled by nervous East German media
— nor even, as some believed, of a jealous husband. Rather, the hero of
Soviet teenagers killed himself, deliberately donning two jackets on a
summer night so that the currents would drag him under.
“He couldn’t see a way out,” Leopold Gruen, the director, told The
Times. “He wanted to go back to the United States but realised there was
no return. At the same time, the socialist ideals that had brought him to
the East had fallen by the wayside.”
Reed’s socialism was rooted in the 1970s — he once sang proudly in the private
railway carriage of a Kremlin politician — and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms
looked about to shake up his world.
Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1938, Reed was neither a good actor nor a
particularly good singer, but he arrived in Eastern Europe at the right
moment: communist chiefs were looking for a cult figure, a left-wing rock
star who could stir youthful enthusiasm for a stagnant system. His first hit
was a version of Elvis’s Blue Suede Shoes.
His Western singing career had never taken off, but he was very popular in the
Chile of the Marxist Salvador Allende and his anti-Americanism, combined
with clean-cut good looks, caught the attention of Soviet talent-spotters.
At the Leipzig Film Festival in 1971 he met his second wife, an East German,
and made the country his base. It was seen as a huge propaganda coup by the
communists and his records were produced by the millions in Moscow studios.
The Stasi secret police arranged a flat as a love nest for his mistresses and
he was flown around the world to sing We Shall Overcome to
dispossessed farmers. “I was sure we had got ourselves a Hollywood star,”
says Egon Krenz, the last leader of East Germany, in the film Red Elvis.
That remained the central misunderstanding: the communists thought, wrongly,
that they had netted a world-class perfomer, while Reed thought that he had
found his true revolutionary home. “It was a classic tragedy,” said Mr
Gruen, “ a story of naivety.” The crumbling of his illusions — and the
curdling of his marriage — drove him to suicide. Perhaps it is this unhappy
combination that has inspired film-makers and writers.
Apart from Mr Gruen’s film, Tom Hanks is planning to direct a Hollywood
version of Reed’s life based on the book Comrade Rockstar, by
Reggie Nadelson. A CD of his best songs has been released and a new
biography was published last year. Mr Gruen said that there would probably
be no definitive answer to the riddle of Reed’s death. An Eastern
intelligence service could have killed him rather than let him return to the
US but that would have been a serious risk. So suicide is Mr Gruen’s
explanation. “Suddenly there were too many cul-de-sacs in his life,” says
the director. “He felt trapped.”
