Hopper (10 page)

“This party was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me,” remembered Andy.

Cruising the LA freeways, Andy stared up at giant Liz Taylor. Cleopatra loomed over the Strip.

Driving past the suburb of Tarzana, Andy was inspired to shoot a short film:
Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort of
. Rather than deal with the likes of David O. Selznick, so
boring
, he did it on the fly. Whipping out his Bolex at producer John Houseman's swimming pool, Andy directed Hopper to shimmy up a palm tree in a leopard-print towel and get a coconut.

No Method needed, just pound the chest, swing around as he once had back on the egg ranch.

It was all so totally fabulous for Andy. Overwhelmed at the black-tie opening of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena art museum, Andy puked on too much pink champagne. The dizzying possibility of art lay
everywhere
.

Running amok in his black tie with his Nikon, Hopper spotted a hand-painted sign with a finger pointing toward the entrance of the historic Hotel Green, where the gala was being held. Freeing the sign with a screwdriver in an act of artistic liberation, Hopper presented it to the godfather of pop, Duchamp, who allowed himself to produce in his lifetime no more than twenty “readymades.” On this rare occasion, Duchamp signed.

Miraculously transformed into art,
Hotel Green
hung at Hopper's home, christened by
Vogue
as “the Prado of Pop.” The Duchamp/Hopper collaboration was in good company with Andy's
Double Mona Lisa
, Ed Kienholz's sculpture of a mannequin's head picking her nose atop a roller skate, and Lichtenstein's
Mad Scientist
paid for by Brooke's $65-a-week unemployment checks.

“You're married to a wealthy woman,” Hopper's agent told him. “You're squandering her money. Look at this. You're making a fool of yourself. Get rid of these things or I'm leaving.”

Out went the agent, to whom all this seemed like a pile of worthless junk. In came pop artist James Rosenquist, whose woman with red-lacquered fingernails hung on the wall courtesy of the Hayward fortune. Rosenquist could tell Brooke was a little weary of her husband, who'd turned their home into a must-stop welcoming station on the pop circuit with parties all the time and people wandering in at odd hours.

A creepy fourteen-foot Mexican papier-mâché clown floated on the ceiling, looking down on the hungry children—the Hoppers' two-year-old daughter, Marin, and Brooke's two children from her previous marriage.

“I'm going out. I'm leaving,” said Hopper. “We gotta go get some food for the kids.”

At the supermarket, Rosenquist saw Rock Hudson at the meat counter, staring at his fellow slabs of beef. Returning to his pop palace, Hopper cooked dinner in the kitchen with collages of vintage soup can labels plastered on the cupboards. Brooke popped in and started being really nasty to Dennis.

“I wanna go out and score some grass,” said Hopper.

He took Rosenquist on a sub rosa Hollywood house tour. The whole neighborhood kept their doors open. Creeping into one darkened house, they saw people sleeping all over the floor.

“Whatever you do,” whispered Hopper, “don't say anything. Be quiet.”

Stepping over bodies, Rosenquist saw, at the end of a long passage, John Barrymore's son holding a baby. They got some grass and tippy-toed out.

B
red despite the wild sterility of Dodge City, he is now morassed in a creativeness that is almost as hopelessly complete as that which spread and drowned the great Cocteau,” Terry Southern wrote for
Vogue
's profile, “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers.” “The Den Hoppers are tops in their field. Precisely what their field is, is by no means certain—except that she is a Great Beauty, and he a kind of Mad Person.”

Terry was the consummate hipster on the scene, the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of the seriously groovy
Dr. Strangelove
and the author of
Candy
, the banned sex romp based on Voltaire's native, optimistic hero. Still, he couldn't keep up with peripatetic Hopper, whose Nikon was a barometer for what was
happening
.

Amid the chaos at Allen Ginsberg's East Village pad, a naked beauty flung a potpourri of rose petals and dog hair into an electric fan blowing up from the floor as Buñuel's surrealist film
L'Age d'Or
was projected in reverse.

“It was all pretty weird, now that I think about it,” wrote Terry. “Hopper—who even then was probably one of the most talented actors alive—became quite excited by the spectacle and eager to take part, gliding around in a Marcel Marceau manner, grimacing oddly, and, at the same time, attempting to take photographs with a 35-millimeter Nikon.”

Not long after, in March 1965, Terry warned his friend against going on a “madcap jaunt” to march from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King. Brando had sparked Hopper's sudden interest in civil rights, having called everyone in Hollywood, rallying them to the cause. Hopper took off.

“Hopper, take care!” warned Terry. “You are spreading yourself thin—in this case, perhaps down to the proverbial mincemeat!”

In Alabama, an onlooker pissed on Dennis, who was marching between Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. “White trash!” the guy yelled. “Hippie, commie, longhair!”

“Wow,” said Hopper. “I mean, I don't care if he has
short
hair!”

The Confederate flag flew proudly atop Old Glory at the state house in Montgomery. Hopper photographed MLK asking the gathered, “How long?” Hopper was then off to document the rock-and-roll scene for
Vogue
. An American carnival passed before his lens. James Brown grinned at the girls smiling next to the James Brown Productions jet. In a Russian Cossack hat, David Crosby perched with the Byrds outside the LA County Museum. Dennis shot Jefferson Airplane and even touched down in swinging London to shoot Brian Jones holding a sitar.

The Rolling Stone handed over his mirrored octagonal shades to give to Peter Fonda.

Nicknamed “the Tourist” for always showing up with a camera around his neck, Hopper captured his own kind: the Hollywood hip. Within the gates of exclusive Malibu Colony, his clique drifted in and out to the sounds of Peter, in a white floppy beach hat, strumming his twelve-string acoustic guitar. A huntress in a flower-print bikini, his sister, Jane, pulled back the string of her archery bow. The tension quivered down her toes into the soft sands of Malibu.

Hitting the bull's-eye, Hopper captured Janey's perfect ass in black-and-white. Except for Hopper, life was placid here.

“You gotta come, Fonda,” Hopper demanded. “You gotta see
this
!”

Hooked into the scene at the Pasadena art museum, Dennis took Fonda to foreign film screenings that couldn't be seen anywhere else in Hollywood. Along with the Buñuel/Dalí collaboration,
Un Chien Andalou
, Peter was particularly taken by a 16mm print of the Marx Brothers'
Duck Soup
. He'd seen
Citizen Kane
, but Dennis introduced him to Welles's ill-fated follow-up,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, a cautionary tale with Welles losing control of his film, chopped up in editing by studio moles who slapped on a happy ending.

If ever given a chance to make a movie, Hopper would have to figure out how to steer it through this land of the Philistines. Of course it was a fantasy in '65, when no major studio would've considered handing over the money for a Dennis Hopper film. It was more like a joke, but not for Hopper.

Binging on European art films and reborn to the possibilities of moviemaking, twenty-nine-year-old Hopper lacked the needed millions to mount his own production. But with the world as his set, he snapped his Nikon as the waves soothed Malibu and the sun set on its languid shores. Then he drove his Corvair convertible through a wall of fire to shoot the riots raging in Watts, another spectacular scene for his increasingly strange and ever-expanding montage.

S
omewhere high in the Sierra Madre, 6,800 feet above sea level in the craggy state of Durango, Mexico, the bad guy with six-guns awaited a five-car train with an antique Stephenson steam engine built in 1892.

Overnight the dusty village of Chupaderos, pop. 300, had transformed into the frontier town of Clearwater, Texas, circa 1889. On this Wild West set, complete with a saloon, a gun shop with a rifle plastered on its side, and the American flag hoisted high above the town square, the real villagers, working as extras, gathered to greet the sons of Katie Elder, blood brothers riding in for revenge.

The voice on the megaphone bellowed through the once-peaceful streets. “
Tighten up!
You're spread out like a widow woman's shit!”

Hardly mellowed after his recent colon cancer surgery, Hopper's old foe Hathaway chomped a cigar as he prepared to direct Big Duke—John Wayne—in the Marlboro Man's 165th picture.
The Sons of Katie Elder
was Wayne's first since licking the big C himself, leaving him saddled with half a lung and an oxygen tank. Manacled to his brother at the ankle, Big Duke as the eldest Elder was to jump off a bridge into the freezing waters of the Rio Chico.

“You can't use a double for that scene,” ordered Hathaway. “Do it yourself.”

Off the set, Big Duke warded off his oncoming pneumonia with a couple of vitamin C tablets courtesy of his third wife, Pilar, a former Peruvian actress thirty years his junior. He was ready to shoot it out in his climactic scene against Dennis, playing the twitchy son of a murderous gunsmith.

“Duke and I decided you should go back to work,” Hathaway told Hopper back when he cast him, seeing as how he and Brooke, a Hayward, had a little girl to look out for now. Hathaway laid out the rules: “No trouble from you, kid. This is a Big Duke picture, and Big Duke don't understand that Method shit.”

Big Duke kept an eye out, ready to relieve his itchy trigger finger if what they said about the kid was true. Word around the saloon was he was a
subversive
, trying to sneak psychology into the classic Western.

All eyes watched Hathaway deliver line readings to Dennis before he rolled camera. Rather than another three-day showdown in the middle of nowhere, where he might easily be chopped up and fed to the rattlesnakes, Hopper mimicked his director exactly, just as Hathaway wanted.

“That was beautiful, kid,” said Hathaway. “That was beautiful.”

“You see, Henry, I'm a much better actor now than I was eight years ago.”

“You're not a better actor. You're just smarter.”

It was steaks all around, flown in from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas courtesy of Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin, cast as one of the blood brothers, stuck out here in the woods without any broads. Hathaway cooked the meat himself over an open fire under a cathedral of ahuehuete trees. By the flickering light, Hopper considered the movies—they had such a strong effect on those making them, but especially on those on the other side of the screen. The movies sent audiences into tailspins, making his mother wish she was married to Errol Flynn instead of a grocer.

Even more trippy? In six weeks the production would be gone, but the sets would remain.

Big Duke had big plans for Durango. In front of the hotel on the plaza, Wayne hoisted his fist in the air and sunk it into a patch of wet cement laid down by the villagers, a crude ritual mimicking his handprint ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. He was intent on turning Durango into his personal Eden, a place to settle down and make Westerns, working by day, sleeping by night to a rattlesnake lullaby. All the while oblivious to the fact that these villagers were now living in a Wild West set. When they moseyed past these facades, would they begin to confuse their simple lives with the world of movie fantasy? Would they slip across that imaginary line and act like movie cowboys, playing shoot-'em-up, spurring real rage and violence? What the hell would happen to the villagers?

Big Duke pulled Hopper aside. “Ya gotta get off that loco weed, boy.”

On his return to civilization, Hopper dashed off a manifesto about his epiphany and showed it to his friend, Stewart Stern. The
Rebel
screenwriter thought it was very interesting, though at times he couldn't help wondering if Hopper was a phony. Like the time Dennis told him he needed to get a road.

“What do you mean, Dennis?”

The afternoon's adventure led to a studio prop shop, featuring hundreds and hundreds of yards of fake roads from all over the world: Dorothy's yellow brick, endless stretches of gray American highway, English cobblestones and dirt paths constructed to look from as far off as Timbuktu. They were all made of rubber and ready to be rolled up and taken away. Hopper had promised a charity auction a piece of original art, so he bought fourteen yards of ancient Roman Appian Way, attached a hefty price tag and a title:
Found Object: Dennis Hopper
.

Bang! It sold.

Realizing Hopper's manifesto was far more valuable than a stretch of yellow-brick rubber road, Stern asked Hopper to sign it, holding on to it with a hunch that it might someday be important.

The Last Movie

A
t home in Beverly Hills on his two acres of land with a tennis court and swimming pool, Peter Fonda figured he could do a film for cheap like American International Pictures. The independent studio was servicing the drive-in market with all those Frankie and Annette beach party movies. AIP also single-handedly revived the career of Vincent Price, star of its Edgar Allan Poe films directed by Roger Corman, a no-budget auteur hailed as the Orson Welles of Z pictures (that much further down the alphabet from B).