Hopper (2 page)

The journalist held on for dear life as Hopper launched into his story, a strange and twisted tale full of superhero highs and decadent lows. It all began rather innocently in Dodge City, Kansas, just around the time the Dust Bowl was settling down. Back in its rip-roaring heyday, dime-store books around the globe branded Dodge City, “the Wickedest City in America,” the end of the trail for herds of cowboys ready to raise hell after bringing longhorn cattle from Texas—and trouble to boot. It took the quickest guns in the West to keep the peace, including the legendary heroes of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona—Wyatt Earp and his tubercular sidekick, Doc Holliday.

What the law didn't chase off, the dust certainly did by the time Hopper's tale began.

On a bright Saturday morning in April 1939, the old cowtown proudly dragged out its boots and did its best to look its wildest worst. The junior chamber of commerce had issued a bulletin stating “Keep Your Whiskers” and offered a two-hundred-dollar prize for the best beard, one that harkened back to those woolly days of old Dodge. Everybody came out for the big day, including the Hopper family. Barely three years old, Dennis watched in amazement the shaggy wild men draped in buffalo skins, looming over dapper dudes in handlebar mustaches. They all took their places like extras outside the railway station alongside a cast of tens of thousands from across the country, desperate for a bit of color after years of suffering under the sun-blotted blackness of the dust storms. The seconds ticked toward the arrival of the actors. The town would ever afterward remember the premiere of
Dodge City
the movie as the biggest thing to happen to Dodge, shadowing even its storied past.

Shortly after ten o'clock, thirty barnstormers from the Wichita Aeronautic Society ripped through the skies. The band struck up “Oh! Susanna” as the steel-blue Warner Bros. Special chugged in on the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. Out from the extravagant seventeen-car train, which included eight luxury Pullmans, stepped a curiosity cabinet of Hollywood's most wanted, like Humphrey Bogart, and some unwanted, like the exotic Lya Lys, who sucked the alabaster toe of a Venus statue in the surrealist film masterpiece
L'Age d'Or
. The punch-drunk former light heavyweight champion of the world, “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, stumbled out of the baggage car gussied up to look like the Lady Gay Saloon, the infamous watering hole of the “bibulous Babylon of the Western frontier,” as Dodge City was known before it turned dry as a bone. A collection of B-movie sharpshooters burst forth into the light, Hoot Gibson and Buck Jones in his white ten-gallon hat. Buck's trusty horse, Silver, pranced out of the animal car. Murmurs passed between mother and grandmother. Would he really come all the way from California to see them?

At last, the star with the slick, pencil-thin mustache appeared on the platform to the roar of his fans.

“I remember Errol Flynn came to Dodge City,” said Hopper, telling a story he would repeat to friends and journalists throughout his life. “That was big time.”

Starring in Hopper's earliest memory, the swashbuckling Hollywood libertine flashed a blazing smile to the throngs of young girls flushed with excitement, waving like crazy from the sidelines clamoring for his attention, and held back only by the efforts of six companies of National Guardsmen. One day when Dennis was all grown up, he, too, might roll through town in a fringed buckskin jacket, high on his steed.

Straddling a white horse strapped with a $25,000 hand-tooled black-and-silver saddle commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad, Errol Flynn led the parade, trailed by a procession of covered wagons, twenty-five corn-fed children on Shetland ponies, unicyclists in derby hats, and dignitaries—including three governors, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and the newly crowned cowgirl queen, Miss Mary Jean Frankenberger, a freshman at Dodge City's junior college. Miss Mary had her white boots on.

West of Chicago

THERE WAS NO LAW!

West of Dodge City

THERE WAS NO GOD!

At the Dodge Theater, the town's ornate movie palace lit up by marquee lightbulbs,
Dodge City
depicted the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad to the frontier outpost, setting the stage for hordes of bad guys just itching to be shot down by Errol Flynn playing the lone cowboy. All night at the Dodge, grinding out shows till dawn, the trailblazing hero rode into the sunset again and again with his girl on shotgun, rosy Olivia de Havilland. By sundown, having triumphantly resurrected the long-lost glory days of Dodge, the real Errol Flynn chugged out of the station with the key to the city in hand; going with him were Hoot and Buck, and even trusty Silver, riding off in the animal car.

“And anyway, they came there,” said Hopper of those movie cowboys, offering a hint as to why he turned out the way he did. “That probably had a lot to do with me eventually wanting to be an actor, I think.”

Not a single cowboy could be found roaming the lone dusty streets come Monday morning as life resumed in Dodge City, pop. 9,000—just yesterday brimming with ten-gallon hats, now emptied out like an abandoned movie set. Brandishing his silver cap pistols, little Dennis played shoot-'em-up against the older boy who lived across the street from his grandpa Hopper. One of them had to be Indian; one of them had to be cowboy. Looking back to his trike-riding hell-raiser playmate with a pint-size straw hat, Leonard Fowler remembered, “Dennis wanted to be cowboy most of the time.”

“Like, when I was little, I lived on a farm near Dodge City, Kansas,” continued Hopper in his peculiar high-pitched twang, roaring down the mountain and jumping ahead in his tale for the
Life
journalist. “Wheat fields all around, as far as you could see. No neighbors, no other kids. Just a train that came through once a day.”

A farm-raised runt, he would lie in a ditch at his grandparents' as the wind rustled and the Kansas sky loomed before him. By his side was his trusty dog with a spot around his eye. The tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad split the weathered farmhouse from the wheat fields spreading west as far as he could see. Chugging furiously, the train roared past, leaving nothing else for Dennis to do but pick himself out of the ditch and poke around the dirt with a stick. Filling his lonely world with collections of butterflies and stamps from faraway places—“Occasionally I cleaned out the chicken house. I watched, more than anything else”—he spent most of his hours wondering where the train came from and went. Where had the train taken all those cowboys?

The confusing question had yet to be answered as Nellie tucked her grandson into bed. Lightning bugs faded away in a Mason jar as off in the distance, storms flashed like blue veins on a giant's temple.

Dennis had come to live at the egg ranch shortly before his sixth birthday, after World War II blew in like a mean sou'wester and swept his father away from Dodge. With his mother busy “at the pool,” the family would say without much further comment, Nellie took him in. Fixing lunch in a white clapboard farmhouse like Auntie Em's in
The Wizard of Oz
, she kept an eye out as Dennis roamed the alfalfa patch on a Shetland pony given to him by his grandpa. Lonnie even brought him home a sheepdog from the Clutter family, doomed to be brutally murdered by drifters, as depicted in Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
. Hard at work in his bib overalls on a wheat field out in Garden City, some sixty miles away, Lonnie left Nellie to raise Dennis and his baby brother, David, along with tending to the coop. The family thought it was too much for the old woman, but Nellie came from rugged stock.

Long ago, one Mattie Mac Masters McInteer bumped along in a covered wagon to Kansas. Reading her Bible every Sunday, she prayed her daughter might witness more than hardship. She even named her after the famous globe-trotting newspaper girl, Nellie Bly, who beat the record set in Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days
. Little Nellie Bly McInteer didn't see alligators in Port Said or lush tennis courts in Hong Kong, but she did grow up to see the grasshopper plague. And the jackrabbit invasion that forced the townspeople to go on roundups—pounding out the rampant bunny problem with clubs so as not to waste bullets. And the Black Blizzard of '35 when the apocalyptic face of Jesus Christ appeared in a dust cloud over the baseball diamond like the Second Coming.

Yes, Nellie managed to see a few things through twenty-mile-an-hour winds that sucked dust from the rutted fields and pummeled the egg ranch. It seemed the sun might never shine again, but when it finally did, the dull gray light revealed a weathered old farmhouse with no color at all.

Then one May day in 1936, screaming in the distance, the Super Chief roared past, splashing its brilliant warbonnet colors of red and yellow onto the egg ranch. Tearing through the Southwest touching speeds of 108 miles an hour, going faster than any train before, the brand-new transcontinental flyer continued its inaugural journey to the Pacific. This Train of the Stars, as the honchos at the Santa Fe Railroad dubbed it, catered to Hollywood big shots ready to discover the next big thing. The egg ranch was just another blip on their juggernaut journey, but one day those big shots would be staring at Dennis, who knew nothing of what went on inside their luxurious sleeper cars named Taos and nothing of their dirty dealings on the Navajo rugs with those aspiring Errol Flynns. But the boy was destined for greatness. Nothing could keep him from lying in the ditch with his dog, waiting for the train. Nellie was so poor she had to make his shirts out of gingham chicken-feed sacks, but she gathered eggs from the coop so they'd have money to go to the movies.

In singing-cowboy Saturday matinees at the Dodge Theater, Gene Autry yodeled to the delight of the grannies, making them swoon. Against the backdrop murals of powder-blue sky and fake cacti, Autry shot it out with six-guns for the motherless little dogie hooting in the balcony with a sack of chocolates from Duckwalls, the five-and-dime. Opening on
The Singing Vagabond
,
Guns and Guitars
, and
Public Cowboy No. 1
, the red-velvet curtain swooshed close on the promise of unending adventure with the hero riding off on Champion, his horse, followed by his pardner, Frog, with the floppy hat. Entranced by the light that projected the movies, piercing the dust and darkness, Dennis had the strangest thought a boy ever had—and it led him to the heights of fame, and the most debauched states.

“I was about five,” said Hopper to the journalist as he careened down a precarious stretch of Peruvian track. “My grandmother put some eggs in her apron and we walked five miles to town and she sold the eggs and took me to my first movie. And right away it hit me. The places I was seeing on the screen were the places the train came from and went to. The world on the screen was the real world, and I felt as if my heart would explode I wanted so much to be a part of it.”

Holding on for dear life, the journalist took note. It was hard to pin down what all this madness on the mountain actually meant to Hopper, but it seemed to be the ultimate incarnation of his lifelong pursuit of the American Dream. It wasn't the Horatio Alger up-by-the-bootstraps variety they tried to teach him at stinkin' Lincoln Elementary. It was something far more fantastic he'd been chasing like the ragged tail of a shooting star, ever since he was a little boy on a twelve-acre egg ranch across from the railroad tracks. He'd go far and wide to find it even if it took him to the farthest reaches of the Peruvian Andes.

Unveiled to America on the cover of
Life
in 1970, Dennis Hopper smiled in a black cowboy hat, wearing a bolo tie and a shit-eating grin, holding a football in the crook of his arm and twirling a dandelion. The ensuing pages told of a raving madman riding around his private, drug-crazed world in darkest Peru, a world that included “whipping parties” and one inexplicable instance of a woman chained to a porch post Joan of Arc fashion with fire crackling at her feet. The whole tale seemed completely too insane for readers to zero in on a single nostalgic childhood detail. But one Ruth Baker, still in Dodge City long after her famous second cousin flew the coop, was quick to point out the crack.

“Well, Nellie sold eggs,” clarified cousin Ruth. “But the story about her bringing them in an apron to walk to Dodge, that's not true. That wasn't Aunt Nellie. She'd do lots of things but she'd never bring eggs in an apron to Dodge. That's quite a walk.”

Perhaps Dennis had appropriated for himself the opening scene from
The Wizard of Oz
when, after the three roars of MGM's Leo the Lion, Auntie Em fills her apron with eggs in a sepia-toned Kansas. At some point it ceased to matter whether it was a real memory or a movie memory. Hopper probably couldn't tell the difference anymore as he looked back with a head full of visions paid for by golden eggs.