Hopper (24 page)

To get into his character, Hopper made a connection with the Fool from the tarot deck. He knew about the card from filming
Night Tide
years before, in which he played a scene as a sailor visiting a bejeweled fortune-teller. The Fool knows the secret wonders of the world, he was told—only he can't remember where he's stashed them away.

“I'm an American! American civilian! Hi, Yanks!”

Hopper thrust out a hand to greet the Yankees coming in up the murky Nung, including Forrest, who was wearing a giant banana leaf on his head to keep cool. Forrest was ready to get the hell out of the jungle. He had tickets to go on leave to Hong Kong for the weekend. He wanted to finish this scene and make his flight. But Hopper refused to do the part the way Coppola wanted.

“Cut! What the fuck is this goin' on?”

Coppola tried to give Hopper direction. Each time, it seemed like a breakthrough.

“Oh yeah,” said Hopper. “Right, right, okay, I got it.”

Then Hopper did it the exact same way again, well on his way to another climactic showdown with his director.

“Gimme just one, Dennis. I've given you forty-four takes. Just gimme one.”

“Yes! I got you. Okay! Let's do it again!”

Forrest was getting really squirrely: “Shit, Dennis, can't you just do
one
for him? I gotta get to Hong Kong! Can't you just fuckin' do one? Hell, you've alienated yourself from everybody here already.”

“That never bothered me before,” Hopper told him. Suddenly it hit Forrest under that banana leaf: he was being selfish while Hopper was being strong.

“When they make me hurry,” Hopper told him, “that's when I go
slower
.”

Fuckin'
A
. Hopper was strong. He even smelled strong. Everyone on the production could smell him comin' like an animal. He didn't bathe. Not once did he wash his costume.

One day at the mess hall where the cast and crew took their meals, Dennis was jabbering away, trying to talk to Brando, who didn't give Hopper the time of day. Bloated from the years, Marlon slowly unfolded a napkin and draped it over his sweaty bald head, shaven like a monk's to keep off the flies, and kept eating. Brando
knew
that would really hurt Hopper. He knew how much Hopper adored him.

Being swatted off tortured Hopper, who wore his pain plainly on his face.

Brando always hated the ceremony of people around him. It drove him to distraction: “You're the best. You're the greatest. You're a god.”

Hopper buzzing and mewling about his table was too much. Hopper made his stomach churn. Brando classified him as a kiss-ass, just like Dean before him. Jimmy had been pathologically obsessed with Brando.

Brando had even pulled Dean aside once and, trying to help the kid, told him that he was sick. Dean agreed.

“Don't hang out with that person,” Brando warned about Hopper. “He's too violent.”

Traveling along with Brando into the heart of darkness was his personal photographer, attractive nineteen-year-old Stefani Kong. She was adventuresome enough to say to herself, “Well, we'll see how violent of a person he is.”

One night, when it seemed most of the cast and crew had lost their minds and left, Stefani and Hopper decided to go over to the art department compound, and stay out past curfew. At the time, there was martial law in the Philippines. The curfew was midnight in the city, and in the provinces and the jungle where they were, it was ten.

On this night, it was about three in the morning when Stef and Dennis came into this village clearing, with a cluster of people sitting on the dirt road, the full moon shining down on them. Hopper really reeked that night. Stefani could smell him.

Suddenly, a pack of wild dogs appeared. The road was suddenly empty. Stef freaked out.

They'd all been given health information by the production on arrival, like: Do not share your utensils with the headhunters; they have leprosy. Southeast Asian venereal disease—incurable. If you get bitten by a mad dog—just lie down because you're gonna die a slow, painful rabies death. No such thing as a rabies shot here.

“Don't worry, Stefani,” said Hopper. “I'm gonna take care of this.”

“Oh my God, I mean there's like a lotta dogs. There's only
one
of you.”

Hopper went out in the middle of the dirt road. He started chanting a song and doing this wild Indian dance. The bewildered dogs just looked at him and finally, not knowing what to make of his performance, slunk off. Hopper removed his worn-in cowboy hat, stuck with an eagle feather, and took a bow for his audience—“Thank you very much.”

Hopper moved out of the resort, where the rest of the production was only too happy to stay and escape the tropical heat and helicopter-size mosquitoes. Getting deeper into his character, he moved into the Angkor Wat–style Kurtz temple set, located on an uncharted pocket of tangled jungle. The set was populated with the Ifugao tribe that Coppola had imported from the mountains to the north. They were portraying the Vietnamese Montagnard, warrior tribesmen famed for their ferocity. As part of their scene, they sang the Doors in unison, “Kum on bay-bee lite my fi-uh.” Soon the tribesmen started imitating Hopper, laughing, “Hey, man.”

The cameras turned off for the night, but Hopper remained among the Ifugao. The Kurtz/Brando compound was littered with the heads of rebels, stuck on sticks like death lollipops.

As the sun set over the temple, Hopper considered one of his gods. Everything Brando touched he made scorchingly real. After all these years, Hopper still found himself flailing around. Brando didn't even want to be in the same
room
as him. In the event it happened, Brando would lay down his pink veiny head and go to sleep on cue. He hated stinking Hopper, the pathetic little mutt who wanted to lick his boots.

Reveling in his self-loathing, Hopper returned for the final round in his very own Thrilla in Manila.

Throughout the shoot, Marlon had refused to film a scene in the same room as Hopper, but Brando
finally
agreed to work with Hopper on one condition—he could throw things at him.

“Yeah, go ahead,” said Hopper.

Working with this great man was worth having things thrown at him like a dog. Shutterbug Stefani captured Hopper between takes. He wasn't miserable at all but laughing like this was the best thing that ever happened to him. Brando's throwing shit at me, I'm in pig heaven!

W
E ARE THE HOLLOW MEN

W
E ARE THE STUFFED MEN

L
EANING TOGETHER

H
EADPIECE FILLED WITH STRAW
. A
LAS
!

As Kurtz, Brando laboriously recited T. S. Eliot for his scene with Hopper.

Oh, ho! Was somebody trying to best Hopper in dramatic declamation? Taking over “The Hollow Men” poem, Hopper spun it around with no fractions, no maybes, no supposes! It was all dialectics! He either
loved
or he
hated
.

T
HIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

T
HIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

T
HIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

N
OT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER.

Brando threw bananas at him, and with a whimper, Hopper was splitting, Jack! Mixing in a dash of “I should have been a pair of ragged claws” from Eliot's “Prufrock” along with Kipling's “If”—with “if” being the middle word in life—Hopper juggled everything like a Shakespearean fool, rhyming and preening like a crazed Mardi Gras Indian and dropping in all the elements to make his performance pure, genuine:

HOPPER!

“We have done this scene three hundred fucking times,” called out an exasperated Coppola. “Would you just do it once my way?”

“Your fuckin' way? I could've made
Easy Rider
five times with all the fucking film you've lost here! What is your fuckin' way?”

Frederic Forrest couldn't believe it. Hopper didn't need some director yakkin' to him. He knew how to create an unforgettable character within himself. He was a rebel, always. Hopper was their whole generation, like a comet shooting across the sky. He was an extension of Jimmy, but all his own. So what if Jimmy was a fake Brando—the Warhol soup can to the real soup can? If Hopper was a fake Jimmy, then he was really a genius too! Forrest admired Hopper more than any other actor because he wouldn't let the system put him down. Like a star in the firmament with Jimmy, Hopper had his
own
light.

Hopper stayed at the Kurtz temple, remaining there in character for the rest of his shoot. The day he left for Germany for his next role—to star as the psychopathic Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders's
The American Friend
—Hopper was all of a sudden shaven, cleaned up. You wouldn't know it was the same human being! He'd totally changed.

So was he insane or was it just for the shoot? The cast and crew placed bets among themselves.

Hopper left them all and boarded the plane, departing victorious. Going head-to-head with Brando and, dare one say, coming out on top, had freed him in a way. He'd killed the Buddha, as Eastern-tinged Brando might have put it, or as Jim Morrison wailed at the end of
Apocalypse Now
, playing over the ritual butchering of Colonel Kurtz:

Now that he'd taken on the father, all that was left was his mother.

D
ennis is wanting me to go to Mexico to meet some friends of his,” Andy Warhol wrote in his diary on March 8, 1979. “Dennis and his group always did know all the rich people, but they're so sixties and they're crazy.”

Still hopeful that he could find an audience who would appreciate his masterpiece, Hopper was promoting
The Last Movie
in Mexico. Aside from a stint in Paris, he mostly lived in Mexico City in the late seventies, working when asked and doing research for
The Death Ship
, a film he wanted to base on the book by enigmatic author B. Traven. Virtually every detail of Traven's life was up for debate and hotly disputed. Hopper discovered many theories about this chimera's true identity, some wildly fantastic.

Dennis was on location scouting around Cuernavaca, reportedly with Jack Nicholson, who was slated to star in the movie. Only it never materialized. Jack rocketed farther into the stratosphere with his role as Jack the writer who goes off the deep end in
The Shining
.

Hopper submerged himself deeper in B. Traven, an obsession shared with Dean Stockwell.

“I honest to God can't remember why in the hell the both of us were there,” recalled Stockwell of the time they found themselves in a Mexico City hotel.

Dean heard this commotion goin' on upstairs in Dennis's room. It turned out that Dennis had locked and bolted himself in their room and was making a big scene, having practically kidnapped a woman in there, scaring her to death. He was throwing knives. Dean saw them stickin' through the door. Hopper would pull 'em out and go back to the end of the room and start throwin' 'em again.

Finally the police broke down the door and they subdued Hopper, brought him downstairs to the lobby. They were going to arrest Dean too.

By pure happenstance, this Mexican aristocrat with a pompadour was walking in. This high-level guy had met Dennis a couple days before. He interceded and got them out of there.

“We flew out the next day,” said Dean, “or else we both would've been in a fuckin' Mexican jail.”

Y
ou buy a bag of popcorn and go to the movie house and sit there and say, ‘Oh boy! I'm going to see a movie.' Well, it's not going to be Cary Grant anymore, but I'll take a Dennis Hopper movie over most any day,” said Don Gordon, the actor who starred in
Bullitt
with Steve McQueen. “Hey, the guy was an artist. His art was about collecting paintings, making movies, taking pictures and making pictures. It was about having women and living life to the fullest. You have to understand when you are talking about Dennis, all of it is really all bundled up into one. It's like the Medusa, man. His movies are like the Medusa head. It's all snakes and things, but if you look at it very carefully, and it doesn't turn you to stone? It's coooool.”