Hopper (28 page)

Trapped in a dystopian nightmare, Hopper made the best of it in
Super Mario Bros
., the big-screen version of the Nintendo game. With a wicked long tongue that looked like a pointed flank of raw strip steak, he was King Koopa, evil despot of Dinohattan, a bizarro New York City filmed in the early 1990s in a vacant cement plant in the beach town of Wilmington, North Carolina. Searching downtown Wilmington for a studio in which he could paint, Hopper stumbled on an enormous sandstone Masonic temple in total disarray, about to be torn down.

Standing on the roof of his five-story shrine overlooking Cape Fear River, Hopper said, “I agree it's a little weird, but I
like
it here.”

A vision of the future in perfect Masonic order unfolded for fifty-five-year-old Hopper. Buying the property for peanuts and putting a million into restoration, he planned to open an acting school, unleashing veritable hordes of Hopper-trained actors into the universe.

“Daddy, I think you're probably a really good actor, but why did you play King Koopa?” asked his son, young Henry. “He's such a bad guy, why did you want to play him?”

“So you can have shoes.”

“I don't need shoes.”

Yet Hopper found himself hawking for Nike as Stanley, a deranged referee. In a trench coat, wearing an intense gaze and black backpack, Dennis rode the bus while ranting on about the Dallas Cowboys quarterback. Sneaking into the Buffalo Bills locker room, he sniffed the potent aroma of an enormous shoe belonging to the defensive end. He unwrapped Neon Deion Sanders's shoe before a Christmas tree. “Can you imagine the career Jack Nicholson has had and he has never gone out on television to plug
anything
?” Hopper asked Charlie Rose in their continuing dialogue across several interviews throughout the years. “I'm not saying that I'm doing wonderful work, and I'm not saying—I think
Speed
is terrific, you know. But the great role? I don't feel I've ever really had.”

Performing for Charlie in a yellow-and-brown houndstooth sport coat and green paisley tie, Hopper offered more about his addictions, and regret, anything to prove himself a good clean boy—sober and ready to work again. He wanted Hollywood to see he was the kind of upstanding actor who could be entrusted with the role of a megablockbuster maniac who holds a city bus hostage with a plan so sick, he'd created a bomb that would
blow up
if the bus went under fifty miles an hour!

Concluding his night of talk show magic, Hopper did much better on
Charlie Rose
than he had a few months earlier in 1994 on
The Tonight Show
, when he told Jay Leno an anecdote about how actor Rip Torn, who had once been considered for Jack Nicholson's part of the Southern lawyer in
Easy Rider
, went after
him
with a knife:

“Rip and I had a little, uh, problem—”

“What kind of a problem?”

“Well, at dinner he pulled a knife on me. It was one way for me to say we're not working together.”

Actually, as the courts later ruled, it was Hopper who had gone for the steak or butter knife, according to various memories of the fateful night.

“Well, that's supremely ironic, isn't it, that he should tell it exactly backwards?” remarked Terry Southern.

Terry had hung around trying to be a friend to Dennis even after he was given the cold shoulder. After
Easy Rider
hit like a winning lottery ticket, Hopper argued that he himself had written the script and denied Fonda and Terry's role in it. This was particularly difficult for Terry, seeing as he was the writer among the brain trust, the only one among them who knew what he was doing when he got behind the typewriter and plowed.

Hopper claimed Terry was just a flashy name to get the production financed as, backed by a high-powered legal team, he tried wrenching from Southern his deserved writing credit on
Easy Rider
.

“Terry never wrote one fucking word, not one line of dialogue,” Hopper claimed.

So what about all those heated sessions in the Clark Cortez? And those in Terry's lawyer's office on West 55th Street that the brain trust appropriated as their story conference room, hashing out the tale of Billy and Captain America over cigarettes, joints, and martinis?

Hopper claimed it was all in his head. He embellished, saying that after dinner with Rip Torn, he stayed in New York and locked himself in for two weeks and emerged with a screenplay. This was the Hopper friends described as being unable to sit still for a moment. He couldn't get himself to pick up the pen and write his memoirs, despite the multiple high-figured book deals he collected over twenty-plus years, only to have to give back his advances because he hadn't written a single word. Meanwhile, Terry had slaved over a letter he hated to write and sent it to Hopper in 1970, hoping the spirit of the sixties was still alive.

Hopper never responded. Terry stuck around anyway with Hopper, trying to make William Burroughs's beatnik classic
Junkie
into a film. Patti Smith was slated to star alongside Hopper. It was shelved, especially after Hopper dabbled with heroin as part of his research.

The idea for a sequel to
Easy Rider
—
Easy Ridin' in Biker Heaven—
came right around the time Terry accompanied Hopper to the Big H Motors Speedway, where he offered his friend moral support while he flirted with self-annihilation in the Dynamite Death Chair act. The sequel was also shelved, and Terry had no problem with Dennis trying to inch in on his credit on that one.

Set in a postapocalyptic America in the year 2068—a hundred years after that fateful day the duck hunters gunned down Billy and Wyatt—the Leader of Biker Heaven comes down to earth to get the two back on their hogs for a ride through the wasteland to burned-out Washington, DC. They are delivering to the president the
real
American flag, the badass Revolutionary War–era
DON'T TREAD ON ME
Gadsden flag with a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike, later used by Nike.

Occasionally Hopper would summon Terry to cool happenings, where Terry was good to have around—“Man, you're going to dig this scene.”

Dennis called him to come to
Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt's mansion, where Hopper was a guest photographer shooting a “Celebrity Porn” feature with hot lesbo action. Hopper was really excited because he thought there was going to be real sex—only to discover it was fake: he just had to get the shot.

In March 1992, Hopper's people faxed over a memo instructing Terry to relinquish any rights to
Easy Rider
.

“Vicious greed,” Terry called it.

Following Hopper's appearance on
The Tonight Show
, Terry was to give a deposition on behalf of Rip Torn, who was suing Hopper for defamation because he was fed up with Hopper's recurring telling of the knife story. Torn felt it had done a hatchet job on his career. Speaking under oath, Terry said he had stopped considering Dennis a good friend after asking for his help on numerous occasions. Collapsing on the Columbia University steps, where he was teaching screenwriting, Terry died penniless, without his point, but with a piece of paper in his pocket scrawled with his thoughts about the significance of
Easy Rider
.

He mourned for America and bemoaned a culture so ravaged by hatred and paranoia that the movie's “grotesque inevitable resolution” was for the two free-spirited protagonists to be blown away—“for no better reason than a Newt Gingrich type objecting to their long hair.”

In December 1995, Hopper sued Fonda for a greater share of
Easy Rider
profits, in a breach of contract suit that claimed he'd only gotten 33 percent of the film's proceeds when he should have received 41 percent. Those eight extra points would've compensated for the screenplay Hopper claimed he had written all by himself, which he swore until the last day of his life.

Terry was dead by the time Hopper was called to testify, but when the matter had come up at the Rip Torn hearing, for which Torn was eventually awarded $475,000 in defamation, Hopper accused Terry of committing perjury when Terry said he was the author of
Easy Rider
.

“I did it myself,” said Hopper.

“What about a copy of the screenplay?”

“I don't know that one exists,” said Hopper, still creating nimbly in the moment like Cocteau.

A preshooting draft was produced in court. By the end of the hearing the judge decided that Hopper was an unreliable witness. All arrows pointed toward
Easy Rider
being a collaboration. It was the ultimate case of: Who wrote that story?

Perhaps the most revealing evidence open to anyone who has the time to spend an afternoon at the New York Public Library is not just an
Easy Rider
screenplay, found in Terry Southern's stack of embalmed papers, but also a thirty-eight-page partial screenplay that scripts the entire Mardi Gras trip, cemetery acid scene, and even includes the movie's iconic line, “We blew it.”

Hopper appealed the Torn ruling and the result came back to bite. The judge fined him even more. It cost Hopper a pretty penny to tell what would be his million-dollar anecdote. How would he ever make up the bread?

I
t was the role of a lifetime, reminiscent of
Patton
, the film opening with the great George C. Scott standing in front of a giant unfurled American flag in his uniform, delivering a speech to his troops—“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”

Fringed by an enormous Nike flag in his stripes, referee Hopper took in the powerful feeling of performing for the 1995 Super Bowl before the biggest audience he'd ever have. Well, why not? Paul Newman was hawking his own salad dressing and Fig Newmans.

Next up was
Waterworld
, a
Mad Max
rip-off originally to be a Roger Corman film.

“I play a golf fanatic called the Deacon,” Hopper told his friend Jean Stein, Dr. Stein's daughter, for her literary magazine. “The movie is set in a water world after the ice caps have melted. But the Deacon knows there's land out there somewhere and he's got to find it because he wants to play golf. First he's going to drill for oil to fuel his jet skis and war machinery. Then he's going to start by building an eighteen-hole golf course. But he wants to have plenty of land for expansion, thirty-six holes, forty-eight holes, seventy-two holes.”

The role was close to his heart. Hopper had picked up the game in Texas while filming
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
in which he was Lefty, an ex–Texas Ranger who packs a pair of chainsaws in his holsters—

“Keep hitting the ball straight toward the hole until you hear the turkey gobble,” Willie Nelson cryptically instructed at his nine-hole Pedernales Cut-N-Putt golf course in Spicewood, Texas.

Hopper tried joining the elite at Sherwood Country Club located among the glens in Thousand Oaks, California, where Errol Flynn once played the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. Jack Nicholson got in. Hopper didn't.

“He's
charming
in the locker room, so I hear,” said Hopper. Not that he would know.

Unfit to frolic on Sherwood's greens, Hopper joined his band of merry men—Joe Pesci, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. The quartet retreated to a Japanese-owned public course tucked in a canyon above Malibu. Hopper didn't have much of a swing; he couldn't hit the ball very far. But he really liked golf. And Joe Pesci was
incredible
.

One day, on the links with a golfing buddy, Hopper was feeling lousy with an upset stomach. After three or four holes he finally said something.

“Aw man, I feel like shit.”

“Quit!”

“No man, I'm gonna go on. I'm gonna go on.”

He made it to the ninth hole. Then he puked all over the side of the green.

“Will you
go home
, man?”

It turned out Hopper had passed a gallstone. He'd been in unbelievable agony and still wouldn't leave the course. He was very passionate about golf.

Shooting off a Hawaiian island, decked out in a postapocalyptic eye patch, codpiece, and long Western-style duster, Hopper swung his rusty golf putter. He had shaved his head himself for the role and, letting his hands travel across his skull, felt the texture and uneven shape of his head. Squiggly little veins raised like rivers on a melon. It irked him. He didn't like it.

60 MINUTES
TAKE TWO

STARRING DENNIS HOPPER

CHARLIE ROSE

The biggest mistake of your life was making
The Last Movie
.

DENNIS HOPPER

The Last Movie
and moving to Taos, New Mexico.

CHARLIE ROSE

Do you assess this career as a . . .?

DENNIS HOPPER

As a failure? I mean, I think I would. There are moments that I have had some real brilliance, you know? I think there were moments. Sometimes in a career, moments are enough.

There was a moment in 1987's
Straight to Hell
, a punk spaghetti Western. Dennis played a bad guy who sells an arsenal of guns to more bad guys. Handing over the goods, a whole bunch of gangsters charge in through the door, guns drawn, looking blank. Hopper looks at them and laughs, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” It wasn't in the script. It was just his reaction when they came through the door. It set everyone on edge for the scene.
Now
what's gonna happen?