Hopper (7 page)

Elvis felt duped. “He believed that movie fights were real, and that movie bullets were real,” Hopper recalled. “And when I explained that they weren't, he got very pissed off at me! And Elvis was twenty-one years old at the time!”

“I've made a study of poor Jimmy Dean,” said Elvis. “I've made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young 'uns, go for us. We're sullen; we're broodin'; we're something of a menace. I don't understand it exactly, but that's what the girls like in men. I don't know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can't be sexy if you smile. You can't be a rebel if you grin.”

He'd taken in as much as he could of his dead idol—gobbling up a hunka Hopper and a hunka burnin' Natalie Wood, who dug her claws into his back as he rode around on his brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Nick Adams chugged a quarter mile behind on Elvis's old one.

By then, Elvis figured he knew so much about Dean that he had this rebel thing licked. With total conviction, he sang to his girl in his B Western,
Love Me Tender
, beaten only by
Giant
at the box office. Elvis didn't even need to writhe on the floor. He simply refused to smile.

Chewed up and spit out by this slick hillbilly who loved his mama, Hopper sat in an all-night seedy diner with fellow sweepstakes losers Nick and Natalie like a trio of kids airbrushed into the famous
Nighthawks
painting by the other Hopper. They prepared to get to work on their extensive study of real-life lonely outsiders—real coffee drinkers, real pie eaters.

Like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys prowling skid row, the impressionable gang gawked curbside as the LAPD tossed real derelicts into a paddy wagon. Sharpening senses, becoming real artists hip to the underbelly, they took the world as their stage.

“Fuck Errol Flynn!” cried Hopper, swinging from a length of rope and landing on the porch of Nick Adams's home in sleepy Laurel Canyon. Another evening he wrapped himself in Nick's bearskin rug and paraded through the neighborhood with a movie poster featuring Dorothy McGuire wearing a bonnet. The mad act landed notice in
Variety
, bolstering Dennis's wacky, irreverent persona.

Meanwhile, Hopper and Natalie were becoming a steamy item. Posing in fishnet stockings on a cabaret stool for
Look
's “Natalie Wood: Teenage Tiger,” she offered tabloids an inside peek at the “Real Life Rebellion of a Teenage ‘Man-Buster.'”

“We got in a relationship where we were going out to parties together and we would score for each other,” explained Hopper. “We had great fun procuring for each other. We weren't blind to the fact that we could see other people, but we were having sex all through our relationship.”

Natalie upped the stakes of her blossoming wild-child image by arranging an illicit rendezvous with a married movie star who slipped her a pill, then whipped and savagely raped her. Roaring over to Hopper's apartment in her Thunderbird, Natalie burst in and caught Hopper in the midst of painting one of his abstracts.

“Lay down,” she demanded, grabbing Hopper's bullwhip. “Let me whip
you
.”

Hopper had become something of an expert at the Western art of whip cracking, hoping it would give him a little something extra to further his career. Getting whipped was even better.

“It was almost that we were naive to the point that if people did drugs and alcohol and were nymphomaniacs,” figured Hopper, “then that must be the way to creativity, and creativity's where we wanna be. We wanna be the best.”

One night at Nick's rustic cabin in La Cañada, Hopper set the scene of a boozy salon where madness and genius thrived. Natalie starred as bombshell Jean Harlow, luxuriating in the bubbly decadence of Hollywood's golden era.

“OK, Natalie,” directed Hopper. “We're ready for the orgy.”

Natalie disrobed. Stepping naked into a tub filled with champagne, she screamed when the bubbles fizzed up into her nether regions. (“Set her on fucking
fire
,” said Hopper.) The next scene featured Natalie in the emergency room, back to those doctors who once cast her as a delinquent.

First Dean died. Then Hopper's sidekick Nick was found dead in his apartment in 1968, having overdosed on pills. Perhaps even murdered.

Having OD'd on his porcelain throne at Graceland in 1977, Elvis was dead, all bloated up on his rebel image. Hopper cried when he heard the news over the telephone.

Lastly, in 1981, over the course of a stormy night of sambuca with her fellow actors, husband Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken, Natalie fell off her yacht and drowned, to forever star in an enticing unsolved Hollywood mystery set off Catalina Island.

So the winner of the James Dean Replacement Sweepstakes by default was Hopper. Inquiring
Weekly World News
readers wanted to know: Would Hopper be the next victim of the diabolical
Rebel
curse? The intrepid tabloid asked him to comment on their story “Dreadful Death Curse of Cult Movie.”

How did they even manage to track him down? He wasn't exactly readily available at the time. His skin was pale and slimy. Even in newsprint, he looked wet, drenched in a psychotic's perspiration. His bugged-out eyes were wide as the mysterious fanged Bat Boy, a regular on the cover of this Martian-infested supermarket rag.

“It's very strange the way they all died,” admitted Hopper, then at the height of his coke-addled paranoia. “I only know I'm a survivor. I won't let it get to me.”

T
he imaginary line was the lesson Hopper took from the set of
Giant
, the Warner Bros. epic shot on the heels of
Rebel
in the summer of 1955. The studio machine spared no expense on what promised to be a
Gone with the Wind
for the Lone Star State. The whole town of Marfa, pop. 3,500, sweltered in the heat as Elizabeth Taylor chugged in on the Texas and Pacific Railway to the dirt-dry whistle-stop. They'd all come out to see her, finer than four thousand head of the finest Texas cattle brought in for the big roundup scene. Not to mention Clear View Snuffy, the National Brangus bull champion imported from Oklahoma to play King Tut, pride of the Benedict ranch. Cordoned off from the set with a huge wooden derrick atop a well filled with real oil imported from California, ready to gush on cue, a crowd of thousands shuffled about in cowboy boots, wiped sweat off with worn handkerchiefs, all to catch a glimpse of Liz—“jack-off material,” said one onlooker. Powdered and puffed and cleavaged, she was the biggest movie star James Dean had ever worked with, and he couldn't help but be nervous, so he did what came naturally. Sauntering over to the good people standing around to see this tale of oil and greed, he whipped out his dick and peed.

Riding shotgun back to town after wrapping for the day, Hopper said, “Jimmy, I've really seen you do a lot of strange things, but today, really, that takes it, babe. I mean what was that, what was
that
all about?'”

“Working with Elizabeth Taylor,” said Dean. “Really nervous, first time I have a scene with her, I can't even speak. So I had to take a pee, and I thought, ‘Well, it's not workin' in this sequence for me,' so, uh, I figured if I could go and pee in front of those four thousand people I could get back there and I could do anything on film.”

Hopper had his own Liz hang-ups—he'd hug his pillow at night and pretend it was her—but somehow it didn't befit his role as the young upright son of a cattle baron, Jordan Benedict III, to expose himself like Jimmy. But he didn't want to get all frozen up like one of those lit-up Marfa jackrabbits he and Jimmy shot with .22s, hypnotizing 'em in the headlights of the pickup truck.

“Well, you know,” advised Jimmy, “if you're smoking a cigarette, don't
act
smoking the cigarette. Just smoke the cigarette when you feel like it.”

Dean had plenty of tricks up his sleeve. To embody his character, Jett Rink, the young wildcatter who had aged into a bitter drunk by the time of the climactic banquet, Dean didn't actually drink himself into a stupor when the script called for him to be raging drunk. He just spun around and around until he was disoriented, then staggered ahead, making him appear soused as he stepped into the scene and tried to regain his balance.

Suddenly it came together for Hopper. The trick was to just
be
. When his time came to smoke the cigarette before Liz, playing his mother, Hopper smoked it. Not smoke it all contemplative like Rock Hudson, the big hunk of beefcake playing his father, but how Jimmy smoked it.

“And that's great acting,” said Hopper. “Because then it isn't
acting
at all.”

That night, Dennis ate with Dean at the Villa Capri. The Rat Pack had finally accepted Jimmy into the fold. At last showing up in a suit and tie, not his overalls, Dean clowned around with Sammy Davis Jr. like they were old pals. Jimmy was growing up. The kid had a big future ahead of him.

“I saw what you did today,” said Dean. “I wish Edmund Kean could have seen you. And John Barrymore. Because today you were great.”

Dennis started tearing up, the tears brimming.

“It's very sweet,” said Dean. “You're showing appreciation for what I'm saying, but when you really become a fucking actor you'll have to leave the room to cry.
Then
you'll be there.”

A year after Jimmy died, Hopper strutted down the red carpet in his black tie for the star-studded Texas-sized
Giant
premiere. He pushed his way into the dazzlingly lit Roxy Theatre in New York.

“You are a very, very fine actor,” said the television hostess, wrapped in a mink stole and glittering diamond tiara.

“Thank you very much,” said Hopper, holding her white-gloved hand for a little too long.

Wielding a microphone like a scepter for the telecast event, she told him how great he was with Natalie Wood the night before on
The Kaiser Aluminum Hour
. Yes. That was the episode where Hopper played a carnival barker who keeps Natalie, a hoochie-coochie dancer, in his evil clutches. Hopper hoped those days were winding to a close. He'd snubbed Natalie as his date tonight for the sophisticated Southern belle of the Actors Studio, elegant Joanne Woodward with chic new Joan of Arc bangs, soon to flex her mastery of the craft by playing multiple personalities in
The Three Faces of Eve
.

“Is this your wife?” asked the hostess.

“No, no, it's not my
wife
!” giggled Hopper, like it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard.

Bubbling with boyish charm that night, he tried to wiggle his way into Joanne's apartment. Why was Joanne suddenly pushing him down a flight of stairs? Alas, the naive lad paled in comparison to the suave lady-killer awaiting a secret rendezvous on the other side of her door, her Actors Studio classmate with the blazing blue eyes.

That
guy?
Newman
? How
boring
. Hopper took him out one time to see Miles Davis and he didn't even get it.

“What is this
music
?” asked Newman.

What a square. Of course Paul Newman didn't dig jazz: the music of the Method according to Dean, a raw scorching expression where every note hung in the air as real as real could get. And still Newman managed to land the coveted role of hardscrabble boxer Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, the one to have been played by Dean. But Hopper was the one ready for stardom! He was the one who shone in the firmament against Rock and Liz!

Hopper's reputation in Hollywood was getting weird—Dean worship had left him quirky and neurotic, a nervous persona his peer Anthony Perkins (to play the mama's boy in
Psycho
) already had down. What was the studio going to do with him? Gussied up in white satin pantaloons and a jerkin with gold-tasseled epaulettes, Hopper was the spitting image of the Little Corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte. A Warner flack pointed out how he'd even bought a poodle named Josephine and was giving all of his friends bottles of Napoleon brandy for Christmas. Introduced in voiceover by Vincent Price, who played the Devil, Hopper got about three minutes of screen time before the wacky historical romp moved on to the Marx Brothers. Harpo played Sir Isaac Newton.

What else could Hopper do? Why not farm him out for a whopping $6,000 to horse breeder and cattle connoisseur Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney?

The filthy-rich scion had a notion to make a whole series of films about America. Whitney's landmark production
The Searchers
was expertly crafted by director John Ford with his alter ego in the saddle. Once again the Ford/Wayne combination was sure to be a winner! Only this time around, instead of Pappy and the Duke, it was the sons of the Johns—the Pats, Pat Ford producing and the wooden Pat Wayne starring. Stuck in a retread of their fathers' Westerns, Hopper did what he could in his less-than-stellar role of a twitchy Mexican killer.