Hopper (9 page)

The Actors Studio had taught Hopper simple sense memory exercises that allowed one to experience sensations from the past while performing. Looking up from his crinkled newspaper, Strasberg would fire his Svengali gaze and instruct students to wipe the slate clean by shaking off all tensions. Then they were to ask: What was I wearing? What was I touching? Can I see anything?

On the set of
Key Witness
, MGM's low-budget thriller, Hopper played a switchblade killer, Cowboy, who wreaks havoc throughout East LA on his Harley-Davidson V-Twin Knucklehead. In addition to movie motorcycle lessons, he practiced his craft on a Vespa, racing Steve McQueen along the dirt firebreaks from Coldwater Canyon to the Pacific.

“We had so many wrecks my Vespa looked like a crushed beer can with wheels,” bragged Hopper, acquiring the fashionable Italian scooter after getting his wheels taken away for too many speeding tickets.

The techniques of the Method were at his fingertips for his big love scene with a clingy sex fiend, perky in her bullet bra under a tight turtleneck. Action! She ran her fingers through Cowboy's hair. Cowboy reared back and smacked her. He'd just come back from a “bop,” a battle, and no sharp fancy nails were gonna get stuck in his slick hair when he was all shook up.

In a flash, Cowboy split, screeching off in his Chrysler with the fins, going so fast out of his bad boy garage headquarters—“Muggles, open the door!”—the fat man who played the LAPD detective had to leap out of the way to keep from becoming roadkill.

“You have to keep your touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing really acute,” Hopper explained of his method. “Which makes you totally bananas.”

The proof was on film. Hopper definitely swung, bossing around his kooky hophead henchmen, but he wasn't anywhere near the mother of all Strasberg's exercises. Having seen actor after actor taken off the Studio stage in a straitjacket once they suddenly hit their
emotional
memory, Hopper finally dug what Jimmy meant. It
could
destroy him. Crash and burn. The thing was so dangerous it took
years
to build up to, years cut short by scurrying back to Hollywood.

Dragging himself out of bed at ten o'clock in the morning to dip into the stark tracts of Nietzsche poolside, Hopper took a final stab at keeping the pulse of Manhattan alive by trudging through modern absurdist plays in the California sun. He covered canvases in thick black oil paint, but it was no use, the sunlight kept shining in.

“Man, I felt like a fly killing myself on a window,” said Hopper.

His only escape was to submerge himself in LA's underground art scene at the Ferus Gallery, harkening to
ferus humanus
, the wild man. Introduced to an underground art world of strangers like Wallace Berman, a shaggy Topanga Canyon mystic who kept an American flag decal on his back door—
SUPPORT THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION—
Hopper's worlds converged.

Landing his first leading role in
Night Tide
, a no-name, microbudget horror film directed by occult enthusiast Curtis Harrington and shot for $50,000 cash on the fringes of weird LA, Hopper played a sailor who falls for a sideshow mermaid on their first date in her nautical-themed apartment atop the Santa Monica Pier carousel. After a hearty mackerel breakfast under draped nets and hanging starfish, it should've been smooth sailing had it not been for Marjorie Cameron.

With her flaming red hair and sorceress looks, Hopper was convinced that Marjorie was an out-and-out witch. The Ferus artist was notorious for her drawing of a wicked beast humping a woman with a forked tongue. She once attempted to embody the Whore of Babylon in a magick ritual to summon up some sick Frankenstein aberration called a
homunculus moonchild
. Then one day, just like that, Marjorie's rocket scientist husband, Jack Parsons, blew up in their garage. This was all in real life.

In
Night Tide
, no less weird, Marjorie played a siren who lures Hopper's love into the depths of the ocean. Letting out a moan as he rocked in his flippers in a rowboat, Hopper tried to comfort himself over the loss of his mermaid.

Hopper had longed to sink his jowls into some real theater, ever since he'd been slated for
The Diary of Anne Frank
, which Warner Bros. refused to let him do because the timing interfered with publicity shots for
Giant
. Now he would have his Broadway debut as Hammond Maxwell.

All artistry was dammed upon entering the gothic gates of Falconhurst, an antebellum plantation dripping with magnolias and fortified by the pure stock of the ruddy Mandingo tribe. The gimp-legged son of a rheumy slave breeder, Hammond had no idea his blushing bride was really a New Orleans bed wench. At the Lyceum Theater, Hopper as Hammond scorned his wife, whose formidable talents in the bedchamber belied her repeated claims of virginity. Plum crazy and drunk on corn liquor, Blanche relinquished her taffeta, pulled the bullwhip from the drawer and deftly beat the baby out of Hammond's pregnant slave lover.

Vogue
cover girl Brooke Hayward played the wicked whiptrix, and Hopper would never forget the time her whip accidentally caught the leg of the actress playing the slave, flaying her ankle. On the third day of rehearsal, he told Brooke he'd marry her.
Mandingo
tanked, but Hopper scored a hit.

The couple married in a small ceremony in New York in August 1961, a scattering of the bride's family in attendance to welcome Hopper into their Hollywood dynasty. Brooke's super-agent/producer father, Leland Hayward, hated the freaky homunculus. Joining the celebration was Brooke's childhood friend Jane, practically her sister with the Haywards and Fondas intertwined in business, marriage, and tragedy.

Jane Fonda invited the newlyweds back to her apartment for an impromptu reception attended by her younger brother, Peter, who tried to figure out the guy who had just married into the family saga. Hearing Hopper's story about someone back on the farm in Kansas who used to cut the heads off chickens, Peter thought he painted a very graphic picture of life in rural America. Why Hopper was going on about bloody chickens running about spurting blood just after his wedding, Peter couldn't fathom, but the chickens would be brought up on more than one occasion.

Peter was intrigued. He could see some incredible excitement in Hopper's aura.

T
he great Bel Air fire of '61 roared up the canyon like a tsunami of flame, destroying the Hoppers' new home as well as six hundred poems (fifteen thousand, as Hopper's telling progressed) and three hundred paintings he'd created over the years. He tried to start painting again but just couldn't bring himself to do it, so he hammered his paintbrush onto the canvas and threw it into a corner.

Dark times awaited him at super-producer David O. Selznick's two-story Spanish colonial residence, shady enough for the reclusive Garbo to feel comfortable when hiding out there in the twenties. In the study hung the oil painting prop of Selznick International Pictures'
Portrait of Jennie
, starring the fiery beauty Jennifer Jones. David O.'s wife and leading lady was waiting in vain for another interesting project to come her way.

“That's not good enough,” David O. would tell Jennifer as scripts arrived at the door. “You haven't worked for a while so when you do again, you're gonna have to make a
big
entrance.”

Every night he dictated memos into the wee hours. The Kent cigarette never left his mouth. After every inhalation on its Micronite filter, he spouted to his secretaries scribbling shorthand, going through two or three girls in a night, dictating, dictating, dictating.

Hoping for another
Gone with the Wind
, which he had produced in his glory days, Selznick tried to make F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night
. Through heavy horn-rimmed glasses, he saw Jane Fonda clear as day as the Roaring Twenties starlet sucked into the world of the impossibly glamorous Divers, to be played by Jason Robards and, of course, Jennifer, who finally would make her grand entrance. Selznick had no idea that the studio moles would
destroy
his vision, making it unwatchable, grotesque.

From the privileged view in the Selznick guest house, where the Hoppers were invited to stay until they could get back on their feet, Dennis witnessed the final throes of an old Hollywood giant whose tragic flaw was caring too much about the movies—a bottomless pit for his obsessive micromanaging.

Embracing a kindred spirit with open arms, David O. dictated: “Keep truckin' it, Dennis.”

“Oh, Bob, look at that!” said Hopper, glimpsing a knockout. “Oh wow, back up, back up!”

On the last bit of Route 66, Hopper snapped a photo of a Standard Oil station's twin signs. He called the resulting work
Double Standard
.

Dennis was hardly ever without his Nikon camera dangling around his neck, his twenty-fifth birthday present from Brooke. He rode shotgun down a ribbon of highway. At the wheel was the son of Jennifer Jones and actor Robert Walker, cinema's most infamous traveling companion—the bad guy in
Strangers on a Train
. Just getting his start on the hit television show
Route 66
, Bobby Walker Jr., who had the same wicked smile as his dad, drove Hopper around to ogle the fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboards along Sunset Strip, a roadside gallery featuring the world's largest collection of these hand-painted signs. Perfectly rendering portraits of the stars, the billboard painters of Los Angeles were the best in the trade, making cans of Spam look glamorous.

Right around the corner was Barney's Beanery, packed with a group of hot-rod-loving California artists inspired by the futuristic emptiness of LA. Becoming a regular, Hopper drank with fellow Dodge City refugee Billy Al Bengston, who created motorcycle-inspired paintings, and artist Larry Bell, who fashioned chrome-edged glass cubes—sleek beauties befitting their world of freeways. Larry liked Hopper, a funny guy, not full of himself like most of Hollywood. Bell didn't think anyone in the LA art scene took Hopper's work very seriously, but Hopper kept at it, making bizarre sculptures, one incorporating a religious candle stand and Chiclets.

“You should
really
concentrate on your painting,” encouraged Paul Newman, showing up to Dennis's first gallery opening in 1963.

Dapper art dealer Irving Blum was rather floored by Hopper's sixth sense about painting. Not that Blum ever offered to show Hopper's work at Ferus, which he was dragging out of the amphibian stages and into the limelight, but somehow Hopper always seemed to be ahead of the curve, finding by chance a style or movement before it really had a name.

Whaam!

“That's it,” screamed Hopper, jumping up and down before the work of a New York City artist, Roy Lichtenstein, who saw comic strips as actual art. “That's the return to reality!”

Hopper also loved those Campbell's Soup cans by a slight white-haired commercial illustrator dying to break out as a
real
artist. Andy Warhol lived in New York but wanted to exhibit his work in Los Angeles, given the glamorous fantasy that Blum had whipped up for him of a gallery
filled
with movie stars. This was a complete lie, the only movie star who ever came to Ferus being Hopper.

“Let's do it,” said Andy.

Hung on the gallery walls, in thirty-two different creamy and chunky varieties, Warhol's soup can paintings heralded a new kind of ism, plastered in Hopper's childhood memory from those bold labels of Bar-B-Q Prunes and Tendersweet Sweet Corn, a wallpaper of fruit and vegetables at his father's grocery. This “commonism,” as pop was initially called, was a revolution for Hopper. There would be no more slogging through that tortured mode of the abstract expressionists that went hand in hand with the Method. Why not be
electric
—bubbly, fizzy like soda pop, or those terrific Spam billboards? Hopper bought one of Warhol's first tomato soup can paintings for around $100. However, after selling his friend the painting, shrewd gallerist Blum decided to keep all thirty-two varieties together as a group. Hopper never got to taste his tomato soup.

Soon enough, Dennis would meet Andy in New York. Starring as a patricidal killer in “The Weeping Baboon” episode of
The Defenders
, a CBS courtroom drama, Dennis read the Declaration of Independence from the witness stand. Andy hadn't met many movie stars and, visiting the set at Filmways Studios in East Harlem, was starstruck, remembering Dennis as Billy the Kid in
Sugarfoot
.

“So crazy in the eyes,” said Andy. “Billy the Maniac.”

Dennis finally had a true fan, a pop genius who could appreciate his range—from Fritz in NBC's
Swiss Family Robinson
to a Nazi in
The Twilight Zone
.

Andy hadn't been able to make it to LA for his Campbell's Soup cans show, but Hopper promised if he came out for his upcoming Liz-Elvis one, he'd throw him a real movie-star party.

To prepare for Andy's arrival, Hopper drove to the Foster and Kleiser billboard company and bought a giant hamburger and a giant can of Spam to wallpaper his new Spanish stucco home in North Crescent Heights. He slapped a gigantic toothpaste-white smile over the sink. By the toilet, a man fed his maniacally happy wife a hot dog. The bathroom decorated, much to Brooke's dismay, Hopper went to work on the rest of his mad pad, a pop art wonderland with his own fake saguaro cactus, a giant rubber Coca-Cola bottle, a carousel horse, pipe organ, mirror ball, and gumball machine.

After a three-thousand-mile road trip in a Ford Falcon station wagon, listening to hits like Bobby Vinton's “Blue Velvet,” Andy rolled up with his entourage. He was simply
amazed
at the people dancing to those songs he'd heard on the car radio. There were all these sons of movie stars, Bobby Walker and Peter Fonda, who Andy thought looked like a “preppy mathematician.” Andy went gaga over Troy Donahue and Russ Tamblyn from
Peyton Place
. He even heard a twisted bit of gossip about Hopper's sexual kinks. Andy
loved
scuttlebutt.