Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

by Peter Biskind

  “I was a little bit loaded, and I looked at... a photograph from The Wild Angels of me and Bruce Dern on a chop,” he recalled. “Suddenly I thought, that’s it, that’s the modern Western; two cats just riding across the country... and maybe they make a big score, see, so they have a lot of money. And they’re gonna cross the country and go retire to Florida... When a couple of duck poachers in a truck rip them off ’cause they don’t like the way they look.”

  It was 4:30 in the morning, and the only person crazy enough to get the idea was Dennis Hopper. Although the two men often feuded, Fonda and Hopper were best of friends. It was 1:30 in the morning in L.A. Fonda called Hopper, woke him up. “Now listen to this, man...”

  “Wow, that’s a hell of a story. What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, I figure you direct it, I produce it, we’ll both write it, and both star in it, save some money.”

  “You’d let me direct it, man?”

  “Well, I surely am not ready to direct it and you want to direct and I like your energy, yeah, I want you to direct it.”

  According to Hopper, he and Peter had promised each other they would not become biker stars, were meant for better things, so he was not enthusiastic. But so far nothing better had presented itself, and this film was a lock, since Fonda had a three-picture deal at AIP. Dennis’s response was, “Peter, did they say they’d give you the money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I think it’s a great fuckin’ idea!” They debated what the drug score should be. Hopper said, “Peter, we couldn’t carry enough grass on bikes that’s gonna make anybody able to retire. That’s a stupid fucking score. It’s got to be something else.”

  “What about heroin?”

  “It’s got a bad connotation. A terrible idea. Why not cocaine?” Cocaine it was. “I picked cocaine because it was the drug of kings,’ recalls Hopper. “I had gotten it from Benny Shapiro, the music promoter, who had gotten it from Duke Ellington.” In those days, no one dreamed cocaine was habit forming. Since it wasn’t available on the street, and it was very expensive, it was scarce. (In the movie, they used baking soda.)

  Fonda’s call couldn’t have come at a better moment for Hopper. He had hit rock bottom. A wild and disheveled sometime actor, talented photographer, and pioneering collector of Pop Art, a former pal and acolyte of James Dean, whom he had met on the set of Rebel Without a Cause, Hopper had been blackballed for crossing swords with director Henry Hathaway. He was in the habit of buttonholing studio types at parties and hectoring them about the industry—it was rotting from within, it was dead—the Ancient Mariner on acid. He kept saying, “Heads are going to roll, the old order is going to fall, all you dinosaurs are going to die.” He argued that Hollywood had to be run on socialist principles, that what was needed was an infusion of money channeled to young people like himself. He recalled, “I was desperate. I’d nail a producer in a corner and demand to know, ‘Why am I not directing? Why am I not acting?’ Who wants to deal with a maniac like that?” They smirked, moved away. “New York and Hollywood are hard for me, where you have to go and sit in a producer’s lap at those parties,” confessed Hopper. “I try to be polite and courteous, and then sure enough, I get pissed off and blow it. Let’s face it, I can’t stay on my best behavior for long. I don’t have the social amenities to make it or enjoy it.”

  Hopper was living in L.A. with his wife, Brooke Hayward. Brooke was the daughter of agent-producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan—who had once been married to Henry Fonda. She was about as close as Hopper would ever get to Old Hollywood royalty. Brooke was in the middle of an affair with designer Richard Sylbert when she met Hopper while they were both acting in an off-Broadway show called Mandingo in 1961. Her stepmother of the moment, Pamela Churchill Hayward, later Pamela Harriman, was perennially matchmaking, trying to fix her up with eligible males, “the son of General Pershing, that kind of shit,” says her brother, Bill. “I think Brooke brought Dennis around just to shock her.” But she was in love. “He was an incredibly colorful character in those days,” recalls Brooke, “a sweetheart.”

  The same year, the beauty and the beast got married and moved to L.A. Brooke had two children from a previous marriage, and in April 1962, they had a baby girl they named Marin. But the honeymoon was not to last. Even as a young man, Hopper had been a dedicated drinker, having developed a taste for beer at the tender age of twelve when he was out harvesting wheat on his grandfather’s farm in Kansas. During the ’60s, it got worse. Recalls Brooke, “We didn’t have a lot of alcohol in the house, because if we did, Dennis would finish it off in minutes. He’d even drink the cooking sherry.”

  Brooke attributes the beginning of his decline to the first love-in in San Francisco in 1966, where he got into acid in a big way. When he got back, she continues, “he had a three-day growth of beard, he was filthy, his hair was crazy—he’d started growing a ponytail—he had one of those horrible mandalas around his neck, and his eyes were blood red. Dennis was altered forever.”

  It was right after the love-in that he broke her nose, the first time he’d ever hit her. “It wasn’t a big deal, but it did make me think twice about ever getting into an argument with him,” says Brooke. “And after that, it was like opening the floodgates.” One night, she drove from their home on North Crescent Heights down to a theater on La Cienega in her yellow Checker cab to watch Dennis rehearse his part in a Michael McClure play, The Beard. Hopper was playing Billy the Kid, who, in the words of Peter Fonda, “rips off Jean Harlow’s panties and eats her out—in heaven.” Hopper was nervous about performing in front of an audience. “He was completely crazy,” Brooke recalls. “After the performance, I said, ‘I’ve left the children alone, I’ve got to go home.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t want you to leave.’ I got back into the car, and he jumped on the hood, and kicked the windshield in, in front of about ten people. I was scared, and I had to drive home with no windshield.” (Hopper says he doesn’t recall the incident.)

  Inclined toward paranoia to begin with, Hopper was becoming more so under the influence of alcohol and chemicals. He imagined himself persecuted like Jesus Christ, dying in his thirty-third year. Even his friends were afraid of him, thought he had a loose screw.

  Needless to say, Dennis wasn’t a barrel of fun to live with. He was extremely jealous, particularly of Sylbert. But Brooke was faithful, at least partly because, as she says, “I was scared to death of Dennis, it would have been suicidal, he would try to strangle me,” and partly because she had her hands full taking care of her three kids. He would often fall asleep drunk with a lit cigarette between his fingers, starting fires. “One time I woke up, the room was full of smoke, there was Dennis lying in bed, and there were flames coming out all over,” Brooke remembers. “I pushed him out of the bed so he didn’t catch on fire. Sometimes I’ve regretted that, often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t.”

  Whiskey and drugs were part of Hopper’s artistic program. He saw himself in the great tradition of boozing actors going back to the early days of film, John Barrymore and W.C. Fields. Dennis liked to quote Van Gogh saying he drank for a whole summer before he discovered his famous yellow pigment.

  Hopper claims that Hayward was a manic-depressive. “It was hard. She would be up and talking at a party, performing, and the second the last person left, she would fall into this deep funk. I would try to talk to her, she would slam the door of her room, lock it, shut herself in there for days at a time. It was a nightmare. And she wasn’t using drugs, and she wasn’t drinking. She just had a major problem. I remember she took a bunch of pills. I think she tried [suicide] a couple of times. She ended up in Cedars.” (Hayward denies that she tried to commit suicide.)

  Brooke was by no stretch of the imagination a supportive person. She had a sharp tongue, and she applied this lash to Dennis, mocking him, putting him down, making sure he knew she thought he would never amount to anything. She had grown up with Fonda, seen it all—his mothe
r’s suicide, Peter shooting himself in the stomach when he was ten, the parade of stepmothers. To her, Peter and Dennis were a confederacy of losers. “Nobody took Easy Rider terribly seriously,” she recalls. “Was this film really going to get made? If it got made, would it ever be seen?” Dennis complained, “The day I started Easy Rider, Brooke said, ‘You are going after fool’s gold.’ You don’t say that to me, man, about something I’ve waited fifteen years—no, all my life—to do.”

  Says Fonda, “My wife put the movie down too, but I didn’t break her nose.”

  Hopper badly wanted to direct, and understood that Easy Rider might be the only shot he’d ever get. Fonda and Hopper lined up Terry Southern, who was a hot writer at the time, with Dr. Strangelove, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Loved One to his credit, to turn the story outline and their notes into a proper script, and produce it. The movie was then called The Loners. But suddenly, AIP head Sam Arkoff began coming up with objections. He didn’t like the idea of the heroes dealing hard drugs. “The audience will never get over it,” he said. Fonda replied, “What we’re doing is fucking with the rules. There should be no rules, man. We’re being honest to ourselves.” Then AIP stipulated that if the movie fell behind, they had the right to take it away. Fonda said, “No, can’t do that.” He and Hopper were unhappy with AIP, but they had nowhere else to turn.

  BONNIE AND CLYDE opened in London on September 15, became a hit, more than a hit, a phenomenon. The Bonnie beret was all the rage, hip, happening, but the groundswell that was building for the picture was too late to affect the bookings in the U.S.

  Then, on December 8, weeks after it had closed, Time magazine put it on the cover—a silk screen by Robert Rauschenberg, yet—as the peg and prime example for a story bannered: “The New Cinema: Violence... Sex... Art,” by Stefan Kanfer. In the body of the piece, Kanfer cited the lesbian scenes in The Fox, the jarring shock cuts in Point Blank, the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, and the experimentation of films like Blow-Up and The Battle of Algiers to argue that European innovation was entering mainstream American filmmaking. He defined the characteristics of the New Cinema: disregard for time-honored pieties of plot, chronology, and motivation; a promiscuous jumbling together of comedy and tragedy; ditto heroes and villains; sexual boldness; and a new, ironic distance that withholds obvious moral judgments. Time called Bonnie and Clyde “the best movie of the year,” a “watershed picture,” bracketing it with groundbreakers like The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. Kanfer even compared the climactic ambush to Greek tragedy.

  After Time hit the newsstands, Beatty paid a call on Eliot Hyman. He said, “We have to rethink this. The movie’s been mishandled. I want you to re-release the picture.” Hyman rolled his eyes. Nobody rereleased pictures. “There’s a conflict of interest in your booking Reflections in a Golden Eye, a Seven Arts movie, and Bonnie and Clyde” continued Beatty. “I’m going to make trouble for you.” Hyman refused again. He had been appalled when he discovered the size of Beatty’s profit participation. In fact, the actor’s slice was so large Hyman felt it didn’t pay him to re-release the movie; the studio wouldn’t make any money even if the picture did well. Finally, Hyman said, “I’ll release the picture if you reduce the size of your cut.”

  Now it was Beatty’s turn to refuse, and he did, saying, “I’m gonna sue you, Eliot.” Hyman regarded him coldly, figuring the odds, as he nervously flipped his pencil up in the air, caught it, threaded it through his fingers.

  “What the hell would you sue me for?”

  Beatty was bluffing, didn’t have the foggiest idea what he would sue him for, but vaguely familiar with Hyman’s past, which he knew included some questionable associations, he thought, Eliot knows more than I could possibly dream of. So he looked him in the eye, and said, “I think you know.” Within a couple of weeks Hyman had rebooked the picture. “With a man like Eliot, that was, of course, the best thing to say, because whatever it was he knew, it frightened him,” says Beatty. The picture reopened on the day the Academy nominations were announced. Bonnie and Clyde got ten.

  Bonnie and Clyde went back into twenty-five theaters, many the identical ones it originally played. The groundswell had been such that the same exhibitors that had had the film rammed down their throats the first time were now clamoring to get it back. On February 21, Warners released the movie in 340 theaters. In September, it had grossed $2,600 for a week at one theater in Cleveland; it played the same theater in February and grossed $26,000. “By the time it got back to the theaters, the studio could not get very good terms, because they had screwed the release up so badly,” says Beatty. Still, the numbers were dramatic. By the end of 1967, the picture had netted $2.5 million in rentals. In 1968, when it was re-released, it netted $16.5 million in rentals, then making it one of the top twenty grossing pictures of all time.

  Beatty had begun to see Julie Christie, whom he had first met in London in 1965 at a command performance for the Queen. “Julie was the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever met,” he says. “She was deeply and authentically left-wing, and making this fuss over royalty did not amuse her. She could not contain her antipathy for this type of ceremony.” She had grown up poor on a farm in Wales, and she was not impressed by the fact that Beatty was a movie star, in fact, held it against him. She indulged her profession only to support her myriad causes.

  Nevertheless, they became seriously involved, and remained so for about four years. Christie had no trouble fitting into L.A.’s hip political scene. She shared his suite when she was in town, dashing through the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a diaphanous white cotton sari with little underneath. “If ever a movie star existed for whom stardom meant nothing, it was Julie,” says Towne. “She was genuinely a blithe spirit.” Five-figure residual checks would flutter from her handbag onto the floor of the hotel lobby as she rummaged around for her keys. One day she appalled Beatty by losing a $1,000 check in the street. But she was clear and uncompromising about her priorities, never stayed in Hollywood longer than she had to, and when she had made enough money, she would stop acting. By march of 1967, however much she disdained stardom, she had become a hot actress, having won an Oscar for Darling.

  When Christie was elsewhere, Beatty indulged his singular form of recreation. He was always on the phone with women, rarely identifying himself, speaking in a soft, whispery voice, flattering in its assumption of intimacy, enormously appealing in its hesitancy and stumbling awkwardness. He told them that yes, he was in love with Julie, but he wanted to see them anyway. Not in the least put off, they appeared to find this reassuring. He explained his MO: “You get slapped a lot, but you get fucked a lot, too.”

  BONNIE AND CLYDE won awards from the New York Society of Film Critics, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild. The Oscars were scheduled for April 8. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. The denizens of Beverly Hills acknowledged the occasion by driving with their lights on. King’s funeral was set for April 9, and five Academy participants—four of them black (Louis Armstrong, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Sidney Poitier) plus Rod Steiger—threatened to withdraw if the show was not postponed. The Academy reluctantly agreed to reschedule it for April 10. The competition shaped up to be one between the Old Hollywood and the New. It was Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate against two safe liberal films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as well as a big musical, Doctor Dolittle, that had bombed at the box office, nearly finishing the job Cleopatra had started at Fox. Martha Raye read a letter from General William Westmoreland thanking Hollywood for raising the morale of U.S. troops in Vietnam through its work with the USO. The host was Bob Hope, who joked about Lyndon Johnson’s recent decision not to seek reelection. The Old Hollywood laughed. The New Hollywood, including Beatty and Christie, Dustin Hoffman and his date, Eugene McCarthy’s daughter Ellen, and Mike Nichols, sat stonefaced through Hope’s patter. Nevertheless, the Bonnie and Clyde gang were c
onfident, expecting to clean up. “We were so fucking sure we were going to win the Oscars,” recalls Newman. “Ken Hyman came up to us in the lobby, and said, ‘Got your speech ready, boys?’”

  Benton and Newman lost. So did Penn, to Mike Nichols for The Graduate. Bonnie and Clyde lost Best Picture to In the Heat of the Night. After all the Sturm und Drang, it won only two awards, Estelle Parsons for Best Supporting Actress and Burnett Guffey for Best Cinematography—ironic, because Guffey hated the way he was forced to photograph the film and developed an ulcer during the shoot. “We’re all disappointed,” said Dunaway. “As a bunch of bankrobbers, we was robbed.”

  “There were people in Hollywood who just hated that movie,” recalls Benton. “The thing that ticked off Crowther is that there was banjo music while they were shooting people. It was perceived to be a thumbing-your-nose attitude, a moral flipness, an arrogance, because nobody in this movie ever said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve killed somebody.’”

  Bonnie and Clyde was a watershed. “We didn’t know what we were tapping into,” said Penn. “The walls came tumbling down after Bonnie and Clyde. All the things that were in concrete began to just fall away.”

  If the ’50s saw American culture turning away from Marx toward Freud, Bonnie and Clyde signifies not so much a return to Marx, as an escape from the insistent navel-gazing and psychologizing of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, a rebirth of interest in social relations. “The Freudian nature of their own relationship puts me to sleep,” said Beatty, referring to the desperate couple. “I’ve seen too much of that.” If Freud was dead, long live Wilhelm Reich. Not unlike Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde carried a message of sexual liberation. In the picture’s somewhat crude emotional economy, Clyde’s gun does what his dick can’t, and when his dick can, there’s nothing left for his gun to do, so he dies. It was all summed up by that ubiquitous antiwar bumper sticker: Make Love, Not War.