“I knew then there would be trouble, because being a lighting gaffer is a real honest-to-God fucking job that requires some expertise,” continues Hayward. “Having a meeting for Dennis was like having an audience. There was no way he was going to listen to anybody else. It was all about his speeches. So when they get to New Orleans, there was war. Lots of people have never spoken to each other again, lots of hard feelings. And it was much worse than anybody thought it was going to be.”
Brooke Hayward drove Dennis to the airport. She said, “You’re making a big mistake, this is never going to work, Peter can’t act. I’ve known him since I was a child. You’re just going to make a fool out of yourself.”
“You’ve never wanted me to succeed, you should be encouraging me, instead of telling me I’m going to fail. I want a divorce.”
“Fine.”
According to Hopper, “That was it, I never saw her again.”
Mardi Gras lasted five days. There was no script. Peter and Dennis knew the names of the two main characters, Billy, after Billy the Kid, played by Hopper, and Wyatt, after Wyatt Earp (aka Captain America), played by Fonda. They also knew they wanted to shoot an acid trip, but didn’t know much else. The three cameramen, Barry Feinstein, Baird Bryant, who had shot for New York underground filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, and Les Blank, later celebrated for his whimsical ethnographic documentaries, stumbled about in confusion. Hopper had told each one that he was the first camera. Recalls Peter Pilafian, Bryant’s soundman, “There was disagreement as to what the larger movie was, and what stage things would be at when the characters got to Mardi Gras. Dennis was this semipsychotic maniac. There would be a couple of handguns, loaded, on the table. He liked that kind of atmosphere.” Adds Bill Hayward, “He went right off the rails down there, just completely fucking lost it.”
From Hopper’s point of view, there were too many chiefs, not enough braves. “Every one of them wanted to be a director,” Hopper recalls. “I didn’t want anybody shooting any film unless I told them to. But every time I turned around, they’d be shooting.”
The first morning, Friday, February 23, 1968, Hopper gathered the cast and crew in the parking lot of the airport Hilton at 6:30 in the morning. “I was really keyed up,” he says. “As far as I was concerned, I was the greatest fuckin’ film director that had ever been in America.” He appeared to be in the grip of full-blown paranoia and, remembers Bryant, “he just started haranguing us about how he’d heard a lot about how many creative people there were on this crew, but there is only one creative person here, and that’s me. The rest of you are all just hired hands, slaves. He was totally out of his mind. He was just raving; probably he had some combination of drugs and alcohol.” According to Fonda, he raged at each astonished person in turn, “This is MY fucking movie! And nobody’s going to take MY fucking movie away from me!” until he shouted himself hoarse. Southern listened to Dennis’s performance, and made motions as if he were jacking off an enormous dick. He knew, as everybody did, that James Dean was Dennis’s guru. When Dennis came out with something particularly nutty, he’d say, “Jimmy wouldn’t appreciate that, Dennis.” Fonda was looking at his watch, thinking, “This is un-fucking-believable. We missed the start of the parade.” He continues, “Everybody was looking at me because I’m the producer, and all I could think of was, Oh, shit! I’m fucked. It’s my twenty-eighth birthday. What a fucking present I’ve given myself—this little fascist blowin’ us all off, absolutely going nuts.” Fonda asked Pilafian and the other soundmen to record surreptitiously Hopper’s ranting. He thought it might come in handy.
People started quitting. On the final day, Hopper shot the acid trip in the graveyard with Fonda and actresses Karen Black and Toni Basil. “I showed up with my camera, and nobody else was there,” says Bryant. “The whole crew had just had it. Dennis bullied Toni to take her clothes off and crawl into one of those graves with the skeletons.” The cemetery sequence was the pièce de résistance of the Mardi Gras shoot. It only took a day and a half, but Dennis and Peter had a serious falling out. Hopper was trying to get Fonda to bring up his feelings about his mother—who had committed suicide—for a scene in which he mumbles reproaches to a statue of the Madonna. “Here’s what I want you to do, man,” said Hopper, who by that time, late in the day, had had a generous helping of speed, wine, and weed. “I want you to get up there, man, I want you to sit on that, that’s the Italian statue of liberty, man, I want you to go up and sit on her lap, man, I want you to ask your mother why she copped out on you.”
“Hoppy, you can’t do that. You’re taking advantage. Just because you’re part of the family because of Brooke, that doesn’t give you the right to make me go public with it like this. Captain America don’t have no fuckin’ parents, man. He just sprung forth, just the way you see him. I’m not takin’ Peter Fonda’s mother complex and puttin’ it up there on the screen.”
“Nobody’s gonna know, man. You gotta do it, man.”
“Everybody’s gonna know, they all know what happened.” Although it was Fonda who was angry and upset, it was Hopper who was unaccountably close to tears. Fonda finally climbed up on the Madonna, and squeezed out, “You’re such a fool, mother, I hate you so much,” while Hopper watched, tears running down his cheeks. “That was the first time I’d ever vocalized any of that stuff,” says Fonda. “I actually started breaking down myself. I was sobbing.”
Reflects Hayward, “It may not sound like a big deal to most people, but it was an actor trusting a director and him going outside the bounds of what he was supposed to know. Peter never got over that. They developed a rift in their relationship that never recovered. I don’t know quite why it’s as bad as Peter—I mean, it kind of worked!”
Paranoid to the end, Hopper demanded Feinstein’s exposed stock, saying, “I don’t trust you—gimme all your film, I want it in my room!” Feinstein started throwing the film cans at him, whereupon Dennis jumped him, kicked and pummeled him. They went flying through a door into the room shared by Basil and Black. According to Dennis, Peter was in bed with both women. The two men paused for a second to contemplate this spectacle, and then Feinstein heaved a television set at Dennis. (Says Black, “I was never in bed with Peter Fonda, believe me.”)
As they were wrapping up in New Orleans, Peter called Brooke back in L.A. in the middle of the night. He said, she recalls, “We’re finished. Dennis is coming back tomorrow. I think you ought to take the children and get out of the house. Dennis has gone berserk.”
“Well, I’ve certainly seen—”
“No, this is much worse. And the footage is going to be dreadful, the whole thing is awful, it’s a disaster, I can’t work with him, I’m going to have to fire him.” She thought, I could take the children, but where am I going to go, and besides which, is that a good thing to do? Is it a nice thing to do? Is it the correct thing to do? A few hours later, she got a phone call from Southern that disturbed her more. He said, “You gotta get out of the house. We’ve all seen Dennis misbehave in the most terrible ways thousands of times in your living room, as you know better than anyone, but this time it’s really serious. This guy’s around the bend.” She was nervous, thought to herself, If Dennis knows he’s going to be fired, that’s going to make it trickier. He’s going to be under a lot of pressure. It could happen that he would strangle me to death, and not even know it. And then what would happen when the children found me in the morning? She decided to stand her ground.
When Hopper returned, he took to bed for three or four days, his custom when bad things happened, as they did all too frequently. “The dying swan,” as Brooke calls him, held court in the bedroom. Hopper finally got up to attend a screening of the Mardi Gras dailies for Schneider, Rafelson, and other interested parties. Recalls Bill Hayward, “It was just an endless parade of shit.” Brooke, who went with Dennis, says, “It was just dreadful stuff, murky, the camerawork wasn’t any good. The talent I knew Dennis had, and Peter knew Dennis had, that we’d seen in the second uni
t stuff for The Trip that he’d shot, none of that was there. There was a terrible silence in that screening room.” Several days went by, with Peter presumably trying to find a replacement for Dennis, who was getting increasingly edgy. Remembers Brooke, “He was now drinking a great deal, and doing a lot of different drugs, which did not help his state of mind, and he was under the gun. He was violent, and dangerous. Exceedingly dangerous.”
Hopper claims he was unaware that Fonda wanted to replace him until Bert told him later that Peter had played the tapes of his tantrums in New Orleans for him and Nicholson. Bert said, he recalls, “I want to tell you about your friend Peter Fonda. He told me, ‘Hopper’s lost his mind, he’s obviously crazy.’ Peter and your brother-in-law Bill Hayward tried to get you fired. So you’re not confused about who your friends are.” Fonda handed Bert a check for $40,000, saying, “This is not going to work. When Hopper gets on the set, he loses it. I think he’s absolutely blown away that I’m the producer.”
“Well, don’t you want to make the movie?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Let’s find a way of doing it. I don’t think Dennis had the proper preparation, he doesn’t have the right crew, that’ll make a difference.”
One night, as Brooke prepared hot dogs and beans for the children, Dennis came striding into the house accompanied by underground filmmaker Bruce Conner, best known for a montage film called Cosmic Ray. Conner sat down at the Victorian organ, and started to play. According to Brooke, Dennis was incensed because the children had eaten all the food, leaving nothing for his dinner. He threatened her. She says that her little son Jeffrey stood in front of her with his arms crossed, saying, “Don’t you get near my mother.” With Conner still pounding at the organ like a mad Phantom of the Opera, refusing to look up, Marin began to scream, and Brooke thought, These children have already seen too much. If he gets any worse than he is right now, I won’t be able to handle it. I’ve got to get out of here. She took Conner aside, and pleaded, “Bruce, I want you to get Dennis out of here now, far away.” He replied, “I don’t want to get into the middle of this.” She hissed, “I’m not asking you to get in the middle of this. I want you to get him out of the house. On some excuse, go down to Malibu, go see Dean Stockwell, so I can get myself together.” Hopper and Conner left, Brooke packed up the children, and spent a week out in a shack where her friend Jill Senary lived in Santa Monica with her alcoholic husband. They slept on the floor in sleeping bags. “I went underground,” continues Brooke. “Dennis did not know where I was. I got a divorce lawyer, who said, ‘We’ve got to have a restraining order, but as long as he’s in the house—you gotta get him outta the house.’ Then my brother called me, said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Dennis has just been arrested for smoking dope on the Strip, and he’s in jail.’”
As Hopper recalled the incident, “They stopped me only because my hair was somewhat long, and I was driving an old car. They said I’d thrown a roach out of the car, which I had not. Well, I did have this roach in my pocket. Then, in court, they produce as evidence not my roach, which was wrapped in white paper, but somebody else’s roach, which was wrapped in black paper. How ludicrous, man! It was dark. They couldn’t have even seen a black roach.”
Continues Brooke, “I called my lawyer, said, ‘Dennis is in jail.’
“ ‘Great. Go back to the house.’ That’s what did it. Dennis being in jail speeded up the restraining order. Bert bailed him out, and got Dennis out of town on a lengthy location scout. So that’s how I survived. It was just luck. If Dennis had been replaced, I’m sure he would have killed me.” Dennis and his close friend, production manager Paul Lewis, later broke into the house to get the art Dennis said was his, but they say Brooke had removed it. She adds, “When we did get divorced, I probably could have gone for half of his cut from Easy Rider, but I refused to take a nickel from him, because I didn’t want him coming after me with a shotgun and shooting me.”
WHILE HOPPER AND FONDA were going at it in New Orleans, Schneider had convinced Columbia to distribute the picture. Although Raybert was on the Columbia lot, it might well have been on a different planet. The management of Columbia was relatively stable, but it was a stodgy, conservative studio almost totally out of step with the emerging counterculture. Throughout the ’60s, while the other studios were bottoming out, the company had been doing well with Lawrence of Arabia, Ship of Fools, Funny Girl, and A Man for All Seasons, insulating it from the changes around it. But by the late ’60s it was starting its downward slide. Columbia president Leo Jaffe once torpedoed a deal for Hair that was at the signing stage, saying, “As long as I am president of this company, I cannot have a film that says ‘fuck’ in it.” Bert hated the studios, and Columbia’s evident disdain for this project confirmed his antipathies. He wouldn’t even show them the dailies.
Stanley Schneider ran the studio out of New York. He was turning out to be a major disappointment. By all accounts a decent and loyal man, he was in every way the opposite of Bert: cautious, conservative in his tastes, without “a creative bone in his body,” according to Robert Lovenheim, a junior executive. Stanley passed on The Sting, Stanley passed on Blazing Saddles, because he was offended by the farting. When he would smoke the occasional joint, an assistant would put his palm under the tip to catch the ash. Lovenheim and Guber once asked him to look at M*A*S*H because Robert Altman was desperate to get away from Fox and looking for a place to set up his next picture. He refused, saying, “A Schneider does not go and see a picture on the Fox lot!”
Leo and Stanley didn’t know what to make of Dennis. Jerry Ayres, who was then an executive, was present at one meeting between the three. “There was Dennis, with the spinach hanging down and the leather hat, and in the middle of the meeting, he got up and stuck his finger up my nose.” But if Bert wanted to mind him, keep him away from the front office, that was fine.
Hopper and Lewis, whom Bert had hired as the production manager, traveled all over the South, a seriously risky trip in those days, when longhairs—Hopper’s was down to his shoulders—were being threatened and beaten.
According to Hopper, he called Peter from New Orleans and said, “How’s the script going?”
“Oh, we haven’t started writing yet.”
“What the fuck’re you talking about? That’s really nuts. We’ve already got all the locations, we know exactly what we want to shoot, and we don’t have a fuckin’ script?” Hopper flew to New York, went to the Fonda town house on East 74th Street, and discovered that Peter, Southern, and Rip Torn, who had been cast as Hanson, the ACLU lawyer who joins the trip, had gone out to dinner with a few girls to Serendipity, a hip restaurant in the East ’60s. Like Southern, Torn was a big name. He had appeared in numerous films, including Baby Doll, A Face in the Crowd, and Sweet Bird of Youth. Hopper burst in upon the revelers, who were all drinking wine and having a fine time of it, and shouted, “What the fuck is happening, Peter, why aren’t you guys writing?” Having gotten their attention, he continued, “Things are so rough out there I couldn’t even stop in Texas, they’re cutting dudes’ hair with rusty razors.” Torn, who hailed from Texas, recalls he tried to calm Hopper down, saying, “Aw, take it easy, not everyone from Texas is an a-hole,” and stood up, extending his hand, but Hopper batted it away, pushed him, saying something like, “Sit down, you motherfucker.” Then, says Torn, Hopper grabbed a steak knife off the table and threatened him with it, placing the point between his eyes, about five inches away. Torn, who had been a military policeman in the army, disarmed Hopper, reversing the knife and putting it on his chest. According to writer Don Carpenter, who was also there, Hopper jumped backward, bumping into Fonda, knocking him down. Hopper exclaimed, “I’ve got a buck knife. You wanna have a knife fight?” Torn replied, “I’ll wait for you in the street. Bring your guns. Bring your knives. Bring your pals, and we’ll find out in about three seconds who the punk is.” He walked outside. “I knew he had a buck knife, but I had to consider what would ha
ppen if he did have a gun,” adds Torn, “so I stood between two cars with a trashcan lid I was going to sail at him and run like hell. But he never came out.” Torn, who had a conflicting commitment, could not get Raybert to pay him what he wanted, and never did play Hanson.*
The search was on for someone to replace Torn. “Bert was a little bit nervous that between Fonda and Hopper and this notion that we were not going to be on the set, we would never get a film,” recalls Rafelson. He persuaded Dennis to accept Nicholson, who would be his eyes and ears, or, as Jack put it, to stop Dennis and Peter from killing each other.
At that point, Hopper claims he shut himself in Southern’s office for two weeks and wrote the script himself. Hopper had already tried to get rid of Southern, but Bert refused, saying, “You don’t have any names in this, he’s a big name.” Says Hopper, “Terry never wrote one fucking word, not one line of dialogue.”
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 9