Hopper

by Tom Folsom

At fifteen he was a master of the hambone acting style then at its apex with Sir Laurence Olivier donning a fleshy nose, dandy’s wig, and villainous eyebrows as wretched King Richard III. Or Orson Welles, masked in blackface for his film version of Othello. Enraptured by his hammy heroes—the great rival fakes of their age—Hopper was on the path to greasepaint glory, but the stars intervened and changed his course.

  In one fateful week, Hopper sat glued to a death match playing in theaters across America. In A Place in the Sun, delicate Montgomery Clift did his haunting shuffle to the electric chair and, in spite of the sets and makeup and all other things that screamed fake in the movies, somehow managed to be real. In the other corner, brawny Marlon Brando slouched in a sombrero and thick mustache as Mexico’s Tiger on a White Horse, Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary martyr of Viva Zapata!

  To be or not to be? Would Hopper continue on the path toward the grandiloquent Shakespeareans, last of a fast-dying breed? Or would he dive into dark, unexplored territory? Daring him to leap into the unknown was Kipling’s checklist of manhood, “If,” ingrained in his brain from his declamation contests.

  IF YOU CAN MAKE ONE HEAP OF ALL YOUR WINNINGS

  AND RISK IT ON ONE TURN OF PITCH-AND-TOSS,

  AND LOSE, AND START AGAIN AT YOUR BEGINNINGS

  AND NEVER BREATHE A WORD ABOUT YOUR LOSS

  “There was something real happening,” said Hopper. “I didn’t really know what it was but I knew it was fantastic and marvelous and that I had to find that thing.”

  That summer, sixteen-year-old Hopper took off to apprentice at the Pasadena Playhouse. Kicking off its season of star-spangled Americana, Valley Forge, “a tale of living suffering,” was drenched in the sort of misery all the rage with serious theatergoers. Onstage, wearing a powder-white wig, burly Canadian actor Raymond Burr faced the horrors of that awful winter as General George Washington. Hopper was so thrilled, he forgot about his own grinding poverty, a harrowing condition shared with his sprightly pal from the Helix drama club. Bill Dyer scooped flavor after flavor in a nearby ice-cream parlor, while Dennis flipped burgers at the Playhouse Café. The two were so desperate, they broke into Bill’s aunt’s home in Pasadena, busting the lock on the flimsy back door and bursting in to raid her fridge.

  “My God,” said Bill. “We’re breaking and entering, we’re so hungry!”

  Excited to hit the skids and hot to reach the brooding dramatic lows of his new heroes, Hopper skulked into the Pasadena Playhouse Laboratory Theatre, showcasing unknown plays and lesser-known actors. He shone in his role as the juvenile lead in Doomsday. Set in a bomb-ridden, war-torn Poland suffering under a crazed dictator named Hitlin, an amalgam of Hitler and Stalin, this dirge of horrors ended with the merciful drop of the curtain. Exiting to scattered applause and emerging into the light of balmy Pasadena, Hopper slunk back to the screwheads.

  “High school was hell,” said Hopper, yet he was always smiling in the pages of his Tartan.

  The La Jolla Playhouse was the dream of a group of Hollywood actors who brought the split-level farmhouse tradition of rustic New England summer stock to the earthly paradise of the ritzy seaside. The Pacific’s flat blue horizon looked a lot more interesting with starlets lounging wistfully in bathing suits, learning their lines on the rocks against dramatically crashing waves. Managing the Playhouse was jet-setting Life photographer John Swope, who had just shot the magazine’s cover of Brando in a toga.

  At the rosy stucco Valencia Hotel, the Pink Lady of La Jolla, seventeen-year-old Dennis couldn’t keep his eyes off Swope’s wife, a sweltering older brunette lounging poolside in her movie-star sunglasses. To the world she was everymother, from the honorable poverty-stricken woman of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to the homely maid stuck in The Enchanted Cottage. To Hopper she would always be Sally Bowles, the flighty American who lavishly sleeps her way across Europe in I Am a Camera, the snapshot of Weimar hedonism opening the Playhouse season.

  Dennis fell into “worshipful passion” for this lovely movie star Dorothy McGuire, doing all the things as his Sally Bowles that Dodge City missed out on. Wide-eyed and hormonally raging, he hung on to the curtain pulley as if it would hoist him to the moon. All the while fluttering onstage in a billowy skirt and a tight black strappy top accentuating her terrific shoulders, something like those of his mother—though somehow Dorothy looked better, without the pinched face—she didn’t scold but instead offered sexy unconditional love to the struggling young artist in an intoxicating blend that was part mother, part—

  Apprenticing at La Jolla Playhouse, age seventeen, 1953

  Look magazine

  Hopper was so starry-eyed that he missed his cue to bring curtain down. Banned from pulling it for the rest of the season, he cleaned the dressing rooms of visiting stars like a stable boy.

  “What a glamorous job that was,” said Hopper. “I’m very serious. It was a glamorous job. Seriously it was. I mean, there were all these movie stars; I’d never seen a movie star before in my life. I was actually cleaning their toilets!”

  And not just any toilet but Olivia de Havilland’s toilet! She rode into the La Jolla Playhouse to star in the season finale, The Dazzling Hour. Dennis’s bathroom fantasy had come true, the fantastic women of his youth converging in one breezy dream summer.

  Returning to Helix to star in his senior play, Harvey, he shone as the man whose only friend is a six-foot imaginary rabbit. Hopper was voted most likely to succeed, class of ’54. He performed all summer at the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival and, donning his doublet as Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice at the Old Globe, projected the ballad of his undying love to the brunette maiden beaming at him from the audience. He had invited Dorothy to come to the show and she came!

  “Fair ladies,” spoke Hopper in tights, “you drop manna in the way of starved people.”

  Soon to play the kindly frontier marm in Old Yeller, Dorothy offered her discovery some oh-so-arousing words of encouragement after the performance. Better yet, her husband promised a letter of recommendation to a big-shot TV casting director. Along with his two-hundred-dollar Old Globe scholarship, Dennis had everything he needed to get the hell out of Lemon Grove for good.

  “When you run out of your two hundred dollars,” huffed Marjorie, “call us and we’ll come get you.”

  HOLLYWOOD

  Clanking alongside a glittery streak of hot rods cruising Sunset Strip, eighteen-year-old Hopper checked his pockets when he and his pal from drama club, Bill Dyer, decided to pool money for a hamburger. Two cents. That’s all he had. Rolling down the window, Dennis threw out the last pennies from his two-hundred-dollar scholarship and burst out laughing. What else could he do? Struggling to make it as a lounge singer, Bill had just enough gas in his beat-up Chevy to drive his roommate through the gates of Hal Roach Studios, known as “The Lot of Fun” from its days of cranking out Laurel and Hardy films.

  It had taken Hopper some time to finally connect with the big-shot casting director within, a tough bird named Ruth Burch. She sized up new meat with the professional eye of a butcher and got a whiff of the overeager odor of success. This kid looked like a real pretty boy. A little guy, not much taller than five feet eight. But he had those blue eyes—crazy, yet sweet. And that big bobble head (the stars always had big heads), only what was with the grandiosity? Did the kid think he was Laurence Olivier?

  Telling Hopper he was too cocky for his own good, the tough bird sent him to the trenches, doling him out a bit part on Cavalcade for America. Celebrating the true grit historical backbone of the nation, its upcoming episode, “A Medal for Miss Walker,” told the tale of a hospitalized Civil War veteran who falls in love with his nurse. Playing a dying amputee with three limbs and ten lines, Hopper landed a cattle call reading for a hot new NBC series, Medic, staged in real clinics and real operating rooms. Its newspaperman creator went to extreme lengths, with no effort spared to make his show feel real. He wore a hearing aid for half a day before his show on deafness. He spent
time in an iron lung to get “inside” his polio story. He filmed six different births to capture the perfect shot of the cutting of an umbilical cord. He went a little overboard with his episode about a C-section, “The Glorious Red Gallagher,” which the network found too graphic and unfit for family viewing.

  Still, everyone agreed the upcoming “Boy in the Storm” episode required an actor committed to Medic’s unflinching brand of rusty-nail realism. Fakery had gotten Hopper to this point, with his dramatic Shakespearean flourishes and perfect diction that floored the competition in his declamation contests. But in the face of some thirty-five other desperate hunks of meat clamoring to get the role, he would have to cast aside any whiff of fakery and plummet headfirst into the dirty depths of realism. Fortune smiled, for who better than Vincent Price to help him become real? Starring in House of Wax, the man jumped out at screaming teens in red-and-blue stereoscopic specs, right before their eyes, making them feel part of the writhing, living drama just as the blaring trailer promised.

  The door creaked open to a lush Spanish villa outside of Beverly Hills, guarded by a five-and-a-half-foot stone Huastecan sun god wearing a cobra crown. Within lay Hopper’s host, in the flesh among succulents and oversized tropical potted plants. The prop boy at La Jolla Playhouse, one of the only friends Hopper had in town, had made the introduction. Hopper had certainly come to the right place.

  The Real, the True Miracle of Third Dimension!

  In his earlier days, the oddly handsome Vincent Price had frequented that Minutes of the Last Meeting salon of boozy Hollywood bohemians who so inspired Hopper. Price desperately hoped to play one of the great Shakespearean leads but also longed to deliver a performance so real he could actually touch his audience. One day when House of Wax was playing in Times Square, he snuck into the theater, quiet as he could, mind you. In the row ahead of him, two teenage girls shuddered as they watched his mad sculptor in grotesquely alive 3-D. When the lights came on after the bone-chilling ending, Vincent Price peeked his head between the girls and asked, in his politely devilish tone, “Did you like it?” He made the girls scream.

  Something weird was happening in the Price home, apart from the fact that Vincent Price was living there. It wasn’t the giant totem pole sticking out of the backyard like an erection, tongues protruding from the animal figures stacked one on top of another. It was a five-by-six-foot painting obliterating the living room wall, an abstract canvas by American artist Richard Diebenkorn. It sucked Hopper in like a whirlpool.

  Was it a California landscape of hills and swimming pools? Or was it a sunset? It seemed to change colors and moods according to the time of day and Hopper’s own state.

  “I’d been painting abstractly,” said Hopper, who’d been dabbling ever since his mother gave him a set of watercolors back when he was a boy. “But I’d never really thought that anybody really painted abstractly until I saw these things.”

  Taking Hopper under his wing, Price taught him all about the burgeoning abstract expressionist movement. Sick of snobs who thought all great art came from Europe, Price was a fierce champion of this truly American revolution that exploded the psyche like jazz. He liked Jackson Pollock, a New York tough guy who came from rugged western stock. A rebel, he broke away from his mentor, the cantankerous muralist Thomas Hart Benton, who loathed the formless drippings of his ex-protégé. Hopper was pretty disturbed, too.

  The splattered drip-drops in the eleven-by-fourteen-inch Pollock on Price’s wall were Brando on a canvas, jumping off the screen, vital, completely spontaneous. Inspired, Dennis dashed off a huge abstract of his own, diving into the void toward some greater unseen reality, leaving it to dry on the driveway. Price’s son backed over it on his way to the market.

  “Whatever’s wrong with me, it’s really not like being crazy, is it?” asked the boy in the storm.

  When Hopper stepped out of his Medic read, he told his agent, the legendary Bob Raison, “You know, I got this job.” Hopper just knew he’d risen above the herd.

  “You had a good experience reading,” said Raison, tempering expectations. “I wanted you to get a good experience reading. You didn’t get this job.”

  “They said my seizures were the best they’d seen,” said Hopper. “Indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  Broadcast to America in black and white on a Monday night at 9:00 PM in January 1955, “Boy in the Storm” starred teenage Hopper in a hospital bathrobe, wrenching hearts as he twittered about in slippers, hopeful as a baby bird that someone would take him home despite his illness. In a flash, he dropped to the hospital floor and jerked about in an epileptic seizure, foaming at the mouth in a television tour de force. The boy in the storm took off into the stratosphere, a whirlwind that dropped him directly into the nexus of the sixties’ Technicolor universe, which was completely unbelievable and yet somehow real.

  THE SYSTEM

  Cut to the year 1969, the jukebox blasting “Age of Aquarius” by the 5th Dimension. Across the globe, hippies, seekers, outlaws, and misfits are hanging on every word of thirty-three-year-old Dennis Hopper, the revolutionary director who upended the Hollywood studio system. His attendance is requested at a nuclear physics conference meeting on a mountaintop in Sweden for the purpose of “projecting a new society.” A prophet of the age, wild-eyed with greasy hair flowing from under his felt cowboy hat, he offers followers and reporters, “Light is my obsession. I feel it as an elemental source of power, like a kind of cosmic coal. It makes things grow; it makes things die. It can turn into anything—a plant, an idea. Movies are made of light. Just think of the power of light to transform itself into everything we are and can imagine!”

  The New York Times got the exclusive of his earliest clash with the industry, the epic tale of how a young rebel stuck it to the man, man, the most feared force in Hollywood.

  “I was going to be either a matador, a race-car driver, or a boxer,” began Hopper. “In Spain, if you’re broke and lousy in school, you become a matador. In Italy, you race cars. Here, you box, or act. I boxed and got beat up, so acting was the only thing left.” He explained how the morning after playing the epileptic orphan on Medic, five major studios gave him contract offers. “Columbia called first and I was brought into Harry Cohn’s huge office.” That’s Harry Cohn—the tyrannical Columbia Pictures studio boss, better known as King Cohn.

  Hopper was dressed up in a suit and tie; there were no Navajo talismans dangling around his neck yet. He had waited in the reception office, a sweatbox set up so that a desperate person might have to wait three days before admittance, the beastly Cohn secretly peeking in to examine his prey.

  In the lucky position of being courted for a contract, Hopper was buzzed right through the soundproof portal—discolored from years of sweaty palms.

  “And I walk, swish, swish—you know, sweating, man.”

  He shuffled down the length of plush carpet toward an enormous desk raised slightly above floor level like a stage. Cohn had ripped off the design from Il Duce, whose picture had once hung on the wall, the fascist dictator being the subject of Columbia’s 1933 documentary Mussolini Speaks! Oppressed by his surroundings, Hopper took in the hundred or so Oscars glinting in an arc behind the movie mogul’s desk. (“Like a rainbow,” said Hopper. “I had never seen an Oscar before. I was nervous as hell.”) Sitting down, he picked a crack in the ceiling to stare at as Cohn laid on his fleshy charm.

  “I’ve seen your TV show, kid. You got it; you’re a natural, like Monty Clift! What else have you done?”

  “Shakespeare.”

  Cohn couldn’t believe it. “Max! Send the kid to school for six months. Take all the Shakespeare out of him. I can’t stand Shakespeare.”

  “At that point,” explained Hopper, wrapping up his oft-told tale, “I said to Harry Cohn, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Whereupon I was barred from Columbia. I didn’t go back there for fifteen years, until they agreed to release Easy Rider. Freaky.”

  After telling Cohn where to stick it—th
e same Cohn who used his Mafia connections to threaten Sammy Davis Jr. with the loss of his only seeing eye if he didn’t quit looking at one of Cohn’s blond movie stars—Hopper should have been blackballed from Hollywood for the rest of his life. If he was lucky.

  But it just so happened that Warner Bros. needed a baby-faced hell-raising type for its upcoming juvenile delinquent picture, Rebel Without a Cause. The studio scooped him up for $200 a week for twenty-six weeks. Unlike Warner matinee idol Tab Hunter (formerly Arthur Kelm), Dennis Hopper had the good fortune to remain himself, providing the perfect angle for his first big ink. Biting the hook, Hollywood gossip maven Hedda Hopper typed NO RELATION as the headline of her item: “Hear Dennis Hopper has been signed to a long-term contract by Warner Bros.”

  With a name in place, the studio machine was ready to crank out a new star on the assembly line. Eager to shine him up like a lucky penny, the publicity folks shot stills capitalizing on the wholesome look of their newest contract player. They posed him waking up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at five o’clock in the morning, making his bed and stuffing a pillow into a fresh white case, drinking a thick-as-Elmer’s glass of milk from his fridge, responsibly writing out checks for the bills on his kitchen table. Cornball images perfectly complemented Hopper’s upcoming Rebel role, making it all the more frightening that any sweet American boy could be swept up in the scourge of delinquency. Still, he couldn’t look like a total sissy, so the studio’s top flack, an expert forger of backstories on incoming talent, dished up a ripe coming-of-age factoid about fourteen-year-old Hopper helping with the harvesting on his grandparents’ wheat farm. The kid not only tilled America’s soil but, after getting pounded by a tough customer in the Golden Gloves welterweight finals, landed a broken nose, two busted ribs, and a three-week stay in the hospital.

  “Dennis Hopper might have been trading leather in the boxing ring today instead of trading lines in the acting profession,” went the item Warner Bros. sent out for immediate release, “but for a ferocious young man bent on beating in Hopper’s head.”