by Tom Folsom
Now that the flacks had roughed the kid up with a little Tinseltown sprinkling of grit, the only thing left was to hook him up with a love interest.
REBEL
Starlet after starlet, including buxom Jayne Mansfield, hoped to play the girlfriend of the brooding loner who hates his apron-wearing father for submitting to his domineering mother. Rain poured down on the Warner Bros. backlot as the girls cozied up to Hopper for their Rebel screen tests. All night long he embodied the star-making role of the lost boy who only wants somebody to tell him the truth. Who else could even come close to nailing the part of the troubled teenage hero? Hopper thought he was the best actor in the world, “pound for pound,” but nobody seemed to recognize it.
By the time the cinematographer finished tinkering with CinemaScope, famously dismissed as only good for shooting snakes and funerals, the next big thing felt like a wet, unhappy animal.
After his soggy ordeal on the backlot, Dennis returned home to his apartment on Doheny Drive and slept off the experience. The next day his roommate, trusty Bill Dyer, handed him the phone.
“It’s Natalie Wood!”
The child star? Why was Natalie Wood calling? Wasn’t she in Miracle on 34th Street—the little girl who sits on the lap of the Macy’s Santa Claus?
“I tested with you last night,” said Natalie. “Do you remember? It was raining.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.”
“I’d like to fuck you, but I don’t do anything. I just lay there.”
At breakneck speed, Hopper varoomed his new red Austin Healey convertible, courtesy of his new contract, toward the spired Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip. His first bona fide Hollywood starlet lay in Bungalow 2, the one by the pool, continuing her ongoing audition with the director of Rebel, Nicholas Ray, a silver-haired, chain-smoking auteur cursed with a romantic nature and a taste for vice. Doing all she could to be perceived as wild by the aging director, sixteen-year-old Natalie hoped to shed that awful sugary nutmeg-wafting residue of child stardom.
Picking up the nubile starlet and wheeling her up winding Mulholland Drive, Hopper parked on a secluded lover’s lane in the Hollywood Hills and started to go down on her.
“Oh, you can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Because Nick just fucked me.”
Overlooking the twinkling panorama of Hollywood, Hopper reached the big time, an event duly sent out for immediate release by the studio flack.
“Hopper, Warner Bros. contract player who makes his film debut in Rebel Without a Cause, is dating Natalie Wood, pretty filmland starlet. Natalie, incidentally, has tested for a role in the James Dean starrer which rolls shortly.”
It was true. Hopper wasn’t the star. He was playing the bit part of a hoodlum named Goon. Hopper had only been a stand-in that rainy night for the real star, twenty-four-year-old James Dean, who had been off in New York prowling rainy Times Square, hunched in an overcoat and puffing a cigarette dangling from his Cupid’s-bow lips. Dean’s pose was inspired by a photo of existential philosopher Albert Camus, grimacing on the back of one of his paperbacks, which were so chic to carry in a back pocket. The resulting pictures went into Dean’s upcoming Life profile, “Moody New Star,” paving the way for his breakout film, East of Eden.
Rumors floated around that Dean actually slept in his dressing room during Eden’s filming, locked inside the studio gates at night by director Elia Kazan, who wanted his star focused and free from the distraction of zooming around town on a shell-blue Triumph motorcycle. Nobody was allowed to disturb Dean. It was said he kept a loaded Colt .45 by his side as he slept.
Hopper liked to tell the story of how Kazan finally unleashed his hellcat to the cast and crew who were lined up outside the soundstage. “You’re gonna meet a boy and he’s gonna be strange to you and he’s gonna be different,” said Hopper impersonating Kazan. “But no matter what you see, or what you think of him, when you see him on the screen, he’s gonna be pure gold. I want you to meet James Dean.” Kazan opened the soundstage door to unveil his freak secret weapon, like 3-D, so real on-screen he grabbed you. Dean came out and screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
One day, feeling stiff in a tie, Hopper met Dean at the commissary where the studio players—cowboys and Indians alike—ate lunch in their costumes. “I didn’t believe it. Here was this grubby guy in tennis sneakers, an old turtleneck, and glasses,” said Hopper. “We were introduced, and he didn’t even turn around; he didn’t say hello. That’s how he was, man. Honest. If he didn’t feel like talking to you, he just didn’t.”
Trailing Dean like a shadow, Hopper became a regular at Googie’s, the zippy populuxe-style coffee shop to the stars on Sunset Strip. Googly eyes from the double Os of its electric green-blue sign looked down on jittery actors emoting over diner coffee and Stanislavsky while trying not to ogle the self-obsessed farm boy who poured in endless sugars. Gazing longingly at each spoonful as it dissolved, Dean held court over the back booth as king of the “night watch” crowd. This bizarre cast of characters included a spectacled toady rumored to have gotten his nose done to look more like Dean, and Vampira, a goth television hostess who rode around Tinseltown in a hearse or an old Packard convertible, chauffeured as she held aloft a black umbrella to blot out the sun. Such strange customers were attracted to Dean. Vampira took note of the night Hopper secretly followed Dean all around his regular spots, peeking into restaurant windows, looking for him.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Dennis!” Vampira told him. “Don’t be so San Diego!”
Hopper was coming into his own, without feeling the need to copy anybody. After all, he was Natalie Wood’s leading man, drinking black coffee in his very own booth. Despite her intimate rehearsals in Bungalow 2, however, Nicholas Ray hadn’t yet told Natalie whether she had gotten the part. And why cryingly not?! Couldn’t she play Dean’s girl? Hadn’t she already acted beside him on the live television show I’m a Fool, playing the nice girl to his wandering drifter?
“I know you,” Dean had told her. “You’re a child actor.”
It was horrible! Would she ever lose her Christmasy glow? Jangled up on Googie’s coffee, a nervous wreck, Natalie ordered Hopper to take her to the Villa Capri. Dean had just started lurking around this Rat Pack hangout but ate in the kitchen, a new kind of cool that Sinatra and the boys didn’t exactly get. They’d send the kid over a glass of milk and a comb, give him the rub.
“Fine man, fine boy,” said proprietor Patsy D’Amore. “Dressed with overalls, like men who dig ditches.”
By nightfall, Natalie was practically sobbing on the checkered tablecloth about how Ray still hadn’t called to say she’d gotten the part. She just wasn’t enough of a bad girl to play a delinquent. Or was she?
A randy Hopper took her up twisty Mulholland Drive through the Santa Monica Mountains, haunted by the ghosts of thrill-seeking teens who had turned the dangerous road into a makeshift drag strip, inspiring the harrowing “chickie run” scene in the Rebel screenplay. Hopper drank half a bottle of whiskey and handed it over. Natalie puked. It started to rain. Now they were really bad, living the nightmarish drama as they wheeled down a treacherously slick stretch of killer road. Turning a hairpin corner, Hopper plowed his red convertible head-on into an oncoming car, throwing Natalie onto the street. Neighbors ran out with blankets, and the ambulance roared toward her.
“It’s all my fault,” groaned Hopper. “I shouldn’t have brought that bottle.”
At the emergency room, Nicholas Ray pushed his Goon up against the white wall and slapped him. “Shut up,” said Ray. “And straighten up.”
Looking at Ray’s bad, bad Lolita scratched up in a hospital bed, the doctor called her a goddamn juvenile delinquent.
“Do you hear what he called me, Nick?” screamed Natalie. “He called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent! Now do I get the part?”
Hopper was amazed. Lying in the street in the rain, Natalie hadn’t been calling for her mother but instead r
attled off the digits of the Chateau Marmont, repeating, “Nick Ray . . . the number is,” conscious enough to know she was in the throes of a breakout performance that needed to be seen at once.
Stunned at this totally neurotic, completely savvy freak wunderkind on her way to megastardom—practically daring him to one-up her—Hopper prepared to shed any trace of the fresh-faced goody-goody voted most likely to succeed.
On the first day of shooting, Ray sent a dozen roses to Natalie’s dressing room. Just like Goon, a real delinquent, Hopper freaked out and called Natalie all sorts of nasty names for whoring around with Nick.
“All the guys just wanna screw me,” said Natalie of her silver fox. “He just wants to make love to me.”
Just as the director was about to shoot the planetarium scene at the Griffith Observatory, Hopper ran off to get a hot dog, holding up production and costing the studio plenty. Ray tried to fire him on the spot, but the brat was under contract, so he cut his lines. Hopper moped while Dean moved like a jungle cat in the fight scene, flashing about like a matador, the switchblade quick in his hand against Buzz, the bully gang leader. Dean insisted on using real blades, so real blood ran down his neck after Buzz accidentally stabbed him behind the ear.
“Cut!” yelled Ray, ready to call in the studio medics. Dean lost it and, by Hopper’s account, threatened to murder his director.
“Don’t you ever say fucking ‘cut!’ man. I’m the only one who says ‘cut’ here! If I get that close, I want it on film. I don’t want you cutting it!”
Frozen in the taillights of Dean’s raw talent, but refusing to be silenced into obscurity, the boy in the storm had no choice but to bump up his offscreen role as the passionate lover fighting to win back Natalie. Hopper got so into his role that he pulled aside one of his fellow Rebel delinquents, Steffi, who was the daughter of Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky. Hopper detailed how he’d gone out with a gun one night for a showdown with Nick at the Chateau Marmont. His attempt to end the twisted ménage à trois by blowing away the dirty rat only fed into an item the studio was sending out to Steffi’s father: “Hopper registers with the impact of a young Cagney.” But nobody seemed to pay much notice to Hopper now that his lines had been cut. He was practically an extra, forcing the studio to spread its bullshit thinner by the day.
DEAN
Wheeling a pea-green two-tone Custom Deluxe 20 Chevy pickup truck across a dusty stretch of Taos, New Mexico, a weather-beaten Hopper slammed on his brakes. He was pushing forty. It was sometime in the middle of the seventies.
Screeching to a stop, he hopped out and planted his boots in the dirt. Decked out in his cowboy hat, a faded denim jacket, and a big goddamn belt buckle and bolo tie, he faced the camera for a James Dean documentary, to climax in a rousing Dean montage to the tune of “James Dean” by the Eagles. By now, he had the tale down of that fateful night at the chickie run scene.
“Look, I really wanna be a great actor, too,” Hopper told Dean. “I want to know what you’re doing. I wanna know what your secret is.”
Hopper had always been fascinated with Dean, ever since a cold, wet early morning at the end of a long, brutal day of shooting. Lying in the street before a green-eyed windup monkey, Dean watched the toy clank its cymbals until it wound down, then lovingly covered it up with a piece of discarded newspaper for a blanket. Curling up beside his only friend in the world, Jimmy went to sleep. It would be the opening shot of Rebel Without a Cause.
“I have a script in my hand that says this guy’s in the gutter, drunk,” explained Hopper. “Well, first of all, the guy is in the street playing with a toy monkey? And doing baby things—trying to curl up . . . Where did that come from? It came from genius; that’s where it came from. That was all him. Nobody directed him to do that. James Dean directed James Dean.”
Dennis, Natalie, and Dean, Rebel Without a Cause, 1955
Archivio GBB/CONTRASTO/Redux, copyright © Archivio GBB/CONTRASTO/Redux
Everything came to a head in the hills of Calabasas, on a thousand acres with pepper trees and thoroughbred horses owned by movie mogul Harry Warner. Called to the Warner Ranch for the chickie run, all the delinquents cheered on two gas-guzzlers in a suicide race toward a rocky bluff with the inky waters below. First who jumped was a chicken.
Blazing paths in a red windbreaker, Dean somersaulted out of the black ’49 Merc in a death-defying feline leap much too real for Hopper after a long shoot of watching genius unfurl. He realized he didn’t know anything!
Going after Dean, Hopper threw him right up against that iconic Merc and asked for his secret.
“So, he asked me, very quietly, why I acted,” said Hopper. “And I told him what a nightmare my home life had been, everybody neurotic because they weren’t doing what they wanted to do and yelling at me when I wanted to be creative, because creative people ended up in bars—which I later found out to be true.”
“How can I do it?” asked Hopper. “Do I have to go to Strasberg? Do I have to go to New York?”
Dean had been schooled at the fabled Actors Studio under diminutive acting coach Lee Strasberg, keeper of the Method, the mysterious acting alchemy that spun performances into Oscar gold. But Dean was too much himself to be anybody’s disciple. Guided by his own method, he eked out a bohemian existence in his beatnik pad in Manhattan with bull horns mounted on the wall, bringing him back to the roots of his animal instinct, a reminder to strip away the bark of civilization.
Strasberg taught many dangerous things, like emotional memory.
“You are too sensitive,” Dean warned, telling Hopper never to go there. “He’ll destroy you.”
Was that what had sent Dean howling and writhing on the floor when he tried to win the love of his brothel madam mother in the gut-wrenching scene in East of Eden? Jesus.
Maybe Jimmy was right. Hopper shouldn’t play with that sort of thing.
“Jimmy and I found we’d had the same experience at home,” said Hopper. He felt just like Jimmy, a lonely farm boy who needed an escape.
“Let me help you a little,” said Dean. Every once in a while, when Hopper didn’t even know he was watching, Jimmy would mumble, “Why don’t you try the scene this way?” And Jimmy was always right.
“There’ll never be anybody like Jimmy again, man,” said Hopper. “It was, in a strange way, a closer friendship than most people have, but it wasn’t the kind of thing where he said, ‘Let’s go out and tear up the town.’ Sometimes we’d have dinner. Also we were into peyote and grass before anybody else.”
In those days, he and Dean would sit around and cook peyote on a stovetop, like a can of Campbell’s Soup, or smoke pot in the Warner Bros. dressing room with brown paper bags over their heads so the stink wouldn’t get out. They looked like small-time bank robbers, but so long as they were stoned? Guaranteed easy access to the moment, so precious for actors.
Then suddenly Jimmy was gone, leaving Hopper alone to watch the curtain open to vibrant Technicolor, Dean grinning before the green-eyed monkey. Leaping out of the speeding Merc ’49 before it dove into the water, Dean seemed so alive that he seemed to exist somewhere beyond the screen. Hopper could hardly believe he was dead, killed in his silver Porsche 550 Spyder a month before Rebel hit theaters.
The amputee girl from across the hall knocked on Hopper’s door. Jimmy used to visit her, inspired by her body like a Greek ruin. Standing on her one leg at the threshold, she told Hopper’s roommate it was horrible; there had been an accident. Was Dennis in the Porsche with Jimmy? Bill got really paranoid.
A strange thing happened when Dennis came home that night from Googie’s. Dennis told Bill, “Jimmy’s in this room with us now.”
Sitting inert on a shelf was that weird toy monkey, cymbals ceremoniously extended, but silent. Hopper had saved it from the set.
“Jesus, that monkey,” said Rebel screenwriter Stewart Stern, visiting Hopper’s apartment not long after Dean’s death. They were just back from their impromptu road trip to Tijuana to s
ee the bullfights. Hauling ass from the border, Hopper had driven his red Austin-Healey at breakneck speeds. He claimed to be an aficionado of the bullfights, but instead of hanging out at Caesar’s, the hotel where the matadors stayed, they’d stayed at a dump and hit the lap dancing joints packed with sailors from San Diego.
“Well, you know,” said Dennis, staring at his friend with a weird glint in his eye. “Jimmy comes to see me still. He does.”
One day when he’d been taking a nap, an incessant, tinny clanking woke him up. Looking across the room, he saw it jumping up and down on his shelf, crashing its little cymbals.
“All of a sudden the monkey came to life,” said Hopper. And sometimes when he was shaving, he got the feeling he was being watched. “I look and there’s Jimmy, right on the other side of the window.”
Around the world, all sorts of strange stories were popping up about Dean. In an Indonesian mountain city, Javanese teens smoked cigarettes and strutted the streets in rolled-up jeans and Rebel-red jackets. Deep in the heart of Arkansas, college students built a fire by a river, sculpted an Academy Award out of mud, flung earth at each other in a bacchanal and chanted, “Jimmy, give us a sign.” A dog howled in the distance. Fans sent eight thousand letters a month addressed to James Dean in care of Warner Bros. Dean’s ghost even beat out the very alive Rock Hudson in a Photoplay poll casting votes for America’s number one star. Jimmy Dean Returns!, an account “written” from the dead by Dean via his dime-store salesgirl lover, sold five hundred thousand copies. He’d been communicating to her through automatic writing. Suffering another one of these ridiculous stories at the end of an exhausting road trip, Stern had his fill.
“Dennis, you’re out of your mind.”