Hopper

by Tom Folsom

Not long after, he invited Hopper for a barbecue at his home in Benedict Canyon. The hamburgers sizzled while something tapped away inside.

  Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  “That’s the—”

  “No, Dennis, the monkey isn’t here.”

  “Well, it’s Jimmy.”

  Stepping inside, they saw on Stern’s top shelf a little wooden Buddha from Thailand, bouncing up and down.

  Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  “It’s Jimmy,” said Hopper. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Hopper flew out the door, leaving Stern to deal with Dean.

  “Sit down,” said something powerful. “Leave yourself alone, but pick up the pen.”

  So, Stern began to write—rather, Jimmy began to write—but the only word Stern could decipher was “wood.” Natalie Wood perhaps? Whatever it meant, it was definitely spooky, leading him to conclude that if anybody were to have contact with the dead, it would be Dennis.

  THE DEATH CURSE

  Within weeks of the silver Spyder crash on September 30, 1955, Variety pegged Dennis Hopper as the next James Dean. Of course the next James Dean would never call himself the next James Dean. The trick to winning what Warner matinee idol Tab Hunter acidly called the “James Dean Replacement Sweepstakes” was to completely deny being a contender. Stating on the record that he refused to give any interviews about Dean, Hopper did not permit photographers to snap pictures of a treasured painting given to him by his departed friend.

  Otherwise he’d be as shameless as his slick pal Nick Adams, a fellow Rebel delinquent who’d taken to showing up to parties in a candy-red windbreaker. For Life’s feature “Delirium Over Dead Star,” the notorious Hollywood opportunist posed with a cigarette by his kitschy shrine of Dean memorabilia, including Dean’s hat and a poem Dean had penned about a lonely boy.

  Hopper let it be known—he wanted no part in such gloss. Coolly playing his cards, he pleaded to Young Movie Lovers magazine, “Please, don’t call me another Jimmy Dean.”

  Practically every young actor was being thrust into the sweepstakes, like a guy Hopper saw pulling up to a popular Hollywood restaurant in a Porsche, just like Dean’s. He even kind of looked like Dean. Weird. And his name was Dean!

  You Picked Dean Stockwell

  to Play Jimmy Dean!

  But Would It Ruin Him

  or Make Him a Star?

  So asked the pages of Movie Life, a cheap fanzine that made this grown-up child star cringe. Dean Stockwell preferred to hang out with his subterranean art crowd and make cosmic collages and strange underground movies like For Crazy Horse, Pas de Trois, and Moonstone, screened out in the wilds of Topanga Canyon.

  But a dark horse roaring in from Tupelo had no reservations about going after James Dean gold. Dropping to his knees before Nicholas Ray, the stranger with the slicked-back black hair commenced to recite Dean’s lines from “Rebel Without a Pebble,” as he adoringly called his favorite film. He’d seen it over and over in the theaters and was desperate to star in the upcoming James Dean Story, not realizing it was going to be a documentary, or knowing what a documentary was anyway.

  “I’d sure like to take a crack at it,” said Elvis Presley. “I think I could do it easy.”

  Hunting down Hopper so he could hear all about Jimmy Dean, Elvis confided how worried he was because the script of a B Western he was about to star in instructed him to smack around his lovely costar. He told Dennis, “Man, I never hit a woman before.”

  Realizing the confusion, Hopper sat down the sloe-eyed cowboy for a chat. He broke it to him gently that the movies—like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny—weren’t real. Dennis ought to know, having just filmed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Playing the troubled rustler Billy Clanton, he’d clutched his chest and dropped off the balcony for the final scene. Crashing onto one of the old-time cameras at Fly’s Photographic Studio, he was a portrait of wasted youth. Then he picked himself up, brushed himself off, and walked off the Paramount backlot with fake saguaro cacti and a mountain made of a big hump of gray asbestos. See, he wasn’t really dead. He’d merely shot it out with fake bullets against a fake Wyatt Earp at a fake O.K. Corral.

  Elvis felt duped. “He believed that movie fights were real, and that movie bullets were real,” Hopper recalled. “And when I explained that they weren’t, he got very pissed off at me! And Elvis was twenty-one years old at the time!”

  “I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean,” said Elvis. “I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ’uns, go for us. We’re sullen; we’re broodin’; we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men. I don’t know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.”

  He’d taken in as much as he could of his dead idol—gobbling up a hunka Hopper and a hunka burnin’ Natalie Wood, who dug her claws into his back as he rode around on his brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Nick Adams chugged a quarter mile behind on Elvis’s old one.

  By then, Elvis figured he knew so much about Dean that he had this rebel thing licked. With total conviction, he sang to his girl in his B Western, Love Me Tender, beaten only by Giant at the box office. Elvis didn’t even need to writhe on the floor. He simply refused to smile.

  Chewed up and spit out by this slick hillbilly who loved his mama, Hopper sat in an all-night seedy diner with fellow sweepstakes losers Nick and Natalie like a trio of kids airbrushed into the famous Nighthawks painting by the other Hopper. They prepared to get to work on their extensive study of real-life lonely outsiders—real coffee drinkers, real pie eaters.

  Like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys prowling skid row, the impressionable gang gawked curbside as the LAPD tossed real derelicts into a paddy wagon. Sharpening senses, becoming real artists hip to the underbelly, they took the world as their stage.

  “Fuck Errol Flynn!” cried Hopper, swinging from a length of rope and landing on the porch of Nick Adams’s home in sleepy Laurel Canyon. Another evening he wrapped himself in Nick’s bearskin rug and paraded through the neighborhood with a movie poster featuring Dorothy McGuire wearing a bonnet. The mad act landed notice in Variety, bolstering Dennis’s wacky, irreverent persona.

  Meanwhile, Hopper and Natalie were becoming a steamy item. Posing in fishnet stockings on a cabaret stool for Look’s “Natalie Wood: Teenage Tiger,” she offered tabloids an inside peek at the “Real Life Rebellion of a Teenage ‘Man-Buster.’”

  “We got in a relationship where we were going out to parties together and we would score for each other,” explained Hopper. “We had great fun procuring for each other. We weren’t blind to the fact that we could see other people, but we were having sex all through our relationship.”

  Natalie upped the stakes of her blossoming wild-child image by arranging an illicit rendezvous with a married movie star who slipped her a pill, then whipped and savagely raped her. Roaring over to Hopper’s apartment in her Thunderbird, Natalie burst in and caught Hopper in the midst of painting one of his abstracts.

  “Lay down,” she demanded, grabbing Hopper’s bullwhip. “Let me whip you.”

  Hopper had become something of an expert at the Western art of whip cracking, hoping it would give him a little something extra to further his career. Getting whipped was even better.

  “It was almost that we were naive to the point that if people did drugs and alcohol and were nymphomaniacs,” figured Hopper, “then that must be the way to creativity, and creativity’s where we wanna be. We wanna be the best.”

  One night at Nick’s rustic cabin in La Cañada, Hopper set the scene of a boozy salon where madness and genius thrived. Natalie starred as bombshell Jean Harlow, luxuriating in the bubbly decadence of Hollywood’s golden era.

  “OK, Natalie,” directed Hopper. “We’re ready for the orgy.”

  Natalie disrobed. Stepping naked into a tub filled with champagne, she screamed when the bubbles fizzed u
p into her nether regions. (“Set her on fucking fire,” said Hopper.) The next scene featured Natalie in the emergency room, back to those doctors who once cast her as a delinquent.

  First Dean died. Then Hopper’s sidekick Nick was found dead in his apartment in 1968, having overdosed on pills. Perhaps even murdered.

  Having OD’d on his porcelain throne at Graceland in 1977, Elvis was dead, all bloated up on his rebel image. Hopper cried when he heard the news over the telephone.

  Lastly, in 1981, over the course of a stormy night of sambuca with her fellow actors, husband Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken, Natalie fell off her yacht and drowned, to forever star in an enticing unsolved Hollywood mystery set off Catalina Island.

  So the winner of the James Dean Replacement Sweepstakes by default was Hopper. Inquiring Weekly World News readers wanted to know: Would Hopper be the next victim of the diabolical Rebel curse? The intrepid tabloid asked him to comment on their story “Dreadful Death Curse of Cult Movie.”

  How did they even manage to track him down? He wasn’t exactly readily available at the time. His skin was pale and slimy. Even in newsprint, he looked wet, drenched in a psychotic’s perspiration. His bugged-out eyes were wide as the mysterious fanged Bat Boy, a regular on the cover of this Martian-infested supermarket rag.

  “It’s very strange the way they all died,” admitted Hopper, then at the height of his coke-addled paranoia. “I only know I’m a survivor. I won’t let it get to me.”

  GIANT

  The imaginary line was the lesson Hopper took from the set of Giant, the Warner Bros. epic shot on the heels of Rebel in the summer of 1955. The studio machine spared no expense on what promised to be a Gone with the Wind for the Lone Star State. The whole town of Marfa, pop. 3,500, sweltered in the heat as Elizabeth Taylor chugged in on the Texas and Pacific Railway to the dirt-dry whistle-stop. They’d all come out to see her, finer than four thousand head of the finest Texas cattle brought in for the big roundup scene. Not to mention Clear View Snuffy, the National Brangus bull champion imported from Oklahoma to play King Tut, pride of the Benedict ranch. Cordoned off from the set with a huge wooden derrick atop a well filled with real oil imported from California, ready to gush on cue, a crowd of thousands shuffled about in cowboy boots, wiped sweat off with worn handkerchiefs, all to catch a glimpse of Liz—“jack-off material,” said one onlooker. Powdered and puffed and cleavaged, she was the biggest movie star James Dean had ever worked with, and he couldn’t help but be nervous, so he did what came naturally. Sauntering over to the good people standing around to see this tale of oil and greed, he whipped out his dick and peed.

  Riding shotgun back to town after wrapping for the day, Hopper said, “Jimmy, I’ve really seen you do a lot of strange things, but today, really, that takes it, babe. I mean what was that, what was that all about?’”

  “Working with Elizabeth Taylor,” said Dean. “Really nervous, first time I have a scene with her, I can’t even speak. So I had to take a pee, and I thought, ‘Well, it’s not workin’ in this sequence for me,’ so, uh, I figured if I could go and pee in front of those four thousand people I could get back there and I could do anything on film.”

  Hopper had his own Liz hang-ups—he’d hug his pillow at night and pretend it was her—but somehow it didn’t befit his role as the young upright son of a cattle baron, Jordan Benedict III, to expose himself like Jimmy. But he didn’t want to get all frozen up like one of those lit-up Marfa jackrabbits he and Jimmy shot with .22s, hypnotizing ’em in the headlights of the pickup truck.

  “Well, you know,” advised Jimmy, “if you’re smoking a cigarette, don’t act smoking the cigarette. Just smoke the cigarette when you feel like it.”

  Dean had plenty of tricks up his sleeve. To embody his character, Jett Rink, the young wildcatter who had aged into a bitter drunk by the time of the climactic banquet, Dean didn’t actually drink himself into a stupor when the script called for him to be raging drunk. He just spun around and around until he was disoriented, then staggered ahead, making him appear soused as he stepped into the scene and tried to regain his balance.

  Suddenly it came together for Hopper. The trick was to just be. When his time came to smoke the cigarette before Liz, playing his mother, Hopper smoked it. Not smoke it all contemplative like Rock Hudson, the big hunk of beefcake playing his father, but how Jimmy smoked it.

  “And that’s great acting,” said Hopper. “Because then it isn’t acting at all.”

  That night, Dennis ate with Dean at the Villa Capri. The Rat Pack had finally accepted Jimmy into the fold. At last showing up in a suit and tie, not his overalls, Dean clowned around with Sammy Davis Jr. like they were old pals. Jimmy was growing up. The kid had a big future ahead of him.

  “I saw what you did today,” said Dean. “I wish Edmund Kean could have seen you. And John Barrymore. Because today you were great.”

  Dennis started tearing up, the tears brimming.

  “It’s very sweet,” said Dean. “You’re showing appreciation for what I’m saying, but when you really become a fucking actor you’ll have to leave the room to cry. Then you’ll be there.”

  A year after Jimmy died, Hopper strutted down the red carpet in his black tie for the star-studded Texas-sized Giant premiere. He pushed his way into the dazzlingly lit Roxy Theatre in New York.

  “You are a very, very fine actor,” said the television hostess, wrapped in a mink stole and glittering diamond tiara.

  “Thank you very much,” said Hopper, holding her white-gloved hand for a little too long.

  Wielding a microphone like a scepter for the telecast event, she told him how great he was with Natalie Wood the night before on The Kaiser Aluminum Hour. Yes. That was the episode where Hopper played a carnival barker who keeps Natalie, a hoochie-coochie dancer, in his evil clutches. Hopper hoped those days were winding to a close. He’d snubbed Natalie as his date tonight for the sophisticated Southern belle of the Actors Studio, elegant Joanne Woodward with chic new Joan of Arc bangs, soon to flex her mastery of the craft by playing multiple personalities in The Three Faces of Eve.

  “Is this your wife?” asked the hostess.

  “No, no, it’s not my wife!” giggled Hopper, like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.

  Bubbling with boyish charm that night, he tried to wiggle his way into Joanne’s apartment. Why was Joanne suddenly pushing him down a flight of stairs? Alas, the naive lad paled in comparison to the suave lady-killer awaiting a secret rendezvous on the other side of her door, her Actors Studio classmate with the blazing blue eyes.

  That guy? Newman? How boring. Hopper took him out one time to see Miles Davis and he didn’t even get it.

  “What is this music?” asked Newman.

  What a square. Of course Paul Newman didn’t dig jazz: the music of the Method according to Dean, a raw scorching expression where every note hung in the air as real as real could get. And still Newman managed to land the coveted role of hardscrabble boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me, the one to have been played by Dean. But Hopper was the one ready for stardom! He was the one who shone in the firmament against Rock and Liz!

  Hopper’s reputation in Hollywood was getting weird—Dean worship had left him quirky and neurotic, a nervous persona his peer Anthony Perkins (to play the mama’s boy in Psycho) already had down. What was the studio going to do with him? Gussied up in white satin pantaloons and a jerkin with gold-tasseled epaulettes, Hopper was the spitting image of the Little Corporal, Napoleon Bonaparte. A Warner flack pointed out how he’d even bought a poodle named Josephine and was giving all of his friends bottles of Napoleon brandy for Christmas. Introduced in voiceover by Vincent Price, who played the Devil, Hopper got about three minutes of screen time before the wacky historical romp moved on to the Marx Brothers. Harpo played Sir Isaac Newton.

  What else could Hopper do? Why not farm him out for a whopping $6,000 to horse breeder and cattle connoisseur Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney?
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  The filthy-rich scion had a notion to make a whole series of films about America. Whitney’s landmark production The Searchers was expertly crafted by director John Ford with his alter ego in the saddle. Once again the Ford/Wayne combination was sure to be a winner! Only this time around, instead of Pappy and the Duke, it was the sons of the Johns—the Pats, Pat Ford producing and the wooden Pat Wayne starring. Stuck in a retread of their fathers’ Westerns, Hopper did what he could in his less-than-stellar role of a twitchy Mexican killer.

  Napoleon, 1957

  Licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc

  Moseying about Western Street, the main drag on the Warner Bros. Wild West backlot, Hopper played the high-strung Utah Kid in an episode of Cheyenne. After enough time passed for the television audience to forget his face, he returned as a spastic train robber ready to jump out of his skin. His crazed look reminded ol’ Cheyenne Bodie of something he’d seen only once before—in the eyes of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid.

  “I’d rather face Bonney anytime,” said Cheyenne. “This boy’s a rattlesnake.”

  How much longer would Hopper have to stand around and have such cow shit lines slung on him?

  Figuring he was a real pepper pot, the studio slapped on an evil cowboy getup—black boots, black hat, black leather vest—and sent him back to Western Street to play a Billy the Kid cameo in “Brannigan’s Boots,” the pilot episode of Sugarfoot. Bested by the hapless happy-go-lucky sheriff “Sugarfoot” Brewster, Hopper stole out of town on his horse.

  Meanwhile, back at the Warner Ranch, Paul Newman rocketed to stardom as Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, an edgy version of the outlaw legend, which recast Billy as a brooding juvie from the back alleys of New York.

  At a party at the home of Stewart Stern, the Rebel screenwriter becoming known around town as “the guy who writes for Newman,” Hopper considered Warner Bros.’ new golden boy, about to ride into the sunset with his beautiful Academy Award–winning bride, digging Oscar gold in The Three Faces of Eve.