Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  What the hell sort of racket was this Actors Studio these two had broken into?

  Hopper began to spew forth a barrage of nonsensical beat-inspired poetry, leaving Joanne no choice but to whack him on the head with Stern’s antique bed warmer, loosening the copper pan from the wooden handle. Perhaps a screw, too.

  “I’m a better actor than you are, Newman!” screamed Hopper. “And I’m better than she is!”

  Cool Hand Newman dealt an unflappable six-gun line. “Dennis, get well soon.”

  BLACKBALL

  It felt like a biblical curse. Hopper was off to the California desert to play another goddamn twitchy bad guy in another B Western, Henry Hathaway’s From Hell to Texas by Twentieth Century Fox. Couldn’t Warner Bros. loan him out for something grander, as golden as MGM’s 1941 Western spectacular Billy the Kid? So big that studio chief Louis B. Mayer had dramatic clouds and mesas painted on top of the film shot on location in Monument Valley, the ancient totemic sandstone buttes of mammoth proportions not quite monumental enough for Hollywood.

  Hot and dusty on a Texas prairie staged in the Sierra Nevada, Hopper’s son of a vengeful cattleman tried to get the jump on the gun-handy hero played by Don Murray, who retaliated with a spectacular one-handed diving rifle shot. Rodd Redwing, a Chickasaw Indian who worked in the movies, taught Don to never shoot at the head—the cardboard wad blank could easily take out an eye.

  “Cut!” yelled Henry Hathaway, the last of the great hard-ass directors. “Don, you’re pointing the rifle at the woods!”

  “I was pointing at the body.”

  “Okay! Take two! Ahhrgh! Yeah, you were pointing at the woods!”

  As the sun beat down on Lone Pine, California, Hopper got ready to suffer Hathaway’s whip like Dean had under George Stevens, Giant’s immovable freight train of a director whom budding star Warren Beatty nicknamed the Super Chief.

  “I may be working in a factory,” Jimmy told the Super Chief, believing his mechanized approach to acting was killing him. “But I’m not a machine. Do you realize I’m doing emotional memories? That I’m working with my senses—my sight, hearing, smell—”

  POW!

  “Cut! Ahhrgh! Don! I told you you’re pointing at—”

  “No, Henry, I’m pointing at—”

  Hopper sauntered over, shot right between the eyes with a cardboard wad. Real blood trickled down his nose into his mouth. If only the bullets had been real, too.

  By the time Hopper moseyed onto his set, Hathaway had directed so many of these oaters and horse operas, he could practically direct this one while taking a shit in the outhouse. He knew the Western inside out, classic tales of good and evil, white man/redskin, simple as Cain and Abel. He’d directed Gary Cooper in The Virginian, for chrissakes. Coop never asked about motivations—“Well, why would my character do that?” But this runty son-of-a-bitch contract player from Warner Bros. was bunging up the works, asking all sorts of damn fool questions that didn’t belong in a Western.

  “Please don’t give me line readings,” insisted Hopper, pushing against Hathaway’s habit of feeding him every line—the way he wanted it.

  “I’m a Method actor,” said Hopper. “I work with my ears, my sight, my head, and my smell.”

  Hathaway finally snapped. He’d been around since the dawn of time, when dinosaurs roamed Hollywood. He was a young upstart assistant director on Ben-Hur. The 1925 one. They didn’t have goddamn sound, let alone worry about smell.

  Cutting off Hopper, he stopped production to see if anyone could understand the goddamn kid mumbling lines into the floorboards—Aaaaayeeeeuh, hey man, aahduuh—like some Jimmy Dean. Hathaway asked his entire cast and crew, “Can you understand Jimmy? Can you understand Jimmy?”

  Someone piped up and said he couldn’t understand a single goddamn word the kid said the entire picture.

  Hathaway turned to Hopper. “You hear that, Jimmy?”

  Hopper told Hathaway where he could stick his picture and walked off the set.

  Hathaway didn’t know what to make of it. Hopper ignored him, ignored direction, argued with him, swore at him, called him a fucking idiot.

  Dumbfounded, Hathaway turned to the crack shot hero of his picture.

  “I just don’t know what to do with this kid. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Don had. One of the things that drove him crazy about these Actors Studio types was how they’d smoke a cigarette, making the whole scene about the stupid cigarette.

  “I don’t know how to deal with him, Don.”

  So the good guy agreed to a man-to-man chat with the bad guy, perhaps not so bad, just a little confused.

  “You’re not looking at what a Western is,” Don told Hopper. “The classic Western is a morality tale. Things are pretty black and white. Having all these discussions about psychology?”

  Out here in the desert, Hopper told him all about Jimmy on the set of Giant, of all Jimmy had to go through to get into the character of Jett Rink.

  In Marfa, Jimmy would hang around the locals in his ten-gallon hat, learning rope tricks until he could throw a lasso as sure as a turn of the earth. All that effort—only to face off against the Super Chief, who sucked the last drop out of him like an oil derrick. The makeup artist sprinkled gray in Jimmy’s hair for the banquet scene, but those bags under his eyes? They weren’t acting.

  Jimmy still couldn’t get through to the Super Chief. He wanted to take a drink from his own flask for the scene, knowing his character was too proud to drink from the table of rich folks who looked down on him. The Super Chief wouldn’t let him. Only later, when Jimmy was dead, did the director concede that Dean knew Jett Rink better than he did.

  “Jimmy wanted to direct too, man,” said Hopper. “He wouldn’t take anything from the studios, wouldn’t let them rust his machinery. That’s why he was almost fired during Giant. He was his own man, man.”

  Don tried to break through—“Use what Kazan said, ‘Take a disadvantage and make it an advantage’”—employing a bit of the ol’ psychology by telling Hopper, “Henry, your director, is like your father, and you’re fighting with the father. Use your frustration in the movie. Make it work for you.”

  Heading back to set, Don hoped he’d done something good for the classic Western, maybe even taught the bad guy a trick or two. He thought Hopper had taken the lesson to heart because afterward Hopper reined himself in, became better behaved, and they were able to get through the shoot on time and within budget. Moseying back to civilization, Hopper awaited his fate from Warner Bros., which was being scribbled on a scrap of paper in the studio’s bowels by a number cruncher tallying up revenue from loaning him out for the year: $8,200 from Twentieth Century Fox, $6,000 from C. V. Whitney, and so on. The bottom line? “Dennis cost us $250.00 for the year,” wrote the number cruncher. Their lucky penny had come up short. Formal release papers followed, hurling Dennis Hopper into the outer darkness beyond the studio gates.

  “You’ve spoken of Dean’s description of an imaginary line, and it’s one of the most profound thoughts I’ve ever—”

  Speaking four decades later in an alternate universe, the dean emeritus of the Actors Studio welcomed his guest to the show. Tonight’s special episode of Inside the Actors Studio featured distinguished Studio alumnus Dennis Hopper, pushing sixty, with all of his hair shaved off for his latest role as the villain with the evil eye patch and leather codpiece in Waterworld, the postapocalyptic summer blockbuster.

  “You appeared in a picture called From Hell to Texas,” spoke the erudite James Lipton. “And here’s Henry Hathaway, directing you in an entirely different way. You were young and juicy and rebellious. What happened on that set?”

  “He gave me line readings,” said Hopper. “Told me when to pick up the cup, put down the cup, when to get on the horse, off the horse, when to hold the reins, when to put the reins down, when to take a drag off the cigarette, how to say my name, and where to sit on the set.”

  A collective
groan arose from an audience filled with aspiring Method actors to whom this prescribed paint-by-numbers style of direction was barbaric.

  “I walked off the picture three times. So anyway, finally, the last day of the film—”

  The audience could visualize it in their heads like sense memory, this tale of good versus evil . . .

  From Hell to Texas . . .

  Take Two!

  Sick and tired of the rebellious actor’s continuing defiance of his authoritarian direction, the villainous Hathaway escorted twenty-one-year-old Hopper into a room on Twentieth Century Fox’s lot filled with fresh canisters of film.

  “You know what these are? I have enough film in those cans to work for a month. We don’t have to go to lunch or dinner, or anything. We’re just going to sit here until you do this scene exactly as I tell you. We’ll send out for lunch, send out for dinner; we’re here. Sleeping bags will be brought in.”

  So went Hopper’s version of the showdown between the sadist director and the great actor (lasting three days).

  “You want to see Hathaway and Hopper freaking out?” said executives calling each other from the major studios. “Come on over.”

  Warner Bros. studio boss Jack Warner finally reached his contract player on the horn. “What the fuck is going on? Do what fucking Hathaway says and get back over here!”

  His entire studio career was on the line, and still Hopper would not do the scene the way Hathaway wanted it. Finally, on the eighty-sixth take, emotionally bankrupt after three hellish days, Hopper cracked. Exhausted, crying, broken as a kicked mule, he fixed himself up and, holding his nose, did the scene just as Hathaway wanted.

  When it was all over, the director pulled him aside and sneered.

  “Kid, there’s one thing I can promise you. You’ll never work in this town again.”

  Enraptured by this classic tale of the showdown with the bad guy, the Actors Studio audience sat in awe of the good guy—blackballed by the Hollywood studio system, forced to come to New York for his one shot at the notoriously competitive Actors Studio. Only three spots were available to a throng of fifteen thousand aspirants—not just amateurs, but seasoned professionals clamored to be accepted.

  How to distinguish himself? As the line went from John Ford’s classic about forging the Western myth: “Print the legend.”

  THE METHOD

  Los Angeles is a city without principles. Mine were falling. So I left. What I mean is, movies are an art, or can be, but out there they make shoestrings. There’s no time for creating except around a swimming pool. So I came here and began studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. I never studied before. It’s great working only from inspiration, but one day it’s not there. An actor has to learn his craft. I always wanted to come here, but with Warner’s I couldn’t. Out there you need permission to go to the bathroom.”

  Closing his remarks on a New York City talk show in 1959, a year freed from the studio’s shackles, twenty-two-year-old Hopper had full liberty to go downtown to the Village and drink up with the abstract expressionists who lurked at Cedar Tavern, a dark-paneled hive of tortured artists haunted by its own Dean: Jackson Pollock, killed in a car accident not long after Jimmy. Plastered and driven by existential guilt over a recent sale of a painting while his friends were still broke, one artist threw fifty-dollar bills into the air, screaming, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  Alas, money could ruin the purity of art. Hopper knew it too well with an offer from MGM dangling before him, threatening to destroy his image of himself as the suffering blackballed artist. Luring him away from the sanctuary of the hallowed Actors Studio, the bitch dog of Hollywood nipped at his heels. In need of some cash, Hopper slapped a bumper sticker on his Plymouth, THE ONLY ISM FOR ME IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, and hit the road for the shoestring factory.

  The Actors Studio had taught Hopper simple sense memory exercises that allowed one to experience sensations from the past while performing. Looking up from his crinkled newspaper, Strasberg would fire his Svengali gaze and instruct students to wipe the slate clean by shaking off all tensions. Then they were to ask: What was I wearing? What was I touching? Can I see anything?

  On the set of Key Witness, MGM’s low-budget thriller, Hopper played a switchblade killer, Cowboy, who wreaks havoc throughout East LA on his Harley-Davidson V-Twin Knucklehead. In addition to movie motorcycle lessons, he practiced his craft on a Vespa, racing Steve McQueen along the dirt firebreaks from Coldwater Canyon to the Pacific.

  “We had so many wrecks my Vespa looked like a crushed beer can with wheels,” bragged Hopper, acquiring the fashionable Italian scooter after getting his wheels taken away for too many speeding tickets.

  The techniques of the Method were at his fingertips for his big love scene with a clingy sex fiend, perky in her bullet bra under a tight turtleneck. Action! She ran her fingers through Cowboy’s hair. Cowboy reared back and smacked her. He’d just come back from a “bop,” a battle, and no sharp fancy nails were gonna get stuck in his slick hair when he was all shook up.

  In a flash, Cowboy split, screeching off in his Chrysler with the fins, going so fast out of his bad boy garage headquarters—“Muggles, open the door!”—the fat man who played the LAPD detective had to leap out of the way to keep from becoming roadkill.

  “You have to keep your touch, smell, taste, sight, and hearing really acute,” Hopper explained of his method. “Which makes you totally bananas.”

  The proof was on film. Hopper definitely swung, bossing around his kooky hophead henchmen, but he wasn’t anywhere near the mother of all Strasberg’s exercises. Having seen actor after actor taken off the Studio stage in a straitjacket once they suddenly hit their emotional memory, Hopper finally dug what Jimmy meant. It could destroy him. Crash and burn. The thing was so dangerous it took years to build up to, years cut short by scurrying back to Hollywood.

  Dragging himself out of bed at ten o’clock in the morning to dip into the stark tracts of Nietzsche poolside, Hopper took a final stab at keeping the pulse of Manhattan alive by trudging through modern absurdist plays in the California sun. He covered canvases in thick black oil paint, but it was no use, the sunlight kept shining in.

  “Man, I felt like a fly killing myself on a window,” said Hopper.

  His only escape was to submerge himself in LA’s underground art scene at the Ferus Gallery, harkening to ferus humanus, the wild man. Introduced to an underground art world of strangers like Wallace Berman, a shaggy Topanga Canyon mystic who kept an American flag decal on his back door—SUPPORT THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION—Hopper’s worlds converged.

  Landing his first leading role in Night Tide, a no-name, microbudget horror film directed by occult enthusiast Curtis Harrington and shot for $50,000 cash on the fringes of weird LA, Hopper played a sailor who falls for a sideshow mermaid on their first date in her nautical-themed apartment atop the Santa Monica Pier carousel. After a hearty mackerel breakfast under draped nets and hanging starfish, it should’ve been smooth sailing had it not been for Marjorie Cameron.

  With her flaming red hair and sorceress looks, Hopper was convinced that Marjorie was an out-and-out witch. The Ferus artist was notorious for her drawing of a wicked beast humping a woman with a forked tongue. She once attempted to embody the Whore of Babylon in a magick ritual to summon up some sick Frankenstein aberration called a homunculus moonchild. Then one day, just like that, Marjorie’s rocket scientist husband, Jack Parsons, blew up in their garage. This was all in real life.

  In Night Tide, no less weird, Marjorie played a siren who lures Hopper’s love into the depths of the ocean. Letting out a moan as he rocked in his flippers in a rowboat, Hopper tried to comfort himself over the loss of his mermaid.

  Hopper had longed to sink his jowls into some real theater, ever since he’d been slated for The Diary of Anne Frank, which Warner Bros. refused to let him do because the timing interfered with publicity shots for Giant. Now he would have his Broadway debut as Hammond Maxwell. />
  All artistry was dammed upon entering the gothic gates of Falconhurst, an antebellum plantation dripping with magnolias and fortified by the pure stock of the ruddy Mandingo tribe. The gimp-legged son of a rheumy slave breeder, Hammond had no idea his blushing bride was really a New Orleans bed wench. At the Lyceum Theater, Hopper as Hammond scorned his wife, whose formidable talents in the bedchamber belied her repeated claims of virginity. Plum crazy and drunk on corn liquor, Blanche relinquished her taffeta, pulled the bullwhip from the drawer and deftly beat the baby out of Hammond’s pregnant slave lover.

  Vogue cover girl Brooke Hayward played the wicked whiptrix, and Hopper would never forget the time her whip accidentally caught the leg of the actress playing the slave, flaying her ankle. On the third day of rehearsal, he told Brooke he’d marry her. Mandingo tanked, but Hopper scored a hit.

  The couple married in a small ceremony in New York in August 1961, a scattering of the bride’s family in attendance to welcome Hopper into their Hollywood dynasty. Brooke’s super-agent/producer father, Leland Hayward, hated the freaky homunculus. Joining the celebration was Brooke’s childhood friend Jane, practically her sister with the Haywards and Fondas intertwined in business, marriage, and tragedy.

  Jane Fonda invited the newlyweds back to her apartment for an impromptu reception attended by her younger brother, Peter, who tried to figure out the guy who had just married into the family saga. Hearing Hopper’s story about someone back on the farm in Kansas who used to cut the heads off chickens, Peter thought he painted a very graphic picture of life in rural America. Why Hopper was going on about bloody chickens running about spurting blood just after his wedding, Peter couldn’t fathom, but the chickens would be brought up on more than one occasion.

  Peter was intrigued. He could see some incredible excitement in Hopper’s aura.