by Tom Folsom
THE MAD PAD
The great Bel Air fire of ’61 roared up the canyon like a tsunami of flame, destroying the Hoppers’ new home as well as six hundred poems (fifteen thousand, as Hopper’s telling progressed) and three hundred paintings he’d created over the years. He tried to start painting again but just couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he hammered his paintbrush onto the canvas and threw it into a corner.
Dark times awaited him at super-producer David O. Selznick’s two-story Spanish colonial residence, shady enough for the reclusive Garbo to feel comfortable when hiding out there in the twenties. In the study hung the oil painting prop of Selznick International Pictures’ Portrait of Jennie, starring the fiery beauty Jennifer Jones. David O.’s wife and leading lady was waiting in vain for another interesting project to come her way.
“That’s not good enough,” David O. would tell Jennifer as scripts arrived at the door. “You haven’t worked for a while so when you do again, you’re gonna have to make a big entrance.”
Every night he dictated memos into the wee hours. The Kent cigarette never left his mouth. After every inhalation on its Micronite filter, he spouted to his secretaries scribbling shorthand, going through two or three girls in a night, dictating, dictating, dictating.
Hoping for another Gone with the Wind, which he had produced in his glory days, Selznick tried to make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Through heavy horn-rimmed glasses, he saw Jane Fonda clear as day as the Roaring Twenties starlet sucked into the world of the impossibly glamorous Divers, to be played by Jason Robards and, of course, Jennifer, who finally would make her grand entrance. Selznick had no idea that the studio moles would destroy his vision, making it unwatchable, grotesque.
From the privileged view in the Selznick guest house, where the Hoppers were invited to stay until they could get back on their feet, Dennis witnessed the final throes of an old Hollywood giant whose tragic flaw was caring too much about the movies—a bottomless pit for his obsessive micromanaging.
Embracing a kindred spirit with open arms, David O. dictated: “Keep truckin’ it, Dennis.”
“Oh, Bob, look at that!” said Hopper, glimpsing a knockout. “Oh wow, back up, back up!”
On the last bit of Route 66, Hopper snapped a photo of a Standard Oil station’s twin signs. He called the resulting work Double Standard.
Dennis was hardly ever without his Nikon camera dangling around his neck, his twenty-fifth birthday present from Brooke. He rode shotgun down a ribbon of highway. At the wheel was the son of Jennifer Jones and actor Robert Walker, cinema’s most infamous traveling companion—the bad guy in Strangers on a Train. Just getting his start on the hit television show Route 66, Bobby Walker Jr., who had the same wicked smile as his dad, drove Hopper around to ogle the fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboards along Sunset Strip, a roadside gallery featuring the world’s largest collection of these hand-painted signs. Perfectly rendering portraits of the stars, the billboard painters of Los Angeles were the best in the trade, making cans of Spam look glamorous.
Right around the corner was Barney’s Beanery, packed with a group of hot-rod-loving California artists inspired by the futuristic emptiness of LA. Becoming a regular, Hopper drank with fellow Dodge City refugee Billy Al Bengston, who created motorcycle-inspired paintings, and artist Larry Bell, who fashioned chrome-edged glass cubes—sleek beauties befitting their world of freeways. Larry liked Hopper, a funny guy, not full of himself like most of Hollywood. Bell didn’t think anyone in the LA art scene took Hopper’s work very seriously, but Hopper kept at it, making bizarre sculptures, one incorporating a religious candle stand and Chiclets.
“You should really concentrate on your painting,” encouraged Paul Newman, showing up to Dennis’s first gallery opening in 1963.
Dapper art dealer Irving Blum was rather floored by Hopper’s sixth sense about painting. Not that Blum ever offered to show Hopper’s work at Ferus, which he was dragging out of the amphibian stages and into the limelight, but somehow Hopper always seemed to be ahead of the curve, finding by chance a style or movement before it really had a name.
Whaam!
“That’s it,” screamed Hopper, jumping up and down before the work of a New York City artist, Roy Lichtenstein, who saw comic strips as actual art. “That’s the return to reality!”
Hopper also loved those Campbell’s Soup cans by a slight white-haired commercial illustrator dying to break out as a real artist. Andy Warhol lived in New York but wanted to exhibit his work in Los Angeles, given the glamorous fantasy that Blum had whipped up for him of a gallery filled with movie stars. This was a complete lie, the only movie star who ever came to Ferus being Hopper.
“Let’s do it,” said Andy.
Hung on the gallery walls, in thirty-two different creamy and chunky varieties, Warhol’s soup can paintings heralded a new kind of ism, plastered in Hopper’s childhood memory from those bold labels of Bar-B-Q Prunes and Tendersweet Sweet Corn, a wallpaper of fruit and vegetables at his father’s grocery. This “commonism,” as pop was initially called, was a revolution for Hopper. There would be no more slogging through that tortured mode of the abstract expressionists that went hand in hand with the Method. Why not be electric—bubbly, fizzy like soda pop, or those terrific Spam billboards? Hopper bought one of Warhol’s first tomato soup can paintings for around $100. However, after selling his friend the painting, shrewd gallerist Blum decided to keep all thirty-two varieties together as a group. Hopper never got to taste his tomato soup.
Soon enough, Dennis would meet Andy in New York. Starring as a patricidal killer in “The Weeping Baboon” episode of The Defenders, a CBS courtroom drama, Dennis read the Declaration of Independence from the witness stand. Andy hadn’t met many movie stars and, visiting the set at Filmways Studios in East Harlem, was starstruck, remembering Dennis as Billy the Kid in Sugarfoot.
“So crazy in the eyes,” said Andy. “Billy the Maniac.”
Dennis finally had a true fan, a pop genius who could appreciate his range—from Fritz in NBC’s Swiss Family Robinson to a Nazi in The Twilight Zone.
Andy hadn’t been able to make it to LA for his Campbell’s Soup cans show, but Hopper promised if he came out for his upcoming Liz-Elvis one, he’d throw him a real movie-star party.
To prepare for Andy’s arrival, Hopper drove to the Foster and Kleiser billboard company and bought a giant hamburger and a giant can of Spam to wallpaper his new Spanish stucco home in North Crescent Heights. He slapped a gigantic toothpaste-white smile over the sink. By the toilet, a man fed his maniacally happy wife a hot dog. The bathroom decorated, much to Brooke’s dismay, Hopper went to work on the rest of his mad pad, a pop art wonderland with his own fake saguaro cactus, a giant rubber Coca-Cola bottle, a carousel horse, pipe organ, mirror ball, and gumball machine.
After a three-thousand-mile road trip in a Ford Falcon station wagon, listening to hits like Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” Andy rolled up with his entourage. He was simply amazed at the people dancing to those songs he’d heard on the car radio. There were all these sons of movie stars, Bobby Walker and Peter Fonda, who Andy thought looked like a “preppy mathematician.” Andy went gaga over Troy Donahue and Russ Tamblyn from Peyton Place. He even heard a twisted bit of gossip about Hopper’s sexual kinks. Andy loved scuttlebutt.
“This party was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me,” remembered Andy.
Cruising the LA freeways, Andy stared up at giant Liz Taylor. Cleopatra loomed over the Strip.
Driving past the suburb of Tarzana, Andy was inspired to shoot a short film: Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort of. Rather than deal with the likes of David O. Selznick, so boring, he did it on the fly. Whipping out his Bolex at producer John Houseman’s swimming pool, Andy directed Hopper to shimmy up a palm tree in a leopard-print towel and get a coconut.
No Method needed, just pound the chest, swing around as he once had back on the egg ranch.
It was all so tot
ally fabulous for Andy. Overwhelmed at the black-tie opening of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena art museum, Andy puked on too much pink champagne. The dizzying possibility of art lay everywhere.
Running amok in his black tie with his Nikon, Hopper spotted a hand-painted sign with a finger pointing toward the entrance of the historic Hotel Green, where the gala was being held. Freeing the sign with a screwdriver in an act of artistic liberation, Hopper presented it to the godfather of pop, Duchamp, who allowed himself to produce in his lifetime no more than twenty “readymades.” On this rare occasion, Duchamp signed.
Miraculously transformed into art, Hotel Green hung at Hopper’s home, christened by Vogue as “the Prado of Pop.” The Duchamp/Hopper collaboration was in good company with Andy’s Double Mona Lisa, Ed Kienholz’s sculpture of a mannequin’s head picking her nose atop a roller skate, and Lichtenstein’s Mad Scientist paid for by Brooke’s $65-a-week unemployment checks.
“You’re married to a wealthy woman,” Hopper’s agent told him. “You’re squandering her money. Look at this. You’re making a fool of yourself. Get rid of these things or I’m leaving.”
Out went the agent, to whom all this seemed like a pile of worthless junk. In came pop artist James Rosenquist, whose woman with red-lacquered fingernails hung on the wall courtesy of the Hayward fortune. Rosenquist could tell Brooke was a little weary of her husband, who’d turned their home into a must-stop welcoming station on the pop circuit with parties all the time and people wandering in at odd hours.
A creepy fourteen-foot Mexican papier-mâché clown floated on the ceiling, looking down on the hungry children—the Hoppers’ two-year-old daughter, Marin, and Brooke’s two children from her previous marriage.
“I’m going out. I’m leaving,” said Hopper. “We gotta go get some food for the kids.”
At the supermarket, Rosenquist saw Rock Hudson at the meat counter, staring at his fellow slabs of beef. Returning to his pop palace, Hopper cooked dinner in the kitchen with collages of vintage soup can labels plastered on the cupboards. Brooke popped in and started being really nasty to Dennis.
“I wanna go out and score some grass,” said Hopper.
He took Rosenquist on a sub rosa Hollywood house tour. The whole neighborhood kept their doors open. Creeping into one darkened house, they saw people sleeping all over the floor.
“Whatever you do,” whispered Hopper, “don’t say anything. Be quiet.”
Stepping over bodies, Rosenquist saw, at the end of a long passage, John Barrymore’s son holding a baby. They got some grass and tippy-toed out.
MALIBU COLONY
Bred despite the wild sterility of Dodge City, he is now morassed in a creativeness that is almost as hopelessly complete as that which spread and drowned the great Cocteau,” Terry Southern wrote for Vogue’s profile, “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers.” “The Den Hoppers are tops in their field. Precisely what their field is, is by no means certain—except that she is a Great Beauty, and he a kind of Mad Person.”
Terry was the consummate hipster on the scene, the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of the seriously groovy Dr. Strangelove and the author of Candy, the banned sex romp based on Voltaire’s native, optimistic hero. Still, he couldn’t keep up with peripatetic Hopper, whose Nikon was a barometer for what was happening.
Amid the chaos at Allen Ginsberg’s East Village pad, a naked beauty flung a potpourri of rose petals and dog hair into an electric fan blowing up from the floor as Buñuel’s surrealist film L’Age d’Or was projected in reverse.
“It was all pretty weird, now that I think about it,” wrote Terry. “Hopper—who even then was probably one of the most talented actors alive—became quite excited by the spectacle and eager to take part, gliding around in a Marcel Marceau manner, grimacing oddly, and, at the same time, attempting to take photographs with a 35-millimeter Nikon.”
Not long after, in March 1965, Terry warned his friend against going on a “madcap jaunt” to march from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King. Brando had sparked Hopper’s sudden interest in civil rights, having called everyone in Hollywood, rallying them to the cause. Hopper took off.
“Hopper, take care!” warned Terry. “You are spreading yourself thin—in this case, perhaps down to the proverbial mincemeat!”
In Alabama, an onlooker pissed on Dennis, who was marching between Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. “White trash!” the guy yelled. “Hippie, commie, longhair!”
“Wow,” said Hopper. “I mean, I don’t care if he has short hair!”
The Confederate flag flew proudly atop Old Glory at the state house in Montgomery. Hopper photographed MLK asking the gathered, “How long?” Hopper was then off to document the rock-and-roll scene for Vogue. An American carnival passed before his lens. James Brown grinned at the girls smiling next to the James Brown Productions jet. In a Russian Cossack hat, David Crosby perched with the Byrds outside the LA County Museum. Dennis shot Jefferson Airplane and even touched down in swinging London to shoot Brian Jones holding a sitar.
The Rolling Stone handed over his mirrored octagonal shades to give to Peter Fonda.
Nicknamed “the Tourist” for always showing up with a camera around his neck, Hopper captured his own kind: the Hollywood hip. Within the gates of exclusive Malibu Colony, his clique drifted in and out to the sounds of Peter, in a white floppy beach hat, strumming his twelve-string acoustic guitar. A huntress in a flower-print bikini, his sister, Jane, pulled back the string of her archery bow. The tension quivered down her toes into the soft sands of Malibu.
Hitting the bull’s-eye, Hopper captured Janey’s perfect ass in black-and-white. Except for Hopper, life was placid here.
“You gotta come, Fonda,” Hopper demanded. “You gotta see this!”
Hooked into the scene at the Pasadena art museum, Dennis took Fonda to foreign film screenings that couldn’t be seen anywhere else in Hollywood. Along with the Buñuel/Dalí collaboration, Un Chien Andalou, Peter was particularly taken by a 16mm print of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. He’d seen Citizen Kane, but Dennis introduced him to Welles’s ill-fated follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, a cautionary tale with Welles losing control of his film, chopped up in editing by studio moles who slapped on a happy ending.
If ever given a chance to make a movie, Hopper would have to figure out how to steer it through this land of the Philistines. Of course it was a fantasy in ’65, when no major studio would’ve considered handing over the money for a Dennis Hopper film. It was more like a joke, but not for Hopper.
Binging on European art films and reborn to the possibilities of moviemaking, twenty-nine-year-old Hopper lacked the needed millions to mount his own production. But with the world as his set, he snapped his Nikon as the waves soothed Malibu and the sun set on its languid shores. Then he drove his Corvair convertible through a wall of fire to shoot the riots raging in Watts, another spectacular scene for his increasingly strange and ever-expanding montage.
DURANGO
Somewhere high in the Sierra Madre, 6,800 feet above sea level in the craggy state of Durango, Mexico, the bad guy with six-guns awaited a five-car train with an antique Stephenson steam engine built in 1892.
Overnight the dusty village of Chupaderos, pop. 300, had transformed into the frontier town of Clearwater, Texas, circa 1889. On this Wild West set, complete with a saloon, a gun shop with a rifle plastered on its side, and the American flag hoisted high above the town square, the real villagers, working as extras, gathered to greet the sons of Katie Elder, blood brothers riding in for revenge.
The voice on the megaphone bellowed through the once-peaceful streets. “Tighten up! You’re spread out like a widow woman’s shit!”
Hardly mellowed after his recent colon cancer surgery, Hopper’s old foe Hathaway chomped a cigar as he prepared to direct Big Duke—John Wayne—in the Marlboro Man’s 165th picture. The Sons of Katie Elder was Wayne’s first since licking the big C himself, leaving him saddled with half a
lung and an oxygen tank. Manacled to his brother at the ankle, Big Duke as the eldest Elder was to jump off a bridge into the freezing waters of the Rio Chico.
“You can’t use a double for that scene,” ordered Hathaway. “Do it yourself.”
Off the set, Big Duke warded off his oncoming pneumonia with a couple of vitamin C tablets courtesy of his third wife, Pilar, a former Peruvian actress thirty years his junior. He was ready to shoot it out in his climactic scene against Dennis, playing the twitchy son of a murderous gunsmith.
“Duke and I decided you should go back to work,” Hathaway told Hopper back when he cast him, seeing as how he and Brooke, a Hayward, had a little girl to look out for now. Hathaway laid out the rules: “No trouble from you, kid. This is a Big Duke picture, and Big Duke don’t understand that Method shit.”
Big Duke kept an eye out, ready to relieve his itchy trigger finger if what they said about the kid was true. Word around the saloon was he was a subversive, trying to sneak psychology into the classic Western.
All eyes watched Hathaway deliver line readings to Dennis before he rolled camera. Rather than another three-day showdown in the middle of nowhere, where he might easily be chopped up and fed to the rattlesnakes, Hopper mimicked his director exactly, just as Hathaway wanted.
“That was beautiful, kid,” said Hathaway. “That was beautiful.”
“You see, Henry, I’m a much better actor now than I was eight years ago.”
“You’re not a better actor. You’re just smarter.”
It was steaks all around, flown in from the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas courtesy of Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin, cast as one of the blood brothers, stuck out here in the woods without any broads. Hathaway cooked the meat himself over an open fire under a cathedral of ahuehuete trees. By the flickering light, Hopper considered the movies—they had such a strong effect on those making them, but especially on those on the other side of the screen. The movies sent audiences into tailspins, making his mother wish she was married to Errol Flynn instead of a grocer.