Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  “You can’t win this battle with Universal on the editing of the movie,” said Gruskoff. He gave it to Hopper straight—if he’d rein his vision back just a little, he could become one of the elite directors in the world. The thing was, Gruskoff realized, Dennis was an artist. Still, it seemed too bad.

  Danny Selznick felt terrible. He had great affection for Hopper. They had recently discovered they were born less than twenty-four hours apart. Hopper in Kansas, Danny in Hollywood. Two guys on the Universal lot, worlds apart. Each a bullheaded Taurus. He thought the future was wide open for Dennis. He wanted him to keep making movies.

  Selznick Memo to Self:

  What about a freeze-frame on

  the dead stuntman in the end?

  Then again, even if Dennis recut the film, there was something about the public building people up after a great success like Easy Rider, then gleefully tearing them down. Critics were itching to attack Hopper, a terrific target given his totally over-the-top persona. Danny hated the thought of Hopper ending up like his father, David O., who by the end of his life was unable to get anyone to finance a picture.

  “Are there going to be any changes?” asked Danny when it came to the final decision.

  “No,” said Hopper.

  Hopper said the same thing when summoned back to the Black Tower to be judged by Lew Wasserman. Hopper eyeballed that prop cane billed as George Washington’s. His brother David had suggested he try to steal it. Hopper was just about to leave when—

  “By the way, Mr. Wasserman, how do you know that’s really George Washington’s cane? Could you explain that to me before I walk out of here?”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  The Last Movie was sentenced to a death as primitive as the villagers killing the stuntman, perhaps more savage. Hopper referred to it until the end of his days as “assassination time.” Hopper had to recruit Bert Schneider for Columbia’s help with the release since Universal basically bailed. On September 29, 1971, the film set an opening day record at RKO’s Fifty-Ninth Street Twin Theatre in Manhattan. Then the critics attacked. “One would have to be playing Judas to the public to advise anyone to go see The Last Movie,” wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, railing against it just as she railed against 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Graduate. The public forewarned, The Last Movie made only $5,000 in its fourth and final week at the Twin, then vanished into obscurity in the Universal vaults. Hopper’s suffering only strengthened his belief in his film.

  “Well, the movie’s in their hands now,” said Hopper. “And their hands are full of blood. Corporate blood.”

  Despite his lashings, Hopper lived to tell his story at the restaurant in the Chelsea Hotel, El Quijote, decorated with thousands of Don Quixote statuettes. Hopper wore a dark-brown cowboy hat over a red bandana headband. A small cross hung around his neck. He didn’t have enough money to pay his hotel bill. He slipped out in a taxi while his old Digger friend, Emmett Grogan—for whom he’d drop-kicked a man during the Summer of Love—repaid him by blocking the desk clerk waving the bill.

  “Mr. Hopper! Oh, Mr. Hopper!”

  Hopper was off to play a train robber in Kid Blue, a comic Western shot in Durango, Mexico, where Big Duke had planted roots. Who knew? Maybe there’d even be hope for a resurrection of The Last Movie. For at the end lay the beginning.

  THE GHOST

  One night at the Mud Palace, Dennis heard something moving upstairs. He had heard these rustlings before, but this time, it was distinctly coming from the second floor bedroom at the end of the hall. Ever since Dennis had moved in, the room was always freezing, cold even in the summer and strangely impossible to heat. It was where Mabel Dodge Luhan, the doyenne of the Southwest, dead some ten years, had once slept.

  In the 1920s, Mabel had written to D. H. Lawrence, who was living in Europe, engaged in his “savage pilgrimage” wanderings around the Continent. She pleaded with him to move to Taos. While not an artist herself, she prided herself on having an intimate understanding of the artistic temperament, especially that of the male artist, and his huge capacity for love, suffering, and lust. When D. H. came to live with her, she learned how quickly he could spin off into violent rages. After intercourse with his wife, he often beat her, furious at himself for succumbing to the baser weakness of sinking his “pecker” into her fatty flesh. D. H. might be a barking mad coyote, chained in her courtyard, but Mabel forgave him, for he was her genius.

  Mabel had imported the writer to Taos for a purpose. She wanted him to write the Great American Novel about Taos. At times she was a very demanding art patron.

  “You need something new and different,” Mabel had told her treasured houseguest. “You need a new mother!”

  Her ghost chased Hopper around the Mud Palace. Packing up, he moved out of the Mud Palace and into another adobe building on the compound, across the courtyard, known as the Tony House. Mabel had built the Tony House for her Tiwa Indian husband, Tony Luhan, stoic with his long braids and chiseled monument face. Hopper would get to play cowboys and Indians again as he had as a boy in Dodge, except now he had a .38 to fire up into the vigas.

  “You might hurt somebody,” warned his friend Dean Stockwell.

  Attracted by Taos’s primordial power, Hopper’s friend had been coming here ever since he’d played the lead in the film version of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. On set in England, he’d read D. H.’s writings about the Indian dances in this mystical place called Taos, which he’d never heard of before. When Dean got back, he “got a car, got a broad,” and took off. Taos was truly an enchanted spot.

  Dean was one of the few who could deal with Dennis, a super-energized being who started talking and wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. And when you mixed that with cocaine and alcohol?

  “Oh, Jesus!” said Dean, who just got stoned, but Hopper got stoned and energized—going from one idea to another, just—“Ahblahblabibblielbialagh!”

  Dean wasn’t scared of the man in any real sense. He fervently believed that Hopper would never actually shoot anybody. Hopper just loved his own outrageousness, digging the way he was. It was just the vibe he was affecting. Wasn’t it?

  One crazy night at the Mud Palace, Hopper fired two shots at the Warhol silk screen of Mao hanging in the kitchen—blue face, green blubbery lips. Pow!

  Around the same time, Hopper’s art dealer friend who owned the Ferus Gallery, Irving Blum, came to Taos to visit and found Hopper in the midst of a bunch of bikers and odd types hanging around. Hopper was so spaced out, Blum thought he was a goner for sure.

  The Taos artists mostly got the feeling Hopper wasn’t doing much of anything in terms of making art anymore. He wasn’t doing much of anything except going totally nuts, stoned all the time with guns everywhere, like he was expecting the CIA to storm him. Friends felt he was amped up on the paranoia that comes with doing way too much blow.

  One time, Hopper and his roughhousing pals were shooting guns and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Hopper’s young daughter with Brooke, Marin, was visiting. She called a friend of the family, who then called artist Larry Bell, who’d moved to Taos to get some peace.

  “Can you get her out of there?”

  Larry picked up Marin at the end of the long driveway at the Mud Palace. She was terrified. She was just a little kid. Larry figured Dennis didn’t even realize she was gone.

  From the perspective of Hollywood, Hopper had gone totally off-the-grid nuts.

  From the perspective of New Buffalo and the Taos commune scene, Hopper was living the sixties dream large with lots of money, a very selfish existence. For one, they were hoping he’d set up a needed community medical clinic. He wasn’t creating crash pads for people like they thought he should with all that dough. He was just having a good time. Still, it was a bit of a thrill for everyone whenever Hopper showed up to New Buffalo. Some girl would usually give him a blow job.

  One night the Eagles were staying at New Buffalo after a gig in Albuquerque. Dennis came over stra
pped with a pistol and in the middle of an argument with a Chicano, pulled it out and aimed it at the guy’s head. The party went on, but a commune girl grabbed a knife from the kitchen and went after Hopper for some wrong he’d done to her. Another time someone held up a watermelon against Hopper in self-defense. Hopper stuck his knife right in.

  It was all part of the Dennis Hopper psychodrama cowboy act, figured New Buffalo. The bad karma justified their decision to not let him film Easy Rider there. A couple of the commune guys really dug the movie, but others thought it was pure counterpropaganda. Hopper didn’t live on a commune. He had rich friends and an indulgent life, so how could he be qualified to show what living was really like on a hardscrabble dirt farm with no money and workin’ hard, tryin’ to live his life? (Even if a handful of these dirt farmers were rich kids, too.) Bore about as much relevance to the truth as any Hollywood movie.

  The founder of New Buffalo, Rick Klein had taken to hanging out with Hopper ever since his band, the Oriental Blue Streaks, had moved into the Mud Palace. Hopper would come over to have dinner from the Tony House, where he was sequestered with his guns and coke.

  “This friend of mine is makin’ this movie and needs a soundtrack and I thought of you guys,” said Dennis. “He’s gonna fly you out to Hollywood. You’ll see the movie and see what you think.”

  “Oh man, we can really be creative!”

  The Blue Streaks imagined they were going to be doing something along the lines of Easy Rider. Only they didn’t quite realize that after The Last Movie, Hopper was totally persona non grata in Hollywood. The band worked on something for the movie Hopper set them up with, The Young Nurses, a real B-grade one with the most memorable scene being when the nurses tie a helium-filled balloon to a guy’s dick. All the Streaks could come up with was “Bedpan Blues.”

  Drinking at a bar on the Taos plaza, Hopper and Rick hung out for hours and talked about old times. A few years at the beginning of the love movement were truly magic. People were just feelin’ it. You would be walking along the street and if your vibes were right, you could walk up to a girl . . .

  “You’re so beautiful. I’d really like to make love to you.”

  “Sure, brother. I’d like to make love to you, too.”

  “We were going to hold hands, take LSD, find God—and what happened?” asked Hopper. “We ended up at the drug dealer’s door, carrying guns, and in total madness.”

  When cocaine came in, a lot of the kinder souls began to see the destruction of the sixties.

  “You come into the bathroom with me and you come into the bathroom with me, but fuck these other people.”

  That was the vibe. It started getting selfish because of all the money that was involved.

  “The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me,” Hopper would brag. “There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.”

  Hopper disappeared into the bathroom at the bar and didn’t come out for hours. He’d been getting pretty reclusive ever since moving to the Tony House. Rick figured the fallout was bound to happen—you’re takin’ a lot of cocaine, you gotta drink to come down. Pretty much leads to madness.

  TRAIN TO THE STARS

  A pariah to all, Hopper took the train to nowhere. And it was dingy, for nevermore would the fiery Warbonnet red and yellow Train to the Stars from his boyhood streak across the West. This was thanks to the honchos at the Santa Fe Railroad who refused to relinquish the name of the Super Chief to Amtrak. Apparently they found its service lacking and unbefitting a storied legacy that once featured those luxurious sleepers christened “Taos,” adorned with Navajo rugs.

  It was 1976. Hopper was stuck riding the rails back and forth for a month with a camera crew in his face for the independent film Tracks, shot almost entirely on Amtrak. Filmy with sweat, playing a soldier coming home from Vietnam, a greenish Hopper lapped his tongue into the mouth of the pretty girl playing a preppy college coed. He loved, but he hated to love.

  The role wasn’t much of a stretch for Hopper, who’d just lost his third wife, Daria Halprin. He’d met the beautiful, earthy star of the cult film Zabriskie Point during a screening of Easy Rider at the first Belgrade International Film Festival—gathering under the slogan of “A Brave New World.”

  Portrait with Daria Halprin, shot by Robert Altman, San Francisco, 1972

  Getty Images

  They married in a hillside ceremony overlooking San Francisco Bay. Beginning the processional was a synthesizer medley of ram’s horn and flute. The blast of a Yemenite trumpet brought Daria, dressed in a Spanish fiesta skirt and traditional purple velvet Navajo blouse festooned with a hundred silver buttons. Holding her hand high in the seaside air, her landscape architect father led the bride down curving steps to the canopy, presenting her to Hopper, togged out in a claret velvet shirt. Everyone sat on rustic benches. Crushing the traditional wineglass underfoot, Hopper danced the hora to a conga and electric guitar arrangement of “Hava Nagila.”

  Daria gave him a child, Ruthanna, then divorced him.

  Looking out the train window while the cameras rolled on Tracks, Hopper listened to Dean Stockwell, his traveling companion sitting beside him, also starring in the film. The two Hollywood runaways, Dennis and Dean, swapped childhood stories.

  When Dean was a child actor, squeezed between Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the sailor musical, Anchors Aweigh, Errol Flynn had given him a set of pilot’s wings with three interlocking Fs. Turning it over revealed a big cock and balls. Flynn told the boy it stood for “Flynn’s Flying Fuckers.”

  Tracks director Henry Jaglom gave his actors the space to improvise—slip into the record groove of themselves for their characters.

  Hopper as the soldier spun a riff of autobiographical dialogue about wanting to go where the trains went because he was poor and he couldn’t go anywhere. So the railroad tracks led him into the service.

  Hopper walked up the aisle of the Tracks train to another car. Waiting for him was a woman playing a freak who rode the rails just for kicks. She got off on how Hopper’s soldier told her he’d lie on the kitchen floor, pretending to do his homework. Just so he could peer up Mommy’s dress.

  The director had known Hopper since Easy Rider. Jaglom had helped on the edits, though he believed it was Hopper’s film in every sense, reflecting his spirit, feelings, and essence. Pure Hopper. So was The Last Movie. Jaglom had gone down to the Andes to play a role but, being a little guy, was dwarfed by the burly six-four actors hanging around in cowboy hats. They all thought Jaglom was a sissy for not plunging in and consuming the juggernaut quantities of the local brew while snorting mountainous quantities of coke and then going riding on shaggy horses.

  All Jaglom had wanted was a Bufferin. An aspirin. He was having trouble breathing at the high altitude, but he couldn’t even procure a goddamn Bufferin. Those big, tanned llama hunks all thought it was a big joke. Peru had been a total madhouse, like the lunatics taking over the asylum. After several days, Jaglom got too sick to stay, but not before he put the finishing touches on his letter to the Screen Actors Guild about the filthy llama-sty dressing room conditions.

  “Sure, send it in,” said Hopper.

  Yes, Jaglom knew exactly what kind of madman he was dealing with. Before they filmed Tracks, Jaglom was eating with Hopper and his girlfriend at a restaurant. Hopper casually offered her to him, like a bite of steak, and when Jaglom politely turned down the offer, Hopper threw him to the ground and lifted a Heinz bottle over his head to smash his face. The sweetest man in the world one minute, the most violent and out of control the next.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell whether this line existed, if Hopper was putting on an act or really out of his mind, trying to kill him with a ketchup bottle. They laughed it off.

  Jaglom scheduled all of Hopper’s scenes early for Tracks, knowing if he shot Hopper before noon, he’d be great. But come one o’clock, given the enormous amounts of alcohol and whatever else Ho
pper was consuming daily, it was impossible to get a performance out of him. The only quality Jaglom could use him for in the afternoon was raw anger.

  It was getting late one day as Hopper, in his army dress greens with “US” embroidered on the collar and colorful decorations on his chest, stood before the open grave of the dead soldier his character had brought home in a casket in the train’s luggage car. Standing over the grave, Hopper was supposed to recite this wonderfully shaded speech that Jaglom had written about America losing its innocence.

  “Action.”

  Hopper tore up the speech, threw it down into the pit of the earth, and started shouting furiously.

  “You motherfuckers, you motherfuckers, you wanna go to Nam? You wanna go to Nam? You motherfuckers? You motherfuckers? You wanna go to Nam?”

  Jumping down into the grave, he tore open the coffin with his bare hands and unzipped the body bag stuffed with ammunition and machine guns, all of which his character was going to use to bring Nam to small-town America.

  “Great. Cut.”

  Crouched in full gear like an abused animal, helmet on and rifle ready, Hopper was not ready to jump out of the movie. Instead, he turned his back on Jaglom and the crew and began walking off the set. He seemed wounded and angry.

  “Dennis? What are you doing?”

  “You don’t need me anymore. You don’t care about me anymore. Movie’s over.”

  DESIRE

  Bring me Coors, turn the heater on, and put some more water on that radiator,” Hopper yelled downstairs through a hole in the floor beside his sprawling bed at the Tony House. He called it the intercom.

  Desiree did as she was told. With no daughter of his own around, even though he had two of them, Hopper practically adopted her. He’d met Desiree at a Kris Kristofferson concert when she was twelve. Hopper was larger than life, and she was mesmerized. Even though Desiree was a kid, people said she was an old soul. She felt she knew Hopper from somewhere, like she felt she knew James Dean. She carried around Dean fan books in her backpack at school.