Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Taking the train to Albuquerque from Los Angeles (where she lived with her mother, who had worked on some Elvis movies) and then hitching a ride to Taos, she started spending summers at the Tony House, sleeping in a heap of blankets downstairs by the kiva fireplace. Her favorite thing was when Dennis, sort of like her weird uncle, taught her about art. On the days when the art that Dennis had bought arrived in trucks, he would order Desiree to unwrap it, like huge brown-paper Christmas presents. Then he told her to figure out what the art meant. Desiree thought that Bruce Conner’s assemblage piece hanging by the bathroom looked like junk—cigarette butts, an ashtray, a bottle cap, all stuck with nails in this box.

  One day the IRS came and took Hopper’s entire collection away.

  Desiree knew when to make herself scarce. Like when these girls came over in their squaw skirts, wearing no underwear. Desiree remembered everything. People would tell her, “You are always the one in the corner just observing everyone and watching, like you’re filming it in your head.” She knew not to go where she wasn’t supposed to.

  Hopper freaked out after she found his guns in the closet, but somehow the Monster Room, which even Hopper didn’t go into, kept on calling her name. One day Desiree psyched herself up, told herself, “I’m gonna go in there. I’m gonna be brave today.” She poked in. In the middle of the room was a carved wooden folk figure of Death, hooded and riding this crazy animal cart, aiming her bow and arrow. That really scared the hell out of her. She ran out.

  The summer she turned fifteen, Desiree took the love bus up to Taos. A bunch of Hopper’s friends went to the El Cortez Theater to see Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with Kris Kristofferson playing Billy, blasting anyone who dared mess with him in the dusty town. During the movie, Hopper was sitting next to Desiree and kept twitching about, getting up and leaving, leaving and coming back. He was really nervous because it was the evening of their special ceremony.

  Kids who hung around Topanga Canyon back in LA had been pressuring Desiree to have sex to see what it was all about. Even though Desiree’s friend, the actor and martial arts expert David Carradine, warned her to stay away from Dennis, she loved Dennis. She told Dennis she wanted him to be the one to deflower her.

  Hopper gave her all this stuff that night, a mix of mescaline and peyote and cocaine. They cuddled and hugged, but afterward Desiree wondered what happened to the big bang she’d heard about. She would have known, right? She was feeling pretty fuzzy herself and thought perhaps Dennis was too stoned to get it up.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  Hopper got really mad. “How dare you, I’m a grown man, whaddya talking about—”

  Leaving Desiree at the Tony House, he headed out the door with a .357 Magnum to the La Fonda hotel on the town plaza, where the owner kept a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s paintings of orgies. There were men and women, women and mythic beasts, really dirty stuff. Old D. H. proudly adorned every canvas with a pecker—the phallus being the great sacred image for him, symbolizing the deep life force civilization tried to squash. After winning some acid in a hand of poker, Hopper stepped out onto the plaza and a giant tree appeared before him. It looked like a terrifying grizzly bear.

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  He shot several times, blasting away at the grizzly, drawing the law. Making a break for it, he tried to run like hell back over to the Mud Palace, to make it to the Indian land in back, federal land out of jurisdiction, but the cops caught him, handcuffed him, and roughed him up pretty good. The pigs threw him in Taos jail, where Hopper had filmed the scene in Easy Rider when Jack Nicholson first appears, locked in the drunk tank with Billy and Captain America. Jack was about to be fully unleashed to America in the film version of Ken Kesey’s book about madness being the true sanity, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Goddamn it, motherfuckers. Fuckers. Fucking. Fuckers.

  Mug shot, arrested by Taos police, 1975

  eyevine/Redux, copyright © eyevine

  By morning, Desiree was on the phone with the bondsman, trying to free Hopper from counts of disorderly conduct and possession of a deadly weapon, two of verbal assault, and the final count of resisting arrest. After he was sprung that afternoon, Hopper came back to Desiree. Like a mother, Desiree cooked him eggs. She cleaned his wounds. The cops had been really bad to him, beat the shit out of him, and hadn’t even cleaned his eyes. She nursed him back to health.

  Driving his bullet-riddled pickup to the Taos airport, Hopper stood at the end of the runway with a rifle to greet Philippe Mora, the director of Mad Dog Morgan. Hopper left no doubt in Mora’s mind as to his ability to incarnate the legendary Aussie bushranger who defied a corrupt system that shackled, branded, and buggered him. Though the system might hunt him down, shoot him down like a mad dog, cut off his head, and fashion his scrotum into a tobacco pouch, never would they break his spirit.

  Dropping the director outside the La Fonda hotel, the scene of the crime, Hopper instructed, “Give the guy behind the desk ten dollars and tell him Dennis said to show you the ‘French pictures.’” Being a painter, Mora appreciated the dirty D.H.s.

  Hopper was soon off to Australia to shoot Mad Dog Morgan. To upright Aussies, it seemed like every drug dealer in the southern hemisphere was parachuting in to score big on the actor’s legendary coke habit. To throw them off track, the director told some gung-ho grips on his crew to turn around every road sign within a two-mile radius of their shooting location, topsy-turvy.

  In swashbuckling Mad Dog style, Hopper drank staggering quantities of rum. However out of it he appeared, as soon as he heard action:

  BAM

  A finely trained actor, he rode through the bush, performing horse tricks learned long ago on the Warner Bros. backlot.

  Still, Hopper might drop dead from all the excess—enough for an Australian judge to declare that Hopper should clinically be dead. And if he did kick the bucket, what would happen to the film?

  Preparing for the worst, Mora had a silicone mask made of Hopper’s face. If the worst happened, they could put it on a stuntman and at least shoot all the long shots. The Hopper mask would be like those James Dean heads they used to sell for five dollars, coated in MiracleFlesh faux flesh, kissable for the lonely night. Makeup artists started putting on the first layer of latex.

  “What’s this fuckin’ plastic thing on my face?”

  “I just got this idea, Dennis. You’re riding along on your horse, you see your own face in the sky, and it blows up.”

  “Far-out. Fantastic. Far-out, man.”

  One day, Mad Dog Hopper’s sidekick, played by the ubiquitous Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, disappeared into the bush saying he’d be back in ten minutes. But in dreamtime, the Aborigines’ fluid sense of time and space, ten minutes might mean an endless shoot, so Mora recruited two native trackers with lean brown bodies and long white beards to bring back Gulpilil. They returned with him days later. It turned out Gulpilil had gone on walkabout to ask the kookaburras in the gum trees about Hopper’s soul.

  “Well? What did they say to you?” asked the director.

  “The kookaburras in the trees, they all say Dennis is crazy.”

  By the end of the film, everyone was exhausted, but Hopper was ready for more.

  “What about that scene where I’m riding along on my horse and my face blows up? You haven’t shot that.”

  After all of the mysteries he’d experienced on the shoot, one left Mora completely perplexed. It was about three o’clock in the bush—it was just Mora and Hopper and the kookaburras’ maniacal cackling.

  By now Mora had come to realize that his star wasn’t the tough guy biker rebel of Easy Rider. Dennis was an incredibly sensitive being. He started crying as he started to tell Mora about James Dean. Hopper broke down, trembling like Dean. His face got younger, as if it were turning back the years, and then, as if by movie magic, his face turned into Dean’s. Mora had never seen anything like it.

  NAM

  At the bar of the Pagsa
njan Falls Resort in the Philippines, cast members threw knives in the air, swung from chandeliers, all going nutty after another day of endlessly filming Apocalypse Now in the jungle. Stuck in the shit was Frederic Forrest, a young actor from Waxahachie, Texas, who had been drafted to play the sweet-natured New Orleans saucier, Chef. On the night Hopper arrived, Forrest cornered him.

  “What was it like with Jimmy? I wanna know everything.”

  Back home in Waxahachie, all the older kids used to talk about James Dean. The newspapers wrote how he was just a copycat Brando, and Forrest and his friends didn’t like that at all—“They’re full of shit. Jimmy’s not acting. He’s just like us!” Forrest hadn’t even seen Jimmy in anything since movies didn’t come to Waxahachie until they’d been out for a while. When the Dallas Morning News reported ACTOR KILLED IN PORSCHE, Forrest didn’t even know what a Porsche was. When he finally saw East of Eden, Forrest knew Dean was as brilliant and powerful as Marlon, lighter than Brando.

  Over a bottle of tequila, Hopper and Forrest talked all night long about Jimmy, who worshipped Brando.

  Hopper told Forrest how Dean fused two worlds together—by carrying Monty Clift in his lowered left hand pleading, “Please forgive me,” and Brando in his raised right fist, telling his audience, “Go fuck yourself.”

  As Forrest asked Hopper everything he could think of about Jimmy, this crazy guy walked up, pulled out a machete, and slung it down in the table between them.

  Thwack!

  “I’ve had a contract out on you for three years,” said the man, glowering at Hopper.

  Forrest was terrified. He thought the dude looked like Charlie Manson. Hopper barely glanced up or stopped talking to give the guy the time of day, like the guy didn’t exist. Hopper just kept rappin’ on about Jimmy. Finally the guy slunk away.

  Hungover the next day in the middle of the Pagsanjan Falls jungle, Forrest was feeling woozy and dropped like a fly, passed out cold.

  “What the fuck?” asked Hopper. “Who do we have here? Humphrey Bogart?”

  Hopper was ready to roll, Jack. Director Francis Ford Coppola had originally cast him to play the part of Colby, a rogue soldier with ten lines who serves under Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. The brilliant Kurtz had gone native, lording godlike over the ferocious Montagnard tribe of headhunters at the end of the Nung River. After observing Hopper’s erratic behavior, Coppola decided to switch Dennis’s role to play the incessantly snapping photojournalist, wearing cameras like shrunken heads around his neck. (Hopper claimed the switch was Brando’s suggestion.)

  Apocalypse Now, Pagsanjan, Philippines, 1976

  Mary Ellen Mark

  To get into his character, Hopper made a connection with the Fool from the tarot deck. He knew about the card from filming Night Tide years before, in which he played a scene as a sailor visiting a bejeweled fortune-teller. The Fool knows the secret wonders of the world, he was told—only he can’t remember where he’s stashed them away.

  “I’m an American! American civilian! Hi, Yanks!”

  Hopper thrust out a hand to greet the Yankees coming in up the murky Nung, including Forrest, who was wearing a giant banana leaf on his head to keep cool. Forrest was ready to get the hell out of the jungle. He had tickets to go on leave to Hong Kong for the weekend. He wanted to finish this scene and make his flight. But Hopper refused to do the part the way Coppola wanted.

  “Cut! What the fuck is this goin’ on?”

  Coppola tried to give Hopper direction. Each time, it seemed like a breakthrough.

  “Oh yeah,” said Hopper. “Right, right, okay, I got it.”

  Then Hopper did it the exact same way again, well on his way to another climactic showdown with his director.

  “Gimme just one, Dennis. I’ve given you forty-four takes. Just gimme one.”

  “Yes! I got you. Okay! Let’s do it again!”

  Forrest was getting really squirrely: “Shit, Dennis, can’t you just do one for him? I gotta get to Hong Kong! Can’t you just fuckin’ do one? Hell, you’ve alienated yourself from everybody here already.”

  “That never bothered me before,” Hopper told him. Suddenly it hit Forrest under that banana leaf: he was being selfish while Hopper was being strong.

  “When they make me hurry,” Hopper told him, “that’s when I go slower.”

  Fuckin’ A. Hopper was strong. He even smelled strong. Everyone on the production could smell him comin’ like an animal. He didn’t bathe. Not once did he wash his costume.

  One day at the mess hall where the cast and crew took their meals, Dennis was jabbering away, trying to talk to Brando, who didn’t give Hopper the time of day. Bloated from the years, Marlon slowly unfolded a napkin and draped it over his sweaty bald head, shaven like a monk’s to keep off the flies, and kept eating. Brando knew that would really hurt Hopper. He knew how much Hopper adored him.

  Being swatted off tortured Hopper, who wore his pain plainly on his face.

  Brando always hated the ceremony of people around him. It drove him to distraction: “You’re the best. You’re the greatest. You’re a god.”

  Hopper buzzing and mewling about his table was too much. Hopper made his stomach churn. Brando classified him as a kiss-ass, just like Dean before him. Jimmy had been pathologically obsessed with Brando.

  Brando had even pulled Dean aside once and, trying to help the kid, told him that he was sick. Dean agreed.

  “Don’t hang out with that person,” Brando warned about Hopper. “He’s too violent.”

  Traveling along with Brando into the heart of darkness was his personal photographer, attractive nineteen-year-old Stefani Kong. She was adventuresome enough to say to herself, “Well, we’ll see how violent of a person he is.”

  One night, when it seemed most of the cast and crew had lost their minds and left, Stefani and Hopper decided to go over to the art department compound, and stay out past curfew. At the time, there was martial law in the Philippines. The curfew was midnight in the city, and in the provinces and the jungle where they were, it was ten.

  On this night, it was about three in the morning when Stef and Dennis came into this village clearing, with a cluster of people sitting on the dirt road, the full moon shining down on them. Hopper really reeked that night. Stefani could smell him.

  Suddenly, a pack of wild dogs appeared. The road was suddenly empty. Stef freaked out.

  They’d all been given health information by the production on arrival, like: Do not share your utensils with the headhunters; they have leprosy. Southeast Asian venereal disease—incurable. If you get bitten by a mad dog—just lie down because you’re gonna die a slow, painful rabies death. No such thing as a rabies shot here.

  “Don’t worry, Stefani,” said Hopper. “I’m gonna take care of this.”

  “Oh my God, I mean there’s like a lotta dogs. There’s only one of you.”

  Hopper went out in the middle of the dirt road. He started chanting a song and doing this wild Indian dance. The bewildered dogs just looked at him and finally, not knowing what to make of his performance, slunk off. Hopper removed his worn-in cowboy hat, stuck with an eagle feather, and took a bow for his audience—“Thank you very much.”

  Hopper moved out of the resort, where the rest of the production was only too happy to stay and escape the tropical heat and helicopter-size mosquitoes. Getting deeper into his character, he moved into the Angkor Wat–style Kurtz temple set, located on an uncharted pocket of tangled jungle. The set was populated with the Ifugao tribe that Coppola had imported from the mountains to the north. They were portraying the Vietnamese Montagnard, warrior tribesmen famed for their ferocity. As part of their scene, they sang the Doors in unison, “Kum on bay-bee lite my fi-uh.” Soon the tribesmen started imitating Hopper, laughing, “Hey, man.”

  The cameras turned off for the night, but Hopper remained among the Ifugao. The Kurtz/Brando compound was littered with the heads of rebels, stuck on sticks like death lollipops.

  As th
e sun set over the temple, Hopper considered one of his gods. Everything Brando touched he made scorchingly real. After all these years, Hopper still found himself flailing around. Brando didn’t even want to be in the same room as him. In the event it happened, Brando would lay down his pink veiny head and go to sleep on cue. He hated stinking Hopper, the pathetic little mutt who wanted to lick his boots.

  Reveling in his self-loathing, Hopper returned for the final round in his very own Thrilla in Manila.

  Throughout the shoot, Marlon had refused to film a scene in the same room as Hopper, but Brando finally agreed to work with Hopper on one condition—he could throw things at him.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” said Hopper.

  Working with this great man was worth having things thrown at him like a dog. Shutterbug Stefani captured Hopper between takes. He wasn’t miserable at all but laughing like this was the best thing that ever happened to him. Brando’s throwing shit at me, I’m in pig heaven!

  WE ARE THE HOLLOW MEN

  WE ARE THE STUFFED MEN

  LEANING TOGETHER

  HEADPIECE FILLED WITH STRAW. ALAS!

  As Kurtz, Brando laboriously recited T. S. Eliot for his scene with Hopper.

  Oh, ho! Was somebody trying to best Hopper in dramatic declamation? Taking over “The Hollow Men” poem, Hopper spun it around with no fractions, no maybes, no supposes! It was all dialectics! He either loved or he hated.

  THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

  THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

  THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS

  NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER.

  Brando threw bananas at him, and with a whimper, Hopper was splitting, Jack! Mixing in a dash of “I should have been a pair of ragged claws” from Eliot’s “Prufrock” along with Kipling’s “If”—with “if” being the middle word in life—Hopper juggled everything like a Shakespearean fool, rhyming and preening like a crazed Mardi Gras Indian and dropping in all the elements to make his performance pure, genuine: