Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Even more trippy? In six weeks the production would be gone, but the sets would remain.

  Big Duke had big plans for Durango. In front of the hotel on the plaza, Wayne hoisted his fist in the air and sunk it into a patch of wet cement laid down by the villagers, a crude ritual mimicking his handprint ceremony at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. He was intent on turning Durango into his personal Eden, a place to settle down and make Westerns, working by day, sleeping by night to a rattlesnake lullaby. All the while oblivious to the fact that these villagers were now living in a Wild West set. When they moseyed past these facades, would they begin to confuse their simple lives with the world of movie fantasy? Would they slip across that imaginary line and act like movie cowboys, playing shoot-’em-up, spurring real rage and violence? What the hell would happen to the villagers?

  Big Duke pulled Hopper aside. “Ya gotta get off that loco weed, boy.”

  On his return to civilization, Hopper dashed off a manifesto about his epiphany and showed it to his friend, Stewart Stern. The Rebel screenwriter thought it was very interesting, though at times he couldn’t help wondering if Hopper was a phony. Like the time Dennis told him he needed to get a road.

  “What do you mean, Dennis?”

  The afternoon’s adventure led to a studio prop shop, featuring hundreds and hundreds of yards of fake roads from all over the world: Dorothy’s yellow brick, endless stretches of gray American highway, English cobblestones and dirt paths constructed to look from as far off as Timbuktu. They were all made of rubber and ready to be rolled up and taken away. Hopper had promised a charity auction a piece of original art, so he bought fourteen yards of ancient Roman Appian Way, attached a hefty price tag and a title: Found Object: Dennis Hopper.

  Bang! It sold.

  Realizing Hopper’s manifesto was far more valuable than a stretch of yellow-brick rubber road, Stern asked Hopper to sign it, holding on to it with a hunch that it might someday be important.

  What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films. But who delivers? Where do we find them? How much does it cost? Where do they get the quarter of a million dollars? . . . No one knows the answer. But they will appear. America’s where it can be done.. . . Yes we’d better do it then. Or I’m going to die a very cranky Individual, and I won’t be alone.

  Dennis Hopper

  PART 2

  The Last Movie

  Z PICTURES

  At home in Beverly Hills on his two acres of land with a tennis court and swimming pool, Peter Fonda figured he could do a film for cheap like American International Pictures. The independent studio was servicing the drive-in market with all those Frankie and Annette beach party movies. AIP also single-handedly revived the career of Vincent Price, star of its Edgar Allan Poe films directed by Roger Corman, a no-budget auteur hailed as the Orson Welles of Z pictures (that much further down the alphabet from B).

  Fresh off of playing an astronaut in AIP’s Queen of Blood, Hopper was sick of Z pictures. He was meant for greater things than teaching an attractive green-skinned Martian how to suck water from a straw. And kiss.

  “Man, we ought to make a movie,” said Fonda over a beer at his place.

  “Aw, everybody says that,” said Hopper. “But nobody really does it.”

  “I’d like to make a movie about a man who’s lookin’ for love. He’s lookin’ everywhere. At the end he finds out that love was what he had at the beginning.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, you’ll pay for it?”

  “Fuckin’ A, I’ll pay for it.”

  Fonda formed his very own Pando Productions company, and the two friends excitedly set about working on their first film together. Hopper called it The Ying and the Yang.

  “No, Dennis, it’s Yin/Yang. It’s a one-word concept.”

  “No, it’s The Ying and the Yang.”

  “There’s no g, Dennis!”

  In a rented house in Sherman Oaks, they banged out a screenplay with a third wheel and a secretary taking dictation. The Yin(g) and the Yang, as they compromised on, would begin with a spectacular shot of the sun rising over one of those giant donuts along the highway, like Randy’s Donuts in LA.

  With Peter starring and Dennis costarring and directing, the two were off to New York to look for money to finance their “insane comedy,” reported Variety in December 1965. Fonda told legendary columnist Army Archerd he hoped his dad and sister would make cameos—Yin and Yang.

  In New York, the boys landed at a big art happening full of rock and rollers and models orbiting a sculpture composed of all sorts of things: wheels, bicycles, tricycles, balloons, and a money thrower. On cue, this contraption catapulted coins into the audience as the clanking behemoth began to saw, hammer, and melt itself to the ground. Someone had paid an ungodly amount to commission this sculpture and watch the whole thing collapse on itself in a pile of rubble.

  “This is chaos and anarchy in the top form!” said Peter.

  With all this money flung about in the name of art, surely they would find someone to finance a good old American art film. Ripe for the taking was a gang of rich kids funding acid guru Timothy Leary’s research on the psychic powers of LSD. Dropping tabs to save America, they’d also pumped money into an animated Wizard of Oz with Oz as the Buddha in the center of a mandala.

  “There’s tons of bucks!” said Fonda.

  First on the list were Peggy and Billy Hitchcock, the Mellon bank heirs. Hopper and Fonda drove upstate to Millbrook, New York, to visit the siblings in a far-out gothic mansion where Leary was now headquartered. Perhaps the Hitchcocks were too deep into their exploration of consciousness, as well as playing with Fang, Leary’s psychedelic dog, but the meet dead-ended pretty quickly, a total bust.

  Also connected to the scene was the mysterious Van Wolf. This entrepreneur invited potential Yin(g) and the Yang backers to his Manhattan pad painted in psychedelic colors. Among his eccentric guests was Salvador Dalí, as well as Dalí’s mistress and girlfriend. The two women pretended to be witches, but unfortunately weren’t “angels,” as Hopper called the yet-to-be-seen beings who might bankroll a movie. Dalí did however invite Fonda to take part in a happening, where they’d all fling paint onto an inflated balloon projected with L’Age d’Or.

  Perhaps the boys would have better luck with the exorbitantly rich A&P supermarket heir who had commissioned Dalí to do a surrealist painting about Columbus’s discovery of America.

  “If you can levitate,” said George Huntington Hartford II, “I’ll give you the money to make the film.”

  “That’s pretty swift, Hunt,” said Fonda.

  Hopper was sick of this rich-kid shit. “What man? Man, are you kidding, man!”

  Their last hope was the Mérode Altarpiece by the Master of Flémalle. This 1425 triptych featuring the Annunciation starred a teenage Mary, the angel Gabriel, and in the right panel, Joseph making rattraps to catch the devil. Pictured in the left panel, along with the patrons who’d commissioned the work, was a strange bearded man in red tights. This was the artist, defiantly putting himself in the painting.

  “He saved art, man,” said Hopper. Just like he and Fonda were going to save the American movie. They later considered making a movie about the whole experience of looking for funding.

  Cut To: An apartment on New York’s ritzy Upper East Side. Inside are HOPPER, FONDA, gallerist WALTER HOPPS, and Fonda’s GOOD FRIEND. Before them is a triptych the Good Friend pulled from her closet. In the center panel, under the gaze of the ANGEL GABRIEL, is MARY. Hopps recognizes the scene from the Mérode Altarpiece hanging in The Cloisters. Or does it?

  “That’s a great copy of the Mérode Altarpiece,” Hopps said of this fake. Hopper’s friend, the director of the Pasadena art museum, was a shadowy agent in thick glasses who addressed the mysteries of art in the tone of government secrets.

  “It’s not a copy,” said Fonda’s good friend. “My father bought it
as an original in 1935.”

  After an intimate investigation, Hopps was verging on tears, shaking he was so excited. “The wood looks right! But we have to have it investigated.”

  If the triptych turned out to be the original, Fonda’s friend promised to sell it and use the money to fund the movie. Ordering up an unmarked black Lincoln limo, Fonda swaddled three potentially precious pieces of medieval wood in pillowcases, stashed them in the Lincoln, and blended in with the traffic heading to a Fifth Avenue mansion housing the Columbia University School of the Arts.

  After the triptych was unwrapped and put on the easel, the art experts copped an attitude.

  “Well, that’s not the original.”

  “The original is at the Cloisters.”

  Blah, blah, blah—just putting these movie guys down, like they were dealing with a bunch of cavemen. But in comes this creaky old Frenchman on loan from the Louvre. The main dude. The triptych stops him in his tracks.

  “Où est la neige?”

  “What’s he saying, man? What’s he saying?” asked Hopper.

  In the right panel, snowflakes were falling in a window behind Joseph. Un miracle—it turned out.

  Everyone was “Wow. Wow.” The creaky old Frenchman was absolutely blown away with no qualms about the authenticity of Hopper and Fonda’s Mérode Altarpiece.

  Just to be sure, the art experts wanted to take the triptych away and test the paint.

  “No.”

  All eyes were on Hopper.

  “Whaddya mean ‘no’?” asked Fonda.

  “Come here, man!” Hopper hissed, pulling him aside. “You know what they’re gonna do? They’re gonna take it and keep it, and give us the copy back, ’cause this is the fuckin’ original, man! You know, man, we gotta get outta here!”

  “Fuck,” thought Fonda, swayed by Hopper’s conviction. “He’s right.”

  Real or fake, the triptych went back into the closet. Fonda went back up to Millbrook. Leaving New York alone in a taxi on the way to JFK airport, Hopper looked back at the skyline as the crisscrossed steel girders on the bridge passed above and the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” went to static on the radio.

  THE ANGEL

  The form is now fifty years old,” preached Hopper. “We’re in the same period as the artists were right after the Flemish Renaissance! Fifty years later, man, came the Italian Renaissance, and man, filmmakers should be making Sistine Chapels now! Michelangelo and da Vinci, they didn’t dig working for that Establishment pope, but they didn’t get negative about it. They tried to do something that was a little uplifting. Not dirty, not violent! And that’s what it’s about, man!”

  Phil Spector dug. Dandified in gold-rimmed shades, a ruffled shirt, and a pocket watch dangling from his three-piece suit, the boy genius record producer behind the famed Wall of Sound was in the midst of big changes. He had made his fortune engineering creations by girl bands like the Ronettes and the Crystals but was about to chuck his pioneering brand of teenybopper bubblegum pop for a new sonic masterpiece, something revolutionary. The Citizen Kane of pop!

  Nikon in hand, Hopper caught Spector at just the right moment, documenting his epic Gold Star Studios sessions with a sweat-drenched Tina Turner belting it out in her bra. Shooting the cover for the big gamble upon which Spector was banking his future, River Deep—Mountain High, Hopper posed Ike and Tina in front of a gigantic billboard with a movie star’s enormous teardrop. Fortunately for Hopper, the album tanked, debuting at 98 on Billboard’s Top 100, a crushing blow that made Spector turn his gaze toward the movies. A journalist came to interview him within the confines of his gloomy Hollywood palace draped in British oil-painted landscapes.

  “The sad thing,” said Spector, “is that most great artists start playing to the public rather than for their own satisfaction. This is why I must move on. Hollywood taught everybody around the world how to make movies. Now they’ve all passed us by. That’s why Hollywood has to make a great art film—to show the rest of the world. The Last Movie will be that film.”

  To be directed by Dennis Hopper with a screenplay by Stewart Stern, The Last Movie promised a postmodern twist on the classic Western. Starring two generations of Hollywood royalty—Jennifer Jones, Jason Robards, and Jane Fonda, it would feature the very cast David O. Selznick, dead for a year now, had dreamed about for his big Tender Is the Night comeback. The first great American art movie would be a new beginning for Hollywood. Shooting would start September 15, 1966. And if the Philistines at the studios wouldn’t finance it?

  “In that case,” said Spector, devilishly flashing the diamond studded S on his ring, “I will.”

  Charging forth to Durango, Hopper embarked on location scouting. Everything screamed “Go!” Then he returned to Spector’s Phillies Records, the studio where his wunderkind music-turned-film-producer had developed an eccentric habit of wandering off to study his book on how to care for Saint Bernards.

  Passing the time, Hopper learned karate from Spector’s thick Hungarian bodyguard, Emil, who protected his boss in the Rolls-Royce and fearsomely wielded a black cane topped with a white death head. There were delays and delays for The Last Movie, the routine trials and tribulations of independent moviemaking, the glamorous business with which Spector was becoming increasingly bored.

  As the cost of the great American art movie swelled past the million-dollar mark, Spector pulled out, unwilling to risk his fortune. Retiring to his castle, the fallen boy genius obsessively watched Citizen Kane over and over in his private screening room.

  Hopper had to find another angel. One possibility was Doris Duke. So that Hopper could meet this fabulously wealthy woman, rumored to be the richest in the world, flamboyant interior designer Tony Duquette offered to throw one of his lavish black-tie dinners in his extravagantly gaudy West Hollywood palace, a former silent movie studio. It promised to be a grand affair.

  Somebody’s little munchkin in a yellow cape was waving a flag with a pot leaf insignia onstage before the Grateful Dead, noodling away at the polo field in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Hopper was as high as the far-out parachutist flying above the idyllic scene spread out at the Human Be-In in January 1967.

  Up and away went pinkish, opalescent, rainbow-colored soap bubbles, blown by groovy chicks in a sea of feathers, body paint, flowing skirts, and tie-dye. Everyone flocked to Ocean Beach to watch the sun set over the Pacific, its horizon line significantly altered by thousands of turkey sandwiches handed out for free and spiked with acid.

  Oh, man, Hopper was going to be late for that dinner.

  Coming down from his Be-In acid trip, he entered a far heavier scene at what looked like the temple of a Sun God, complete with a throne Tony Duquette had imported from Chapultepec Palace—in Aztecan meaning “the grasshopper’s hill.” Instead of a tie for his big Doris Duke dinner, Hopper sported a mandala hanging from his favorite love beads.

  Covered in filth and with bloodshot eyes, he crashed the party, bursting in well after it started. After fingerbowls, he drove Doris home in his own yellow Checker Cab. Careening toward Falcon Lair, her Beverly Hills estate, he ranted on about how Hollywood needed to be run on socialist principles.

  Revolutionary ideas had been percolating in his brain since his recent return to Warner Bros., playing a mentally retarded convict named Babalugats in the prison movie Cool Hand Luke. He’d been shackled in a rural California prison camp draped with genuine Louisiana moss and guarded by a dozen purebred bloodhounds from the Ernie Smith School for Movie Dogs, including a liver-and-red-coated movie star named Blue. To get into character, Hopper was forced to sleep in his motel room in a prison uniform and chains. Come sunup, he was slaving away, doing backbreaking labor on a chain gang, shoveling hard earth on top of steaming blacktop along a mile of country highway on a sweltering day. He had no lines to ease the pain. He was covered in steaming tar. All the while, the camera gazed lovingly on the blazing blue eyes of the film’s shirtless star, who was thriving in the Hollywood syst
em while only pretending to beat it in his role as the nonconformist rebel.

  When Hopper ran things, heads were going to roll. Then Newman would be in chains.

  Fleeing the Checker Cab, a terrified Doris Duke ran into her lair and locked her gates.

  Hopper had barely scratched the surface of his plans. As the husband of a Hayward, he was able to lob his opinions like grenades at Hollywood parties with the fabulously stiff old guard. To august director George Cukor, whose recent My Fair Lady was a sheer delight, Hopper said, “You are the old Hollywood and we’re the new. We are going to bury you.”

  THE TRIP

  Peter Fonda was rocketing to stardom after AIP director Roger Corman, playing directly to the teenyboppers, realized that the staple villain of the beach party movies, Eric Von Zipper, a portly, leather-clad motorcyclist who spun sand on teen heroes Frankie and Annette, should be the hero. Corman’s Hells Angels-inspired film, The Wild Angels, became a smash at the box office, grossing $10 million on a mere $360,000 budget. Starring as Heavenly Blues, an Angel who just wants to get loaded, Fonda led an outlaw biker gang on the way to an Angel’s funeral. In the church, a drunken orgy ensued, complete with an altar rape scene.

  Next up for Fonda on Roger’s Z pipeline was The Trip, an LSD shocker promising all the terror, exhilaration, and ecstatic loneliness of an acid trip—as if the movie were the tab. A guy around the scene, Jack Nicholson, had written the screenplay. He’d kicked around with Hopper’s friend Bobby Walker on the set of 1964’s Ensign Pulver.

  On the tenth floor of the Acapulco Hilton, getting into his role as “the man with the most original mind in the Navy,” Bobby smoked up while thinking how crazy it was how this guy charmed everybody.

  “If they would put Jack in a movie where he could be free to be Jack,” thought Bobby, lost in contemplation, “if he could ever let out that innate charm and devil-may-care kind of rakish, sardonic, charming-wise-guy personality, he’d be a huge hit.”