by Tom Folsom
Only Jack was trapped in Corman hell. The Cry Baby Killer was only the first in an ignominious string of Corman roles Jack had suffered through for the sake of his craft, including the masochistic dental patient in The Little Shop of Horrors. Figuring he had a better shot as a writer than as an actor, he tried a new path, turning to screenwriting.
After reading Jack’s final draft of The Trip, full of weird cuts and visually groovy acid-trip flashes, Fonda put it down, moved to tears.
“Oh my God,” he told himself. “I get to work in the first real American art film. This is like American art shit! This is gonna go out in the theaters! I can’t wait till Hopper hears about this!”
Corman doled out a part for Hopper as a drug dealer who sports a necklace strung with human teeth. He also let Hopper and Fonda go out on their own to shoot some scenes for the acid trip. These Bergmanesque sequences featured Fonda wearing a puffy blouse and running around the sand dunes in Yuma, California, and eating gruel offered by a dwarf in the forest near Big Sur. The cloaked figure of Death awaited atop a rocky bluff.
No Man Is Above the Law, and No Man Is Below It
Life Magazine’s Bikini-Revealing Coverage
American Airlines to New York—4½ Hours of High Living
Rolaids
Hopper filmed Fonda wandering around in a preppy red sweater, passing before a revolving Bullwinkle statue on Sunset Strip, lost in the neon glow of the Whisky A Go Go. Using intercut footage, the giant hand-painted billboards were going to be part of the acid trip sequence. There would be none of that projected cosmic plasma fantasia shit littering the bars and clubs, but something much more real.
But AIP, unwilling to risk the bottom line on something genuinely arty, thought kids might instead enjoy a mini-carousel with a midget rider. Or Hopper dressed as a psychedelic priest absolving a monkey.
When The Trip was unleashed to audiences in ’67, it was totally decked out in spinning spiral projections in a DayGlo nightclub with naked painted go-go girls who’d been selected during AIP’s televised Psychedelic Paint-In casting party. So Hopper could still be the first out of the gates with the great American art film. Could everything still fall into place?
Sitting beside Dennis on the beach, Fonda, practically his brother, had already told Variety he was committed to The Last Movie. This was supposed to be a family affair with not only sister Jane but Henry, too. The Fonda patriarch had read The Last Movie and said it was the most original Western he’d ever read, a staggering compliment from the man who starred as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, directed by the master himself, John Ford. Bobby Walker was to play a part in the movie too, just like his mother, Jennifer Jones, who believed in Dennis as if she were his own mother, seeing his dedication and talent, warmed by his creative spark.
“Make grand entrances and quick exits,” she would say. Hopper thought he would pave her triumphant return to the screen.
And there was screenwriter Stewart Stern, who kept an eye on the boys, all just a little younger than him. Sometimes he thought it was awful how illusion grabbed them.
The boys delved into the meaning of existence, only to come up lost. That day on the beach, they’d all been having this wonderful conversation, which turned funny for the boys, who were being clever, then brilliant, only Stern saw that the more brilliant they thought they were, the dumber they were, leaving him odd man out. Stern did not get high eating magic mushrooms or go down LSD rabbit holes. As a writer, his hold on reality was too precious. He simply couldn’t be like Hopper or Bobby Walker, the movie star’s son, paddling away in his canoe from Malibu to Catalina Island to find his spirit self.
For Bobby, especially, it was all about the pilgrimage. Dennis had to be constantly moving, but Bobby didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to photograph anything or have his ego stroked by civilization. It was enough to be out in nature at two o’clock in the morning under the moon.
One night, these huge ships began to bear down on his canoe. Bobby saw himself trapped in a strange movie: “Are they gonna run me over? Why am I putting myself in harm’s way like this? Am I an idiot? Who do I have to kiss to get off this movie?”
At the very least, Dennis, Peter, and Bobby wanted to direct the movie of their lives. They liked Baja and hatched a plan to buy some land together, where they could settle down with their families in this utopia. They went to meetings with the Mexican landowners. Clean-cut Fonda would show up in his suit and tie, holding an aluminum briefcase. Hopper and Bobby wore hippie beards. The boys went from landowner to landowner, trying to get someone to sell them just a sliver to settle on.
Fearing a hippie invasion, nobody even wanted them to talk to the motel maids.
Fonda cut out early. He was always in a bit more of a hurry. Dennis and Bobby still thought they needed to hang out, talk to the farmers. The two were so friendly and nice but bombed out of their minds. Nobody ended up giving them the time of day down in Baja.
The twin Robinson Crusoes did discover an exotic out-of-the-way beach where no tourist would ever think of going. Wading into the warm water—you could stand in it up to your waist all day long and never get cold or bored—Dennis admitted he’d always been afraid of the water. He finally surrendered and floated on his back. Bobby thought it was a wonderful healing experience. If only Dennis could have carried that feeling on and not drifted away.
LOVE
A little monkey with love painted on his cranium. Ravi Shankar’s entourage garnishing the crowd of flower children with rose petals. Hopper opened his eyes to the Technicolor experience at the Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love.
His hair grown out, he looked lost and loveless, dwarfed beside Nico, the Teutonic goddess of the Velvet Underground. Onstage against throbbing plasma projections wailed terrifying Grace Slick. Humongous Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas swayed beside her cassocked Papas and . . . Gorgeous.
Shimmering Mama Michelle Phillips was the ultimate fantasy with the face of an angel and the voice of a siren. She shone directly onto an ecstatic Hopper, who soaked in the purest, most beautiful moment of his whole trip.
The psychedelic experience had taken on religious dimensions for Hopper ever since that strange visit with Fonda to find angels. There in Manhattan, one night in a hotel lobby, Hopper had encountered a prostitute reading the Gospel according to Thomas. Translated from Coptic scrolls discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, the Gnostic Gospel floated among the spiritually hip who liked to fuck and think about the meaning of gnosis, or “experience.” During a walk through Muir Woods, Dennis recited the Gospel for Michael McClure, playwright of The Beard, in which Hopper would play the role of Billy the Kid. A fallen redwood lay in his path. Dennis laid a hand on it. His handprint seemed to sear into the bark. Was it the drugs or real?
Hopper was going a little crazy. Brooke felt her husband was getting dangerous.
Back at the Love-In, held on Easter Sunday before the Summer of Love, Hopper had snapped away with his Nikon. A fleshy conga line of flute players, wandering minstrels, and a girl with a heart painted on her forehead wound through the forest. A wild creature in a loincloth completely freaked out, gyrating naked and screaming incantations. Some dumbfounded cowpoke chewing gum watched from the sidelines.
Hopper showed Brooke the proofs of the groovy shots he’d taken, only she wasn’t too impressed. She was in a rush to pick up the kids from school—“Well, Dennis . . .” He broke her nose with a single swipe.
POW!
A few months later, Brooke sat in the audience at the Warner Playhouse on La Cienega Boulevard, where Hopper was deep into rehearsal as Billy the Kid. The Beard was set in heaven, described by the playwright as a “blue-velvet dominated eternity.” As Billy, the dandified killer, Hopper hurled insults at bubbly sexpot Jean Harlow. After she made fun of his long sissy hair, Billy ripped off her panties, as directed, and dove in headfirst.
Plagued by awful performance anxiety, Dennis went completely nuts after rehe
arsal. He wanted Brooke to stay, but she insisted she had to get home.
“I’ve left the children alone,” said Brooke, impatiently. “I’ve got to go home.”
“No, I don’t want you to.”
Out in the parking lot, as Brooke climbed into their Checker Cab, Dennis burst into a tantrum. In front of a dozen onlookers, he jumped on the yellow hood and kicked in the windshield while Brooke sat terrified in the driver’s seat. She drove home with the wind blowing in her face.
Dennis followed his light, dancing a path to the other side of Death Valley. The desert pit was too hot for any respectable film studio but perfect for AIP’s latest shocker, The Glory Stompers, originally slated as a Western. But in Corman pics, entire plots could change overnight. The Indians became a menacing biker gang of well-oiled Black Souls. The traditional campfire scene metamorphosed into a leather-clad mosh pit of chicks with beer guts lubricated by the gasoline fumes spewing from a pack of revved-up Harleys.
In a cutoff jean vest, Hopper straddled his purple chopper as the leader of the Black Souls, then snuck off to the bushes to smoke dope. “Grasshopper,” his fellow cast members called him.
Back in San Francisco, Grasshopper was hanging out with the Diggers, the guys who salted the turkey sandwiches with acid to turn everyone on at the Be-In. Led by Emmett Grogan, the Diggers were a self-described band of “community anarchists” in an underground rebellion. An offshoot of the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe floored Hopper with their bawdy, ribald free-for-all guerrilla theater like something from the Old Globe.
On this particular occasion, Emmett and the Mime Troupe director Peter Coyote were roaring on about some story—“Bein’ profane, as we do,” recalled Coyote—when suddenly, some guy who was hanging around took offense and punched Emmett in the face. Hopper didn’t miss a beat. Jumping up on the table, he drop-kicked that motherfucker in the cranium. Grasshopper was no one to fuck with.
The Diggers dug. Hopper was proving himself not just as an actor, but as a real motorcycle hell-raiser like Sweet Willie Tumbleweed. Held in high esteem by the Diggers, this unbelievably poetic man spun great stories underneath his long hair and menacing leather-clad exterior. He could stop a crowd just by staring at them, but the Diggers saw him lie down like a dog before the raw masculinity of the Hells Angels. The Angels sort of took him over to the dark side, but he was a Digger first.
One night, the Diggers and Sweet Willie were all hanging out with Hopper and Fonda.
“You know, if I was gonna make a movie, I’d make a movie of me and a buddy ridin’ around America, doin’ what we do, seein’ what we see,” said the burly man prophetically, or so the Digger legend went about Sweet Willie Tumbleweed, spinner of stories, the kind that really stuck.
RED FLOCK ROOM
On his promotional tour for The Trip in Toronto, Peter Fonda enjoyed Z picture star treatment courtesy of AIP. Staring into the weird Victorian wallpaper in the Red Flock Room at the low-rent Lakeshore Motel, Fonda figured it was probably a hooker’s room. He cracked open a Heineken, lit up a doobie, and commenced signing a stack of eight-by-ten Wild Angels glossies of him and his costar, Bruce Dern, riding a chopper. Six-foot-three Fonda wondered idly why he only looked about two-and-a-half inches in the photo.
Who in publicity picked this particular still? Even when he wrote, “Best Wishes, Peter Fonda,” it was like, “Where am I?” You couldn’t tell. You didn’t know.
He and Hopper hadn’t been on the best of terms, mainly because when he’d split for Toronto, Fonda didn’t want Dennis to direct his yet-to-be-recorded album: Got to Get You into My Life. Fonda figured he could rip off the Beatles’ song title because when he and John Lennon were tripping at the Playboy Mansion, Fonda kept whispering, “I know what it’s like to be dead, man. I know what it’s like to be dead,” which was sort of true because Peter had accidentally shot himself in the stomach when he was eleven. Lennon took Fonda’s line for his song.
“Dennis, you can’t keep a beat,” said Peter, offering an explanation of why Hopper couldn’t work on his album.
“No, I wanna direct it!”
“Dennis, you don’t direct an album, you produce an album.”
“No, no—”
“No, Dennis, this is sound, not imagery.”
“I wanna direct the album, man. You know, man, I mean—” Hopper, a bullheaded Taurus, started grabbing his own earlobes.
That was the problem with Hopper, Fonda realized; he was a stubborn bull and his heart carried this paranoid thing. It was just part of his character. If you understood it and liked Dennis, and Peter did, you rolled with it. If you didn’t, you’d call him out on it and end a friendship real quick.
Hopper stormed and ranted till finally, fed up, Fonda picked up his Nagra tape recorder with its reel-to-reel tape deck. He’d bought it to record the endless well wishes of strangers who stopped him on the street to gush, “You know, I really love your father. He’s my favorite actor, and I love your sister!” He was planning to put all of this into his album, but instead smashed the Nagra to the ground.
“Dennis, when you can fix that, then you can direct the album.”
“You’re a fucking child! Did you hear yourself? I can’t talk to you. I’m leaving! I’m leaving! I’m never gonna speak to you again! You steal everything from me!”
That passion was one of the great things about Hopper, figured Fonda. When he was set off, it was like lighting a fuse.
Fonda cracked another Heinie, fired up another doobie in his red-flocked cocoon. Up in the firmament, outside his window, Brando, Dean, and Clift twinkled in the cosmos. Marlon’s comet shone brightest. It hooked around the sun, didn’t get sucked in, and then seemed to orbit around it. A celestial navigator, Fonda watched it come, exit—it was really incredible. The tail of that comet sent showers and meteors fizzling down through the atmosphere.
Being a Fonda, Peter had known Marlon from the time he was fifteen, meeting him the same year Jimmy died. Peter didn’t know Jimmy, but he knew his work, so when he first met Hopper, ranting about those bloody chickens, Peter recognized him from Jimmy’s movies and asked him about Dean. For Dennis, knowing Dean was a badge of access, like a backstage pass, something he always wore. Fonda knew how Hopper got into Dean, studied Dean, wanted to know why Dean would do this, why he would do that, what his process was for deciding how to fill the empty moment. Looking back at that glossy of him on the chopper, Peter figured, who better to have as his own riding partner—and director—than Hopper, who’d taken that road with Dean?
“That’s it!” snapped Fonda, jolted out of his red-flocked haze—“It’s not about one hundred Angels on the way to a Hells Angels funeral. It’s about these two guys ridin’ across John Ford’s West.”
It’d be just like The Searchers, with Big Duke on the trail from snowy Gunnison, Colorado, to Mexican Hat, Utah, hunting for his orphaned niece played by Natalie Wood, who’d been kidnapped by Comanche. Naturally Fonda would be Big Duke, being the Big Duke of biker Flicks, only he wouldn’t be going west but east, like the seeker in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. And Fonda wouldn’t really be Big Duke, but more like Wyatt Earp, whom his father once played, or better yet, Captain America! He’d need a floppy-hatted sidekick, of course. Maybe they’d call him Bucky—or Billy? Like Billy the Kid!
So who would play Natalie, the living embodiment of the hero’s doomed existential quest?
Dig this. America. Far-out. Only they wouldn’t find her. Anywhere. Fonda picked up the phone.
EASY RIDER
This is my fucking movie, and nobody’s taking my fucking movie away from me!” Hopper screamed in the New Orleans Airport Hilton parking lot on a miserable early February morning in 1968 with unnaturally freezing temperatures and forecasted snow. Kicking off the first day of shooting on Easy Rider during Mardi Gras, somehow Hopper didn’t seem like the same director who, all mellow, had told his cast and crew in California days earlier, “This is going to be a group of friends and we’re a
ll our own person. Do your own thing.”
The assembled actors, documentary filmmakers, photographers, audiophiles, and assorted groovy characters listening to his parking lot tirade had been plucked from the underground LA movie scene. They’d been told they’d be taking a semidocumentary approach to the shoot, playing it loose, rolling with whatever came their way on the manic streets of Mardi Gras. Amid the chaos of drunkards, frat boys, and drag queens, they were to film the climactic scene of Easy Rider when the bikers Wyatt and Billy—Fonda and Hopper—traipse about with two whores from Madame Tinkertoy’s bordello on their way to drop acid in one of the city’s famous above ground cemeteries.
Billy and Wyatt riding choppers, Easy Rider, 1969
Copyright © Bettmann/CORBIS
Shivering in her costume of fishnet stockings and a glittery silver wisp of a dress, frizzy-haired Karen Black couldn’t believe they were actually in New Orleans shooting among all these people.
“My God,” she had thought when she first met Hopper in LA. “He’s very full of life and energy.” Immediately taken by his idiosyncratic, peculiar sort of genius, she typed up a contract for herself since her agent was out of town. For $300 she now found herself locked in a New Orleans antiques shop with the other actress cast as a bordello whore, vivacious, black-haired Toni Basil, because Hopper didn’t want to misplace anyone.
“Okay, okay, come out, come out. Okay, are you there? Are you there?”
“Yeah, we’re here. What do you want us to do?”
Flying in from New York to join the party was the screenwriter. Instead of hiring some nobody to write the script, Fonda had wooed Terry Southern, hot off of writing the screenplay for Barbarella, a space-age sex romp starring sister Jane. And just like some fucking writer, Terry had proceeded to change, in his own nomenclature, the “wrong-o” title of Hopper and Fonda’s biker movie, which they originally called The Loners. Squaresville. Terry rechristened it Easy Rider, using the lingo for a whore’s old man: not a pimp, just the guy who wants the easy ride.
