Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Rather than take Hopper’s movie away, Bert let him blaze forth. Believing in Hopper’s vision, he figured Dennis just hadn’t had enough time to properly prepare for his New Orleans shoot, with only a week of preproduction because Fonda had miscalculated the start date of Mardi Gras by a month, forcing everyone to hurry up and get there.

  Besides, that Mardi Gras stuff looked kind of trippy. It wasn’t Fonda running around the sand dunes with a dwarf trippy, but trippy. Maybe they could cut it up into something interesting . . .

  Once again, the heavens opened for Dennis as his angel, Bert, bailed him out, out of jail, too, where Hopper stewed after getting busted for smoking a joint on Sunset Strip.

  “They stopped me only because my hair was somewhat long, and I was driving an old car,” bitched Dennis. “They said I’d thrown a roach out of the car, which I had not. Well, I did have this roach in my pocket. Then, in court, they produce as evidence not my roach, which was wrapped in white paper, but somebody else’s roach, which was wrapped in black paper. How ludicrous, man! It was dark, they couldn’t even have seen a black roach!”

  Bert assigned Easy Rider a new production manager, Paul Lewis, who was about the same size as Dennis, also with an outlaw mustache.

  “You and Dennis would be a perfect match,” assured Jack. “He’s finally somebody you can drink with.”

  “I don’t know you,” Hopper told Lewis when he first met him. “I don’t like you. I’m not going to listen to you.”

  So their journey began. They were off for sixteen days to scout locations for the next phase of Easy Rider shooting, wheeling along the gravel paths at the edge of Death Valley towards a mammoth steel bridge spanning the raging Colorado River, leading them into the Venusian landscape of Arizona. Hopper snapped mental Polaroids of the pop art of America, picked up by his senses along the roadside, all to be used someway, somehow. The pink-and-blue neon 76 circle atop the Pine Breeze Motel. The giant Paul Bunyan guarding the pancake house with his axe. The Santa Fe logo emblazoned on those old grounded railroad cars.

  Past the Sacred Mountain gas station, the highway led to the woodsy north dotted with ponderosas. The Painted Desert’s reds, oranges, and pinks led Hopper ever closer to the craggy peaks and cinematic heights of Monument Valley, the land where Big Duke, looking down on the Comanche encampment below, finally found what he was searching for.

  “Dennis, close the window. It’s cold.”

  “No, I have to look and see. The window distorts the colors. I can’t see colors when I have the window closed. Look at the red on the road! We gotta shoot this red on the road—so we get a feeling of changing road.”

  This dialogue went on some eighteen hours a day. One night, Hopper and Lewis stopped at a bar in Farmington, New Mexico, where the local hotel was hosting a big convention of state police. Hopper had hair down to his shoulders, and Lewis had even longer hair.

  “Let’s put ’em up against the wall and see if they stick,” someone threatened.

  “We’re never gonna get out of the fuckin’ bar alive,” said Lewis. Hopper just laughed. They got back into the car.

  “You gotta let me drive, man!”

  “No.”

  Riding down the path from Los Alamos, Lewis reached a fork in the road. Hopper and Lewis were arguing about how to get to Santa Fe, and somehow they went due north, the wrong direction, gravitating ever closer to Taos Mountain, a magnet for weirdos ever since the bearded conquistador Captain Hernando de Alvarado had approached it in 1540 scouting for Coronado’s crazy quest to find the Seven Cities of Gold.

  Hopper knew of Taos as an artist’s colony, but he wasn’t looking for an artists’ colony; he was looking for a commune to film the commune scene in Easy Rider. As luck would have it, he found himself riding into the village of Arroyo Hondo, outside of Taos.

  At the New Buffalo Commune, city kids who had never worked outdoors before dipped soft hands into grain sacks, scattering seeds across 103 acres of high desert, planting corn and beans. Beautiful girls in billowy ankle-length dresses came back with currants picked by the Rio Grande. Brown goats provided milk. A few commune children, playing with matches, burned down the hay wall of the main building, torching the kitchen, but miraculously cooking to perfection the deer and a pot of chicos and beans. So the commune had a feast the day before rebuilding. Getting in touch with his own wild man, Timothy Leary came.

  Living in teepees, New Buffalo was in the midst of rebuilding its dream—even more natural this time—working in tandem with the Tiwa Indians of the nearby Taos Pueblo, with Little Joe Gomez teaching the palefaces how to make adobe bricks from the mud pits. Reality hit hard one winter, leaving the earthlings of New Buffalo to eat horsemeat they scraped up from road kill and kasha, only slightly tastier than starving.

  The commune was living pretty close to the bone, but for Dennis, it was a glimpse of Eden he would portray in Easy Rider, with nymphs frolicking in hot springs, giving thanks for their meager food with a simple, “Amen, let’s eat.”

  “I mean, it was like very mystical to me,” said Hopper. “And I kept trying to get out of town and an Indian would come and say, ‘The mountain is smiling on you. You must come and see this; you must come see that.’”

  Hopper fell in love with a woman in Taos. With his marriage to Brooke on the rocks, it was hard for him to pull away from the spontaneous love found under Taos Mountain and continue with his movie, but he swore to himself he’d come back on his chopper to film Billy and Captain America, riding through Taos Pueblo. Split in two by a raging river fed by the sacred Blue Lake, the Tiwa place of creation, the bikers would ride into the commune, back from where they came after a thousand-year journey.

  “I’ve got to get back to the country,” swore Hopper. “To an earth feeling, like when I was a kid. Taos, man. Taos, New Mexico. There’s freedom there. They don’t mind long hair. The herds mingle.”

  The dream lingered for Hopper at an expensive Manhattan restaurant with glowing Tiffany lamps and Victorian trappings. Across the table was Fonda, Terry Southern, and Terry’s fellow shit-kicking Texan, Rip Torn, whom Terry raved about as having the greatest range of any living American actor, with the possible exception of Brando. Writers.

  Terry loved to go on and on with his highfalutin’ literary references, reminding Dennis how he’d written a part into Easy Rider that was modeled after one of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County characters, a brilliant young attorney who preferred getting liquored up on sour mash with the local yokels, despite his ability to talk fluently about Einstein with physics professors. Terry said he wrote it specifically for Rip Torn.

  Yoknapa-whata the fuck? Hopper wasn’t directing a book, and he didn’t want some writer taking credit for his fucking movie. And he sure as shit didn’t want Rip Torn, another fucking Texan, stealing any of his goddamn screen time.

  Filthy and road weary after his sixteen-day scouting trip, Hopper commenced fighting words, ranting about how things were so rough out there in Texas, he had to fly over the goddamn state to location scout in Louisiana because he was afraid they’d catch him and cut off his hair with a rusty razor.

  Rip stood up for the Lone Star State, so Hopper went for the steak knife on the table. Or was it a butter knife? Things were getting blurry at this late hour for Hopper the guerrilla artist, ready to attack any restriction on his sensibilities.

  HOPPER AND JACK’S ACID TRIP

  Setting on the Rio Grande, the sun cut through to the south, hovering just above eye level. Hopper was eight thousand feet high at the D. H. Lawrence Ranch on Lobo Mountain. Having finished the last day of shooting in Taos for Easy Rider, he’d taken Jack Nicholson on a pilgrimage to the shrine of old D.H., the ruddy, red-bearded writer who had lived and was buried here at the Kiowa Ranch near San Cristobal, outside of Taos. After he died, his wife, Frieda, had his body exhumed from its resting place in Italy. She sent him back to the land he loved best. Lying in front of D.H.’s tomb, Dennis Hopper, whose initials matched the writer�
�s, noticed how the insects circled above in a relationship with the light from the sun.

  “That’s really what we are,” said Jack. “Just insects.”

  Maybe for Jack, but life as an insect clashed with the magnitude of Hopper’s vision for himself of resurrecting the movies, the equal of which rose upon the tomb, the phoenix rising out of the ashes, the symbol of Lawrence’s failed utopia of Rananim. Believing man’s only salvation was to return in haste to his primal nature, Lawrence had invited luminaries such as E. M. Forster to join, but in the end was able to convince only Frieda and a dotty, deaf, aristocratic Englishwoman who lived in a small cabin on the ranch with her ear trumpet named Toby.

  Hopper and Jack were now sitting on old D.H.’s tomb as the full moon cast a timeless glow over a big pine tree, which forty years before, in the 1920s, Lawrence had called his guardian spirit. In the morning, he would lean against his tree with his notebook, frail in body but with his bobble head full of ideas, and struggle with his place on earth. Ignoring his tubercular lungs, he spit blood while writing a story about a terrifying black stallion, perhaps the only beast he could ride to his ill-fated Rananim. Hopper and Jack told themselves they were going to make their stand in life here at Rananim. If Easy Rider wanted to go on, the movie would have to come here and get them because this was where they were and this was where they’d be. They were very tripped out on acid.

  A little later, Hopper and Jack found themselves bubbling in a hot spring, swimming naked with a beautiful Indian woman.

  “Let’s run a little,” said Jack, his voice echoing.

  The woman drove a truck as the boys ran back and forth in front of the headlights.

  “We’re geniuses. You know that,” Jack yelled out to Dennis. “We’re both geniuses! Isn’t it great to be a genius?”

  It was almost sunrise, and Jack needed to get someplace where he could see the dawn. He climbed to the top of a forty-foot tree and breathed in his surroundings. A big white rock that lay in a meadow below suddenly stood and reared up, turning into a white horse.

  Jack thought he’d peaked on the acid, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  The alabaster horse rose up on its muscular hindquarters like D.H.’s powerful stallion. Only white. The beast’s tail wound around, a propeller or a crank of a machine winding to life, as if the creature were about to take off.

  Later that day, on the set of Easy Rider, Jack waltzed out from the police station into the street of Las Vegas, New Mexico, a town near Taos. A nip of Jack Daniel’s before the cameras, a slight detour from the script.

  “Well, here’s to the first of the day, fellas,” said Jack. “To old D. H. Lawrence.”

  Jack took his sip and gave the ol’ nic, nic, nic, pumping his armpit like a wild turkey, a tic he’d picked up from one of the monkey wrenches in the crew who worked on the motorcycles.

  After Hopper had brandished that knife at Rip Torn, Jack had managed to land the part of the alcoholic lawyer. Why not? Who else could work under a crazy knife-wielding director? Hopping on the back of Hopper’s bike and wearing a gold high school football helmet, Jack got ready for his stoned awakening in the scene around the campfire under a nighttime sky. Filled with UFOs, man.

  “They’ve been coming here since 1946 when the scientists first started bouncing radar beams off of the moon,” explained Jack’s character of the UFO-transported Venusians. “And they have been living and working among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about ’em.”

  “What are you talking—man?” asked Hopper.

  “Umm, well, you’ve just seen one of them, didn’t ye?”

  “Hey man, I saw something, man, but I didn’t see ’em working here. You know what I mean?”

  “Well, they are people just like us,” said Jack, laying on the charm. “Their society is more highly evolved. I mean they don’t have no wars; they got no monetary system; they don’t have any leaders because, I mean, each man is a leader.”

  “Wow,” said Fonda.

  “I think it’s a crackpot idea,” said Hopper. “I mean if they’re so smart, why don’t they just reveal themselves to us and get it over with?”

  “Because if they did,” said Jack, a knowing glint in his eyes, “it would cause a general panic.”

  Jack, in his first role as Jack, was brilliant. A huge hit.

  “I’m making a movie that’s like nothing else!” Hopper told the New Buffalo commune.

  “They wanted to cater,” recalled its founder Rick Klein, looking back from his mountain chamber strewn with crystals. “But we were happy eating brown rice.”

  New Buffalo refused to let Hopper film the Easy Rider commune scene at their earthen home (usually welcome to all God’s children), so a fake commune had to be built in the Santa Monica Mountains outside LA. Living for the duration of the shoot in Hopper’s movie commune, the extras, listless souls who usually slept around Topanga Canyon, were entertained by the troubadours of the Gorilla Theater, a riff on the guerrilla theater performed by that offshoot of the Diggers. (“We took offense to that,” said Peter Coyote on behalf of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.) For the communal mealtime scene, everyone held hands in a circle and gave thanks for their meager bounty grown on the rocky soil with a simple “Amen,” spoken by a bearded, emaciated, blond Bobby Walker, cast as the commune leader, wearing a light-blue polka-dot work shirt. The drifting hippies, fucking around in nature, weren’t intense enough for Hopper’s Billy, depressed by the commune kids with their asinine Gorilla Theater troupe dressed up like fools in leotards.

  “Man, look, I gotta get out of here, man. We got things we want to do, man,” said Billy.

  Bobby knew it was his real-life karma to be left behind by Hopper. Somehow Bobby knew he and Hopper would really—diverge. Bobby sensed Hopper’s deep thirst for acceptance and need for his work to be acknowledged by millions. Hopper longed for the world’s love, like a mother’s encouragement: “Wow, Dennis, look at what you’ve done!”

  It just wasn’t Bobby’s particular trip. His trip, in 1968, was just to bob and bob and bob in the ocean. He’d found a company that built escape pods for oil platforms. This pod was round, twenty feet in diameter with a little motor and the ability to bob practically for an eternity in the sea. Bob was entranced by its terrific organic shape. He wasn’t even gonna use the motor. He was going to set himself, his wife, and their three little kids adrift and just float around the world with the currents—going with the flow.

  Behind two sets of big, square movie-star shades, Billy and Captain America revved up their choppers and hit the open road. Wearing a groovy embroidered blouse and black leather pants, Fonda had also become a little sick of utopia. Off the set, he looked at the hippie, love, and flower power movement and considered all those guys who started fuckin’ communes misogynists. Were they fucking kidding? Yeah, his eyes were open.

  Peter didn’t share the same love Dennis had for Taos. It didn’t help that while filming the hot springs scene, the Big Duke of biker flicks caught bronchial pneumonia after Hopper insisted Peter jump into the freezing waters of the Rio Hondo that flowed down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (because the real hot springs Hopper scouted on his road trip were now under two feet of muddy runoff). Hopper constantly needled Peter throughout the shooting of Easy Rider, challenging him physically and mentally, as if he were expensive china fit only for the soft sands of Malibu Colony.

  Dennis’s marriage also fell apart during the making of his movie. He finally granted Brooke the divorce she had filed for around the time he broke her nose (and the windshield). He’d never forget her acid remark the day he started Easy Rider—“You are going after fool’s gold,” a line Brooke swore she never delivered.

  “That didn’t read too well with me,” said Hopper. “Brooke is groovy. We even have a beautiful little girl. But you don’t say that to me, man, about something I’ve waited fifteen years—no, all my life—to do.”

  Cast from the Fonda dynasty for good, Hop
per came to believe that Fonda had plotted against him after Mardi Gras, in that Shakespearean-worthy conspiracy to take his movie away from him. He believed Fonda inched him out of percentage points of Easy Rider, movie points that were as valuable as any gold mine ever hit in the wilds of California.

  Billy and Captain America had really tapped a vein with their great biker flick. Opening on July 14, 1969, Easy Rider made all its money back in the first week—“in one theater,” said Hopper—and it kept on flowing like manna from the heavens. The film that cost only $340,000 to make—in seven weeks—hit the scene by making upward of $40 million, with more to rain down.

  Lines wound around the block at the Beekman Theatre in New York. Pot smoke wafted out of bathroom stalls, mingling with the smell of popcorn as young theatergoers lit up doobies in cahoots with Wyatt and Billy. Inspired by their epic American journey, seekers wanted to move to Taos and live in communes, and on the other side of all this peace and love, other types of thrill seekers were starting to score coke, because it was the hip new thing, because Billy and Wyatt dealt it. Businessmen began hitting the chop shops to buy customized Harleys. Scholars and academics wrote long treatises on the apocalyptic final scene when Captain America’s chopper explodes in a fiery blaze on some nowhere stretch of highway after two rednecks blow Billy and Wyatt away—for having long hair.

  An entire generation asked, “What did it mean when Wyatt told Billy, ‘We blew it’?”

  “Tell me,” said British talk show host David Frost, interviewing the boys after Easy Rider became a megahit. “The film has become a sort of cause célèbre. Are you at all surprised by that? Or did you have a sort of germ of a thought that you were going to become a prophet, p-h-e-t, as well as p-r-o-f-i-t?”