Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  HOPPER!

  “We have done this scene three hundred fucking times,” called out an exasperated Coppola. “Would you just do it once my way?”

  “Your fuckin’ way? I could’ve made Easy Rider five times with all the fucking film you’ve lost here! What is your fuckin’ way?”

  Frederic Forrest couldn’t believe it. Hopper didn’t need some director yakkin’ to him. He knew how to create an unforgettable character within himself. He was a rebel, always. Hopper was their whole generation, like a comet shooting across the sky. He was an extension of Jimmy, but all his own. So what if Jimmy was a fake Brando—the Warhol soup can to the real soup can? If Hopper was a fake Jimmy, then he was really a genius too! Forrest admired Hopper more than any other actor because he wouldn’t let the system put him down. Like a star in the firmament with Jimmy, Hopper had his own light.

  Hopper stayed at the Kurtz temple, remaining there in character for the rest of his shoot. The day he left for Germany for his next role—to star as the psychopathic Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend—Hopper was all of a sudden shaven, cleaned up. You wouldn’t know it was the same human being! He’d totally changed.

  So was he insane or was it just for the shoot? The cast and crew placed bets among themselves.

  Hopper left them all and boarded the plane, departing victorious. Going head-to-head with Brando and, dare one say, coming out on top, had freed him in a way. He’d killed the Buddha, as Eastern-tinged Brando might have put it, or as Jim Morrison wailed at the end of Apocalypse Now, playing over the ritual butchering of Colonel Kurtz:

  Father?

  Yes, son?

  I want to kill you?

  Mother? I want to . . . fuuccc—

  Now that he’d taken on the father, all that was left was his mother.

  MEXICO

  Dennis is wanting me to go to Mexico to meet some friends of his,” Andy Warhol wrote in his diary on March 8, 1979. “Dennis and his group always did know all the rich people, but they’re so sixties and they’re crazy.”

  Still hopeful that he could find an audience who would appreciate his masterpiece, Hopper was promoting The Last Movie in Mexico. Aside from a stint in Paris, he mostly lived in Mexico City in the late seventies, working when asked and doing research for The Death Ship, a film he wanted to base on the book by enigmatic author B. Traven. Virtually every detail of Traven’s life was up for debate and hotly disputed. Hopper discovered many theories about this chimera’s true identity, some wildly fantastic.

  SHADOWY FIGURE OF B. TRAVEN

  EMERGES IN RECENT STUDIES

  Variety

  May 2, 1979

  His name is B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Death Ship. But his film name was “Hal Croves,” under which he worked with John Huston on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and signed the register of Berlin’s Kempinksi Hotel while attending the premiere (or a subsequent showing) of the German production of The Death Ship. Since his death a decade ago, on March 26, 1969, in Mexico City, a filmmaker (Dennis Hopper) and a doctoral candidate in contemporary literature have tackled the mystery.

  Dennis was on location scouting around Cuernavaca, reportedly with Jack Nicholson, who was slated to star in the movie. Only it never materialized. Jack rocketed farther into the stratosphere with his role as Jack the writer who goes off the deep end in The Shining.

  Hopper submerged himself deeper in B. Traven, an obsession shared with Dean Stockwell.

  “I honest to God can’t remember why in the hell the both of us were there,” recalled Stockwell of the time they found themselves in a Mexico City hotel.

  Dean heard this commotion goin’ on upstairs in Dennis’s room. It turned out that Dennis had locked and bolted himself in their room and was making a big scene, having practically kidnapped a woman in there, scaring her to death. He was throwing knives. Dean saw them stickin’ through the door. Hopper would pull ’em out and go back to the end of the room and start throwin’ ’em again.

  Finally the police broke down the door and they subdued Hopper, brought him downstairs to the lobby. They were going to arrest Dean too.

  By pure happenstance, this Mexican aristocrat with a pompadour was walking in. This high-level guy had met Dennis a couple days before. He interceded and got them out of there.

  “We flew out the next day,” said Dean, “or else we both would’ve been in a fuckin’ Mexican jail.”

  BLUE MOVIE

  You buy a bag of popcorn and go to the movie house and sit there and say, ‘Oh boy! I’m going to see a movie.’ Well, it’s not going to be Cary Grant anymore, but I’ll take a Dennis Hopper movie over most any day,” said Don Gordon, the actor who starred in Bullitt with Steve McQueen. “Hey, the guy was an artist. His art was about collecting paintings, making movies, taking pictures and making pictures. It was about having women and living life to the fullest. You have to understand when you are talking about Dennis, all of it is really all bundled up into one. It’s like the Medusa, man. His movies are like the Medusa head. It’s all snakes and things, but if you look at it very carefully, and it doesn’t turn you to stone? It’s coooool.”

  “Don, it’s Dennis. You gotta come right away. You gotta save my film. You gotta come up here to Canada and save my film. I’m in trouble!”

  Don Gordon hung up the phone and called bullshit on that one. Don knew he wasn’t gonna save his movie, but Hopper needed a good actor for his comeback movie he’d inherited, Out of the Blue. Hopper always surprised Don. They’d be filming one scene and then all of a sudden, hop to another—

  “What the f—?”

  “No, no,” Don told himself. “Don’t go there, don’t even think about whether it makes sense, or it doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to Dennis. So he’s gonna put it all together. Someday.”

  “What are we gonna do today?”

  This had happened early one morning during Don’s stint acting in Peru, for chrissakes, on The Last Movie, way back when, up in the Andes.

  “Well, we’re gonna shoot the scene with the two girls and you getting drunk on Pisco Sours.”

  “Dennis, I don’t drink anymore.”

  “Aw, come on, have one Pisco Sour.”

  “Aw, fuck it, whatever happens happens.”

  Cut to 1979. Stepping in at the last minute to replace the original director, Hopper was directing his first film since The Last Movie. He had named it Out of the Blue after his friend Neil Young’s song about a forgotten burnout, which Dennis happened to hear on the car radio on his way to the first day of shooting. His film starred teenage Linda Manz as a young girl so into punk music that the only adult she admires is Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. Her ex-con, truck-driver dad, played by Hopper, loves her so much that he tries to get into her cotton panties.

  Don could tell that Dennis was still a little fucked up, but just like everyone gets once in a while, right? Knowing Dennis, Don felt he knew approximately where his head was, so he just went with the flow. Often, the cast sat around waiting and wondering.

  It wasn’t up to Don to know, he’d tell them. This was Hopper’s movie. Don came from the old school. The director’s the boss. You do what you’re told. You wait until somebody comes along and says, “Go home,” or “We’ll start shooting in ten minutes.” So Don waited—nine hours.

  “Well, fuck that. I’m not gonna sit around for nine hours!” Don banged on the door. “I’m goin’ home. That’s it. Fuck it. I’m outta here. I’m packin’ my bags!”

  Dennis opened the door and they did a little bit of shooting and the next day everything was okay.

  “Whatever happened to Linda Manz?” asked Don. “I liked the kid. I liked her a lot. To me she was a special kind of actor. Out of the Blue is a kind of dream movie for me. It’s its own movie. It’s its own story.”

  “Here’s Don Gordon; he was his buddy,” said Linda Manz, paging through her sticker-strewn scrapbook. The enigmatic cult actress had mysteriously disappear
ed from Hollywood years ago to live hidden away somewhere in the deserts of Southern California.

  “That’s Out of the Blue. That’s Dennis. When he first met me, or I met him, he grabbed me by the clothes and put me up against the elevator to say hello. I thought that was wild. Good times. Happy times. Got to work with all these great actors, directors, sometimes I think, ‘Do they ever think about me?’ I dunno.”

  Turning a page, she brightened. “That’s me. Who’s on my T-shirt? Probably Fonzie. I always thought I was the reincarnation of James Dean ’cause everybody said I looked like James Dean. I even got his widow’s peak. I think Dennis Hopper’s awesome. I always did. I had a lot of fun with Dennis. Both of us, we kept it real.”

  THE GAS

  Dennis had been traveling on the tracks, back and forth, only to skip off to Australia, then the Philippines, Germany, Paris, Mexico City, and Canada. In ’79, he tucked himself away in the Sunset Marquis, the real-life Hotel California, secluded off of Sunset Strip. If those walls could talk.

  Nearly all grown up, Desiree was with him and had never seen Hopper so fucked up. Something had happened to his brain. It seemed to be melting. He was all crumpled, really dirty. She put him in the bathtub and scrubbed him. That night they went out to dinner at the Imperial Gardens Japanese restaurant on the Strip. Dennis introduced her to Ringo Starr. The next morning there was a knock on the door. Hopper hadn’t told Desiree he was doing voiceovers for a movie. The production had come to pick him up, and he was really out of it. Desiree had to shape him up.

  Before he left, Hopper asked her to get him some amyl nitrate.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the gas you inhale. You know, it gives you a buzz. All the gay guys are doing it at the clubs. When I come back today, just have some.”

  “Where do I get it?”

  “A head shop.”

  “Can I get it? I’m eighteen.”

  “Yeah, you can get it.”

  sniffffffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

  The gas induced an intense short-lived euphoria, a bit like a head rush or standing up too fast. His head felt like it was going to explode and he heard his heart thumping in his ears, coming like a train piercing the darkness, flushing his maniacal face. This was a sick little game they were playing.

  “Mommy, MOMMMMEEEEEEE!!!”

  “Okay,” said Desiree, “I’m not taking this.”

  Desiree didn’t need this shit. When he got crazy, she’d always say, “You’re getting crazy now. Stop it!”

  The other girls who saw Hopper would just go, “Oh, that’s Dennis. Do whatever you want to me. Beat me.”

  Acting like a good mommy, Desiree took his amyl away.

  “No, you’re not having this. You can’t handle this and you’re fucked up and we gotta get you sober, and you’re working.”

  So she cleaned him up, again, sent his clothes out to the laundry, did all that stuff. She started feeling positive about Hopper. They’d decided when she was old enough, say twenty-five, they’d have a kid and name him Henry. Like Hathaway.

  Desiree left after Dean Stockwell came over, ready to party. She couldn’t control Hopper when Dean was around.

  Watching golf out of the corner of his eye, Dean recalled those years.

  “I just temporarily left this reality and got involved in another reality that was very primal and had a lot to do with good and evil,” he said. “I’d been doing a lot of amphetamines, so I’m sure that was a contributing factor. It’s impossible to explain. You just leave one reality, and go into another reality, and are fully in this new reality that is incompatible with regular reality.”

  Dean found himself in Cedars-Sinai hospital in LA on the third-floor. The psycho ward.

  “I was in there for a few months gettin’ pumped full of Thorazine. A couple years later, Dennis had his episode. He went off the edge. You’re aware of that, right?”

  DYNAMITE DEATH CHAIR

  Stick around after the race, folks! Watch a famous Hollywood film personality perform the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act. That’s right, folks, he’ll sit in a chair with six sticks of dynamite and light the fuse!”

  The carnival barker roared over the loudspeakers at the Big H Motors Speedway outside of Houston. Earlier that evening, Hopper had screened Out of the Blue for a group of Rice University students. Kind of arty, but here at the Big H, the human stick of dynamite was sure to please everyone. Hopper had first seen the stunt performed at a rodeo back when he was a farm-raised runt.

  In a disheveled suit and earplugs, his face ashen and going gray at the temples, Hopper sat in the middle of the huge speedway, crouched in a chair laced with dozens of bundled sticks of dynamite surrounding him. He was having trouble with the lighter to spark the fuse under him. Jesus.

  KA-BOOM!

  “Whoa! I want to tell you one thing,” said Hopper emerging stumbling and wide-eyed from a huge blast of smoke. “That ain’t no joke, boys! Whoa! It’s like being hit by Muhammad Ali, man! Beers? It’s a theory I had about how solar systems are made. You see, dynamite doesn’t blow in on itself.”

  THE JUNGLE

  Playing the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Euer Weg Führt durch die Hölle, or Jungle Fever, a German production’s white-hot tale about caged women, Hopper found himself, just before shooting began, wandering in his pajamas in the Mexican jungle after becoming fascinated with some outer-space holograms he saw flashing and dancing in his periphery. He had to follow those lights. He had a cinematic narrative playing in his head that put him in the middle of a war . . .

  A few hours later, the sun came up on naked Hopper walking down a road into the Mexican city of Cuernavaca. He began to masturbate on a tree. The police came to arrest him and tried dressing him.

  “No,” said Hopper. “Kill me like this.”

  Inside a Mexican jail, Hopper thought he heard the cries of his friends getting lined up and machine-gunned down outside. The authorities brought him to a hospital, where his lungs didn’t feel like lungs anymore. Sitting on the airplane, fired from the movie and being sent out of the country, Hopper thought he saw cameras everywhere—floating in the sky, hovering over the silver wings.

  Once again, he was starring in his own movie (within the movie). He even thought he was flanked by a couple of stuntmen. No one else was aware of this, of course, as the plane sat unmoving on the runway. By now Hopper thought the plane was on fire. He busted through an escape hatch and walked out onto the wing.

  THE GAME

  Emerging late one night in the early eighties from partying with the cast of Saturday Night Live, Hopper wandered in disarray down Madison Avenue. As cabs sped by him heading uptown, he ran into his friend and executive producer from The Last Movie, Michael Gruskoff, now dealing in much more successful films like Young Frankenstein.

  “You’re in the game, you play the game,” Gruskoff liked to say. “And this is all a big fuckin’ game.”

  The thing was? Hopper knew the game. He had a lot of calling cards. He directed and starred in a great film, Easy Rider. Gruskoff hadn’t seen many who could play the Hollywood game like Dennis. Only Dennis wanted to play his own game.

  “God, I fell asleep on a couch and I just got up,” Hopper told him of his night with the SNL gang. “I was with these fuckin’ kids; all of them were standing on me when I closed my eyes.”

  Gruskoff took him out for a cup of coffee and gave it to him straight.

  “You are Wild Bill Hickok. You are the fastest gun in the West. You have your rep as being—Nobody can do as much drugs as you. So when these kids see you, who idolize you? They raise you one all the time. There’s a new gun in town. New guns.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” said Hopper. “They put me away. These fuckin’ kids, they put me away. They put me away. I can’t do it like they do.”

  Not long after, Gruskoff saw Hopper at a Hollywood party at Carrie Fisher’s. Hopper was in even worse shape this time. He had to be taken away from Carrie’s party to th
e emergency room.

  “I just know that this time it’s gonna work,” said Dennis’s mother, Marjorie, calling up her cousin Ruth from her home in Lemon Grove.

  Dennis went to drug rehab in Century City to kick his coke habit. This was rehab when it was really fucking rehab.

  Hopper’s whole world was nearly destroyed at this point. This time it was his own decision to make a major overhaul, and there to help was his child bride/surrogate mother figure, Desiree, who thought it was going to be great to see Dennis sober. They were going to have fun again! Every day she went to the hospital and asked him how he was doing.

  “Again, I was hearing voices,” he recalled. “People came to see me. After they left I’d hear them being tortured and murdered.”

  On his first day out in the real world, Desiree took a zonked but sober Hopper to play volleyball at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills. He was on suicide watch and therefore wasn’t allowed to wear a belt, so his pants kept falling off. He hitched up his pants and tried again.

  “Stay here, please. Stay with me. I want you to stay with me,” Dennis pleaded with her.

  “I can’t stay with you. One, you’re in the hospital and you don’t always understand you’re in the hospital ’cause you’re on medication. Two, I’m married.”

  The day he finally got out of rehab, he swore to Tracks director Henry Jaglom he’d never touch anything again.

  “Sure, Dennis,” thought Henry. “You’re gonna be dead in a year or two.”

  FRANK BOOTH

  Frank Booth wriggled out from the darkest recesses of the mind, the embodiment of the ugly evil reality lurking under the gingham-print of small-town America. Envisioning his villain, director David Lynch realized Hopper might just be the perfect one to play Frank Booth. Besides Apocalypse Now, Hopper hadn’t really played a defining role in his career yet, and none of his previous bad guy roles stood out in Lynch’s mind. But he just had a feeling about Hopper as Frank.