Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Hopper appealed the Torn ruling and the result came back to bite. The judge fined him even more. It cost Hopper a pretty penny to tell what would be his million-dollar anecdote. How would he ever make up the bread?

  HOPPER’S OWN

  It was the role of a lifetime, reminiscent of Patton, the film opening with the great George C. Scott standing in front of a giant unfurled American flag in his uniform, delivering a speech to his troops—“Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”

  Fringed by an enormous Nike flag in his stripes, referee Hopper took in the powerful feeling of performing for the 1995 Super Bowl before the biggest audience he’d ever have. Well, why not? Paul Newman was hawking his own salad dressing and Fig Newmans.

  Next up was Waterworld, a Mad Max rip-off originally to be a Roger Corman film.

  “I play a golf fanatic called the Deacon,” Hopper told his friend Jean Stein, Dr. Stein’s daughter, for her literary magazine. “The movie is set in a water world after the ice caps have melted. But the Deacon knows there’s land out there somewhere and he’s got to find it because he wants to play golf. First he’s going to drill for oil to fuel his jet skis and war machinery. Then he’s going to start by building an eighteen-hole golf course. But he wants to have plenty of land for expansion, thirty-six holes, forty-eight holes, seventy-two holes.”

  The role was close to his heart. Hopper had picked up the game in Texas while filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in which he was Lefty, an ex–Texas Ranger who packs a pair of chainsaws in his holsters—

  “Keep hitting the ball straight toward the hole until you hear the turkey gobble,” Willie Nelson cryptically instructed at his nine-hole Pedernales Cut-N-Putt golf course in Spicewood, Texas.

  Hopper tried joining the elite at Sherwood Country Club located among the glens in Thousand Oaks, California, where Errol Flynn once played the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. Jack Nicholson got in. Hopper didn’t.

  “He’s charming in the locker room, so I hear,” said Hopper. Not that he would know.

  Unfit to frolic on Sherwood’s greens, Hopper joined his band of merry men—Joe Pesci, Neil Young, Bob Dylan. The quartet retreated to a Japanese-owned public course tucked in a canyon above Malibu. Hopper didn’t have much of a swing; he couldn’t hit the ball very far. But he really liked golf. And Joe Pesci was incredible.

  One day, on the links with a golfing buddy, Hopper was feeling lousy with an upset stomach. After three or four holes he finally said something.

  “Aw man, I feel like shit.”

  “Quit!”

  “No man, I’m gonna go on. I’m gonna go on.”

  He made it to the ninth hole. Then he puked all over the side of the green.

  “Will you go home, man?”

  It turned out Hopper had passed a gallstone. He’d been in unbelievable agony and still wouldn’t leave the course. He was very passionate about golf.

  Shooting off a Hawaiian island, decked out in a postapocalyptic eye patch, codpiece, and long Western-style duster, Hopper swung his rusty golf putter. He had shaved his head himself for the role and, letting his hands travel across his skull, felt the texture and uneven shape of his head. Squiggly little veins raised like rivers on a melon. It irked him. He didn’t like it.

  60 MINUTES TAKE TWO

  STARRING DENNIS HOPPER

  CHARLIE ROSE

  The biggest mistake of your life was making The Last Movie.

  DENNIS HOPPER

  The Last Movie and moving to Taos, New Mexico.

  CHARLIE ROSE

  Do you assess this career as a . . .?

  DENNIS HOPPER

  As a failure? I mean, I think I would. There are moments that I have had some real brilliance, you know? I think there were moments. Sometimes in a career, moments are enough.

  There was a moment in 1987’s Straight to Hell, a punk spaghetti Western. Dennis played a bad guy who sells an arsenal of guns to more bad guys. Handing over the goods, a whole bunch of gangsters charge in through the door, guns drawn, looking blank. Hopper looks at them and laughs, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” It wasn’t in the script. It was just his reaction when they came through the door. It set everyone on edge for the scene. Now what’s gonna happen?

  There was also the time he played a drug smuggler for the Medellín cartel on Doublecrossed, a low-budget cable production filmed in the middle of nowhere. Hopper hit a note, late one night, that moved the dog-tired crew to stop what they were doing and applaud.

  Another cheap film was with Peter Coyote. Hopper’s old actor friend from the San Francisco Mime Troupe mentioned how Sweet Willie Tumbleweed had been shot in the head, leaving one arm and one leg paralyzed, and the old Diggers wanted to buy him a three-wheel motorcycle so he could continue to ride with the Angels. Dennis whipped out his checkbook and wrote a ten-thousand-dollar check without blinking—“a very classy way of acknowledging the debt,” said Coyote, adding, “I know he had a little mournfulness that he never had the career of Anthony Hopkins, and he didn’t take care of his life in a way to do that. But by God, everything he did, even if it was a cheesy piece of crap, he made it more interesting.”

  Hopper’s unique genius made a big hit at the video store, haunted by troubled souls who dug Christopher Walken. They flocked to watch River’s Edge on VHS, with Hopper playing Feck, a hermit who dances the night away with a rubber sex doll. Finely attuned to giving people what they wanted, former video store clerk Quentin Tarantino at last paired the two together for True Romance, his movie about a boy and girl who hit the road after a cocaine score. Hopper played the easygoing cop who in his last moments on earth educates Walken, an icy Sicilian gangster, about the peculiar genetic makeup of his heritage.

  HOPPER

  You’re part eggplant.

  WALKEN

  You’re a cantaloupe.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Tarantino raved to Hopper, “you and Chris together in that scene in True Romance? That should go into a time capsule.”

  He’d be perfectly preserved then in the year 2068, when the Leader of Biker Heaven descends on an American wasteland and barks the order.

  LEADER OF BIKER HEAVEN

  Billy, don’t you understand? You guys really believed in the American Dream! The dreamer may die, but the dream is immortal. Give them back that dream, bikers—give them their new flag. Will you do it?

  Hopper needed to think. Idealism could sure make you broke. He had four ex-wives and alimonies to pay.

  THE GUGGENHEIM GANG

  Thousands gazed on the genuine—but fake—star-spangled Captain America chopper for the Guggenheim’s The Art of the Motorcycle exhibit displayed up the museum’s spiral ramp in New York City. All the real choppers from Easy Rider had been stolen during the filming or blown up for the final scene, so Captain America’s was a stand-in, reflected in Frank Gehry–designed stainless steel mirror panels specially installed for the show. Sponsored by BMW, the 1998 summer blockbuster drew the largest crowd in Guggenheim history, filling the museum’s coffers and fueling its ever-expanding global ambitions.

  Around the same time, Hopper was recruited to join the so-called Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, a celebrity gang of bikers who toured far-flung corners of the earth pimping for the museum. Star power on BMW-sponsored crotch rockets, wherever the Guggenheim staked ground in the name of art, Hopper and his gang would go.

  Straddling his sleek Beamer, Hopper took off on a hundred-mile ride through southern Nevada to herald the arrival of the fabulous new Guggenheim Las Vegas, which was planned to open the following year. When his friend and fellow biker supermodel Lauren Hutton crashed her objet d’art along Nevada State Route 167, some twenty-five miles east of their final destination, the trip was cut tragically short. Miraculously surviving the crash with a punctured lung and broken bones, Hutton was ready to jump on the back of Hopper’s bike for the pilgrimage back to Vegas the following year.

  After a three-day ride, they rolled in across Death Valley to celebrate the
grand opening of the Guggenheim Las Vegas, kicking off with an encore show of The Art of the Motorcycle. This time, a genuine fake orange-and-yellow Harley-Davidson “Billy Bike,” with a Panhead engine and flames painted on the gas tank, gleamed next to Captain America’s fake chopper.

  Next stop for Hopper? The Arabian desert to hype for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Then Saint Petersburg!

  Cruising past Russian peasants lining the route, Hopper skirted critics who damned the BMW-sponsored Guggenheim road show as a harbinger of a fast track to a global cultural wasteland wrought by corporate America. If only Jack Nicholson in a gold football helmet was riding on the back, reminding, “It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold on the marketplace.”

  Sprouting a goatee, Hopper played his Artist role to the hilt at Hugo Boss’s fabulous Fifth Avenue flagship store in Manhattan.

  “Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol were all in the tradition of artists who finger-pointed,” he said to a reporter on the store’s red carpet with no hint of irony. “They exposed the ills of a too-commercial culture.”

  His Hugo Boss exhibition featured enormous billboard-sized paintings created from his old sixties photographs, which he’d transformed into large-scale works like those once showcased on the Strip.

  “I’ve got this amazing show here,” raved the Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Krens on seeing Hopper’s exhibit, picking up the phone and calling the head of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

  A shrewd commercial player, Krens had recently hooked up with the Hermitage for yet another Guggenheim museum in Vegas—this time the Guggenheim Hermitage, located in the Venetian Hotel’s fake Venice with its fake Grand Canal, fake Doge’s Palace, and real Japanese tourists taking photos on the fake Bridge of Sighs.

  Hopper returned to Russia for his art exhibition at the Hermitage, proud to be the first living American artist ever shown there. He rode his sleek Euro crotch rocket in his black-and-white leather BMW biker getup from Saint Petersburg to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, ready to schlock for a Solomon Guggenheim Fund–organized exhibition, Art in America, serving up three hundred years of American art.

  “Fuck Heineken,” screamed Frank Booth from somewhere inside him. “Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

  Trailing in his wake was a pack of filthy-rich Russian oligarchs who’d joined his three-day motorcycle ride through the Russian countryside.

  “Putin wanted to meet me!” said Hopper of the former KGB agent. “I guess he’s seen a lot of bad guys. He shook my hand and said, ‘I love your work.’”

  Back in Venice Beach, he’d been filling his compound with art with an urgency to replace what he’d lost—first with the divorce from Brooke, then when the IRS cleaned out his place in Taos. Some art dealer friend wanted to sell him back a painting he’d lost, whose value had skyrocketed.

  “Man, fuck that guy. You know how much I bought that fuckin’ painting for? Fuck that guy!”

  Hopper felt completely comfortable ranting to his assistant, Gary Ebbins, who didn’t know much about modern art when he began working for Hopper. Dennis took time to explain how art evolved to a point where Robert Rauschenberg finding a piece of twisted metal on the freeway was art and not just a schmuck picking up junk.

  “Dennis, there’s a crate.”

  “It’s gotta be the Rauschenberg piece!”

  “You bought a Rauschenberg?”

  “No, no, no, no! Let’s open it up!”

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “It’s Lemon Junction!”

  “Lemon junction?”

  “This is a very fuckin’ valuable piece of art, Gary! We’re gonna hang it!”

  “You and me?”

  “Yeah! We’re gonna put it up on the wall and we’re gonna hang it. Do you realize all the evolutions that art had to go through to get to Lemon Junction, Gary?”

  “I get it. I get it, man! So, Dennis? If I see a piece of metal on the freeway—”

  “No! You can’t even go there. If Gary Ebbins sees a piece of metal on the freeway, it’s still a fuckin’ piece of worthless metal!”

  To one of his Guggenheim biker buddies, Laurence Fishburne, whom he’d been in the shit with back in the fake Nam, Hopper explained how one should look at works of art as friends. And if you don’t like a work? You two simply don’t have to be friends. Walk away.

  Adding to the charm of his picket-fenced Gehry compound was that Hopper was actually friends with the outlaws whose canvases hung on his walls. He knew Keith Haring back when he was tagging New York streets and spoke at Haring’s memorial at Saint John the Divine after he died of AIDS, describing how he “attacked the subway walls with the fierceness of a gunfighter.” Keith’s sexually graphic Moses and the Burning Bush loomed above Hopper from his second-floor home-viewing gallery. It pictured Moses getting the oracle from the burning bush, who’s female.

  “See, here’s the vagina, the breasts—and Moses has a hard-on,” said Hopper. “So he’s getting it off with the burning bush!”

  Hanging nearby was the broken-plate portrait of Hopper, which Julian Schnabel made to cheer up Dennis after he got flayed by Rip Torn’s lawyers. Hopper acted the part of the art dealer in Schnabel’s Basquiat film, about Warhol’s protégé. One of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sprawling canvases hung in the Hopper compound, not far from Angel in Hell, a portrait of lilac-skinned Cindy Sherman framed in an antique gilded mirror. The work was painted by artist Kenny Scharf, another regular at the Hopper compound Christmas parties.

  “From the time I met him up until Bush number two, I had constant contact with him,” said Scharf. “Up until the Bush thing I just thought he was the coolest guy ever.”

  The Bush thing being that Hopper was pro-Bush. Hopper didn’t hide from friends that he had proudly voted for George W. This was the same counterculture hero who roared through the conservative swaths of America in Easy Rider?

  When Bush was getting ready to run for reelection, Hopper hosted a holiday dinner party, where he gave all his friends a miniature abstract painting with a number on the back. Everyone was to unwrap it and put it on numbers on the ground, like a grid puzzle. When they turned the paintings around, it was Bush’s face with the slogan AXIS OF EVIL. Hopper got it. He chuckled. He voted for Bush anyway. It worked with the repentant role of “How the Mad, Bad & Dangerous Movie Star” came off the bench and back in the game.

  All the while Hopper was searching for a movie to direct. He still hoped to do a great one—“You wanna be in my movie?”

  Hopper went around asking friends to be in Backtrack, which he would direct and play a hit man who stalks a conceptual artist. He recruited his tireless assistant, Gary.

  “Put a suit on. You’re gonna be a gangster. We’re gonna give you a forty-five and you’re gonna shoot at the helicopter.”

  Hopper cast his old mentor, Vincent Price, as the mob boss. Long ago, Price had told Hopper that he’d one day be a voracious art collector. He even gave Dennis his first painting, something green and hideous. Now in his late seventies, Price had been traveling America Easy Rider–style, cruising the country in his very own Clark Cortez RV to see the sights and vistas at the national parks. Though he’d hoped to take a stab at the great leads, Hamlet or Richard III, after that House of Wax role that forever launched him as a master of horror, he had to make do mostly with Z-movie thrillers like Theatre of Blood, playing a vengeful Shakespearean actor who murders his critics.

  Dean Stockwell would play another mob boss in Backtrack. So would Joe Pesci, Hopper’s golf bud.

  Coming over to the compound to talk about his role as a Venice artist who paints with a chainsaw, Bob Dylan wandered around Hopper’s digs—“Wow, man, look at all these books. Have you read all these books?”

  To play D. H. Lawrence in the same arty gangster film Hopper had cast his own in-house writer, Alex Cox, a filmmaker living in one of the Gehry shacks connected to the main house via a second-story industrial catwalk. Cox doctored the script to fit Hoppe
r’s every whim and personal arcana. Hopper wanted very specific things. He wanted this church outside Taos in the script because, Hopper explained, it had a hole in the ground where natural lithium came out, which made him very happy. That had to go in his movie. Also, he wanted a scene shot on a miniature golf course with one of those Mother Hubbard’s shoe holes.

  “Now, why these things mean so much to him, I have no idea. Where does a miniature golf course fit into that guy’s life?” Cox wondered. “Yet it did.”

  Alas, the inspirations were again more inspired than the film, the journey better than the destination. Hopper had grandiose aspirations for his Backtrack film, but he disavowed it completely after the studio took final cut away from him, cutting his fucking movie to shreds and renaming it Catchfire.

  Hopper went to Phil Spector to try to put together another film since they never got to do their early incarnation of The Last Movie. Having gone the way of a neon Charles Foster Kane, Spector’s lush gothic Pyrenees Castle in Alhambra was his own LA Xanadu, featuring velvet curtains in the mysterious windows of thirty-five bedrooms, black-and-white-checkered floors, and creepy suits of armor. At the end of the long driveway was a large cage Phil had custom-built to house his ferocious dogs; it seemed his study of those sweet Saint Bernards had turned dark.

  Hopper returned from his visit completely bewildered, never wanting to go back there again. The guy was a ghost, sleeping all day, haunting the place by night.

  “Well, it’s Phil, you know?” said Hopper. “He just hasn’t changed.”

  The remaining scripts lay in the compound, littered across Mabel Dodge Luhan’s wooden Florentine table, which Hopper had spirited from the Mud Palace when he left behind the seventies for Venice. Hanging above the table was a tastefully sleek avant-garde chandelier made entirely from crushed glass. It was expertly hung, like his other art.