Hopper

by Tom Folsom

  Happy at home, he was left to contemplate his directorial career.

  Would he push on with the meta-Western in which Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary, meets Victorian adventurer Ambrose Bierce? Or how about taking a crack at the adaptation of the book The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a pack of ecoterrorists? Or there was Hellfire, about wild-man Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Hopper wanted Mickey Rourke to play?

  Floating somewhere in the compound was the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas script, sent over by an inspired someone who knew how groovy matching Hopper with Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-fueled journey into the American Dream would be. Easy Rider 2? Not so much, but Hopper planned to break through with an “Easy Rider for the nineties,” which was not some half-baked sequel, but more along the lines of Dante’s Inferno.

  “Very calm,” explained Hopper. “But underneath that calm there’s really tortured things happening.”

  Instead he was slated to direct The Hot Spot, a sex-soaked noir starring Miami Vice’s Don Johnson as a car salesman. Hopper referred to it as “The Last Tango in Texas.” At home in his spare time, he assembled newspaper clippings to fill a voluminous scrapbook about Mexico’s serial killings. He was back from traveling to Romania, trying to secure funding the way Orson Welles scoured Europe.

  Should he just give up and do the Charles Manson biopic, written by the madman himself?

  KAAAAKRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

  “Man,” said Hopper, stunned. “A few feet, either way, it could’ve been all over!”

  A wire snapped, sending fourteen pounds of his loose, tastefully crushed chandelier glass plummeting down on the Florentine dining room table, ingraining yet another cosmic memory in its wood.

  Hopper didn’t sink so low as to do Charles Manson in His Own Words. Instead his last film would be a fashion label–inspired movie titled Tod’s Pashmy Dream, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, shot in La Dolce Vita–style in Rome. Sponsored by the luxury bag company Tod’s, the promotional short was billed as “A Dennis Hopper Film,” starring Gwynnie and a rather boring Tod’s Pashmy bag. It was totally fabulous like Warhol on pink champagne! Enough to make any real artist puke.

  “What’s it called, The Last Movie?” asked hipster director John Lurie.

  Hopper was adrift in Thailand, filming an episode of John Lurie’s Fishing with John. Hopper survived the trip on his post-rehab diet of Snickers and Diet Coke.

  “You know,” said Lurie, “you should really get that movie back and edit it.”

  “Yeah,” Hopper deadpanned. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Hopper was instead busy assembling the movie of his life, the one he’d shot frame by frame on his Nikon. A German art book publisher, famous for high-end smut like its Big Butt Book, commissioned him to do a giant photo book. In keeping with the scope of Hopper, his coffee-table book was going to be practically the size of a coffee table.

  Hopper needed a few pictures to fill in the gaps, so he gathered friends to the cause.

  Stewart Stern had taken a terrific shot of him as a young man at the hospital, waiting for his and Brooke’s daughter to be born. Stern hadn’t seen Hopper for years after The Last Movie. He lived in Seattle now and was absent from the audience when Hopper flew in for a film festival. Hopper called out for him from the stage. Someone told Stern, and they arranged to have dinner that night. To Stern’s surprise, Hopper was not only incredibly sweet but sober.

  “Dennis. How did you get straight?”

  “I just got to where I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “Well, are you open to an idea? I believe that The Last Movie could be the most important document that any future artist could possibly have. That is, if you go back and shoot it again without yourself in the lead. Get the best actor you can find. Shoot the picture again. Then we’ll issue it. Both pictures and the script. Let people see what happened. Not just to the film, but to you as an artist. What the difference is with you, as an artist, and the choices you would make now, against what you made before when you went nuts in Peru. It would do a lot of good for people to see how art can be demolished by what you think is inspiration and is only coke. It’ll give you a chance to vindicate yourself and to have a film that people will look at instead of a fancy failure.”

  “Yeah, that’s, you know . . .” laughed Hopper, then he shrugged it off.

  “From then on we were friends,” said Stern. “But he never did the movie, and he never made the film that I always wanted to make most, which was about his boyhood on the farm in Kansas with his grandma. Oh, what he could have done with his grandma! Because at the bottom of all that was this motherless child.”

  Hopper called his old friend, Bobby Walker, who had a terrific shot of Hopper on the beach teaching his daughter how to shoot a camera. There was another great one of Hopper in front of a big Dr Pepper soda pop sign.

  When Bobby came over to give him the photos, Hopper was swarmed with assistants, busy having his appearances arranged and possibly filming this commercial. Phones were ringing off the hook dealing with his art and buying and selling and showing himself. Hopper was part of a world that Bobby didn’t want any part of.

  Bobby didn’t want to take up too much of Hopper’s time, but later thought at length about seeing Dennis. Tucked away at his home in Malibu, packs of choppers roared past in the distance, all living out Easy Rider fantasies. In retrospect, Bobby was glad he’d decided not to set himself and his family adrift like Kon-Tiki at sea in that escape pod. In the sixties, he was planning to get all his teeth pulled, so he “didn’t have to worry about dentists, ’cause that’s the worst thing when you’re living in remote areas.”

  Bobby’s dad, actor Robert Walker, who was admired by James Dean, had died at thirty-two from a drug overdose. Bobby’s thoughts turned toward Hopper and whether he squandered his talent, or whether something from his searching would survive like all great art.

  I think so much got in his way in the old days of wanting to open the doors of perception and soothe the pains of everyday three-dimensional living. Obliterate any discomforts of the past, obliterate with booze and drugs of one kind or another. His pursuit of oblivion did him in, just as I think it did in all the great talents.”

  Bobby’s mother, Jennifer Jones, had recently died, leaving Bobby to catalog his stepfather David O.’s memos to her, and they were strewn about his house. Unattached to material things, at his mother’s suggestion Bobby was trying to pawn her Oscar, only to be informed by the Academy that he’d only be allowed to sell it back to them for a dollar. Seemed like valueless junk—though Hopper would’ve killed for one, something to hold aloft for that singular great role that never came down the pipeline, the conventional one at least.

  THE COWBOYS

  You had a birthday there in France at the film festival,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

  “On a yacht, yeah,” said Hopper, describing his seventy-third birthday party celebrated in May 2009. “Everybody from Harrison Ford to Bono to Mick Jagger, it was incredible.”

  “Elton John was on the ship?”

  Sporting a suit and tie, Hopper, playing the elder goateed artist statesman, told another story, honed over the years. It was the one about the time he went to see Orson Welles perform his hocus-pocus at the Riviera Hotel.

  “You went to see Orson Welles in Las Vegas?”

  “Yeah, Orson had come back from Europe and did a show in Vegas. It was terrific.”

  More magic tricks. Welles was magnificently pathetic.

  Like his muse, Hopper had played the manic sellout, the repentant former wild child, the crazy villain, the comeback kid. Not to mention the homeboy. What were all these roles leading to? What were they going to say about him when he was gone? Would anybody even pay attention?

  Would they love Hopper in his final role? Of course they would.

  “Dennis,” shouted a paparazzo on the streets of Venice.

  Hopper turned around abruptly and, in his weakened state, fell and hit his
head. He had to put on a huge white bandage and cover it with his street urchin cap.

  The tabloids were all clamoring to get the inside scoop after his latest battle, this time with terminal prostate cancer. A dying Hopper was hot stuff to begin with, but on top of it America’s eyes were glued to him, given the sensational Shakespearean feud raging in Hopperdom. Who would win his valuable art inheritance? The warring parties were his children from different marriages pitted against the estranged ex-wives, spitting at each other like wildcats. And the really sick thing? They were all trapped in Hopper’s world—all living in his sprawling compound.

  Hopper’s daughter Marin lurked in the main house. Living in one of the “three little pigs,” as the Frank Gehry shacks were called, was wife number four, Katherine LaNasa. Hopper met her in the late eighties when she was a ballet dancer. After watching her perform at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in LA, he sat beside her at the dinner afterward at trendy Spago. He was on a date with this really trippy chick who insisted on ordering him fish when he went to the bathroom—“I thought you might want more fish in your diet.”

  Katherine thought it was a weird sexual reference. In truth a mouthwatering carnivore, Hopper had already asked the publicist seat Katherine next to him because of her great ass. She was dressed in a crazy outfit she’d found in Paris like a little Indian boy. Watching her onstage earlier, he had liked the red bottoms under her tutu, how the red elastic went up her crack. The truth was she was a little overweight because she was recovering from an injury, but he didn’t care.

  Seeing Hopper three consecutive nights in the audience, someone said, “I didn’t know you loved the ballet so much!”

  Hopper and Katherine married in 1989 and divorced three years later. They’d recently had a reconciliation on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They hadn’t been close since their divorce, but decided to quit bickering and be friends again. Supporting his final dying role, she came back into the fold. Their actor son, Henry, dribbled out abstracts, like the ones by his father run over in Vincent Price’s driveway.

  No, Katherine wasn’t the estranged wife. The estranged wife, wife number five, was sequestered in another of the pigs.

  Hopper had met her at Rebecca’s Restaurant in Venice. She was the hostess—“I don’t want to bother you now, but when you’re finished,” asked paper-thin Victoria Duffy, big eyes framed by her fiery hair, “would you mind if I asked you about your art?” Not to discuss his acting, oh no, but his photos. Very good.

  Dutifully playing the role of Hopper’s wife, Victoria smiled on his arm on the velvet carpet at all the events and played hostess for lavish parties they threw at the Venice compound, expensively hip after all these years. She was with Dennis for fourteen years, longer than any of the other wives, but Hopper just couldn’t seem to get divorced from her fast enough.

  As long as Victoria was on the premises, she’d be legally fulfilling the obligations of the prenup that they were both married and living together. Suddenly, the sprawling compound seemed too sprawling for Hopper’s own good. From his bedroom window, bunkered in like John Wayne at the Alamo, he could practically see her over the little stretch of yard. All the while, they were, technically, still living together.

  A white picket fence wrapped up his messy world like an all-too-simplistic bow. A frail Hopper surrounded himself with his loved ones—Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, and Marcel Duchamp hanging on the walls. Soon all of his friends would be taken away from him.

  The Hotel Green Duchamp/Hopper collaboration would go for $362,500 at the Dennis Hopper estate sale at Christie’s, a star-studded affair. Hitting $410,500 was Bruce Conner’s religious-themed lithographs Dennis Hopper One Man Show. Warhol’s Mao had been critically wounded when Hopper shot two bullets into him during his wild days, but Warhol resurrected the work by drawing two circles around the bullet holes and signing the hole over Mao’s right shoulder, labeling it “warning shot.” The Warhol/Hopper collaboration went for $302,500.

  Then there was the Dennis Hopper Warhol, somehow greater than his Marilyns or his Elvises. It was a still from The Last Movie, canonizing Hopper as a rebel dreamer in his cowboy hat. Dennis Hopper, 1971, would go for just under a million. The large Basquiat would sell for a whopping $5,794,500, capping off this splendid affair bringing in a grand total of $14,741,657.

  IN THE EVENT OF A DIVORCE CUT HERE directed Hopper’s painting by the enigmatic graffiti artist Banksy.

  “I love you all,” Hopper told the cheering crowd gathered for his star ceremony at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

  Jack Nicholson wore a star-spangled Easy Rider shirt featuring Billy and Captain America. Desiree showed up; she was now an herbalist. Hopper’s Helix High pal, Bill Dyer, was there, too.

  “He told me he had cancer eight years ago,” said Bill. “And the doctor told him he had gotten it all. Then Dennis called and told me they hadn’t.”

  “Dennis!” the paparazzi shouted as he received the plaque given to him by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for its 2,403rd star. Dennis’s star would bring in $3,750, a little more than the certificate of nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern for Original Story and Original Screenplay for the film Easy Rider. At Christie’s, it would outbid a Waterworld pinball machine, not to mention the two lacquer end tables featuring Hopper smoking a big fat cigar, and a framed photograph of silent film star Tom Mix, the god of old movie cowboys in his white hat.

  A pack rat, Hopper kept it all, the art and the junk. Somewhere in it was an Easy Rider poster featuring the chiseled motorcycle god Captain America in his black leather jacket, with the tagline: A MAN WENT LOOKING FOR AMERICA, BUT COULDN’T FIND IT ANYWHERE.

  So where was the script for Easy Rider Hopper had sworn didn’t exist?

  Among the heaps was a script for The Last Movie with a note from Raybert’s Bert Schneider, who was rumored to be an addict, living somewhere in the wilds having blown his share of Easy Rider profits. A few people had seen Bert over the years and said he was sickly but still had his brilliant blue eyes blazing for a little longer.

  In the compound garage, parked along with a pair of motorcycles with flat tires, were stacks of paintings and found objects and boxes of photographs for Hopper’s upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. It was just like the time a Universal exec told him, about The Last Movie, “Art is only worth something if you’re dead. We’ll only make money on this picture if you die.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” said Hopper. “You’re talking to a paranoiac.”

  Dennis Hopper, 1971, Andy Warhol

  Christie’s Images Ltd. 2012, copyright © 2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  The exhibition going up in 2010 would look like a studio prop shop with freestanding backdrop “sets,” like the graffiti-strewn wall and chain-link fence in Venice. Hopper once pointed to it like Duchamp, calling it art and ordering it cut down. Hopper hoped to live long enough to make a grand entrance. Just in case he didn’t, a life-size Hopper statue stood ready in his cowboy getup, reproduced from a poster of The Last Movie.

  The light hit the movie screen. Going up in flames was Rosebud, the cheap little sled Charles Foster Kane had been playing on the day they ripped him away from his mother.

  “It stood for his mother’s love, which Kane never lost,” said Orson Welles, about the grandiose recluse trapped in his private Xanadu till the end of his days, a man who clamored for the love of the world—on his terms.

  As the steel-blue Warner Bros. Special chugged in the distance ready to pick up Hopper and take him to the land of the movies, a constant stream of CNN rapidly fired images à la artist Bruce Conner. Flashing before Hopper were also early cowboy films, sent to him by an old friend.

  The films were older than the ones in which Gene Autry once shot it out at the Dodge Theater. They’d been made back when Hathaway was a young
son of a bitch whippersnapper working on Ben-Hur, and John Ford was an assistant director listening to a real cowboy, Wyatt Earp, jabber away. Stuck in Pasadena with a nagging wife and nowhere on the frontier left to roam, Earp moseyed over to the backlot to tell those damn fools in Hollywood what was what. He regaled Ford with the one about the time he’d shot it out at the O.K. Corral with Billy, leaving Billy dead as a doornail, silent as the tintypes hanging at Fly’s Photographic Studio.

  “I didn’t know anything about the O.K. Corral at the time,” Ford once said. “Wyatt described it fully. As a matter of fact, he drew it out on paper, a sketch of the entire thing.”

  In years to come, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral became the most famous gunfight in the Old West, courtesy of the movies, with Henry Fonda starring as Wyatt Earp in Ford’s classic, My Darling Clementine.

  The films that flickered before Hopper were earlier than that one still, going all the way back to The Great Train Robbery, hand-colored and starring that traveling salesman–actor G. M. Anderson. Staring at the audience in his ten-gallon, he pointed his six-gun at them and blam! He sent crowds screaming and fainting and wanting more!

  His pupils opened. Blue around black of those eyes that talked. The light was fading. Everybody was saying he wouldn’t catch the light, but Hopper hopped on his Harley-Davidson with the Panhead engine and flames blazing on the gas tank and gunned it.

  Trailing behind him was a procession including a curtained Clark Cortez production vehicle, a truck driven by Hungarian émigré László Kovács, his cinematographer with the 35mm camera stocked with Kodak film, and Captain America’s red, white, and blue chopper. The star-spangled gas tank Peter Fonda held between his legs, seeing as how it had come loose on the bumpy dirt washboard road.

  Hopper took his show deeper into the heart of John Ford country, to the sacred Indian ground where Big Duke, that all-American kid born in the heartland as one Marion Mitchell Morrison, sprang forth as the Ringo Kid, appearing in Stagecoach, smiling amid gauzy clouds like the birth of Venus.