Hopper Read online

  Acknowledgments

  Hopper is a rebel biography. The story was out there, the road beckoned, and the people who populated his world were ready to share their memories. The book world tried many times to have Hopper commit his life to the page, but in his improbable, twisted journey into the American dream, his chase for meaning in madness, he could never stay long enough in one place to write it down. It’s been a long, strange road, one that brings to mind Hollywood’s famous line “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” For Hopper it was always about the ride.

  In a time of tell-all celebrity accounts, which make tabloids like the National Enquirer look like pop art, I knew I had to go deeper to tell a story Hopper would have wanted for himself. Dennis was a picaresque character who packed the literary punch of a modern-day Don Quixote. As Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern put it, “Like Jimmy Dean, Dennis was one of these incredible visitors.” Stern always believed a movie should have been made about the boy from Kansas who dreamed of going to where the movies were made.

  In his lifetime, Dennis wore many hats and spun many myths—be forewarned that the terrain is treacherous, but only the most interesting roads have been taken.

  Hollywood and the people in Hopper’s life want his story told. As producer Danny Selznick, son of the legendary David O. Selznick, said, “I knew that someone needed to do his story.” Fascinated by the sheer breadth of his adventure, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission. I simply embarked on the journey.

  I want to thank those who were generous with their time and helped to navigate through each stage of Hopper’s life. They were willing to veer off the well-trodden path and pave the way to more interviews and connections. Thank you to friends and family, rebels and riders, lovers and foes alike. In particular, Peter Fonda, Dean Stockwell, David Lynch, Robert Walker Jr., Stewart Stern, Don Murray, Boyd Elder, Paul Lewis, Todd Colombo, Michael Gruskoff, Tomas Milian, Danny Selznick, Rol Murrow, Larry Schiller, Toni Basil, Karen Black, Les Blank, Peter Pilafian, Henry Jaglom, Philippe Mora, Frederick Forrest, Mary Ellen Mark, Stefani Kong Uhler, Don Gordon, Linda Manz, Robert Duvall, Dennis Fanning, Ice-T, Robert Solo, Haskell Wexler, Harry Dean Stanton, David Anspaugh, Alex Cox, Gary Ebbins, and John Lurie. Thank you James Rosenquist, Irving Blum, Larry Bell, Chuck Arnoldi, Doug Christmas, Laddie John Dill, Kenny Scharf, and all of Hopper’s art world buddies. Also Peter Coyote, Taylor Mead, Rick Klein, and Arty Kopecky for leading me further into the sixties and the commune scene. Lost years in Taos were regained thanks to Ron Cooper, Lisa Law, Peter Mackaness, Paul Martinez, Desiree Romero, and Bill Whaley. Dodge City came to life once more with Ruth Baker, Leonard Fowler, and Don Steele. Thank you also Victoria Duffy, Katherine LaNasa, Bill Dyer, Peter Alexander, Peter Biskind, Robert Dean, Jallo Faber, Douglas Kirkland, Christopher Knight, Kat Kramer, Kat’s mother, Randy Ostrow, Jamie Sheridan, Michael Knight and the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, Cherie Burns, Doug Coffin at the World Headquarters in New Mexico, Kevin Cannon, R. C. Israel, Ouray Meyers, Julia Bortz Pyatt, Lynn Robinson, Don Michael Sampson, Sakti Rinek, Jack Smith, the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, Stephen Bender, Jorge Hinojosa, Logan Sparks, Mark Seliger, and Dave Weiner.

  Thank you to Jim Fitzgerald, Hopper’s longtime literary agent who has been trying to do this book for decades, my agent Zoë Pagnamenta, her assistant Sarah Levitt, and the team at HarperCollins: Carrie Thornton, Cal Morgan, Brittany Hamblin, Kevin Callahan, Gregory Henry, Michael Barrs, and Renato Stanisic. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my friends and family, and my wife, Lily.

  Dedication

  For Dean

  Epigraph

  He’s a walkin’ contradiction,

  partly truth and partly fiction.

  —“THE PILGRIM: CHAPTER 33,” KRIS KRISTOFFERSON

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1: The Yellow Brick Rubber Road

  Kansas

  The Pool

  California

  Hollywood

  The System

  Rebel

  Dean

  The Death Curse

  Giant

  Blackball

  The Method

  The Mad Pad

  Malibu Colony

  Durango

  2: The Last Movie

  Z Pictures

  The Angel

  The Trip

  Love

  Red Flock Room

  Easy Rider

  Lewis and Clark

  Hopper and Jack’s Acid Trip

  Tex

  3: The Movie Within the Movie

  Peru

  4: The Savage Journey

  Taos

  The Mud Palace

  The Spruce Goose

  The Black Tower

  Caning

  The Ghost

  Train to the Stars

  Desire

  Nam

  Mexico

  Blue Movie

  The Gas

  Dynamite Death Chair

  The Jungle

  The Game

  Frank Booth

  5: The American Dream

  Shooter

  Hoppers of Yore

  Cull-uhs

  Biker Heaven

  Hopper’s Own

  The Guggenheim Gang

  The Cowboys

  Captain America

  The Funeral

  Index

  About the Author

  Other Books

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The sun hung like a flaming sword above the high desert of Taos. In the hours to come, it would paint the folds of the craggy Sangre de Cristo Mountains blood red, setting them afire in the name of the Redeemer. Now it dropped unforgivingly over this dry and dusty land in northern New Mexico, beating down on the scraggly burial ground about to crack open in the heat. No breeze stirred the batches of plastic flowers sprouting up from the rocks piled in heaps on the graves. The stones weighed down the multitude. Impatient for the apocalypse, and thirsty for a drop, the restless souls prepared for the arrival of another.

  Then, to the furious roar of a host of engines, screaming as if stoked by hellfire, out from the valley of death shot a customized Harley-Davidson, blazing chrome with red flames flickering on the orange teardrop gas tank. The angry buzzing wasp flew straight for the blinding light.

  Dennis Hopper smiled as the wind flapped the fringes of his buckskin jacket. Dressed in filthy breeches with a floppy cowboy hat looped around his neck, he dug in his well-worn boots and spiraled up like a cyclone. No earthly force could shake him from his steed, hot between his legs. He’d hung on to a speeding train going from Dodge City to Hollywood as a boy, only to race faster than the speed of light up a washboard dirt road to the heights of Monument Valley. After a brief detour to sniff it all in under the frilly, upraised skirt of New Orleans, that Mardi Gras queen, he was back in the saddle, hungrily devouring blacktop at 108 miles an hour, going flat out on a wide-open red-tinted stretch of highway. This time he’d make it for sure.

  Riding higher and higher, Hopper tore through the cosmos fast and loud, the deafening boom of his chopper ripping the fabric of space and time. He followed the glittering stars winking at him in the firmament. Guiding him was James Dean, still burning bright, and in his own orbit, a twinkling Andy Warhol. There was supergiant John Wayne, a massive star even brighter than a giant, despite being very cool. Out yonder flashed Elvis, trailed by the distant glimmer of boy-genius Orson Welles. Hopper gave it some gas.

  He was getting closer now, for ahead in the distance loomed a snowcapped bluish mountain as big as his imagination. A hairpin turn on a treacherous rocky path—littered with the ancient ruins of a forgotten civilization—
revealed a hidden plateau, damp and lush and glowing viridescent in the hallucinatory light that when filtered through the thin alpine air illuminated everything in Technicolor. An endless field of beaming yellow flowers lit the last stretch.

  Like a lost city of the Incas, a fake Wild West town emerged in the mountain mist. Fake cowboys roamed freely here in their ten-gallon hats. Strapped with shiny six-guns loaded with blanks, they jangled past the facades of a fake telegraph office, a fake gunsmith, a fake Longhorn Saloon. A fake steeple rose over the centuries-old Spanish plaza that was guarded by the golden statue of a conquistador standing square in the dust, waiting for wild dogs to piss on him in the moonlight. In scrawled chalk lettering, the weathered sign of the fake white church quoted the Gnostic Gospel:

  Show Me the Stones the Builders Have Rejected for They Are the Cornerstones

  Outlaws and misfits were welcome.

  Planting his boots in this strange, fantastical world of his own creation, the road-weary traveler took it all in. At last he’d reached his peculiar American Dream, tailor-made to fit his nervy frame.

  “Oh man,” cried Hopper. “It’s all real.” And it was only just the beginning.

  PART 1

  The Yellow Brick Rubber Road

  Jimmy’s Place portrait taken by Cecil Beaton on the set of

  The Last Movie, Peru, 1970

  CAMERA PRESS/Cecil Beaton/Redux, copyright © CAMERA PRESS

  KANSAS

  Dennis Hopper lit up a cigarette in the rich Peruvian night. Clean-cut and wiry with more than a hint of disrepute, this handsome gentleman wore a Stetson hat as he barreled down the far side of the acid-green Andes, deftly maneuvering the plummeting hairpin turns in his muddy red Ford pickup truck. Emblazoned on the side was his personal slogan: KANSAS—HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. BROKEN BONES BUT RARIN’ TO GO! Sitting shotgun, a journalist from Life was hungry for the inside scoop for a major cover story about what this wild-eyed actor—suddenly known around the globe as the chopper-riding, hell-raising LSD freak behind the phenomenally successful Easy Rider—was doing in a remote corner of the world, coked up like a maniac and surrounded by a pack of psychedelic cowboys who considered him a genius, or some sort of messiah.

  At the beatific age of thirty-three, Hopper had built on the mountain—as if to ring in the new decade of the seventies—a curious world of which only he seemed to know the true meaning. It lay fourteen thousand feet above sea level in the ancient village of Chincheros, which was populated by native Quechua Indians who had little clue as to what was going on in his head. Centuries before, they’d been overrun by conquistadors. Now came Hopper, transforming their village practically overnight into a Wild West frontier town. He had herds of horses and saddles hauled up the mountain. He flew in burly men to be dressed in a variety of cowboy getups. He dragged B Western movie sets up the mountain path, including a sort of spiritualist temple called Jimmy’s Place with the saying REMINDS YOU OF YOUR DESTINY painted on the window. So what the devil did it mean?

  The journalist held on for dear life as Hopper launched into his story, a strange and twisted tale full of superhero highs and decadent lows. It all began rather innocently in Dodge City, Kansas, just around the time the Dust Bowl was settling down. Back in its rip-roaring heyday, dime-store books around the globe branded Dodge City, “the Wickedest City in America,” the end of the trail for herds of cowboys ready to raise hell after bringing longhorn cattle from Texas—and trouble to boot. It took the quickest guns in the West to keep the peace, including the legendary heroes of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona—Wyatt Earp and his tubercular sidekick, Doc Holliday.

  What the law didn’t chase off, the dust certainly did by the time Hopper’s tale began.

  On a bright Saturday morning in April 1939, the old cowtown proudly dragged out its boots and did its best to look its wildest worst. The junior chamber of commerce had issued a bulletin stating “Keep Your Whiskers” and offered a two-hundred-dollar prize for the best beard, one that harkened back to those woolly days of old Dodge. Everybody came out for the big day, including the Hopper family. Barely three years old, Dennis watched in amazement the shaggy wild men draped in buffalo skins, looming over dapper dudes in handlebar mustaches. They all took their places like extras outside the railway station alongside a cast of tens of thousands from across the country, desperate for a bit of color after years of suffering under the sun-blotted blackness of the dust storms. The seconds ticked toward the arrival of the actors. The town would ever afterward remember the premiere of Dodge City the movie as the biggest thing to happen to Dodge, shadowing even its storied past.

  Dodge City premiere, Kansas, 1939

  Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, copyright © Time Life Pictures

  Shortly after ten o’clock, thirty barnstormers from the Wichita Aeronautic Society ripped through the skies. The band struck up “Oh! Susanna” as the steel-blue Warner Bros. Special chugged in on the tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad. Out from the extravagant seventeen-car train, which included eight luxury Pullmans, stepped a curiosity cabinet of Hollywood’s most wanted, like Humphrey Bogart, and some unwanted, like the exotic Lya Lys, who sucked the alabaster toe of a Venus statue in the surrealist film masterpiece L’Age d’Or. The punch-drunk former light heavyweight champion of the world, “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom, stumbled out of the baggage car gussied up to look like the Lady Gay Saloon, the infamous watering hole of the “bibulous Babylon of the Western frontier,” as Dodge City was known before it turned dry as a bone. A collection of B-movie sharpshooters burst forth into the light, Hoot Gibson and Buck Jones in his white ten-gallon hat. Buck’s trusty horse, Silver, pranced out of the animal car. Murmurs passed between mother and grandmother. Would he really come all the way from California to see them?

  At last, the star with the slick, pencil-thin mustache appeared on the platform to the roar of his fans.

  “I remember Errol Flynn came to Dodge City,” said Hopper, telling a story he would repeat to friends and journalists throughout his life. “That was big time.”

  Starring in Hopper’s earliest memory, the swashbuckling Hollywood libertine flashed a blazing smile to the throngs of young girls flushed with excitement, waving like crazy from the sidelines clamoring for his attention, and held back only by the efforts of six companies of National Guardsmen. One day when Dennis was all grown up, he, too, might roll through town in a fringed buckskin jacket, high on his steed.

  Straddling a white horse strapped with a $25,000 hand-tooled black-and-silver saddle commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad, Errol Flynn led the parade, trailed by a procession of covered wagons, twenty-five corn-fed children on Shetland ponies, unicyclists in derby hats, and dignitaries—including three governors, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and the newly crowned cowgirl queen, Miss Mary Jean Frankenberger, a freshman at Dodge City’s junior college. Miss Mary had her white boots on.

  West of Chicago

  THERE WAS NO LAW!

  West of Dodge City

  THERE WAS NO GOD!

  At the Dodge Theater, the town’s ornate movie palace lit up by marquee lightbulbs, Dodge City depicted the coming of the Santa Fe Railroad to the frontier outpost, setting the stage for hordes of bad guys just itching to be shot down by Errol Flynn playing the lone cowboy. All night at the Dodge, grinding out shows till dawn, the trailblazing hero rode into the sunset again and again with his girl on shotgun, rosy Olivia de Havilland. By sundown, having triumphantly resurrected the long-lost glory days of Dodge, the real Errol Flynn chugged out of the station with the key to the city in hand; going with him were Hoot and Buck, and even trusty Silver, riding off in the animal car.

  “And anyway, they came there,” said Hopper of those movie cowboys, offering a hint as to why he turned out the way he did. “That probably had a lot to do with me eventually wanting to be an actor, I think.”

  Not a single cowboy could be found roaming the lone dusty streets come Monday morning as life resumed in Dodge City, pop.
9,000—just yesterday brimming with ten-gallon hats, now emptied out like an abandoned movie set. Brandishing his silver cap pistols, little Dennis played shoot-’em-up against the older boy who lived across the street from his grandpa Hopper. One of them had to be Indian; one of them had to be cowboy. Looking back to his trike-riding hell-raiser playmate with a pint-size straw hat, Leonard Fowler remembered, “Dennis wanted to be cowboy most of the time.”

  “Like, when I was little, I lived on a farm near Dodge City, Kansas,” continued Hopper in his peculiar high-pitched twang, roaring down the mountain and jumping ahead in his tale for the Life journalist. “Wheat fields all around, as far as you could see. No neighbors, no other kids. Just a train that came through once a day.”

  A farm-raised runt, he would lie in a ditch at his grandparents’ as the wind rustled and the Kansas sky loomed before him. By his side was his trusty dog with a spot around his eye. The tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad split the weathered farmhouse from the wheat fields spreading west as far as he could see. Chugging furiously, the train roared past, leaving nothing else for Dennis to do but pick himself out of the ditch and poke around the dirt with a stick. Filling his lonely world with collections of butterflies and stamps from faraway places—“Occasionally I cleaned out the chicken house. I watched, more than anything else”—he spent most of his hours wondering where the train came from and went. Where had the train taken all those cowboys?

  The confusing question had yet to be answered as Nellie tucked her grandson into bed. Lightning bugs faded away in a Mason jar as off in the distance, storms flashed like blue veins on a giant’s temple.

  Dennis had come to live at the egg ranch shortly before his sixth birthday, after World War II blew in like a mean sou’wester and swept his father away from Dodge. With his mother busy “at the pool,” the family would say without much further comment, Nellie took him in. Fixing lunch in a white clapboard farmhouse like Auntie Em’s in The Wizard of Oz, she kept an eye out as Dennis roamed the alfalfa patch on a Shetland pony given to him by his grandpa. Lonnie even brought him home a sheepdog from the Clutter family, doomed to be brutally murdered by drifters, as depicted in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Hard at work in his bib overalls on a wheat field out in Garden City, some sixty miles away, Lonnie left Nellie to raise Dennis and his baby brother, David, along with tending to the coop. The family thought it was too much for the old woman, but Nellie came from rugged stock.