Hopper
Authors: Tom Folsom
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 mythsâbe 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.
For Dean
He's a walkin' contradiction,
partly truth and partly fiction.
â“T
HE
P
ILGRIM:
C
HAPTER 33
,” K
RIS
K
RISTOFFERSON
1: The Yellow Brick Rubber Road
T
he 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 pathâlittered with the ancient ruins of a forgotten civilizationârevealed 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:
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.
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
D
ennis 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:
KANSASâHOLLYWOOD, CALIF. BROKEN BONES BUT RARIN' TO GO! S
itting shotgun, a journalist from
Life
was hungry for the inside scoop for a major cover story about what this wild-eyed actorâsuddenly known around the globe as the chopper-riding, hell-raising LSD freak behind the phenomenally successful
Easy Rider
âwas 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 mountainâas if to ring in the new decade of the seventiesâa 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?