Hopper (23 page)

It was getting late one day as Hopper, in his army dress greens with “US” embroidered on the collar and colorful decorations on his chest, stood before the open grave of the dead soldier his character had brought home in a casket in the train's luggage car. Standing over the grave, Hopper was supposed to recite this wonderfully shaded speech that Jaglom had written about America losing its innocence.

“Action.”

Hopper tore up the speech, threw it down into the pit of the earth, and started shouting furiously.

“You motherfuckers, you motherfuckers, you wanna go to
Nam
? You wanna go to
Nam
? You motherfuckers?
You
motherfuckers? You wanna go to Nam?”

Jumping down into the grave, he tore open the coffin with his bare hands and unzipped the body bag stuffed with ammunition and machine guns, all of which his character was going to use to bring Nam to small-town America.

“Great. Cut.”

Crouched in full gear like an abused animal, helmet on and rifle ready, Hopper was not ready to jump out of the movie. Instead, he turned his back on Jaglom and the crew and began walking off the set. He seemed wounded and angry.

“Dennis? What are you doing?”

“You don't need me anymore. You don't care about me anymore. Movie's over.”

B
ring me Coors, turn the heater on, and put some more water on that radiator,” Hopper yelled downstairs through a hole in the floor beside his sprawling bed at the Tony House. He called it the intercom.

Desiree did as she was told. With no daughter of his own around, even though he had two of them, Hopper practically adopted her. He'd met Desiree at a Kris Kristofferson concert when she was twelve. Hopper was larger than life, and she was mesmerized. Even though Desiree was a kid, people said she was an old soul. She felt she knew Hopper from somewhere, like she felt she knew James Dean. She carried around Dean fan books in her backpack at school.

Taking the train to Albuquerque from Los Angeles (where she lived with her mother, who had worked on some Elvis movies) and then hitching a ride to Taos, she started spending summers at the Tony House, sleeping in a heap of blankets downstairs by the kiva fireplace. Her favorite thing was when Dennis, sort of like her weird uncle, taught her about art. On the days when the art that Dennis had bought arrived in trucks, he would order Desiree to unwrap it, like huge brown-paper Christmas presents. Then he told her to figure out what the art meant. Desiree thought that Bruce Conner's assemblage piece hanging by the bathroom looked like junk—cigarette butts, an ashtray, a bottle cap, all stuck with nails in this box.

One day the IRS came and took Hopper's entire collection away.

Desiree knew when to make herself scarce. Like when these girls came over in their squaw skirts, wearing no underwear. Desiree remembered everything. People would tell her, “You are always the one in the corner just observing everyone and watching, like you're filming it in your head.” She knew not to go where she wasn't supposed to.

Hopper freaked out after she found his guns in the closet, but somehow the Monster Room, which even Hopper didn't go into, kept on calling her name. One day Desiree psyched herself up, told herself, “I'm gonna go in there. I'm gonna be brave today.” She poked in. In the middle of the room was a carved wooden folk figure of Death, hooded and riding this crazy animal cart, aiming her bow and arrow. That really scared the hell out of her. She ran out.

The summer she turned fifteen, Desiree took the love bus up to Taos. A bunch of Hopper's friends went to the El Cortez Theater to see
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
with Kris Kristofferson playing Billy, blasting anyone who dared mess with him in the dusty town. During the movie, Hopper was sitting next to Desiree and kept twitching about, getting up and leaving, leaving and coming back. He was really nervous because it was the evening of their special ceremony.

Kids who hung around Topanga Canyon back in LA had been pressuring Desiree to have sex to see what it was all about. Even though Desiree's friend, the actor and martial arts expert David Carradine, warned her to stay away from Dennis, she loved Dennis. She told Dennis she wanted him to be the one to deflower her.

Hopper gave her all this stuff that night, a mix of mescaline and peyote and cocaine. They cuddled and hugged, but afterward Desiree wondered what happened to the big bang she'd heard about. She would have known, right? She was feeling pretty fuzzy herself and thought perhaps Dennis was too stoned to get it up.

“Is that it?” she asked.

Hopper got really mad. “How dare you, I'm a grown man, whaddya talking about—”

Leaving Desiree at the Tony House, he headed out the door with a .357 Magnum to the La Fonda hotel on the town plaza, where the owner kept a collection of D. H. Lawrence's paintings of orgies. There were men and women, women and mythic beasts, really dirty stuff. Old D. H. proudly adorned every canvas with a pecker—the phallus being the great sacred image for him, symbolizing the deep life force civilization tried to squash. After winning some acid in a hand of poker, Hopper stepped out onto the plaza and a giant tree appeared before him. It looked like a terrifying grizzly bear.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

He shot several times, blasting away at the grizzly, drawing the law. Making a break for it, he tried to run like hell back over to the Mud Palace, to make it to the Indian land in back, federal land out of jurisdiction, but the cops caught him, handcuffed him, and roughed him up pretty good. The pigs threw him in Taos jail, where Hopper had filmed the scene in
Easy Rider
when Jack Nicholson first appears, locked in the drunk tank with Billy and Captain America. Jack was about to be fully unleashed to America in the film version of Ken Kesey's book about madness being the true sanity,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
.

Goddamn it, motherfuckers. Fuckers. Fucking. Fuckers.

By morning, Desiree was on the phone with the bondsman, trying to free Hopper from counts of disorderly conduct and possession of a deadly weapon, two of verbal assault, and the final count of resisting arrest. After he was sprung that afternoon, Hopper came back to Desiree. Like a mother, Desiree cooked him eggs. She cleaned his wounds. The cops had been really bad to him, beat the shit out of him, and hadn't even cleaned his eyes. She nursed him back to health.

Driving his bullet-riddled pickup to the Taos airport, Hopper stood at the end of the runway with a rifle to greet Philippe Mora, the director of
Mad Dog Morgan
. Hopper left no doubt in Mora's mind as to his ability to incarnate the legendary Aussie bushranger who defied a corrupt system that shackled, branded, and buggered him. Though the system might hunt him down, shoot him down like a mad dog, cut off his head, and fashion his scrotum into a tobacco pouch, never would they break his spirit.

Dropping the director outside the La Fonda hotel, the scene of the crime, Hopper instructed, “Give the guy behind the desk ten dollars and tell him Dennis said to show you the ‘French pictures.'” Being a painter, Mora appreciated the dirty D.H.s.

Hopper was soon off to Australia to shoot
Mad Dog Morgan
. To upright Aussies, it seemed like every drug dealer in the southern hemisphere was parachuting in to score big on the actor's legendary coke habit. To throw them off track, the director told some gung-ho grips on his crew to turn around every road sign within a two-mile radius of their shooting location, topsy-turvy.

In swashbuckling Mad Dog style, Hopper drank staggering quantities of rum. However out of it he appeared, as soon as he heard action:

BAM

A finely trained actor, he rode through the bush, performing horse tricks learned long ago on the Warner Bros. backlot.

Still, Hopper might drop dead from all the excess—enough for an Australian judge to declare that Hopper should clinically be dead. And if he did kick the bucket, what would happen to the film?

Preparing for the worst, Mora had a silicone mask made of Hopper's face. If the worst happened, they could put it on a stuntman and at least shoot all the long shots. The Hopper mask would be like those James Dean heads they used to sell for five dollars, coated in MiracleFlesh faux flesh, kissable for the lonely night. Makeup artists started putting on the first layer of latex.

“What's this fuckin' plastic thing on my face?”

“I just got this idea, Dennis. You're riding along on your horse, you see your own face in the sky, and it
blows up
.”

“Far-out. Fantastic. Far-out, man.”

One day, Mad Dog Hopper's sidekick, played by the ubiquitous Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, disappeared into the bush saying he'd be back in ten minutes. But in dreamtime, the Aborigines' fluid sense of time and space, ten minutes might mean an endless shoot, so Mora recruited two native trackers with lean brown bodies and long white beards to bring back Gulpilil. They returned with him days later. It turned out Gulpilil had gone on walkabout to ask the kookaburras in the gum trees about Hopper's soul.

“Well? What did they say to you?” asked the director.

“The kookaburras in the trees, they all say Dennis is crazy.”

By the end of the film, everyone was exhausted, but Hopper was ready for more.

“What about that scene where I'm riding along on my horse and my face blows up? You haven't
shot
that.”

After all of the mysteries he'd experienced on the shoot, one left Mora completely perplexed. It was about three o'clock in the bush—it was just Mora and Hopper and the kookaburras' maniacal cackling.

By now Mora had come to realize that his star wasn't the tough guy biker rebel of
Easy Rider
. Dennis was an incredibly sensitive being. He started crying as he started to tell Mora about James Dean. Hopper broke down, trembling like Dean. His face got younger, as if it were turning back the years, and then, as if by movie magic, his face
turned into
Dean's. Mora had never seen anything like it.

A
t the bar of the Pagsanjan Falls Resort in the Philippines, cast members threw knives in the air, swung from chandeliers, all going nutty after another day of endlessly filming
Apocalypse Now
in the jungle. Stuck in the shit was Frederic Forrest, a young actor from Waxahachie, Texas, who had been drafted to play the sweet-natured New Orleans saucier, Chef. On the night Hopper arrived, Forrest cornered him.

“What was it like with Jimmy? I wanna know everything.”

Back home in Waxahachie, all the older kids used to talk about James Dean. The newspapers wrote how he was just a copycat Brando, and Forrest and his friends didn't like that at all—“They're full of shit. Jimmy's not acting. He's just like us!” Forrest hadn't even seen Jimmy in anything since movies didn't come to Waxahachie until they'd been out for a while. When the
Dallas Morning News
reported
ACTOR KILLED IN PORSCHE
, Forrest didn't even know what a Porsche
was
. When he finally saw
East of Eden
, Forrest knew Dean was as brilliant and powerful as Marlon,
lighter
than Brando.

Over a bottle of tequila, Hopper and Forrest talked all night long about Jimmy, who
worshipped
Brando.

Hopper told Forrest how Dean fused two worlds together—by carrying Monty Clift in his lowered left hand pleading, “Please forgive me,” and Brando in his raised right fist, telling his audience, “Go
fuck
yourself.”

As Forrest asked Hopper everything he could think of about Jimmy, this crazy guy walked up, pulled out a machete, and slung it down in the table between them.

Thwack!

“I've had a contract out on you for three years,” said the man, glowering at Hopper.

Forrest was terrified. He thought the dude looked like Charlie Manson. Hopper barely glanced up or stopped talking to give the guy the time of day, like the guy didn't exist. Hopper just kept rappin' on about Jimmy. Finally the guy slunk away.

Hungover the next day in the middle of the Pagsanjan Falls jungle, Forrest was feeling woozy and dropped like a fly, passed out cold.

“What the fuck?” asked Hopper. “Who do we have here? Humphrey Bogart?”

Hopper was ready to roll, Jack. Director Francis Ford Coppola had originally cast him to play the part of Colby, a rogue soldier with ten lines who serves under Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. The brilliant Kurtz had gone native, lording godlike over the ferocious Montagnard tribe of headhunters at the end of the Nung River. After observing Hopper's erratic behavior, Coppola decided to switch Dennis's role to play the incessantly snapping photojournalist, wearing cameras like shrunken heads around his neck. (Hopper claimed the switch was Brando's suggestion.)