Hopper (6 page)

“Cut!” yelled Ray, ready to call in the studio medics. Dean lost it and, by Hopper's account, threatened to murder his director.

“Don't you ever say fucking ‘cut!' man. I'm the only one who says ‘cut' here! If I get that
close
, I want it on film. I don't want you cutting it!”

Frozen in the taillights of Dean's raw talent, but refusing to be silenced into obscurity, the boy in the storm had no choice but to bump up his offscreen role as the passionate lover fighting to win back Natalie. Hopper got so into his role that he pulled aside one of his fellow
Rebel
delinquents, Steffi, who was the daughter of Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky. Hopper detailed how he'd gone out with a gun one night for a showdown with Nick at the Chateau Marmont. His attempt to end the twisted ménage à trois by blowing away the dirty rat only fed into an item the studio was sending out to Steffi's father: “Hopper registers with the impact of a young Cagney.” But nobody seemed to pay much notice to Hopper now that his lines had been cut. He was practically an extra, forcing the studio to spread its bullshit thinner by the day.

W
heeling a pea-green two-tone Custom Deluxe 20 Chevy pickup truck across a dusty stretch of Taos, New Mexico, a weather-beaten Hopper slammed on his brakes. He was pushing forty. It was sometime in the middle of the seventies.

Screeching to a stop, he hopped out and planted his boots in the dirt. Decked out in his cowboy hat, a faded denim jacket, and a big goddamn belt buckle and bolo tie, he faced the camera for a James Dean documentary, to climax in a rousing Dean montage to the tune of “James Dean” by the Eagles. By now, he had the tale down of that fateful night at the chickie run scene.

“Look, I really wanna be a great actor, too,” Hopper told Dean. “I want to know what you're doing. I wanna know what your
secret
is.”

Hopper had always been fascinated with Dean, ever since a cold, wet early morning at the end of a long, brutal day of shooting. Lying in the street before a green-eyed windup monkey, Dean watched the toy clank its cymbals until it wound down, then lovingly covered it up with a piece of discarded newspaper for a blanket. Curling up beside his only friend in the world, Jimmy went to sleep. It would be the opening shot of
Rebel Without a Cause
.

“I have a script in my hand that says this guy's in the gutter, drunk,” explained Hopper. “Well, first of all, the guy is in the street playing with a toy monkey? And doing baby things—trying to curl up . . . Where did that
come
from? It came from genius; that's where it came from. That was all him. Nobody directed him to do that. James Dean directed James Dean.”

Everything came to a head in the hills of Calabasas, on a thousand acres with pepper trees and thoroughbred horses owned by movie mogul Harry Warner. Called to the Warner Ranch for the chickie run, all the delinquents cheered on two gas-guzzlers in a suicide race toward a rocky bluff with the inky waters below. First who jumped was a chicken.

Blazing paths in a red windbreaker, Dean somersaulted out of the black '49 Merc in a death-defying feline leap much too real for Hopper after a long shoot of watching genius unfurl. He realized he didn't know anything!

Going after Dean, Hopper threw him right up against that iconic Merc and asked for his secret.

“So, he asked me, very quietly, why I acted,” said Hopper. “And I told him what a nightmare my home life had been, everybody neurotic because they weren't doing what they wanted to do and yelling at me when I wanted to be creative, because creative people ended up in bars—which I later found out to be true.”

“How can I do it?” asked Hopper. “Do I have to go to Strasberg? Do I have to go to New York?”

Dean had been schooled at the fabled Actors Studio under diminutive acting coach Lee Strasberg, keeper of the Method, the mysterious acting alchemy that spun performances into Oscar gold. But Dean was too much himself to be anybody's disciple. Guided by his own method, he eked out a bohemian existence in his beatnik pad in Manhattan with bull horns mounted on the wall, bringing him back to the roots of his animal instinct, a reminder to strip away the bark of civilization.

Strasberg taught many dangerous things, like emotional memory.

“You are too sensitive,” Dean warned, telling Hopper never to go there. “He'll
destroy
you.”

Was that what had sent Dean howling and writhing on the floor when he tried to win the love of his brothel madam mother in the gut-wrenching scene in
East of Eden
? Jesus.

Maybe Jimmy was right. Hopper shouldn't play with that sort of thing.

“Jimmy and I found we'd had the same experience at home,” said Hopper. He felt just like Jimmy, a lonely farm boy who needed an escape.

“Let me help you a little,” said Dean. Every once in a while, when Hopper didn't even know he was watching, Jimmy would mumble, “Why don't you try the scene this way?” And Jimmy was always right.

“There'll never be anybody like Jimmy again, man,” said Hopper. “It was, in a strange way, a closer friendship than most people have, but it wasn't the kind of thing where he said, ‘Let's go out and tear up the town.' Sometimes we'd have dinner. Also we were into peyote and grass before anybody else.”

In those days, he and Dean would sit around and cook peyote on a stovetop, like a can of Campbell's Soup, or smoke pot in the Warner Bros. dressing room with brown paper bags over their heads so the stink wouldn't get out. They looked like small-time bank robbers, but so long as they were stoned? Guaranteed easy access to the moment, so precious for actors.

Then suddenly Jimmy was gone, leaving Hopper alone to watch the curtain open to vibrant Technicolor, Dean grinning before the green-eyed monkey. Leaping out of the speeding Merc '49 before it dove into the water, Dean seemed so
alive
that he seemed to exist somewhere beyond the screen. Hopper could hardly believe he was dead, killed in his silver Porsche 550 Spyder a month before
Rebel
hit theaters.

The amputee girl from across the hall knocked on Hopper's door. Jimmy used to visit her, inspired by her body like a Greek ruin. Standing on her one leg at the threshold, she told Hopper's roommate it was horrible; there had been an accident. Was Dennis in the Porsche with Jimmy? Bill got really paranoid.

A strange thing happened when Dennis came home that night from Googie's. Dennis told Bill, “Jimmy's in this room with us now.”

Sitting inert on a shelf was that weird toy monkey, cymbals ceremoniously extended, but silent. Hopper had saved it from the set.

“Jesus, that monkey,” said
Rebel
screenwriter Stewart Stern, visiting Hopper's apartment not long after Dean's death. They were just back from their impromptu road trip to Tijuana to see the bullfights. Hauling ass from the border, Hopper had driven his red Austin-Healey at breakneck speeds. He claimed to be an aficionado of the bullfights, but instead of hanging out at Caesar's, the hotel where the matadors stayed, they'd stayed at a dump and hit the lap dancing joints packed with sailors from San Diego.

“Well, you know,” said Dennis, staring at his friend with a weird glint in his eye. “Jimmy comes to see me still. He does.”

One day when he'd been taking a nap, an incessant, tinny clanking woke him up. Looking across the room, he saw it jumping up and down on his shelf, crashing its little cymbals.

“All of a sudden the monkey came to life,” said Hopper. And sometimes when he was shaving, he got the feeling he was being watched. “I look and there's Jimmy, right on the other side of the window.”

Around the world, all sorts of strange stories were popping up about Dean. In an Indonesian mountain city, Javanese teens smoked cigarettes and strutted the streets in rolled-up jeans and
Rebel
-red jackets. Deep in the heart of Arkansas, college students built a fire by a river, sculpted an Academy Award out of mud, flung earth at each other in a bacchanal and chanted, “Jimmy, give us a sign.” A dog howled in the distance. Fans sent eight thousand letters a month addressed to James Dean in care of Warner Bros. Dean's ghost even beat out the very alive Rock Hudson in a
Photoplay
poll casting votes for America's number one star.
Jimmy Dean Returns!
, an account “written” from the dead by Dean via his dime-store salesgirl lover, sold five hundred thousand copies. He'd been communicating to her through automatic writing. Suffering another one of these ridiculous stories at the end of an exhausting road trip, Stern had his fill.

“Dennis, you're out of your mind.”

Not long after, he invited Hopper for a barbecue at his home in Benedict Canyon. The hamburgers sizzled while something tapped away inside.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
.

“That's the—”

“No, Dennis, the monkey isn't here.”

“Well, it's Jimmy.”

Stepping inside, they saw on Stern's top shelf a little wooden Buddha from Thailand, bouncing up and down.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
.

“It's Jimmy,” said Hopper. “I'm getting out of here.”

Hopper flew out the door, leaving Stern to deal with Dean.

“Sit down,” said something powerful. “Leave yourself alone, but pick up the pen.”

So, Stern began to write—rather,
Jimmy
began to write—but the only word Stern could decipher was “wood.” Natalie Wood perhaps? Whatever it meant, it was definitely spooky, leading him to conclude that if anybody were to have contact with the dead, it would be Dennis.

W
ithin weeks of the silver Spyder crash on September 30, 1955,
Variety
pegged Dennis Hopper as the next James Dean. Of course the next James Dean would
never
call himself the next James Dean. The trick to winning what Warner matinee idol Tab Hunter acidly called the “James Dean Replacement Sweepstakes” was to completely deny being a contender. Stating on the record that he refused to give any interviews about Dean, Hopper did
not
permit photographers to snap pictures of a treasured painting given to him by his departed friend.

Otherwise he'd be as shameless as his slick pal Nick Adams, a fellow
Rebel
delinquent who'd taken to showing up to parties in a candy-red windbreaker. For
Life
's feature “Delirium Over Dead Star,” the notorious Hollywood opportunist posed with a cigarette by his kitschy shrine of Dean memorabilia, including Dean's hat and a poem Dean had penned about a lonely boy.

Hopper let it be known—he wanted no part in such gloss. Coolly playing his cards, he pleaded to
Young Movie Lovers
magazine, “Please, don't call me another Jimmy Dean.”

Practically every young actor was being thrust into the sweepstakes, like a guy Hopper saw pulling up to a popular Hollywood restaurant in a Porsche, just like Dean's. He even kind of looked like Dean. Weird. And his name
was
Dean!

You Picked Dean Stockwell

to Play Jimmy Dean!

But Would It Ruin Him

or Make Him a Star?

So asked the pages of
Movie Life
, a cheap fanzine that made this grown-up child star cringe. Dean Stockwell preferred to hang out with his subterranean art crowd and make cosmic collages and strange underground movies like
For Crazy Horse
,
Pas de Trois
, and
Moonstone
, screened out in the wilds of Topanga Canyon.

But a dark horse roaring in from Tupelo had no reservations about going after James Dean gold. Dropping to his knees before Nicholas Ray, the stranger with the slicked-back black hair commenced to recite Dean's lines from “Rebel Without a Pebble,” as he adoringly called his favorite film. He'd seen it over and over in the theaters and was desperate to star in the upcoming
James Dean Story
, not realizing it was going to be a documentary, or knowing what a documentary was anyway.

“I'd sure like to take a crack at it,” said Elvis Presley. “I think I could do it easy.”

Hunting down Hopper so he could hear all about Jimmy Dean, Elvis confided how worried he was because the script of a B Western he was about to star in instructed him to smack around his lovely costar. He told Dennis, “Man, I never hit a woman before.”

Realizing the confusion, Hopper sat down the sloe-eyed cowboy for a chat. He broke it to him gently that the movies—like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny—weren't real. Dennis ought to know, having just filmed
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
. Playing the troubled rustler Billy Clanton, he'd clutched his chest and dropped off the balcony for the final scene. Crashing onto one of the old-time cameras at Fly's Photographic Studio, he was a portrait of wasted youth. Then he picked himself up, brushed himself off, and walked off the Paramount backlot with fake saguaro cacti and a mountain made of a big hump of gray asbestos. See, he wasn't really dead. He'd merely shot it out with
fake
bullets against a
fake
Wyatt Earp at a
fake
O.K. Corral.