Hopper (12 page)

Hopper had barely scratched the surface of his plans. As the husband of a Hayward, he was able to lob his opinions like grenades at Hollywood parties with the fabulously stiff old guard. To august director George Cukor, whose recent
My Fair Lady
was a sheer delight, Hopper said, “You are the old Hollywood and we're the new. We are going to
bury you
.”

P
eter Fonda was rocketing to stardom after AIP director Roger Corman, playing directly to the teenyboppers, realized that the staple villain of the beach party movies, Eric Von Zipper, a portly, leather-clad motorcyclist who spun sand on teen heroes Frankie and Annette, should be the hero. Corman's Hells Angels-inspired film,
The Wild Angels
, became a smash at the box office, grossing $10 million on a mere $360,000 budget. Starring as Heavenly Blues, an Angel who just wants to get loaded, Fonda led an outlaw biker gang on the way to an Angel's funeral. In the church, a drunken orgy ensued, complete with an altar rape scene.

Next up for Fonda on Roger's Z pipeline was
The Trip
, an LSD shocker promising all the terror, exhilaration, and ecstatic loneliness of an acid trip—as if the movie were the tab. A guy around the scene, Jack Nicholson, had written the screenplay. He'd kicked around with Hopper's friend Bobby Walker on the set of 1964's
Ensign Pulver
.

On the tenth floor of the Acapulco Hilton, getting into his role as “the man with the most original mind in the Navy,” Bobby smoked up while thinking how crazy it was how this guy charmed everybody.

“If they would put Jack in a movie where he could be free to be
Jack
,” thought Bobby, lost in contemplation, “if he could
ever
let out that innate charm and devil-may-care kind of rakish, sardonic, charming-wise-guy personality, he'd be a
huge
hit.”

Only Jack was trapped in Corman hell.
The Cry Baby Killer
was only the first in an ignominious string of Corman roles Jack had suffered through for the sake of his craft, including the masochistic dental patient in
The Little Shop of Horrors
. Figuring he had a better shot as a writer than as an actor, he tried a new path, turning to screenwriting.

After reading Jack's final draft of
The Trip
, full of weird cuts and visually groovy acid-trip flashes, Fonda put it down, moved to tears.

“
Oh my God
,” he told himself. “I get to work in the first real American art film. This is like American art shit! This is gonna go out in the theaters! I can't wait till Hopper hears about this!”

Corman doled out a part for Hopper as a drug dealer who sports a necklace strung with human teeth. He also let Hopper and Fonda go out on their own to shoot some scenes for the acid trip. These Bergmanesque sequences featured Fonda wearing a puffy blouse and running around the sand dunes in Yuma, California, and eating gruel offered by a dwarf in the forest near Big Sur. The cloaked figure of Death awaited atop a rocky bluff.

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Hopper filmed Fonda wandering around in a preppy red sweater, passing before a revolving Bullwinkle statue on Sunset Strip, lost in the neon glow of the Whisky A Go Go. Using intercut footage, the giant hand-painted billboards were going to be part of the acid trip sequence. There would be none of that projected cosmic plasma fantasia shit littering the bars and clubs, but something much more real.

But AIP, unwilling to risk the bottom line on something genuinely arty, thought kids might instead enjoy a mini-carousel with a midget rider. Or Hopper dressed as a psychedelic priest absolving a monkey.

When
The Trip
was unleashed to audiences in '67, it was totally decked out in spinning spiral projections in a DayGlo nightclub with naked painted go-go girls who'd been selected during AIP's televised Psychedelic Paint-In casting party. So Hopper could still be the first out of the gates with the great American art film. Could everything still fall into place?

Sitting beside Dennis on the beach, Fonda, practically his brother, had already told
Variety
he was committed to
The Last Movie
. This was supposed to be a family affair with not only sister Jane but Henry, too. The Fonda patriarch had read
The Last Movie
and said it was the most original Western he'd ever read, a staggering compliment from the man who starred as Wyatt Earp in
My Darling Clementine
, directed by the master himself, John Ford. Bobby Walker was to play a part in the movie too, just like his mother, Jennifer Jones, who believed in Dennis as if she were his own mother, seeing his dedication and talent, warmed by his creative spark.

“Make grand entrances and quick exits,” she would say. Hopper thought he would pave her triumphant return to the screen.

And there was screenwriter Stewart Stern, who kept an eye on the boys, all just a little younger than him. Sometimes he thought it was
awful
how illusion grabbed them.

The boys delved into the meaning of existence, only to come up lost. That day on the beach, they'd all been having this wonderful conversation, which turned
funny
for the boys, who were being clever, then brilliant, only Stern saw that the more brilliant they thought they were, the dumber they were, leaving him odd man out. Stern did not get high eating magic mushrooms or go down LSD rabbit holes. As a writer, his hold on reality was too precious. He simply couldn't be like Hopper or Bobby Walker, the movie star's son, paddling away in his canoe from Malibu to Catalina Island to find his spirit self.

For Bobby, especially, it was all about the pilgrimage. Dennis had to be constantly moving, but Bobby didn't have to do anything. He didn't have to photograph anything or have his ego stroked by civilization. It was enough to be out in nature at two o'clock in the morning under the moon.

One night, these huge ships began to bear down on his canoe. Bobby saw himself trapped in a strange movie: “Are they gonna run me over? Why am I putting myself in harm's way like this? Am I an
idiot
? Who do I have to kiss to get off this movie?”

At the very least, Dennis, Peter, and Bobby wanted to direct the movie of their lives. They liked Baja and hatched a plan to buy some land together, where they could settle down with their families in this utopia. They went to meetings with the Mexican landowners. Clean-cut Fonda would show up in his suit and tie, holding an aluminum briefcase. Hopper and Bobby wore hippie beards. The boys went from landowner to landowner, trying to get someone to sell them just a sliver to settle on.

Fearing a hippie invasion, nobody even wanted them to talk to the motel maids.

Fonda cut out early. He was always in a bit more of a hurry. Dennis and Bobby still thought they needed to hang out, talk to the farmers. The two were so friendly and nice but bombed out of their minds. Nobody ended up giving them the time of day down in Baja.

The twin Robinson Crusoes did discover an exotic out-of-the-way beach where no tourist would ever think of going. Wading into the warm water—you could stand in it up to your waist all day long and never get cold or bored—Dennis admitted he'd always been afraid of the water. He finally surrendered and floated on his back. Bobby thought it was a wonderful healing experience. If only Dennis could have carried that feeling on and not drifted away.

A
little monkey with love painted on his cranium. Ravi Shankar's entourage garnishing the crowd of flower children with rose petals. Hopper opened his eyes to the Technicolor experience at the Monterey Pop Festival during the Summer of Love.

His hair grown out, he looked lost and loveless, dwarfed beside Nico, the Teutonic goddess of the Velvet Underground. Onstage against throbbing plasma projections wailed terrifying Grace Slick. Humongous Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas swayed beside her cassocked Papas and . . .
Gorgeous
.

Shimmering Mama Michelle Phillips was the ultimate fantasy with the face of an angel and the voice of a siren. She shone directly onto an ecstatic Hopper, who soaked in the purest, most beautiful moment of his whole trip.

The psychedelic experience had taken on religious dimensions for Hopper ever since that strange visit with Fonda to find angels. There in Manhattan, one night in a hotel lobby, Hopper had encountered a prostitute reading the Gospel according to Thomas. Translated from Coptic scrolls discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, the Gnostic Gospel floated among the spiritually hip who liked to fuck and think about the meaning of gnosis, or “experience.” During a walk through Muir Woods, Dennis recited the Gospel for Michael McClure, playwright of
The Beard
, in which Hopper would play the role of Billy the Kid. A fallen redwood lay in his path. Dennis laid a hand on it. His handprint seemed to sear into the bark. Was it the drugs or
real
?

Hopper was going a little crazy. Brooke felt her husband was getting dangerous.

Back at the Love-In, held on Easter Sunday before the Summer of Love, Hopper had snapped away with his Nikon. A fleshy conga line of flute players, wandering minstrels, and a girl with a heart painted on her forehead wound through the forest. A wild creature in a loincloth completely freaked out, gyrating naked and screaming incantations. Some dumbfounded cowpoke chewing gum watched from the sidelines.

Hopper showed Brooke the proofs of the groovy shots he'd taken, only she wasn't too impressed. She was in a rush to pick up the kids from school—“Well, Dennis . . .” He broke her nose with a single swipe.

POW!

A few months later, Brooke sat in the audience at the Warner Playhouse on La Cienega Boulevard, where Hopper was deep into rehearsal as Billy the Kid.
The Beard
was set in heaven, described by the playwright as a “blue-velvet dominated eternity.” As Billy, the dandified killer, Hopper hurled insults at bubbly sexpot Jean Harlow. After she made fun of his long sissy hair, Billy ripped off her panties, as directed, and dove in headfirst.

Plagued by awful performance anxiety, Dennis went completely nuts after rehearsal. He wanted Brooke to stay, but she insisted she had to get home.

“I've left the children alone,” said Brooke, impatiently. “I've got to go home.”

“No, I don't want you to.”

Out in the parking lot, as Brooke climbed into their Checker Cab, Dennis burst into a tantrum. In front of a dozen onlookers, he jumped on the yellow hood and kicked in the windshield while Brooke sat terrified in the driver's seat. She drove home with the wind blowing in her face.

Dennis followed his light, dancing a path to the other side of Death Valley. The desert pit was too hot for any respectable film studio but perfect for AIP's latest shocker,
The Glory Stompers
, originally slated as a Western. But in Corman pics, entire plots could change overnight. The Indians became a menacing biker gang of well-oiled Black Souls. The traditional campfire scene metamorphosed into a leather-clad mosh pit of chicks with beer guts lubricated by the gasoline fumes spewing from a pack of revved-up Harleys.

In a cutoff jean vest, Hopper straddled his purple chopper as the leader of the Black Souls, then snuck off to the bushes to smoke dope. “Grasshopper,” his fellow cast members called him.

Back in San Francisco, Grasshopper was hanging out with the Diggers, the guys who salted the turkey sandwiches with acid to turn everyone on at the Be-In. Led by Emmett Grogan, the Diggers were a self-described band of “community anarchists” in an underground rebellion. An offshoot of the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe floored Hopper with their bawdy, ribald free-for-all guerrilla theater like something from the Old Globe.

On this particular occasion, Emmett and the Mime Troupe director Peter Coyote were roaring on about some story—“Bein' profane, as we do,” recalled Coyote—when suddenly, some guy who was hanging around took offense and punched Emmett in the face. Hopper didn't miss a beat. Jumping up on the table, he drop-kicked that motherfucker in the cranium. Grasshopper was no one to fuck with.

The Diggers dug. Hopper was proving himself not just as an actor, but as a real motorcycle hell-raiser like Sweet Willie Tumbleweed. Held in high esteem by the Diggers, this unbelievably poetic man spun great stories underneath his long hair and menacing leather-clad exterior. He could stop a crowd just by staring at them, but the Diggers saw him lie down like a dog before the raw masculinity of the Hells Angels. The Angels sort of took him over to the dark side, but he was a Digger first.

One night, the Diggers and Sweet Willie were all hanging out with Hopper and Fonda.

“You know, if I was gonna make a movie, I'd make a movie of me and a buddy ridin' around America, doin' what we do, seein' what we see,” said the burly man prophetically, or so the Digger legend went about Sweet Willie Tumbleweed, spinner of stories, the kind that really stuck.

O
n his promotional tour for
The Trip
in Toronto, Peter Fonda enjoyed Z picture star treatment courtesy of AIP. Staring into the weird Victorian wallpaper in the Red Flock Room at the low-rent Lakeshore Motel, Fonda figured it was probably a hooker's room. He cracked open a Heineken, lit up a doobie, and commenced signing a stack of eight-by-ten
Wild Angels
glossies of him and his costar, Bruce Dern, riding a chopper. Six-foot-three Fonda wondered idly why he only looked about two-and-a-half inches in the photo.

Who in publicity picked this particular still? Even when he wrote, “Best Wishes, Peter Fonda,” it was like, “Where am I?” You couldn't tell. You didn't know.

He and Hopper hadn't been on the best of terms, mainly because when he'd split for Toronto, Fonda didn't want Dennis to direct his yet-to-be-recorded album:
Got to Get You into My Life
. Fonda figured he could rip off the Beatles' song title because when he and John Lennon were tripping at the Playboy Mansion, Fonda kept whispering, “I know what it's like to be dead, man. I know what it's like to be dead,” which was sort of true because Peter had accidentally shot himself in the stomach when he was eleven. Lennon took Fonda's line for his song.