Hopper (13 page)

“Dennis, you can't keep a beat,” said Peter, offering an explanation of why Hopper couldn't work on his album.

“No, I wanna direct it!”

“Dennis, you don't
direct
an album, you produce an album.”

“No, no—”

“No, Dennis, this is sound, not imagery.”

“I wanna direct the album, man. You know, man, I mean—” Hopper, a bullheaded Taurus, started grabbing his own earlobes.

That was the problem with Hopper, Fonda realized; he was a stubborn bull and his heart carried this paranoid thing. It was just part of his character. If you understood it and liked Dennis, and Peter did, you rolled with it. If you didn't, you'd call him out on it and end a friendship real quick.

Hopper stormed and ranted till finally, fed up, Fonda picked up his Nagra tape recorder with its reel-to-reel tape deck. He'd bought it to record the endless well wishes of strangers who stopped him on the street to gush, “You know, I really love your father. He's my favorite actor, and I love your sister!” He was planning to put all of this into his album, but instead smashed the Nagra to the ground.

“Dennis, when you can fix
that
, then you can direct the album.”

“You're a fucking child! Did you hear yourself? I can't talk to you. I'm leaving! I'm leaving! I'm never gonna speak to you again! You steal
everything
from me!”

That passion was one of the great things about Hopper, figured Fonda. When he was set off, it was like lighting a fuse.

Fonda cracked another Heinie, fired up another doobie in his red-flocked cocoon. Up in the firmament, outside his window, Brando, Dean, and Clift twinkled in the cosmos. Marlon's comet shone brightest. It hooked around the sun, didn't get sucked in, and then seemed to orbit
around
it. A celestial navigator, Fonda watched it come, exit—it was really incredible. The tail of that comet sent showers and meteors fizzling down through the atmosphere.

Being a Fonda, Peter had known Marlon from the time he was fifteen, meeting him the same year Jimmy died. Peter didn't know Jimmy, but he knew his work, so when he first met Hopper, ranting about those bloody chickens, Peter recognized him from Jimmy's movies and asked him about Dean. For Dennis, knowing Dean was a badge of access, like a backstage pass, something he always wore. Fonda knew how Hopper got
into
Dean, studied Dean, wanted to know why Dean would do this, why he would do that, what his process was for deciding how to fill the empty moment. Looking back at that glossy of him on the chopper, Peter figured, who better to have as his own riding partner—and director—than Hopper, who'd taken that road with Dean?

“That's it!” snapped Fonda, jolted out of his red-flocked haze—“It's not about one hundred Angels on the way to a Hells Angels funeral. It's about these two guys ridin' across John Ford's West.”

It'd be just like
The Searchers
, with Big Duke on the trail from snowy Gunnison, Colorado, to Mexican Hat, Utah, hunting for his orphaned niece played by Natalie Wood, who'd been kidnapped by Comanche. Naturally Fonda would be Big Duke, being the Big Duke of biker Flicks, only he wouldn't be going west but east, like the seeker in Hermann Hesse's
Siddhartha
. And Fonda wouldn't really be Big Duke, but more like Wyatt Earp, whom his father once played, or better yet, Captain America! He'd need a floppy-hatted sidekick, of course. Maybe they'd call him Bucky—or Billy? Like Billy the Kid!

So who would play Natalie, the living embodiment of the hero's doomed existential quest?

Dig this. America. Far-out. Only they wouldn't find her. Anywhere. Fonda picked up the phone.

T
his is
my
fucking movie, and nobody's taking my fucking movie away from me!” Hopper screamed in the New Orleans Airport Hilton parking lot on a miserable early February morning in 1968 with unnaturally freezing temperatures and forecasted snow. Kicking off the first day of shooting on
Easy Rider
during Mardi Gras, somehow Hopper didn't seem like the same director who, all mellow, had told his cast and crew in California days earlier, “This is going to be a group of friends and we're all our own person. Do your own thing.”

The assembled actors, documentary filmmakers, photographers, audiophiles, and assorted groovy characters listening to his parking lot tirade had been plucked from the underground LA movie scene. They'd been told they'd be taking a semidocumentary approach to the shoot, playing it loose, rolling with whatever came their way on the manic streets of Mardi Gras. Amid the chaos of drunkards, frat boys, and drag queens, they were to film the climactic scene of
Easy Rider
when the bikers Wyatt and Billy—Fonda and Hopper—traipse about with two whores from Madame Tinkertoy's bordello on their way to drop acid in one of the city's famous above ground cemeteries.

Shivering in her costume of fishnet stockings and a glittery silver wisp of a dress, frizzy-haired Karen Black couldn't believe they were actually in New Orleans shooting among all these people.

“My God,” she had thought when she first met Hopper in LA. “He's very full of life and energy.” Immediately taken by his idiosyncratic, peculiar sort of genius, she typed up a contract for herself since her agent was out of town. For $300 she now found herself locked in a New Orleans antiques shop with the other actress cast as a bordello whore, vivacious, black-haired Toni Basil, because Hopper didn't want to misplace anyone.

“Okay, okay, come out, come out. Okay, are you there? Are you there?”

“Yeah, we're here. What do you want us to do?”

Flying in from New York to join the party was the screenwriter. Instead of hiring some nobody to write the script, Fonda had wooed Terry Southern, hot off of writing the screenplay for
Barbarella
, a space-age sex romp starring sister Jane. And just like some fucking writer, Terry had proceeded to change, in his own nomenclature, the “wrong-o” title of Hopper and Fonda's biker movie, which they originally called
The Loners
. Squaresville. Terry rechristened it
Easy Rider
, using the lingo for a whore's old man: not a pimp, just the guy who wants the easy ride.

“Well, that's what's happened to America, man,” Fonda told
Rolling Stone
. “Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking an easy ride.”

Terry withdrew into the Clark Cortez motor home production vehicle/on-the-fly-story-conference-room rambling through the streets of New Orleans. Karen affectionately called the camper “the Winnie.” Passersby might have seen a crumpled page of script ripped from the onboard typewriter go flying out a curtained window onto the bead- and confetti-littered street, or heard Southern, Hopper, or Fonda screaming inside—likely all three. The buzz among the crew was that Terry, being the screenwriter of the trio they called the “brain trust,” was there to write scenes with Hopper and Fonda.

Nobody was sure what was giving them such a hellish time in there. Could they not decide on the scenes they were going to film in Mardi Gras? Was there even a script? Or was Hopper overly confident about his ability to make up scenes based on in-the-moment inspiration?

“I believe what Cocteau said,” went the familiar Hopper rant. “Ninety-eight percent of all creation is accident, one percent intellect, and one percent logic!”

At any rate, something was being cooked up inside the roving Clark Cortez, which was like hell—or artistic creation and destruction—on wheels. The Winnie charged forth through narrow cobbled streets bloated with revelers. A circus car that had lost its train, or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on acid, this character with headlights for eyes emitted the strange shouts, shrieks, and hysterical laughter of its riders, typically heard at odd hours. She huffed, puffed, gurgled, and belched out a cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, seeing as everyone in the RV seemed pretty loaded. Terry was a big martini man, and Hopper enveloped everyone in his fairly continual cocktail of dope mixed with red wine, pills, speed, and whatever Cracker Jack prize made its way across the Winnie's communal table.

While the brain trust battled their demons inside the Winnie, some crew members dropped the occasional tab of acid, waiting around to be told what the hell they should go shoot today. Fed up, some simply got up—“Well, screw it. Let's just go out and start shooting things.”

Like tourists with very expensive cameras—an Arriflex, a Bauer, an Eclair—the crew shot the big Mardi Gras parades rolling down Canal Street. Flambeau carriers lit the path of three golden seahorses in the Krewe of Endymion parade. Bandits and a train barreled into a fake tunnel on
The Great Train Robbery
float celebrating the 1903 silent film. Crowds cheered on Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone taming the frontier.

Meanwhile, another character of American folklore was going a little nuts.

In his fringed buckskin jacket and a necklace strung with white seashells from Baja, Hopper pushed his way into the French Quarter with
his
movie, weaving through street vendors hawking foot-longs and multicolored paper happy flowers in full blossom on long sticks.

“Be quiet, please. I'm trying to shoot a major motion picture over here!”

The crowd threw beer cans at him.

At night at the airport Hilton, Karen and Toni shared an uncontrollable case of the giggles. They felt trapped in Dennis's movie. It was too funny. It was such a horrible disaster.

“We've made a terrible error in our lives!” squealed Karen.

They were laughing so hard, they fell off the bed. Suddenly a huge reel of black film came rolling through their door like a tumbleweed. Chasing after it was Hopper, followed by his cameraman. Apparently, Hopper was on a mission to collect all the canisters of the film they'd shot so far.

“I don't trust you. Gimme all your film. I want it in
my
room!”

CRAAAASSSHHHH!

In the course of the struggle, a television was hurled across the room. The two rolled over each other until finally Hopper found himself sitting on top of his cameraman, straddling him.

“I love you, man,” said Hopper with genuine emotion. “Man, I
love
you.”

Securing the film, Hopper proceeded to try to wrench away the camera to go out to the parking lot and shoot the fantastic neon signs caught in the puddles. Karen noticed that he was always out at night, shooting, shooting, shooting. She worried about him and offered him some health-food shop vitamin E to keep him going.

“What's that?” he said, examining the pill.

“It's a
vitamin
, Dennis. It's not gonna hurt you.”

Capturing the neon in the puddles was the least of his worries. The final big day of Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday was the next morning, and Hopper still hadn't gotten a shot of their characters—Billy, Wyatt, and their two whores—in one of the parades.

Unfortunately, nobody had a permit to film the actors in those official parades about to hit Canal Street. That left only the ramshackle African Zulu parade with blackface warriors dancing and gyrating in grass skirts. The whole procession disembarked from the royal barge and meandered uptown according to its own whims and free will. With no set schedule, it was anyone's guess how to catch the parade.

Luckily, among Hopper's crew was cameraman Les Blank, self-schooled in the arcana of American spectacles—from kudzu to zydeco—and a dedicated student of the black Mardi Gras. A socially conscious great white hunter, Blank knew how to chase down the Zulu.

The Clark Cortez took off uptown as inside its tinny abdomen Hopper tried to work the Zulu into his script. The crew saw him constantly trying to control the chaos around him instead of just going with the flow—“Why doesn't he just roll with what's happening?” Deciding to leave the director behind for a little while, they went off and did what they thought needed to be done. Emerging from the Clark Cortez, which was parked on a little sandy spot near an intersection, Hopper got out and stewed in his sand pile as his movie walked away from him. Like Orson Welles once said, dashing off to Rio in a Mars flying boat to film Carnival, “You know, I
hate
carnivals.” In the swirling chaos, Hopper now felt the same. Rio was where Orson had lost control of
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Sweat bubbling on his brow, Hopper was terrified of his own grandiose failure.

“Orson Welles failed, but like hell I'm going to fail,” he told his crew throughout the shoot.

“Where are we?” asked Karen, grabbed by one of these rogue cameramen. “How are we gonna shoot this movie when we don't have a director? We don't have Toni or Peter.”

Feeling out to sea in the parades, Karen gave a local kid a buck to go find Hopper. But of course the kid went and got himself a soda and she never saw him again. Suddenly she heard the music and a thundering like a herd of approaching elephants.