Hopper (27 page)

Pushing deeper into Appalachia, Blackgrove braved cussed highwaymen and ornery mountain folk in the hollows of the Cumberland Valley to forge his particular American dream with his itinerant preacher son in tow, his God-given talent for performance earning such a reputation that the
Barbourville Mountain Advocate
plainly asked its readers:

Then one Thomas Hopper was born in 1825, the year Senator Thomas Hart Benton told colleagues in the staid Senate chamber to rally America toward the uncharted West, evoking an exotic land of ivory, apes, and peacocks.

“There lies the East,” Senator Benton cried. “There lies the road to India.”

Thomas Hopper didn't make it all the way there, instead settling in Missouri, leaving his great-great-grandson Dennis to blaze trails on the westward path, and reach for himself that fantastical land.

Like those Hoppers of old, an imaginary dreamscape filled his head, and one day in Kansas City, Missouri—where his family moved for a stint before relocating permanently to California—Dennis Hopper tried depicting those fantastic Technicolor mountains of his dreams during children's Saturday painting classes at the Nelson art museum, his replacement for the matinees.

Then one day the renowned Thomas Hart Benton took over the class. It wasn't Senator Benton, who had rallied the nation long ago toward Manifest Destiny, but his great-nephew, the artist who packed up his paintbrushes and hit the road in a rickety Ford to see for himself what was out there. He didn't find India but a fabled land of a quintessentially American art, where the artist had to be a fighter and wrestle his vision down.

“What are you doing?” asked Benton, pomaded hair jet black, looming over this young Hopper.

“I'm painting this rock and river and so on,” said twelve-year-old Dennis.

“You're little, so you might be too young to understand what I'm about to say to you. But one day you're going to have to get tight and paint loose.”

If the squirt wanted fantastic blue mesas like the ones in Thomas Hart Benton's epic mural of America, he'd need to go over to Kellys Westport Inn, the local watering hole, get himself a stiff highball, and get behind the canvas and plow.

Too bad the boy was doomed to rot in the land of extravagant idiocy. Yet drink he did.

“I was doing half an ounce of cocaine every few days,” Dennis told Charlie Rose. “I was drinking like a half gallon of rum, then a couple bags of coke to sober up. And that wasn't getting high, that was just to keep going, man.” (Or more pharmacologically correct, he was drinking a half gallon of rum, with a fifth of rum on the side, twenty-eight beers, and snorting three grams of cocaine a day.)

Hopper let it all out, in its god-awful, staggering multitude. Now that he was confessing his sins, America was suddenly paying attention after almost twenty years of writing him off. He was invited on the talk shows after the '87 Oscar race for his tour de force as Frank Booth in
Blue Velvet
and his role as Shooter in
Hoosiers
, for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

“How he got out of this whole fuckin' thing is an amazing thing,” marveled his old pal, Michael Gruskoff. “He should've been gone the way he was doing it. Not many people come back like he did. Came back twice. Came back after Hathaway. Came back after
The Last Movie
. He started building up his career. He was making a new reputation because of people who were starting to get into art in Hollywood and wanted his advice. He started to do things that were not adolescent. People appreciated him for the talent he had.

“Haven't seen many people who know the town like he did—who knows how to use the town. He knew how to use those calling cards. He played the game. He played it as good as you can get—and had the rest of his life. You know what I mean?”

Hopper's dramatic Hollywood comeback—one of the most awe-inspiring in industry history—was featured in
Vanity Fair
three years after he returned to Hollywood from New Mexico. On the cover, a sophisticatedly gray Hopper held a cigar and stared down America for the feature—“How the Mad, Bad & Dangerous Movie Star Came Back from the Dead & Took the Town by Storm.”

“I mean, what—when you sit here today”—even Charlie Rose stumbled to take in the full breadth of Hopper's winding journey—“it's the best of times for you?
Right?
”

“Yes, it is. But you know, I tell you very honestly, Charlie, I don't feel I have
done
it yet. I mean I look at Anthony Hopkins, and I look at
Remains of the Day
, and I go, ‘Where is that part? Where is a movie like this that I could do?' You know, why am I never even
seeing
these kinds of scripts? Why do they never even come close to me?”

I
n a tweed suit, Hopper moseyed through the land of the unwanted. Abandoned autos. Burned-down homes. Trash-littered sidewalks. He was accompanied by his female bodybuilder friend from Beverly Hills who'd recently appeared in
Playboy
and was a muse for fine art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. He climbed over a graffiti-littered wall at the end of a dead-end alley. Three silver futuristic bunkers loomed in the wasteland of Venice Beach, California.

“I
loooooooove
'em,” said Hopper. “I just love 'em. Those are so amazing and
genius
.”

The trio of shacks seemed to have been built for Hopper. He felt as if he'd commissioned them, much to the delight of Venice artists Laddie John Dill and Chuck Arnoldi, up a creek financially on their artist colony sinkhole, in the ghetto, that they'd gotten budding architect Frank Gehry to design. Only the buildings were built
backward
because the blueprints were read that way.

One would-be tenant, a UCLA student, squinted at the graffiti and deciphered a death threat and split. The only takers so far were the cops, who'd been using the bunkers for surveillance to bust a crack house across the street. Hopper snapped one up in 1987, with plans to get the others when he could. In gangsta style, he rolled around his hood in a two-tone brown Cadillac Seville with gold-wire rims, surveying the turf for his new movie,
Colors
, starring bad boy actor Sean Penn.

“We're here to learn about gangs,” announced Sean at a meeting of CRASH, Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, the LAPD gang unit.

“Good fuckin' luck, pal,” said Detective Dennis Fanning.

Detective Fanning was recruited as the technical adviser on
Colors
, and for three months, the LAPD stuck Sean Penn in the backseat of his squad car. “Sometimes when you're with someone, a partner, they could be the greatest cop in the world, and you could be the greatest cop in the world, but you don't have karma when you're in a car together,” explained Fanning at an Orange County Starbucks: “It's just you're always ten seconds late. The bad guy just left. The shooting just went down.

“Other times, you get in the car with somebody, and boom, it's right there. The karma's there. You turn the corner; there's the guy with the gun. You walk in the store; it's gettin' robbed. You pull up to the light; there's the stolen car. That's pretty much how it was with Seany. He got into the car and it turned into a shit magnet, which is nice because guys who consider themselves good street cops like to be considered shit magnets.”

Shit-magnet Seany wanted nobody else to direct
Colors
but Dennis Hopper, seeing as he and his wife, Madonna (“Mo” in cop talk), were big fans of
Out of the Blue
.

Colors
was originally scripted to be about cough syrup abuse, but Hopper drastically recast it to explore the volatile LA gang scene, with Crips and Bloods killing each other off on the streets of South Central like cowboys and Indians. His subject was considered so outlandish at the time that some critics actually thought he'd made it up. Living in Venice Beach, homeboy Dennis got to know the local gang kids on a personal level. He thought it was such a waste of meaningful talent, thoughtfulness, and energy.

“Dennis told me his crazy stories when he left the hospital and of walkin' down the road in his fuckin' pj's,” recounted Fanning of war stories Hopper told him about rehab and out-of-his-tree wanderings in the Mexican jungle. “Me and him had the same stories, just different sides of the fence. We got along famously. I got like ten or fifteen real cops into the movie. They wanted the realism. They used real gangsters, so that made for real fun breakin' for lunchtime on the set. Real cops on one side. Real gangsters on the other.”

“It's heavy, man,” said rapper Ice T. “You gotta think, okay he's in
Easy Rider
—rocked-out white guy gettin' high, riding motorcycles. You say, ‘Okay, he's on some rebel white shit.' Then to do a movie only about blacks and Mexicans?”

Hopper wanted Ice T's “Yo Homeboy, Squeeze the Trigger” on the soundtrack, so T went to a screening: “Okay, the movie's good. It had kind of a fictional line because the Mexicans and the blacks didn't fight at that time, but overall, I was kinda like, pro it. Rick James had the title song, ‘Look at all these Cull-uhs,' or some shit”—T doing his funkiest Rick James impression. “So without asking, I left the studio and we laid the song ‘Colors.' Just submitted it. Cold.”

All of a sudden, this ripple effect happened and everybody was like, “Yo. Dennis Hopper wants to meet you.”

“Yo bro-tha, this song is the shit, it's what the movie is, and it's all that. Yo! This is the essence; this is what it is; this is like beyond what I meant.”

That was homeboy Dennis talking. Ice T suddenly thought he was in
Apocalypse Now
. He'd always been a fan of Hopper's rap in the movie. “It's like he's talkin' about Kurtz, you know, the way he just takes the words and jumbles 'em and spins 'em and drops 'em?” As a fellow artist, Ice T appreciated how Hopper always really felt whatever he was doing.

No stranger to controversy himself, Ice T thought it was unfortunate when the media lashed out at Hopper's finished vision, calling
Colors
a disgrace and accusing him of fabricating a gang situation. Orion Pictures was afraid that if they distributed
Colors
in wide release, blood was going to run in the streets. So the studio offered to pay for security guards in all the release theaters, with protection outside and inside, but still a lot of theaters were too nervous to show the movie. When
Colors
opened in LA in '88, cops arrested nearly 150 gang members. A gang member was shot to death outside a theater in Stockton.

Colors
was hot! Unfortunately for the producers, nobody got killed in the second week, so the controversy died and
Colors
was buried.

If only the suits had put it in wide release more aggressively that first week, they could've made a fortune on Hopper!

In what felt like a flashback to his days under siege in the Mud Palace, Hopper was left to the pack of red-bereted Guardian Angels outside his compound, protesting his depiction of inner-city youth. Clearly he needed to fortify. Buying the Gehry shack on the vacant lot behind him, Hopper proceeded with phase two of his compound. Up went a silver futuristic fortress skin with a wavelike hyperbolic roof and an asymmetrical, windowless industrial corrugated steel facade. Hopper connected his original Gehry shack to the second he'd procured with a series of jarring heavy-duty catwalks. He bought a third a few years later.

Like a paranoid cocaine drug lord's insane bunker, only sober, video monitors played for him an ongoing surveillance loop, which fed his paranoia and served as artful background footage. All the lights in his house flashed at any unauthorized footstep. The compound was buttressed by a handgun stuffed into one of Hopper's socks and a backup shotgun tucked away on the premises.

Completing his American dream house, Hopper put up a white picket fence, like the kind at Auntie Em's in
The Wizard of Oz
or along the streets of
Blue Velvet
's Lumberton, separating him from Venice's mean streets.

“There's a little door on one side of the fence at the back with razor wire all around it,” explained Hopper of one of the compound's secret features. “After I put it up, I went out. I came back and they'd just taken the door off and laid it down. It was still locked, just laid down. I'm living on
their
turf, you know. I mean it's my turf, too. Because this is America.”

W
hen I was offered Koopa, I was quite excited. I thought it was a great opportunity to play a giant human lizard.”