Hopper (30 page)

“Well, it's
Phil
, you know?” said Hopper. “He just hasn't changed.”

The remaining scripts lay in the compound, littered across Mabel Dodge Luhan's wooden Florentine table, which Hopper had spirited from the Mud Palace when he left behind the seventies for Venice. Hanging above the table was a tastefully sleek avant-garde chandelier made entirely from crushed glass. It was expertly hung, like his other art.

Happy at home, he was left to contemplate his directorial career.

Would he push on with the meta-Western in which Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary, meets Victorian adventurer Ambrose Bierce? Or how about taking a crack at the adaptation of the book
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, about a pack of ecoterrorists? Or there was
Hellfire
, about wild-man Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Hopper wanted Mickey Rourke to play?

Floating somewhere in the compound was the
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
script, sent over by an inspired someone who knew how groovy matching Hopper with Hunter S. Thompson's drug-fueled journey into the American Dream would be.
Easy Rider 2
? Not so much, but Hopper planned to break through with an “
Easy Rider
for the nineties,” which was not some half-baked sequel, but more along the lines of Dante's
Inferno
.

“Very calm,” explained Hopper. “But underneath that calm there's really tortured things happening.”

Instead he was slated to direct
The Hot Spot
, a sex-soaked noir starring
Miami Vice
's Don Johnson as a car salesman. Hopper referred to it as “The Last Tango in Texas.” At home in his spare time, he assembled newspaper clippings to fill a voluminous scrapbook about Mexico's serial killings. He was back from traveling to Romania, trying to secure funding the way Orson Welles scoured Europe.

Should he just give up and do the Charles Manson biopic, written by the madman himself?

KAAAAKRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Man,” said Hopper, stunned. “A few feet, either way, it could've been all over!”

A wire snapped, sending fourteen pounds of his loose, tastefully crushed chandelier glass plummeting down on the Florentine dining room table, ingraining yet another cosmic memory in its wood.

Hopper didn't sink so low as to do
Charles Manson in His Own Words
. Instead his last film would be a fashion label–inspired movie titled
Tod's Pashmy Dream
, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, shot in
La Dolce Vita
–style in Rome. Sponsored by the luxury bag company Tod's, the promotional short was billed as “A Dennis Hopper Film,” starring Gwynnie and a rather boring Tod's Pashmy bag. It was totally fabulous like Warhol on pink champagne! Enough to make any real artist puke.

“What's it called,
The Last Movie
?” asked hipster director John Lurie.

Hopper was adrift in Thailand, filming an episode of John Lurie's
Fishing with John
. Hopper survived the trip on his post-rehab diet of Snickers and Diet Coke.

“You know,” said Lurie, “you should really get that movie back and edit it.”

“Yeah,” Hopper deadpanned. “Why didn't I think of that?”

Hopper was instead busy assembling the movie of his life, the one he'd shot frame by frame on his Nikon. A German art book publisher, famous for high-end smut like its
Big Butt Book
, commissioned him to do a giant photo book. In keeping with the scope of Hopper, his coffee-table book was going to be practically the size of a coffee table.

Hopper needed a few pictures to fill in the gaps, so he gathered friends to the cause.

Stewart Stern had taken a terrific shot of him as a young man at the hospital, waiting for his and Brooke's daughter to be born. Stern hadn't seen Hopper for years after
The Last Movie
. He lived in Seattle now and was absent from the audience when Hopper flew in for a film festival. Hopper called out for him from the stage. Someone told Stern, and they arranged to have dinner that night. To Stern's surprise, Hopper was not only incredibly sweet but sober.

“Dennis. How did you get straight?”

“I just got to where I couldn't do it anymore.”

“Well, are you open to an idea? I believe that
The Last Movie
could be the most important document that any future artist could possibly have. That is, if you go back and shoot it again without yourself in the lead. Get the best actor you can find. Shoot the picture again. Then we'll issue it. Both pictures and the script. Let people see what happened. Not just to the film, but to
you
as an artist. What the difference is with you, as an artist, and the choices you would make now, against what you made before when you went nuts in Peru. It would do a lot of good for people to see how art can be demolished by what you think is inspiration and is only coke. It'll give you a chance to vindicate yourself and to have a film that people will look at instead of a fancy failure.”

“Yeah, that's, you know . . .” laughed Hopper, then he shrugged it off.

“From then on we were friends,” said Stern. “But he never did the movie, and he never made the film that I always wanted to make most, which was about his boyhood on the farm in Kansas with his grandma. Oh, what he could have done with his grandma! Because at the bottom of all that was this motherless child.”

Hopper called his old friend, Bobby Walker, who had a terrific shot of Hopper on the beach teaching his daughter how to shoot a camera. There was another great one of Hopper in front of a big Dr Pepper soda pop sign.

When Bobby came over to give him the photos, Hopper was swarmed with assistants, busy having his appearances arranged and possibly filming this commercial. Phones were ringing off the hook dealing with his art and buying and selling and showing himself. Hopper was part of a world that Bobby didn't want any part of.

Bobby didn't want to take up too much of Hopper's time, but later thought at length about seeing Dennis. Tucked away at his home in Malibu, packs of choppers roared past in the distance, all living out
Easy Rider
fantasies. In retrospect, Bobby was glad he'd decided not to set himself and his family adrift like Kon-Tiki at sea in that escape pod. In the sixties, he was planning to get all his teeth pulled, so he “didn't have to worry about dentists, 'cause that's the worst thing when you're living in remote areas.”

Bobby's dad, actor Robert Walker, who was admired by James Dean, had died at thirty-two from a drug overdose. Bobby's thoughts turned toward Hopper and whether he squandered his talent, or whether something from his searching would survive like all great art.

I think so much got in his way in the old days of wanting to open the doors of perception and soothe the pains of everyday three-dimensional living. Obliterate any discomforts of the past, obliterate with booze and drugs of one kind or another. His pursuit of oblivion did him in, just as I think it did in all the great talents.”

Bobby's mother, Jennifer Jones, had recently died, leaving Bobby to catalog his stepfather David O.'s memos to her, and they were strewn about his house. Unattached to material things, at his mother's suggestion Bobby was trying to pawn her Oscar, only to be informed by the Academy that he'd only be allowed to sell it back to them for a dollar. Seemed like valueless junk—though Hopper would've killed for one, something to hold aloft for that singular great role that never came down the pipeline, the conventional one at least.

Y
ou had a birthday there in France at the film festival,” said Jimmy Kimmel on
Jimmy Kimmel Live!

“On a yacht, yeah,” said Hopper, describing his seventy-third birthday party celebrated in May 2009. “Everybody from Harrison Ford to Bono to Mick Jagger, it was incredible.”

“Elton John was on the ship?”

Sporting a suit and tie, Hopper, playing the elder goateed artist statesman, told another story, honed over the years. It was the one about the time he went to see Orson Welles perform his hocus-pocus at the Riviera Hotel.

“You went to see Orson Welles in Las Vegas?”

“Yeah, Orson had come back from Europe and did a show in Vegas. It was terrific.”

More magic tricks. Welles was magnificently pathetic.

Like his muse, Hopper had played the manic sellout, the repentant former wild child, the crazy villain, the comeback kid. Not to mention the homeboy. What were all these roles leading to? What were
they
going to say about him when he was gone? Would anybody even pay attention?

Would they love Hopper in his final role? Of course they would.

“Dennis,” shouted a paparazzo on the streets of Venice.

Hopper turned around abruptly and, in his weakened state, fell and hit his head. He had to put on a huge white bandage and cover it with his street urchin cap.

The tabloids were all clamoring to get the inside scoop after his latest battle, this time with terminal prostate cancer. A dying Hopper was hot stuff to begin with, but on top of it America's eyes were glued to him, given the sensational Shakespearean feud raging in Hopperdom. Who would win his valuable art inheritance? The warring parties were his children from different marriages pitted against the estranged ex-wives, spitting at each other like wildcats. And the really sick thing? They were all trapped in Hopper's world—all living in his sprawling compound.

Hopper's daughter Marin lurked in the main house. Living in one of the “three little pigs,” as the Frank Gehry shacks were called, was wife number four, Katherine LaNasa. Hopper met her in the late eighties when she was a ballet dancer. After watching her perform at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in LA, he sat beside her at the dinner afterward at trendy Spago. He was on a date with this really trippy chick who insisted on ordering him fish when he went to the bathroom—“I thought you might want more
fish
in your diet.”

Katherine thought it was a weird sexual reference. In truth a mouthwatering carnivore, Hopper had already asked the publicist seat Katherine next to him because of her great ass. She was dressed in a crazy outfit she'd found in Paris like a little Indian boy. Watching her onstage earlier, he had liked the red bottoms under her tutu, how the red elastic went up her crack. The truth was she was a little overweight because she was recovering from an injury, but he didn't care.

Seeing Hopper three consecutive nights in the audience, someone said, “I didn't know you loved the ballet so much!”

Hopper and Katherine married in 1989 and divorced three years later. They'd recently had a reconciliation on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They hadn't been close since their divorce, but decided to quit bickering and be friends again. Supporting his final dying role, she came back into the fold. Their actor son, Henry, dribbled out abstracts, like the ones by his father run over in Vincent Price's driveway.

No, Katherine wasn't the estranged wife. The estranged wife, wife number five, was sequestered in another of the pigs.

Hopper had met her at Rebecca's Restaurant in Venice. She was the hostess—“I don't want to bother you now, but when you're finished,” asked paper-thin Victoria Duffy, big eyes framed by her fiery hair, “would you mind if I asked you about your art?” Not to discuss his acting, oh no, but his
photos
. Very good.

Dutifully playing the role of Hopper's wife, Victoria smiled on his arm on the velvet carpet at all the events and played hostess for lavish parties they threw at the Venice compound, expensively hip after all these years. She was with Dennis for fourteen years, longer than any of the other wives, but Hopper just couldn't seem to get divorced from her fast enough.

As long as Victoria was on the premises, she'd be legally fulfilling the obligations of the prenup that they were both married and living together. Suddenly, the sprawling compound seemed too sprawling for Hopper's own good. From his bedroom window, bunkered in like John Wayne at the Alamo, he could practically see her over the little stretch of yard. All the while, they were, technically, still living together.

A white picket fence wrapped up his messy world like an all-too-simplistic bow. A frail Hopper surrounded himself with his loved ones—Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, and Marcel Duchamp hanging on the walls. Soon all of his friends would be taken away from him.

The
Hotel Green
Duchamp/Hopper collaboration would go for $362,500 at the Dennis Hopper estate sale at Christie's, a star-studded affair. Hitting $410,500 was Bruce Conner's religious-themed lithographs
Dennis Hopper One Man Show
. Warhol's
Mao
had been critically wounded when Hopper shot two bullets into him during his wild days, but Warhol resurrected the work by drawing two circles around the bullet holes and signing the hole over Mao's right shoulder, labeling it “warning shot.” The Warhol/Hopper collaboration went for $302,500.

Then there was the Dennis Hopper Warhol, somehow
greater
than his Marilyns or his Elvises. It was a still from
The Last Movie
, canonizing Hopper as a rebel dreamer in his cowboy hat.
Dennis Hopper, 1971
, would go for just under a million. The large Basquiat would sell for a whopping $5,794,500, capping off this splendid affair bringing in a grand total of $14,741,657.

IN THE EVENT OF A DIVORCE CUT HERE
directed Hopper's painting by the enigmatic graffiti artist Banksy.

“I love you all,” Hopper told the cheering crowd gathered for his star ceremony at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Jack Nicholson wore a star-spangled
Easy Rider
shirt featuring Billy and Captain America. Desiree showed up; she was now an herbalist. Hopper's Helix High pal, Bill Dyer, was there, too.

“He told me he had cancer eight years ago,” said Bill. “And the doctor told him he had gotten it all. Then Dennis called and told me they hadn't.”