Hopper (31 page)

“Dennis!” the paparazzi shouted as he received the plaque given to him by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for its 2,403rd star. Dennis's star would bring in $3,750, a little more than the certificate of nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern for Original Story and Original Screenplay for the film
Easy Rider
. At Christie's, it would outbid a
Waterworld
pinball machine, not to mention the two lacquer end tables featuring Hopper smoking a big fat cigar, and a framed photograph of silent film star Tom Mix, the god of old movie cowboys in his white hat.

A pack rat, Hopper kept it all, the art and the junk. Somewhere in it was an
Easy Rider
poster featuring the chiseled motorcycle god Captain America in his black leather jacket, with the tagline:
A MAN WENT LOOKING FOR AMERICA, BUT COULDN'T FIND IT ANYWHERE
.

So where was the script for
Easy Rider
Hopper had sworn didn't exist?

Among the heaps was a script for
The Last Movie
with a note from Raybert's Bert Schneider, who was rumored to be an addict, living
somewhere
in the wilds having blown his share of
Easy Rider
profits. A few people had seen Bert over the years and said he was sickly but still had his brilliant blue eyes blazing for a little longer.

In the compound garage, parked along with a pair of motorcycles with flat tires, were stacks of paintings and found objects and boxes of photographs for Hopper's upcoming retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. It was just like the time a Universal exec told him, about
The Last Movie
, “Art is only worth something if you're dead. We'll only make money on this picture if you die.”

“Don't talk to me like that,” said Hopper. “You're talking to a paranoiac.”

The exhibition going up in 2010 would look like a studio prop shop with freestanding backdrop “sets,” like the graffiti-strewn wall and chain-link fence in Venice. Hopper once pointed to it like Duchamp, calling it art and ordering it cut down. Hopper hoped to live long enough to make a grand entrance. Just in case he didn't, a life-size Hopper statue stood ready in his cowboy getup, reproduced from a poster of
The Last Movie
.

The light hit the movie screen. Going up in flames was Rosebud, the cheap little sled Charles Foster Kane had been playing on the day they ripped him away from his mother.

“It stood for his mother's love, which Kane never lost,” said Orson Welles, about the grandiose recluse trapped in his private Xanadu till the end of his days, a man who clamored for the love of the world—on
his
terms.

As the steel-blue Warner Bros. Special chugged in the distance ready to pick up Hopper and take him to the land of the movies, a constant stream of CNN rapidly fired images à la artist Bruce Conner. Flashing before Hopper were also early cowboy films, sent to him by an old friend.

The films were older than the ones in which Gene Autry once shot it out at the Dodge Theater. They'd been made back when Hathaway was a young son of a bitch whippersnapper working on
Ben-Hur
, and John Ford was an assistant director listening to a real cowboy, Wyatt Earp, jabber away. Stuck in Pasadena with a nagging wife and nowhere on the frontier left to roam, Earp moseyed over to the backlot to tell those damn fools in Hollywood what was what. He regaled Ford with the one about the time he'd shot it out at the O.K. Corral with Billy, leaving Billy dead as a doornail, silent as the tintypes hanging at Fly's Photographic Studio.

“I didn't know anything about the O.K. Corral at the time,” Ford once said. “Wyatt described it fully. As a matter of fact, he drew it out on paper, a sketch of the entire thing.”

In years to come, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral became the most famous gunfight in the Old West, courtesy of the movies, with Henry Fonda starring as Wyatt Earp in Ford's classic,
My Darling Clementine
.

The films that flickered before Hopper were earlier than that one still, going all the way back to
The Great Train Robbery
, hand-colored and starring that traveling salesman–actor G. M. Anderson. Staring at the audience in his ten-gallon, he pointed his six-gun at them and
blam!
He sent crowds screaming and fainting and wanting more!

His pupils opened. Blue around black of those eyes that
talked
. The light was fading. Everybody was saying he wouldn't catch the light, but Hopper hopped on his Harley-Davidson with the Panhead engine and flames blazing on the gas tank and gunned it.

Trailing behind him was a procession including a curtained Clark Cortez production vehicle, a truck driven by Hungarian émigré László Kovács, his cinematographer with the 35mm camera stocked with Kodak film, and Captain America's red, white, and blue chopper. The star-spangled gas tank Peter Fonda held between his legs, seeing as how it had come loose on the bumpy dirt washboard road.

Hopper took his show deeper into the heart of John Ford country, to the sacred Indian ground where Big Duke, that all-American kid born in the heartland as one Marion Mitchell Morrison, sprang forth as the Ringo Kid, appearing in
Stagecoach
, smiling amid gauzy clouds like the birth of Venus.

“There's no light,” called László.

“Shoot it anyway!” said Hopper.

Standing at the overlook in the setting sun, Hopper searched for America, down there in Monument Valley. He couldn't find her anywhere.

It was the greatest moment of his life. The road beckoned. The journey continued.

T
he brilliant thing,” said Peter Fonda, “the beautiful moment, the exceptional thing about it is, we had wrapped the film, we had a big wrap party, and we forgot to shoot the last fuckin' campfire. It was what it was. It was 1968. We argued about that scene. We screamed at each other for forty-five minutes. He wanted me to say all this shit. I didn't wanna say it. Mind you, this goes back to September 27, 1967, in Toronto at the Lakeshore Motel.”

“All I wanna say is, ‘We blew it,'” said Fonda to Hopper.

“What? Whaddya mean we blew it? What?
Fuck
, it looks so cool. Whaddya mean we blew it?”

“He wanted me to explain why we blew it,” recalled Fonda. “I refused. He was yelling and yelling at me and it was this terrible.”

“Well, tell me what you wanna do, man.”

“I wanna do it like Warren Beatty.”

“Warren Beatty? What the fuck do you mean, man?”

“You know, Beatty cuts all his lines in half and mumbles what he does speak.”

“Can you hear yourself, man? I mean, man, I mean, man, man, can you dig it, man? You sound like a fuckin' child, man. They've been waiting forty-five minutes for us. So let's just step out of this motor home and give each other a hug. They'll just think we're a couple of actors that have been, you know, working our Method up to do the scene and then we'll go down and do it. We'll do it two ways. First we'll do it your way, then we'll do it mine.”

Hopper stepped out of the Winnie and threw his arms around Fonda.

“I love ya, Fonda!”

“I doubt it,” thought Fonda, throwing his arms around Hoppy. “I love you, Dennis.”

BILLY

We're rich, man. We're retired in Florida now, mister.

WYATT

We blew it.

BILLY

Whaddya mean we blew it?

WYATT

No, we blew it.

“I'm lookin' at him with my upstage eye,” recalled Fonda. “He had a furrow that maybe Botox removed from him in later life, I dunno, but he furrowed his brow. That Napoleonic furrow was going Grand Canyon, dude! He's gonna hit me!”

“Cut! Okay, man. Stay right where you are, man, you know, man, I, man, just, man, just. Man, just stay where you are.”

“I'm stuttering now,” said Fonda, taking himself back to the moment. “It's not for effect. If I could pull this tape through, you would hear exactly as it was said. My unfortunate memory is that I got saddled with all this fuckin'
junk
. No, it's not junk. In this moment, it's not junk. 'Cause it's about a brilliant man in my life. Hopper was always calling me saying—”

“You gotta come, Fonda. You gotta see this!”

“Whether it's paintings, whether it's films, you've gotta be a part. Irreplaceable. More instructive to me than anybody else in the business. Certainly anybody in my family. Dennis was right in there, delivered me out of the grasp of Hollywood and into the possibility of filmmaking.

“I never would have seen
Duck Soup
had it not been for Hoppy. Never would have seen
Viridiana
. Never would have seen
The Exterminating Angel
. I never would have seen
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Never would have done the most incredible fuckin' shit. It was Dennis who codified me in all those moments in that period of my life, who anointed me, and knighted me, and bouqueted me, and graduated me, and did all that. I don't think on purpose. It was just—he was so
bright
—and he had such perception of art and form and substance that it infused my entire life as an actor, as a director, and it continually does that. 'Cause I always use that Cocteau reference. Ninety-eight percent of art is accident. You
want
that accident. We can't make it happen. It's contrived, but if it happens, you realize it and play with it.”

“Stay right there, man. Don't leave it. Don't leave it, man. Don't leave it.”

“I'm in the moment. Okay, I'm not leaving.”

“Okay, László, put the hundred millimeter.”

“'Cause Hoppy would say, ‘I'll shoot you with a hundred millimeter. Having photographed me a lot, he knew that my best lens was a hundred millimeter lens. That was the best close-up lens for me. That was the most flattering fuckin' lens.”

“Stay right there, man. I may ask you to say it like sixteen times, but can you do it?”

“Yeah, man, yeah, no problem. Yeah. I can do this, no problem.”

“Okay, and cut!”

“All right and action!”

“We blew it, Billy.”

“I think we probably blew it in sixty-seven, but I allow myself the opening gate because I wrote it in sixty-seven, so maybe I wrote it before we blew it. There's no
g
, Dennis! In
Yin/Yang
. Doesn't matter—this close to genius. Thinking we missed it, and suddenly—oh no, we didn't miss anything. We did fuckin' genius. We didn't do it thinking we're geniuses. At least, I didn't. I know Jack didn't. Just fuckin' did it.”

Peter wasn't invited to the funeral, but he just thought it was the right thing to go. He landed in the small Taos airport and took the stretch of highway to the adobe church across the street from Hopper's old El Cortez movie theater. The leathery men and women employed by High Desert Protection Service stood guard, expecting to be overrun by a pack of Glory Stompers.

Guarding the “no” list by the church doors—with Victoria Duffy Hopper getting top billing, was the chunky publicist-type gatekeeper of fabulous velvet-rope events. She barred Fonda from entering the church. Fonda got back on the plane.

“Dennis went to his grave thinking I cheated him,” said Fonda. “I never cheated him. And he never cheated me. Even though he did some stuff that was unhappy for me, he never cheated me. That he would carry that so far into his life, that he would die with that in his heart, upsets me because I would prefer he would die thinking—”

“We did it, man. We're retirin' in Florida, mister. We're rich, Wyatt!”

“Aw no, Billy, we blew it.”

“Whaddya mean, man? We got the money, we're rich! That's what it's all about. You get the money, you're free.”

“No, Billy, we blew it.”

“On the trip back I didn't say goddamn because I had flown in. I made that ride. We did this film together. Regardless of what happened afterward and how we viewed it, doesn't make a difference. We did this film together. And I am so happy and proud of that. Regardless of everything else that happened on the negative side, what happened on the positive side is much more important. Yin Yang. Or
The Yin(g) and the Yang
.”

O
n a hot and dusty afternoon in Taos, Dennis Hopper led a procession of outlaws of one breed or another on a ride to the cemetery. They wore black suits, bolo ties, and paraded a variety of facial hair that would've made them clear picks for that two-hundred-dollar best beard contest back in Dodge City. There were plenty of arty goatees, but the two real contenders were a guy with a woolly white beard à la Rip Van Winkle—outlaw historian Peter Mackiness, whom Hopper had cast as Jesus Christ in
Backtrack
, and a real dude, Kansas-born Doug Coffin, whose pointy mustache stuck out two inches straight on each side like feelers for trouble. He looked like a sheriff out of Tombstone. Somewhere in the mix was movie star Val Kilmer, well baked by the New Mexico sun, looking like a professional wrestler in a cowboy hat. There was the mayor of Taos, who'd finally given Hopper the key to the city. Back when Hopper was locked up in the local jail, the joke was they were going to throw away the key. There were veterans from those wild and woolly days, including Hopper's personal belly dancer, swathed in blue leopard print. The international press mistook her stone-faced spiritual-healer boyfriend for Peter Fonda. After the real Fonda was turned away.