When you see pictures of Dennis Hopper in real life, he often looks like he’s in costume. That’s because in real life he was playing Dennis Hopper, a bigger-than-life character that is at least as complex as any of the fictional roles. Photos of Hopper as Hopper often bear more than superficial resemblances to his most memorable characters, like Max, the acid and pot dealer in The Trip (1967); Billy, the biker sidekick of Peter Fonda’s "Captain America" in Easy Rider (1969); Kansas, the cokey cowboy in The Last Movie (1971); the crazed photojournalist and Colonel Kurtz apologist in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979)—a performance as unsettling as Brando’s; or the sexual psychopath Frank in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Remember Frank? Shirt with silver collar points, leather jacket, gas inhaler. "I’ll send you a love letter straight from my heart, fucker. You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet straight from a gun.…" Hopper got the role of Frank by calling up Lynch and saying, "You have to let me play Frank Booth, because I am Frank Booth!"
What a villain he was! Don’t get me wrong. Nobody ever played those characters better: the stoner, the biker freak, the psycho villain—eyes glittering with insanity, the cattle baron’s bad-seed son. Nobody was a sharper thorn in the sides of the big movie studios. Nobody was a more effective ad for Bolivian marching powder.
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Hopper defined many roles in the emergence of ’60s pop culture. Maybe it’s because his education, as a young contemporary of James Dean, took place at the Actors Studio. This was the American wellspring of Method acting, a school in which performers were taught to inhabit the thoughts and feelings of the characters to create realistic portrayals. Hopper threw himself into his roles body and soul, and he had a special ability to make bad look good, to make insanity interesting—and possibly a career move.
Dennis Hopper made me a biker. In ’67, I saw The Glory Stompers, a film that seemed pretty real in that real outlaw bikers did the stunt riding and populated the wild parties, and as Chino, Hopper seemed to be improvising his nasty chitchat with ease and smoking his joints like he’d put in a lot of practice. But it was the 1969 film Easy Rider that transformed the one-percenter biker into a national obsession.
I think I saw that film six or seven times in two weeks, and it wasn’t long before my Triumph ride had sixteen-inch ape-hanger handlebars and megaphone mufflers that amplified rather than muffled. I had cutoff denim, shoulder-length hair, and a full beard to go with the machine. Easy Rider not only popularized the chopper well beyond the Hells Angels demographic, it was the On the Road of reefer and the first big PR for cocaine.
"The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me," Dennis Hopper bragged. "There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere."
Hopper was a friend of my former boss Andy Warhol. They met in 1963, and the actor bought one of his Campbell’s Soup paintings. And a Mona Lisa. When Andy drove from New York to L.A. in the fall, Dennis promised him a "movie-star party," and Warhol said "it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me." At the time, Hopper was a kingpin of young Hollywood rebel actors, and he was already an accomplished photographer and one of the key Pop Art collectors in L.A.—or, for that matter, anywhere. He had a house in the pop style before it caught on. Warhol wrote in POPism: "It was the first whole house most of us had ever been to that had this kiddie-party atmosphere." Warhol recalled how impressed he was with Dennis, then married to Brooke Hayward, the beautiful daughter of Hollywood power broker Leland Hayward.
"I’d first seen him playing Billy the Kid," Andy wrote, "and I remember thinking how terrific he was, so crazy in the eyes." Billy the charming maniac, the hipster-as-sociopath. Today the real oddities in Dennis Hopper’s well over a hundred film appearances are his Warhol movies: The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys and Tarzan and Jane Regained…Sort of.
I met Dennis Hopper in 1972, when I interviewed him for Andy Warhol’s Interview about The Last Movie. The film was an avant-garde Western, and Hopper, in demand after Easy Rider, got almost a million (then a lot of money). He directed and starred in the picture, which was shot over the course of a whole year in Peru, one of the world’s largest cocaine-producing countries. It was a full-on art-film Western and every bit as cultish as Jodorowsky’s El Topo, with a cast that included Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson (in his first acting role), and Dennis’s then wife, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
Hopper said to come up to his room at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was staying with his new girlfriend, Daria Halprin, who had just starred in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and left the notorious Mel Lyman’s cult. (Her co-star Mark Frechette wasn’t so lucky. He robbed a bank with the cult and died in prison from a "weight-lifting accident." Yikes.)
I arrived discreetly well after lunch and knocked on his door. Dennis answered promptly and said he’d be right with me. What ensued was several minutes of bizarre sound effects, clearly audible through the flimsy door as I waited in the hall—wheezing, throat clearing, nose blowing, coughing, hocking, loogie-ing, and snorting. I assumed he was just getting up.
When the door opened, he looked pretty much like Billy from Easy Rider. He was still in cowboy mode.
A lot of craziness surrounded The Last Movie. It won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but Warner Bros. hated it and wound up putting it into limited release after Hopper refused to relinquish the final cut he’d been guaranteed in his deal. It’s still hard to find a copy of it today, but Dennis was riding high anyway.
His career followed an up-and-down trajectory, but he was relentless: five marriages, conflicts with directors and producers, Oscar nominations (as screenwriter for Easy Rider and supporting actor for Hoosiers), going missing in the desert, a conceptual-art performance involving twenty sticks of dynamite…and, of course, the heroic benders. But after a stint in rehab in 1983, his career settled into a more steady period. The roles were still there.
As Hopper aged, he careened from one casting extreme to another. I think his hard work in acting resembled Andy Warhol’s prolific painting production: It was about bringing home the bacon. Andy had movies, magazines, a whole company to support. Dennis had a series of families and an art habit to support. He built a big Frank Gehry-designed compound in Venice, L.A., and added a neo-Quonset hut to display his extraordinary art collection. He returned to photography with a vengeance and began making paintings of his pictures. He continued to act in and direct films, including the acclaimed L.A. cop film Colors with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall.
His own acting profile evolved. No longer the wild-eyed rabble-rousing rebel, he played more mature psychos. He was seen more and more as a studied villain with an agenda, perhaps a peculiar and unbalanced agenda, but still some goal big enough to inspire sophisticated badness. He played the bad guy in the first season of 24, delivering perhaps the worst Serbian accent in the history of moving pictures but somehow pulling it all off. For one thing, he always looked the part.
The early Dennis Hopper look, from natty artist Angeleno to in-character cowpokes, can be seen in fashion today in places like Berlin and Greenpoint, but he’s also an influence in his later oligarch/archfiend/master-villain style. Bohemian, slightly strange, and surprisingly neat. His look resembled his personality, a strange blend of psychic volatility and explosive potential mid with formal, polite, almost tranquil gentility. Dennis Hopper didn’t follow fashion; it tended to follow him on his zigzag path through pop culture. But his look always had one very special quality. It was slightly unsettling. You always found yourself wondering what he was really thinking—and who he really was.
