In one of our first brief
talks, Dennis said he couldn't see what Jimmy saw in "the witch," or
why he was hanging around with Jack Simmons. I said Jack was around because
Jimmy liked him; I didn't say anything about Maila. Dennis quickly became docile
around Jimmy on the set, apologetic and sometimes silent. During the filming of
Giant, however, Dennis got a little closer to Jimmy, who was encouraging anyone
to take his side against the "others," who were making problems for
him on the Texas locations.
It was after Jimmy's death
several weeks later that Dennis began to change. His agent and mine at the time,
Bob Raison, said, "Dennis has undergone a metamorphosis. He's lost who he
was, and he's being replaced by this troublesome, unbalanced person."
Dennis was peeing in the
long trough in a men's room on the Warners lot one afternoon, 
telling me how he
saw in some way that the duty to carry on Jimmy's enigmatic rebellion had fallen
upon his shoulders. Very much alone in this presumption, he said, "Only
they don't know it yet," and wagged his penis in the direction of the front
office. "But they're going to find out, man . . ."
His later claims of sexual
prowess stemmed from a convoluted need to be viewed as a Lothario -- a pint-sized
"nut" with a Casanova complex. Women chased Brando,and they'd been
literally crazy for Jimmy. Dennis publicly fabricated his sex life to the point
of gross overemphasis in an attempt to attract the same kind of adulation from
the ladies, but those goo-gooers he stumbled across were mainly fringe wanna-bes,
groupies and toads. For this braggart, imaginary partners came and went in a
fantastic blur while his thumping hand refused to lay still.
He'd
been late on the set, and Warners sent a letter detailing the expenses this had
cost the studio-from producer to director, from actors and stand-ins to the grip
and mixer, right down to the makeup man. The waste amounted to a considerable
sum, not to mention the inconvenience to everyone involved in the production.
Satisfied that they were at odds, just like it had been with Jimmy at the end,
Dennis framed the letter and hung it next to a small painting Vincent Price had
given him of a round, sickly green, grotesque face, like a freak or a wind-god,
with distorted, blown-out cheeks and crazy, sleepless eyes.
Relishing the nickname of
"Dennis the Menace," Hopper rode to town on a cockhorse, through a
haze of dope and booze, disregarding the warnings from Warners - ultimatums which
he misconstrued as nothing more than scolding.
The trouble he caused the
studio was all part of Dennis' "break for freedom," as he put it,
bragging that Warners understood they had another volatile talent on their hands
who needed "special handling- the same as Jimmy Dean."
Jack Nicholson, always
ripe for free dope and vino, was at the house listening to Dennis' condemnation
of the moguls. But even soused or stoned, Jack couldn't applaud Dennis'
"mumblings about rebellion," which he saw as rationalizations for an
"ill-chosen course of action."
When Dennis went outside
to where he'd hidden the dope to roll another joint, Jack said to me, "Man,
this is suicide! What the fuck's he doing?" He stared apprehensively at the
studio letter on the wall.
Sally Kellerman, though
physically bigger than Dennis, said she was afraid of him. "It's like
something you may hang around too close to," she said, "and everything
that's bad about it will affect you the same."
Considered pretty much of
a clod at the time, Sally was too tall, her head too big, and she never wore
makeup. A farm girl with Cadillac tits, she was running around with a
sandy-haired hopeful named Roger. In a thick Texas accent, he said he thought of
"things in a Texas way," but no one cared what he thought. He paid me
to shoot some pictures of him, and I snapped off a roll at the Frank Lloyd
Wright house on the hill. Sally wasn't exactly his "girlfriend," he
said, since he'd never "done anything" with her. He believed as
"sure as God" she'd never been laid; maybe a couple of kisses, but she
was cold, he said, "like there's no juice in her battery." She didn't
warm up, and she wasn't going anywhere because she didn't have any personality.
He said she'd asked him if I'd take some pictures of her as well, since she
didn't have any photos to show anyone.
I saw Sally a few days
later in Schwab's, eating a sandwich and drinking milk. I mentioned Roger and
the pictures, and we agreed to take some. She had on a plain skirt, a sweater
buttoned up the front, and was almost dowdy-looking. There wasn't anything
really interesting about her.
We drove around and I took
shots of her in the car with the top down, parked in the shade for contrast with
the bright daylight. Down on Doheny, I showed her where Marilyn Monroe and my
friend John Hodiak used to live. Sally wanted to see the courtyard, so I parked
and we entered the outside door to the foyer, an area with a gold-veined mirror
above the mailboxes. It was a portal-like structure with both ends opening into
the sunlight. I asked her to open her sweater a little, and after two or three
shots she had it unbuttoned almost to her waist, her generous brassiere showing,
with me reflected in the mirror behind her, looking down into the camera.
I saw Sally a few times
after that, and we'd talk or drive down Sunset. She thought I was still involved
with Gena and said Gena had told her that we were married after she'd spotted us
driving past her one day. We weren't together, I told Sally; we'd split up. One
of us would be filing for a divorce pretty soon. Gena had even told Sally she
had a kid, but hadn't told her it wasn't mine.
We were in a drive-in one
afternoon when I kissed Sally, just leaned over and lightly kissed her on the
lips. I said I supposed I shouldn't be doing that with Roger still on the scene,
but Sally said she didn't have anything to do with Roger, or anyone else. She
was looking at me very evenly and said, "I don't want to have anything to
do with anybody because I'm saving myself." I asked her what she was saving
herself for. "For the right situation," she said. "I'm saving
myself for myself."
Producer Michael Garrison
suggested I see about a part in 20th-Century Fox's Compulsion, with Diane Varsi
from Jerry Wald's Peyton Place. Diane had been married twice, once when she was
fifteen, again at seventeen. She'd kicked around L.A. a little after leaving
what she called a "rotten" life in the San Francisco Bay area. She'd
even played drums in a coffee shop before landing the big time. But she was
quick to downplay any seriousness about acting as a career. They'd say to her,
"Stop bitching, Diane, you're a big fucking star."
In Garrison's office,
Diane said, "This isn't going on forever. It isn't going very far. I don't
like this town and, I don't like what it's making me feel about myself." I
asked her what she meant, and she said she felt like she was being
"poisoned slowly, like how you can do it with arsenic over a period of
time. You don't even know you're being poisoned."
I stopped into the Sea
Witch one night when Gena was working there and asked her to sit down with me
for a couple of minutes. The radio guy was broadcasting from the glassed-in
booth, playing Bobby Darin. Troy Donahue was in the corner by the window with
the girl he hung around with, and kept looking over because the last time I'd
seen him we were both with Henry Wilson. I said to Gena, "Can we come to
some meeting of the minds about being separated and what we're doing?" She
stared at me. I said, "About what we're presenting to others that isn't
really true?"
She looked at me for a few
moments, then got up and walked away. When she passed the table again, she said,
"Dennis Hopper came in here last night looking for you. I didn't realize
he's as short as he is. He asked me if I wanted to fuck."
"What'd you
say?" I said.
She smiled and said,
"I told him I'd stick it on the back burner in case of emergency."
Driving
with Dennis in his little red Austin Healy sports car could be scary. Always
giving it gas when the light was turning yellow, he never looked both ways
before racing ahead. At a bus zone he'd block traffic to tell the waiting
commuters he'd seen the bus several blocks back and it was on the way. They
would thank him and he'd pull away laughing. I never understood the prank-one of
many he'd claim he was pulling to "put people on."
One afternoon we hit
downtown Main Street to catch the burlesque girls. Hopping signals, he had to
blow a couple of joints on the way, then sat stiffly anxious when the short,
big-nosed comic in baggy balloon pants teetered around the girls, stepping on a
fart bag for laughs. The comic's voice was shrill and hysterical, and the girls
he "gastered" tittered and giggled, swinging the little cones that
hung from the ends of their tits like glass balls on a Christmas tree.
The strippers pranced and
bumped through the show to a half-empty house-mostly winos, staring at them
distractedly. Dennis displayed near-apathy until the last girl came out. Bony
and dark-skinned with a face pitted as though from smallpox, she bore scars on
her stomach like she'd had some sloppy surgery or someone had tried to stab her
to death.
She stumbled about in gaudy Carmen Miranda platform shoes, barely able to dance,
but something about her so enraptured Dennis that he began at once grabbing and
pulling at his crotch. A couple of bums edged off, thinking he was some sort of
queer, and soon the assistant manager came down the aisle and asked us to leave
the theater. In the lobby, Dennis yelled, "I'm Dennis Hopper, man. I'm with
Warner Brothers and I'll have your fucking job!" The guy said that if he
was such a hotshot he wouldn't want the job in the first place, but if Dennis
didn't leave the lobby immediately he'd call the cops. "We don't allow no
jacking off in here!"
Frequent parties took
place in Hollywood at a small alleyway house on Melrose Place near La Cienega.
Jazz and rock and Elvis were mixed on the reel-to-reel with Arabian music or
Bach or Hank Williams, and the sounds of water dripping or toilets flushing, and
the banging of a hammer or drumsticks on a sheet of metal. Everyone was stoned
and cheap wine flowed by the gallons. Jack Nicholson usually showed up early for
the booze and grass, and the sex orgies just happened - no particular cue -
blooming
on the big old movie-prop couch or on the mattress in the narrow step-down
bedroom where the plaster walls were painted with black sunrises and people
hanged by the neck and women being skinned alive.
Jack shied away from the
hardcore action, though years later he'd be prone to glamorize his past. Looking
back at those "wild and crazy times" and "existential
stunts," he recalled himself far more involved in the scene than he'd
actually been. In reality, he was more like a shadow with gloating eyes, his
"killer smile" just sort of hanging there like a half-witted grin.
Dennis was the one
impelled to crash the "front line," to walk the razor's edge. Like
Hank Williams, he was drawn to the high side, and only partly afraid of charging
further across than he'd be able to get back.
Blonde Tuesday Weld was
barely fourteen but made her appearance at these gatherings, as did producer
Norman Jolly's daughter, Judy Jolly, an energetic girl who was drawn to
Dennis's "torn and twisted monologues."
Dennis was urinating on the side of the
kitchen range while tapping his foot to the music. Squatting alongside me
against the wall in the living room, Jack watched Dennis and said, "A guy
that keeps telling you how sick he is and doing numbers to make you think he is
sick, for whatever reasons. I mean, this guy doesn't have to knock himself out
to prove it . . ."
One night I took Sally up Laurel Canyon
in Dennis's red Austin Healy. We were having some hot tea in the house when
Dennis showed up with two girls he'd picked up at a partv - one for him and one
for me. They'd come up in the girls' car, which I then used to drive Sallv back
down the hill. She wasn't the kind of girl to get into any of Dennis's
"funny" scenes.
Another car swerved past us on the
left, forcing me against the canyon embankment. There wasn't much damage, but
there was some. Sally caught the license number of the other car, and when I got
her to Fountain we sat in the car talking and I gave her a few kisses. I then
headed back up the canyon, worrying about the damage to the car.
One of the girls was naked on the
mattress on the floor where I slept, with Dennis kneeling between her spread
legs, examining her by candlelight while puffing a joint. The other girl was
sitting on Dennis's
bed against the wall beneath the wind-god painting, still
dressed and sporadically emitting a nervous laugh. Dennis looked at me and said,
"She's waiting, man," and 1 sat down next to the clothed girl and
began to undress her. She said she didn't want to take off her things, so I sat
back, lit a cigarette and held her hand. After a few minutes, Dennis blew- out
the candle, and the girl and I sat in the dark, listening to the sounds coming
from the mattress. As Dennis's partner began to cry out over his grunts, I
leaned over and kissed the other girl's ear and told her the car had been
forced against the side of the hill - not much damage, but I had a license number
and the other car was responsible. She listened partly to me and to the gasps
and moans from the mattress, and finally said it didn't matter - it wasn't her car
anyway. It belonged to the other girl's mother, she said, and then she took off
her clothes. Dennis said, "What the fuck's a car?" He'd buy them a new
car - not the following day, perhaps, but soon, with the escalating salary on his
Warners contract.
I told Nicholson about
the girls and the car, since Sally had already talked to Jack about my getting
sideswiped. I was on an interview at NBC on Vine Street, and Jack was there
along with Robert Redford, who was talking about some things he was doing.
Redford always talked about himself; I don't think any other subject held any
interest for him. I'd always found him to be somewhat dumb. When he went in for
the interview, Jack slid over onto the chair Redford had been sitting in next
to mine. We talked briefly about the car incident, and then Jack told me he'd
heard from someone at Warners that Dennis' option was being dropped.
I said if Dennis knew anything about it, he was keeping it a secret.
The slogan 'Movies
Are Better Than Ever' was campaigned frantically by die-hard moguls clinging
to the notions of big-studio control and longevity. But the stranglehold of
television's rapid advance was on. Movies had to survive - they had to draw the
moviegoers back , fill the empty moviehouse seats. There was no need for
unnecessary trouble. The so-called "rebels" were weeded out, those
"misfits" who could create unbalance in the flow toward picture
prosperity. The troublemakers were sifted out through a kind of blackballing
that had quickly gone into effect after Jimmy Dean's death.
The industry was
lenient, and forgave unspeakable things in the name of genuine, saleable talent,
but the consensus was that Dennis Hopper didn't have any such talent. His pranks
had cost the studio money that couldn't be backed up with any sort of commercial
delivery, and so he was simply dumped. It was all very easy-no one cared. But
Dennis hit the unemployment line hard, joining the rest of us out-of-work actors
in a crowded, desperate town.
Brooke Heyward again
hooked up with Dennis Hopper. Since cash and couches and draperies as community
property might prove a solace against the studio doors being shut so tightly in
his face, Dennis married Brooke.
Out of work, Dennis
made a stab at being "a real artist," a painter. He rented a cheap
studio in the old Central Casting building at Hollywood and Western. While
boozing and smoking dope, he splashed and smeared around the paints without
purpose or direction, always the true believer, breaking beyond convention.
Across the street on
the northeast corner was a drugstore with a lunch counter and booths where I'd
sometimes run into Dennis. We'd grab coffee while he'd curse the studios for
refusing to see the talents he believed he possessed. "His opinion is
solely his own," said Lee Wallace, then head of casting at 20th-century
Fox. "Hopper is a boring and shallow person - not a pretty boy but a runt,
though maybe if he drives himself crazy enough some spark will fly so at least
he'll appear interesting, until he bums up. Not only is he a boring actor and a
boring person, he is devoid of any screen personality. Without that, you have no
commercial appeal - the only unforgivable sin in this town. When he's older he
might make an interesting character actor, but right now he is what we call
'dead meat' ..."
By striking the pose of
a visual artist, Dennis felt somehow beyond the "clutches" of
"the bitch goddess" Warren Gates had harped about, or at least beyond
the damaging reach of her representatives, "people like Lee Wallace."
He now gave thanks to the heavens that he was done with that "phase"
of his life. One afternoon he stared at me and quoted the Bible about being a
man and "putting away childish things. "Acting is for kids," he
said. "It's fine for kids, but, man, you gotta grow-up . . ."
Actually, he was parroting Brando.
But the once-promising
boy from out of town lacked the resolve to sever himself completely from what
he'd narrow down to detail as the "bitch's tit." Secretly he kept
hunting after movie roles, hungrily nagging agents and independents and anyone
he could corner or had ever worked with.
He
got the starring role in Curtis Harrington's first full-length feature, Night
Tide, which Curtis filmed while on vacation from Jerry Wald, who was quite
upset that his associate had done such a thing behind his back. But even Night
Tide failed to put Dennis over the top or cause any reconsideration of his
talent.
Since I'd also wanted
to be a painter once, even more than I'd wanted to be an actor, Dennis and I
were able to talk a little more earnestly for a change. His frantic desire to
paint opened up a channel between us. Despite periods of troubled thinking, he
understood in some oblique sense the creative impulse. What kept getting in his
way was a fetish for self-flagellation. This was played out via his fascination
for underdogs and freaks. In this and other respects, he was not unlike Steve
McQueen, yet Dennis' various obsessions were all the more deeply unsettling now
-
that his fame - hardly ever marginal at best - could no longer get in the way.
He asked me about Jimmy
Dean and the girl with one leg. A few-years had slipped past since Rebel
Without a Cause and the story of the one-legged girl who'd written about
Jimmy kissing her stump, but she was still on Dennis' mind. He'd developed an
interest in amputees, cut out pages from a George Grosz art book and a medical
prosthetics catalog. He showed me photographs of a young woman without any arms.
One of the photos appeared to be Dennis' studio across the street, with the
paint-smeared canvases stacked facing a wall. He had close-ups of her
hollowed shoulder sockets, of her stomach, of her navel, and several shots
showed her tucking into her
mouth a spoon held between the toes of one foot. He told me he'd met her on the
comer of Santa Monica and Western, where she'd been selling newspapers. He said
it was the strangest experience to be handed his change by her toes. She was now
going to model for a painting—his black and toe studies showed her with the
toe-held spoon in her mouth. It sounded like something from Tod Browning's Freaks.
I'd seen a girl like that in the Ringling Brothers sideshow, playing a zither
then threading a needle, her face like a young school teacher, with a trace of
cosmetics along the ridge of her lips. She'd been with the Alligator Boy, his
skin red and ridged, the Man With Two Faces who wore a plastic mask over a
jawless skull, the Human Pin Cushion, the Monkey Girl, and a big black man with
elephantiasis of the legs.
I
sensed that Dennis saw himself up on the platform with these creatures—Dennis
the Menace alongside the Alligator Boy and the Red Man With Three Legs.
He showed me the
photographs while we were drinking, and at one smashed point he said that
"in some way" his painting of the deformed girl would bring to the
surface his feelings about the "bitch goddess" he'd raved about, how
she was unable to clasp him to her bosom
because she had no arms and no hands with which to press his face to her breast.
With eyes flashing wildly, he indicated it was the "milk" he sought in
his "holy grail." "Seek hell," he said. "That I
need to live, to breathe, to exist ..."
It didn't have anything
to do with "starring in a fucking movie," he said. "It's why I'm
fucking painting and running up against walls—listening to fucking things
telling me shit in my head—to get at the flow, man, the wellspring of what the
fuck I'm doing even being alive!"
He didn't talk about
Brooke, because he still thought Brooke and I had been sleeping together in New
York when I'd introduced them, and then he'd gone ahead and actually married
her. None of the other girls Dennis and I had shared—even the really wild
black dancer Marlon Brando sent over because he felt guilty about sleeping with
Gena—had been invited around a second time. So the subject of his marriage and
their "picket fence" troubles was starting to ricochet like gun-fire.
He seemed to ignite
with interest when I mentioned an actress I knew who was an exhibitionist. I'd
introduced her to Stuart Rosenberg a couple years earlier. I told Dennis she had
a freakish clit, more than an inch in length, and that she got a charge out of
baring her bottom. She'd show her ass and wiggle it around and keep looking at
you to see how you were enjoying it. I'd seen her recently, I told Dennis,
working the box-office of the Hawaii Theater.
Dennis
wanted to know if Rosenberg had had her, and I said that, in a manner of
speaking, I thought he probably had. One night at Cyrano's, back when Stuart and
I were talking about the Tennessee Williams movie, we'd decided to run down to
Tijuana in my T-Bird to check out some whorehouses. Stuart wanted to see them,
he told me, and maybe talk to a couple of the girls. He said he wanted to watch
a girl take off her clothes—not by peeking through a window, but up close,
undressing for him. I'd told him about a particular bar called Tres Caballos,
where a dancing girl got into a solitary show of such intense self-indulgence
that not a word would be said in the place; even the band would stop playing,
and everyone would stare at her as she lay on the floor with a beer bottle
between her legs, gasping in orgasm. I told Stuart the whole scene was one of
the strangest things I'd seen—all those faces and nobody moving a muscle.
"It's all in the
eye," Stuart said, as I drove south at a hundred miles an hour to get
across the border to the whorehouses before "the mountain devil closes his
wings around himself ..." Stuart said he was probably a voyeur, as nothing
seemed to satisfy him quite as much as watching. "Viewing," he said,
'"holding in the eye and mind the sight of a woman's nakedness, which she's
showing you piece by piece and enjoying it . . ."
Sometime after our
Tijuana expedition, I brought Sharon, the exhibitionist, over to the Park Sunset
to meet Stuart. I told her a little about the director I wanted to do a good
turn for - a nice-looking, neat guy who'd get a bang out of her "down and
dirty, nobody can love me like me" act. I told her Stuart was a family kind
of guy. "If he likes you and has your name in his book of people he's cast
with or wants to use, you can almost count on working sometime with Stuart ..."
I told Dennis she'd
said she was just filling in at the box-office while trying to get extra work in
television or films, or some work modeling. I'd asked her what sort of modeling,
and she'd said, grinning, "Whatcha got?"
Perhaps Dennis had hung
around the Hawaii Theater box office waiting for Sharon and offered to pay her
for posing in his studio. She'd really been pretty in those days. But I found
out she was arrested for shoplifting in the Hollywood Broadway a couple of
months later. She did thirty days downtown, was released, but got busted again
for prostitution and sent back to jail. It wasn't until two years later, after
my friendship with the young Janis Joplin, having returned to L.A. from San
Francisco, that I ran into Sharon on the Boulevard. She was on reds and hanging
around with a drag-queen named Cootch. She'd become a queer, she said, laughing,
and I noticed her teeth had turned yellow. She said it had something to do with
the water up in the desert where she'd done a year and two months in the can.
"Sure, I remember
Dennis Hopper," she told me. She said he'd wanted her to piss in a coffee
jar and then take pictures of her peeing and sitting on the toilet. They wound
up fucking, she said. He'd pleaded on his hands and knees, wanting her to smack
him with a belt. She said she'd hit him a couple of times, but he'd said
"No, no, and asked her to hit him with the "buckle end." Then
he'd wanted to whip her, and she'd said she didn't mind—she liked it. "I
said just don't hit me with the fucking buckle end!"
I believed what she
said, because Dennis and I had both known a young starlet named Nikki who'd had
similar desires. Sharon said Dennis spent a lot of time blowing grass and
talking about "disorienting his senses...busting the fucking limits,"
in order to get out of himself and "make some kind of statement like art
or something..."
She said, "I told
him fuck art—art's just bullshit—it's for faggots and drag queens. I said
get a piece and go out and blow some fucker away."
He said, "Yeah,
yeah," he could do that. Inside, she said, he was like a mad dog. The
"creative turmoil" he suffered was a nightmare, and only by breaking
through like "Alice goes through the mirror" could the mad dog be
unleashed. She said, "That's what he kept saving, and asking me to piss
more, giving me more and more water to drink out of some fucking milk bottle, so
1 could pee a lot and he'd get it all photographed, holding his camera with one
hand and jerking himself off with the other."
Was she joking? Had she
taken any of it seriously? She said she'd been bombed out on whatever he'd been
torching, and her memories were "sort of tangled up like grey string,"
but that "he'd made a lot of sense," she said. "You know, like
Jean Genet the writer -outlaw—the great writer doing weird things and getting
thrown in prison, like down into one of those holes full of snakes. I know what
Dennis was saying about Alice
and the looking glass. You aren't who you are, you know?
Is Jean Genet a crook
and a fag and a thief and a jailbird—or is he a great French writer, a fucking
great world writer? Or is he both, you know?
"Like Jean
Genet," Sharon said, "that's what I think's got Dennis Hopper. He's
wounded like an animal you shoot and don't kill, and he's in a bush somewhere,
figuring out which way to go with it, but sure as shit can't take it to the PTA
or into Miss Tweedle-dum's parlor . . ." With a knowing nod, she said,
"Dennis needs to go to jail for a while and maybe see his mad dog won't eat
him up from the inside out but like they sav, can be man's best friend too, you
know?"
Dennis was a goat in Miss Tweedle-dum's
parlor, suffocating. No one seemed to take seriously anything he was doing, not
even his pregnant wife, Brooke. Soon after her marriage, she no doubt realized
that life with Dennis in Hollywood was like living in a Whirlpool washing
machine—only nobody was going to come out clean. For both of them, suicide was
like an unwanted house guest in the back room, who could always be called out
when the going got bad. And so it would.
The treatment for
George McCready's son was for a feature called Out Takes about two
buddies who score big on a cocaine deal and head out for New Orleans on
motorcycles—riding abreast on the highways as I'd once ridden with Jimmy Dean.
I even had a scene in the story with them touching hands at seventy miles an
hour. The two guys in the story get hooked into a lot of freaky action—ideas
I'd noted down on my New Orleans expedition. Mirroring what I'd written in Naked
City a few years before, they encounter a guy with a shotgun. In Out Takes, it's
Errol Flynn's "grim reaper" that's tracking them, littering the
road-ways with reminders of death. At the end, the guys lose the bikes outside a
whorehouse in the French Quarter, wind up stealing a '59 Cadillac convertible,
and chance to cross paths with death on an otherwise deserted highway. Both
heroes get blown away by the shotgun blasts of a total stranger.
The original title had
been Hot Wire, and when George McCready's son lost his backing, the story
came back to me. Dennis's brother-in-law Bill Heyward, was also scouting ideas
for a possible deal Peter and Dennis might swing through Roger Corman, who had
let Dennis direct some second-unit work on The Trip.
Dennis thought Out
Takes was a great idea and agreed to take it to Peter. Together they'd push
it with American International Pictures, and if they got a green light, they'd
have me do the script and Dennis would direct it. If 1 didn't do the script, I'd
get paid for the story and credited accordingly.
It sounded good. I said
sure. Like Jean Seberg, Dennis said, "We'll make a picture together yet
..."
I didn't hear from him
for a while, and only after I went to Brooke to get back the surfing script did
Dennis tell me that he couldn't get the deal through AIP and therefore wouldn't
be using the biker story. In other words, they wouldn't be making a biker
movie.
He
said they were developing some idea Peter 
had come up with under the working
title Riding Easy—a play on my title Breaking Hard—about two
guys who score big on a cocaine deal and ride across country to New Orleans
"in search of America," only to find it in both barrels of a redneck's
shot gun. That was my basic story—Out Takes—just as I'd outlined it
for Dennis, although I hadn't written the part Nicholson would finally
play—the juiced-up Southern lawyer. But the story line was there, and I wanted
my end of the deal.
They said they couldn't
get the financing from AIP, and both Dennis and Brooke claimed the deal was
dead. But to lend some credibility to the project— to make it seem like
something other than just another low-budget Peter Fonda bike movie, Dennis and
Fonda hired in a writer, Terry Southern to whip up a short, revised treatment.
They began to shop around for a deal with someone who'd let Dennis direct the
picture, as well as star in it with Peter. But nobody seemed willing to let
Dennis direct a movie, no matter how low the budget.
Jack Nicholson didn't
have a part in any picture at the time. He'd written a movie called Head,
featuring the Monkees, and desperately wanted to bail out of acting and do some
serious screenwriting. I tried to get Jack a job with Levy's Pebble Productions,
and although the work looked promising, he took off to play a part in Dennis and
Peter's movie once they had finally found the money to make it.
"I didn't know you'd had anything
to do with that story in the initial stages of it," Jack later told me.
"Reading what you wrote and seeing how the picture came out—well, they
owed you. There is no question in my mind." The question was not, it seemed
to Jack, how could Dennis have done that—but why?
Neither was there any limit to the dope
consumed by Dennis Hopper following his debut as director. The picture they
called Easy Rider was released and making money, and now Dennis could reach for
the ultimate high. He could max out selling his share of the movie go for broke.
Like Janis, realizing that the high was king, more important than career or
commitment, Dennis wound up in Taos, New Mexico, pretending to be a kind of
real-time extension of the Easy Rider movie. He bought the old house of Mable
Luhan Dodge and threw open the door, creating his own free-for-all hippie
gallery dope pad. Over in Hollywood, a few were wondering about his dabbling
with homosexuals while freely chasing the dope and booze. He'd make long
distance calls to a scurrilous, gay Hollywood tabloid newsman who wrote about
the sizes of the stars' cocks. Dennis would drone on about sex and Willy
Nelson—playing Nelson's "Shotgun Willy" over and over, refusing to
answer questions about my involvement in the movie he'd made. His marriage to
Brooke had collapsed long ago, as had a second marriage, and all the roadside
art and pop art he'd bought with Brooke's money was gone, as was the money he'd
swilled away on dope and booze. Some estimates put the amount at a cool
million— and all that he owed me was $750 for a story idea, and a credit.
During
his intense chumminess with Taos gay blades, Dennis still wore the grungy
costume he'd worn in the movie, and quickly—as when you boil a pig in scalding
water—whatever bristle he'd had in the old days began to fall away. He'd roam
about naked, lurking in hallways or passing out in the bushes. According to the
Hollywood reporter, he'd been frightened of the -impulses and actions he'd
confided to the Hollywood scandal sheet and, by way of distraction, tried
throwing himself into a variety of radical causes—-anti-war happenings, Jane
Fonda's get-togethers and gab-tests—but few were interested in Dennis's
dope-spaced self-indulgences. One activist said, "He'd just show up and
hang around and make stupid remarks. I believed his fucking mind was gone, if he
ever had one to start with."
They
thought he was an asshole, a stumbling stooge to some impotent, misguided
romanticism. He clung to that as a kind of life line, unlike Nick Adams, another
actor from Rebel Without a Cause, who'd coasted into television fame as Johnny
Yuma on a show deliberately called The Rebel. Sooner than later, Nick's failures
got the best of him. Some attempts at self-mutilation and a rumored run at
castration, then he cashed it in with a bottle of pills.
But the compulsion for
fame had Dennis by the gonads. 
His careening through the crazies brought him
to desperation: He'd outdo what was being done. He'd be on top again or he'd
be "fucking dead."
Dead was a good place to
go as long you went out wth a bang, like Jimmy had done. No T.S. Eliot whimpers
for Dennis. Rather than a clean suicide like Nick Adams, he'd blow- himself sky
high.
He quickly got the idea of
exploding himself in a kind of dynamite chair. Happenings and performance art
shows were everywhere the big thing, and Dennis was still determined not to be
swept beneath the rug. He learned that dynamite blows outward, creating a vacuum
like the eye of a hurricane.
If one could place
oneself somehow in that eve, the explosion—blasting outward—would leave
him intact. That is, if everything went smoothly. Some small oversight or
mishap and one could be blown to bits.
With his "Russian
suicide chair," Dennis hung around auto races and speedways trying to
gather a crowd to watch him blow himself up. He got some attention, some free
dope on occasion, and got laid with a couple of girls hanging around the
speedways. But he didn't blow himself up, as hard as he tried. Nor did anyone
hire him to put him into a movie. He began to lose his mind.
Voices
obsessed him. God was talking to him, telling him that he had failed--he was
a failure. The perfection of art had eluded him. It would forever
remain out of reach. He heard the voices talking about torture and death.
Alcoholism and drug abuse had taken their toll: Dennis the Menace was going
crazy. After some time in and out of psychiatric wards, his juice gone but his
brain cooling down, Dennis was pandering to Hollywood with hat in hand,
promising to be good.
Afraid of going down
like Barbara Payton, he'd give them the soul along with the body. He
promised to behave--he'd wear suits, dress proper. He'd adopt
conservative thoughts. He'd be able to talk to people like Clint
Eastwood and Charlton Heston. He'd be sort of interested in politics.
He'd give interviews and eat salads and play golf, dovetailing his lobotomized
Mr. Nice Guy behavior into a run of mediocre acting roles nobody would remember.
Dennis the Menace had died, shrieking
somewhere down the corridor of some loony ward, shrugged off like a snake's skin
to blow away in the wind. He wouldn't cause any more trouble, and the new Dennis
wouldn't feel any more pain—it was simple logic.
and