by JOHN GILMORE

One morning heading east across Route 66, I saw the sun rise over the vast desert and swell up above a distant mountain. I felt as though I could let go of the steering wheel and the new '57 Coupe de Ville, a drive-away contracted in Hollywood, would lift from the road and fly to that burning ball of light. My heart knew only the excitement of heading to New York again. I'd hit a fallow point anyway, and all I could think about was getting into theater,  even if I had to wait on tables till I landed a part in a play. Through the director John Stix, I'd been promised a lead, as the leprechaun, in a stock production of Finnian's Rainbow the following season. The idea of singing and playing fantastic characters thrilled me. By reaching beyond the pretty boy mixed-up kids and neurotics 1 was perpetually cast as, I felt I'd grasp what I was after with my life. I had to do it through the work - I could never figure it out on my own.

It was the third time I'd traveled Route 66 from L.A. to New York, but the first time in a brand new Cadillac. My driveaway partner and I switched over every few hours - he was popping bennies and I dropped one too after Albuquerque, so sleep stayed far away. He gave me a few pills for later which I tucked into the top of my army duffel bag. Tanking up in the east of New Mexico, he told the Indian attendant, "Fill it up, chief".

The next dawn a joy went through me as we drove along the bridge against the early morning Manhattan skyline. Sweeping down into the city, I gazed up the walls of its canyons and thrilled to its dawn noises - police whistles, taxi horns, garbage trucks. As I looked out at the people streaming over the streets and sidewalks, I spotted myself in the Cadillac, reflected back in a New York window. It was like I was taking a snapshot of the happiest place I'd known.

I went up to my friend Norman's place on 79th off Broadway to pick up the key to the 17th Street apartment where I'd be staying. "With half the New York actors looking for work in L.A.," Norman said, "you got the competition cut down a little." We drank coffee while he told me about the girl he was living with. They had to keep separate addresses because they were both on probation - they'd been arrested earlier that year. He was happy to have me paying half the rent downtown while he stayed uptown with his lady.

The 17th Street apartment occupied the front two rooms on the top floor - bright, sparsely furnished and spacious, with hardwood floors and a view uptown. 1 came in the door with my duffel bag and overnight bag loaded with books, opened the windows, flopped onto the bed and stared at the skyscrapers.

Within days, I'd looked up a number of the people I'd bummed with in the past - painters like Donate Manfredi and Barbara Lehman, a poet friend, and the actors and directors I knew. A hunger stirred in me that wouldn't stop. I ate  and ate - bacon and eggs and biscuits, steak and potatoes, rare lamb chops and salads. I didn't gain a pound. I even tried to quit smoking. In a few weeks I landed a part on a Sunday morning television show and was up for a role in a Broadway play.

When Dennis Hopper arrived in town to do the television version of Swiss Family-Robinson, he wanted me to fix him up with Barbara. I'd told him she was kooky - took off her clothes at parties, and liked to hump in the middle of a room with people watching. But she wasn't interested in Dennis, and he suggested my introducing him to a few of the other girls I was seeing. He was staying with me on 17th Street, but I always had a room at Stix's place if Dennis wanted my apartment to himself for the night. Dennis was always after a quick jump on a mattress with few preliminaries. He believed that any romancing was unnecessary. He said, "I just want to get my rocks off, man, I'm not looking for a fucking wife!" The first night on 17th Street, Dennis had a blue bag stuffed with marijuana. He wore a striped polo shirt from Sy Devour's in Hollywood, US Keds sneakers, and a gold St. Christopher around his neck, inscribed from "Paul and Joanne." He smoked a handful of fat joints until the whites of his eyes were red, and droned numbly over Hollywood' s failure to see "the truth." While he stayed with me on 17th Street, he ranted about a personal "all-encompassing present" that had him in a kind of bear hug. He was surrounded by shit, "submerged in shit," and the only chance of creative salvation was to shake free of who he was. Dennis anguished over what the Beats were already harping on: that the only way to your truth was to turn your head inside out through dope's disorganization of the senses and generalized craziness. Flipping his lid and letting the steam fly was the only route Dennis could imagine to what he called "the Holy Grail."

Stewart Stern, who wrote the script for Rebel Without a Cause, was close friends with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.  Back in L.A. , Dennis had become a bad boy character sitting unshakably in their midst. I remember a long-handled silent butler on Stewart's coffee table that had a big dent in its bottom. Joanne Woodward told me she'd become so impatient with Dennis' "moaning drivel" one night that she grabbed the silent butler and smacked him on top of the head as hard as she could, "Hoping in some way," she said, "to knock sense into him."

Stumbling through the Village and desperate to get laid, Dennis would stop girls on the street. "I'm Dennis Hopper," he'd say, blocking their path. "Do you want to fuck?" They'd laugh or huff or just glare with indignation - "who the hell is Dennis Hopper?"

One older, crippled woman with almost albino-like eyes, stood right against his chest and said, "Where you want to do it?"

Dennis grabbed my arm. "I'll take her back to the apartment ... " I glanced at the woman and I asked if he was kidding. He said, "No, man, this is what I've been telling you - this is the way, man." I gave him the key, and he took the crippled woman into a taxi. It pulled away with Dennis kissing her. A few days later, he drunkenly tore the St. Christopher medal from his neck and threw it out the apartment window.

He seemed to peak one night when a few people drifted over to empty some wine bottles and smoke up Dennis' dope. A chubby, good-natured guy I knew, an unemployed operatic baritone, had been working as a singing waiter since coming to New York. The gig was across the street from a convent, two blocks north of the Coney Island subway. That night, the singer, who was himself a Catholic, had gathered two nuns on his way to my place. They asked if Dennis and 1 were brothers, and I said, "Certainly not."

Both were in black robes decked with rosaries. One was heavy-set and the other younger, prettier, with a bright face with blonde eyebrows. The singing waiter had coaxed them on a mission - not exactly to save souls, but to meet a challenge - a difficult personality caught between "faith and the abyss," as he put it. He meant Dennis the Menace.

Not to disappoint, Dennis swung into awful form. Sufficiently puffed on dope and weaving with booze, he began to unwind his weirdness. Mocking celibacy as a "fantastic notion of marriage to someone who doesn't exist" (Jesus) -he offered himself to the younger nun, who he said could be blessed by a romp with a "live pulse" like "Dennis Hopper."

The singing waiter, not a small guy, stepped in when Dennis pawed the young nun. "Excuse me, sister," he said. He picked Dennis up in both hands as though he were a pizza, then tossed him onto the bed and threw a blanket over him, warning, "Don't move a muscle. I'm escorting the sisters out of here," the waiter said, "but first you're going to apologize to them."

Dennis couldn't apologize. He pretended to pass out. I made excuses to the nuns, and again assured them that Dennis and I were not related. "He's in a television show," I said. "He's only staying a few days." The younger one kept nodding with a sad smile, and the other sister went to the bed and reached her hand down on Dennis' shoulder. She said, "I can see he's in pain. We will pray for him."

"And I'll pray for you," Dennis mumbled from beneath the blanket, but later claimed no memory of the incident. Every time the subject came up, he'd tighten his face like a child heading to the dentist.

Dennis quickly left New York to hook up with a new dope connection. Before he left, we were having a cup of coffee with John Cassavetes at a knish and hot dog stand. John and I were talking about his film, Shadows. He mentioned that he was still cutting it, when Dennis suddenly burst out, "An artist does crazy things. He's got to break free, man, he's got to get out of the trap by breaking the fucking molds. That's what an artist has to do!"

Cassavetes nodded and said, "Like who're you talking about? Anybody around here we might know?"

Though James Dean had died the previous year, I still had to endure conversations about him with people who knew me as his friend. One afternoon that spring, 1 found myself talking with Montgomery Clift in East Hampton. 

Clift, I supposed, had been drinking since the previous day or earlier, but I reminded him that I'd met him in Coffee Dan's on Hollywood Boulevard years before. It'd been the middle of the night and he'd been sitting there with Burt Lancaster and James Jones, who was decked out in Indian jewelry, and all three were pretty pie-eyed. Clift was nipping from a flask and acting out the scene from From Here to Eternity in which he plays the reenlistment blues on a bugle.

The conversation with Clift in East Hampton got around to Jimmy Dean. "I have great admiration for the work he did," he said, "I've been in the papers as saying I resented Dean, and that's a fucking lie. I never said anything like that, and they'll tell the same goddamn lies over and over until you think it's the truth. I'm sorry he died like that -wrecked in a car. I only hope the guy didn't suffer. There's nothing fucking worse than pain. Do you agree?"

He coughed and I stared at him as his face turned white. He seemed to gag and a stream of vomit poured out of his mouth and nose.

One night I went out for a drink at Jim Downey's with Jane Fonda, who I was seeing then. I was washing my hands when I looked up into the mirror and saw Sal Mineo standing to my side. He said, "Hi." I said hello. 

He was wearing yellow-tinted aviator's glasses, and apologized that he couldn't remember my name "at the moment." He said, "You were the friend of Jimmy's. I'd like to talk to you," and his face got red. I remembered that time on the Warner's lot when Sal was walking ahead of Jimmy and myself, all of us heading to the commissary, and Jimmy snuck up behind Sal and pinched him on the butt. Pinching his ass like that had been about the only time Jimmy'd made any sort of direct contact with him outside of shooting a scene. Sal'd jumped, flustered, then grinned.

His hair was very black and tousled in a Tony Curtis waterfall style nobody wore anymore. He had on a big or roll-collar sport shirt with a huge knot in his red tie. After Rebel, Sal'd gotten the big-gun send up toward stardom from Warners, but somehow it was falling flat. I asked him what he was doing in New York, and he said, "Hiding." I didn't ask him what he was hiding from, and again he said he wanted to talk to me. I said, "I haven't talked about Jimmy to people. We just don't talk about him."

He said he understood that. I gave him my phone number anyway, and he thanked me and left the men's room. Though I expected him to call, it would be many, many years before we'd make contact again.

Jane Fonda and I grabbed another drink in Downey's, then took a taxi to my apartment. She said nothing in the taxi, but sort of slumped back, staring out the window. I remember thinking how pretty she was and how much I was drawn to something about her, which she'd later say was "self-recognition" - that we were so alike that it was "almost like incest."

Jane and I were working on a scene from Ionesco's Jack, or The Submission. I liked her blonde ponytail and long neck, and by the second rehearsal we were in bed together. Something was missing from the relationship - I didn't know what it was. There was always a feeling that wherever she knew she had to be next, most of her was actually already there. Left behind was the tense, fretful shell of a pretty girl whose front top teeth were a little big for her mouth. It took energy to pull Jane into the moment at hand - energy that put a strain on the work and necessitated relaxation time at her apartment - candles and pillows scented with perfume and cosmetics, and the smell of her. Her long willowy body was enticing. But there didn't seem to be a point to love-making, unless to blow off a little steam.

By that time, I was signed to a role in a movie to be shot in Paris, starring Jean Seberg. Going away to do the film was a big break as well as a way to kiss goodbye the strange friendship with Jane. What the filmmakers wanted was a young Marius Goring - an American "starving artist." According to my agent at William Morris, George Litto, I fit the bill perfectly. The contract was sent over by Litto to my personal manager, Howard Austin, who was then handling Tony Perkins along with me. Howard was Gore  Vidal's live-in secretary. They stayed together in Vidal's Upper East Side place. I often saw Tony Perkins in Gore's apartment. Once he came with an attorney who was helping him out of a vice jam. 

Tony was on a day bed, wringing his hands and crying. After he had left, Howard told me about Tony's exploits in the subways and movie theaters. He couldn't stay out of the back rows and public men's rooms, and was in hot water for groping a cop staked out to collar "sex offenders." He told me Tony was anxious with that term - that he believed he was not an "offender." How on earth could he be a sex offender, he said, when the other party was asking for it?

 Index Magazine / New York.  Excerpts from the memoir
Laid Bare