Hopper (18 page)

Miraculously, Hopper left Peru in early 1970. He had his footage, his film canisters were full, and he felt he had done right by the village.

“They thought we were going to destroy their village,” said Hopper. “They thought we were stealing Inca stones and looking for gold, but we got all that straightened, man, and now the people are beginning to groove, man. They're gonna get their town together, man. They're gonna break with that priest, stand on their own. It's going to be gorgeous, man!”

The Savage Journey

I
come from Kansas,” said Hopper. “All my uncles and my grand-uncles, when they made it, they got a Stetson.”

At the Academy Awards in 1970, held just after he returned from Peru, Hopper hoped to jump onstage and accept an
Easy Rider
win for the best original screenplay and story, for which he'd been nominated along with Terry Southern—and, of course, Fonda.

“You know, I'm suing Peter Fonda now,” Hopper told the
New York Times
. “Because we started out equal partners on
Easy Rider
, and he ended up seven points ahead of me. Seven points at $150,000 a point. The movie cost $340,000, and it may end up being the fourth-biggest grosser of all time. This year alone, I'll make a million and a half on it—seventy percent of which will go to the government. The thing is
I
wrote the screenplay in two weeks and I never got paid a penny for it. At the time, I didn't care. Peter said we could straighten out the financial details later.”

None of this raised our hero's estimation in the eyes of Peter's father.

“He's a total freak-out,” retorted Henry Fonda, “stoned out of his mind all the time. Any man who insists on wearing his cowboy hat to the Academy Award ceremonies and keeps it on at the dinner table afterward ought to be spanked. That is
not
off the record. Dennis Hopper is an idiot! Spell the name right:
D-e-n-n-i-s H-o-p-p-e-r
!”

“We're a new kind of human being,” Hopper told
Life
, spreading the word about his people. “We're taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries. I think we're heroes. I want to make movies about us.”

First, of course, he had to finish the movie he was working on. Armed with forty-two hours of uncut footage from Peru, he was about to stake his fortune on a compound, where he planned to edit
The Last Movie
. He'd originally thought of putting his monthly $100,000
Easy Rider
installments toward buying Bing Crosby's ranch in Elko, Nevada.

“Best yearlings in the United States come off this ranch,” said Hopper.

But he decided on Taos instead upon stepping into the sprawling three-story, twenty-two room adobe Mabel Dodge Luhan House, once owned by this wealthy heiress and doyenne of the arts who'd lived there like Gertrude Stein of the West. Mabel had christened her compound Los Gallos after the ceramic chickens dotting its clay roof. Behind the house stretched a dusty swath of Indian land with a large and mysterious wooden cross stuck into its earth like a conquistador's sword. Thirty-three-year-old Hopper felt the vibes fit his mood.

“A lot seems to happen to people at thirty-three, man,” figured Dennis's friend country-and-western singer Kris Kristofferson, who'd been down in Peru acting in his first film role in
The Last Movie
. That's where he wrote his song “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33,” a biblical ballad about Hopper. “Me, I'm thirty-three. Dennis is thirty-three. He has a real Christ thing goin'—pictures of himself everywhere. Christ was apparently thirty-three when he got wiped out.”

All the same, Hopper didn't intend to be sacrificed like poor Billy the biker, blown apart on his chopper after the Mardi Gras trip in
Easy Rider
. Bob Dylan had been furious with Dennis about the ending. He hated to think that the two rednecks who blasted Billy and Captain America off the road at the end of the movie for having long hair got away with it. Dylan wanted revenge.

“Why can't a helicopter come down and blow
those
guys right off the road?” he suggested to Dennis.

Couldn't Fonda pull out a machine gun and go after them? How could Billy
die
in the end?

“What I want to say with
Easy Rider
,” Hopper said to his flock, “is don't be scared, go and try to change America, but if you're gonna wear a badge, whether it's long hair, or black skin, learn to protect yourselves. Go in groups, but go. When people understand that they can't tromp you down, maybe they'll start accepting you. Accepting all the herds.”

A certain set of Taos locals were ready to crucify their newest citizen. After all, somebody needed to be blamed for all the hippies who arrived in droves to live in communes like the one in
Easy Rider
. Hopper decided to bring some backup on what should have been a peaceful literary pilgrimage to the El Salto waterfalls above the little village of Arroyo Seco, just north of Taos.

In this waterfall cave, the ancients had long ago performed human sacrifice, it was said, inspiring D. H. Lawrence to write a chilling fable warning against tampering with primal forces. The caves lay on land claimed some 370 years before by pockmarked Hernán Martín Serrano, whose seed still flourished centuries later here in Arroyo Seco, a hotspot of the so-called Chicano-Hippie War plaguing the region.

Not long before, this clash resulted in a few Chicano kids jumping a smelly hippie invader who was on his way to his crash pad. When the proprietress of a local weaving shop ran out to help, the Arroyo Seco kids told her to go back to Russia, then beat up her son and blasted her window with a shotgun.

Strolling through Arroyo Seco with his posse—his brother David and two burly
Last Movie
actors—Hopper found himself facing off against a couple of Hispanic kids. On behalf of thirteen generations swearing allegiance to King Philip II of Spain, the kids called the international man of cinema a filthy hippie.

Hopper had no intention of drowning in the local murk. His plan was to remake Taos into a countercultural Hollywood with his Alta-Light Productions movie company. His list included Dean Stockwell's original screenplay
After the Gold Rush
, a script that inspired Neil Young's album, as well as
Me and Bobby McGee
, a movie to be based on the Kristofferson song. Maybe Dennis would do that film about his Kansas childhood he'd been dreaming about for practically his whole life. The future was limitless, but first Taos needed to be tamed.

Rather than give his usual rap—“We only
look
different; we're all part of the same herd”—Hopper trailed the kids back to one of their homes and drew out his gun for a citizen's arrest. As Hopper put it, “When the police came, they arrested
us
and held us on eight thousand dollars' bail.”

“We're going to let you out a side door,” said the cops before escorting Hopper out of the courthouse. “We can't protect you, because of the lynch situation.”

As they walked out, one of the Hispanic onlookers, wearing waders since he'd been fly-fishing earlier that day, lunged at Hopper because he couldn't stop thinking about what his crying mother had told him when he came home: “Some hippies had your brother and his friends in a sitting position on the side of the road with
guns
pointed at them.”

Hopper remembered there were sixty or eighty farmers outside the courthouse with pitchforks, and the story continued to grow.

“And then five guys just back from Vietnam came and told me, ‘We're going to kill you.' I pointed out to the police that I'd just been threatened. ‘Shut up,' they said. And then I went the next day and called all my friends, stuntmen, ex-Marines, to come to Taos and we went into town and bought every rifle and semiautomatic gun we could find.”

Packing a submachine gun and flanked by the Mabel Dodge Luhan House's ceramic chickens, Hopper stood watch on his roof in case any Chicanos wheeled across the land in a horde of tricked-out all-terrain vehicles. What would happen to his
movie
if they dynamited his editing shack?

In an attempt to let the town know he meant business, he stormed a school assembly at Taos High School, which the boys on his watch list attended. Hopper addressed the students from the podium—an impromptu motivational speaker.

“Look, we know what you're doing and that may be fine for now, but there's a lot of people coming back from Vietnam and they're going to have long hair and they're going to look like me in this poncho and so on. But understand they're going to have one of these—”

Whipping out a machine gun from under his woolly poncho, he calmly walked out, leaving the local Chicanos and hippies to weave tales of their own about the gringo loco, Dennis Hopper.

“Hopper went to Seco and went into a bar, and I believe they threw him out,” swore one hippie. “Then a bunch of local Chicanos came up and started fuckin' with him, hard. Hopper went back to his house and got his guns, strapped them on, came back, and walked into the bar. This dude that was fuckin' with him? Hopper shot him. Bam! That's a
true
story. The Hispanics didn't know what to do, piss or shit, but Hopper made it very clear up in Seco—their turf—that there was a new boy in town and they'd better not fuck with him, and they'd better not fuck with the hippies, or he'd come back with a vengeance and beat the living fuck out of them.”

Free from the distraction of his movie getting blown up, Hopper breathed in the deep, pure high desert air of Taos, and began editing
The Last Movie
in the fortress of his Mud Palace, as he'd rechristened the Mabel Dodge Luhan House to the dismay of certain society matrons. He even threatened to put up a blinking neon sign.

H
opper would always remember the road trip he took back in 1956 to Las Vegas to see Orson Welles, who was performing a magic show at the Riviera Hotel. In a tuxedo, Welles sandwiched in recitations from
The Merchant of Venice
while making a woman float in midair and passing a hoop over her body to show the trick was real.

A battered boy genius, Welles was broken in more ways than one after snapping his ankle under his three hundred pounds of girth. He'd scoured Europe for funding for his films and was devastated at his inability to make another film with anywhere near the grandiosity of
Citizen Kane
. He took the stage in New York and got a standing ovation as he launched into King Lear, but by the time the curtain closed he'd broken his other ankle. Escaping scathing reviews, rotund Welles limped off to Vegas to do his hocus-pocus.

Taking a break from editing
The Last Movie
, Hopper made an appearance in one of Welles's unfinished films,
The Other Side of the Wind
. In his cowboy hat, he played the autobiographical role of a “New Hollywood” director who wants John Wayne's audience to see his films. When the shoot was over, Hopper and John Huston, who had starred as the grizzled old director, left to visit John Ford in a hospital in Palm Springs. With a black patch over his bad eye, Ford looked worse for the wear after a hip operation. He had only a year or two left in him.

If Hopper was
really
a man, he'd get in bed with Ford for a photo.

The shutter clicked on three trailblazing directors of the Western myth, all crowded into the same bed.

Then came the torrential flood of articles from the media wave that had stormed darkest Peru, detailing Hopper's self-proclamation that, like Welles, he was a genius who was going to save American cinema. At a certain point in shooting
The Last Movie
, Hopper had decided he didn't need a
script
—the same script he and Stewart Stern had been crafting for five years.

“It's all dialectic, I either LOVE or I HATE,” Hopper jabbered on to the
Los Angeles Times
down in Peru. “There are no maybes or supposes. It's one through nine. There are no fractions. There was no Inca Dinka Doo in the screenplay, but it's there now!”

Stern hadn't talked to Hopper for some time when his phone began to ring. It was Hopper—calling from Taos.

“You've
got
to look at the film,” Dennis launched in. “I don't know what to do with it. I
bought
the local theater. The theater's
mine
. You can sit in it all day and watch every bit of film.”