Hopper (3 page)

Aiming the weapon of choice of his favorite cowboy, Red Ryder as played by Wild Bill Elliott—“He didn't sing and dress in all that glittery stuff,” said Hopper, “he was just a cowboy”—the little dude fired BBs at the black-clad desperadoes lurking in the wheat fields. Lying in wait for the train and staring above those fields, Dennis no longer saw the blank screen of a Kansas sky. Instead he projected a panorama of Technicolor mountains—the kind they put in
King of Dodge City
or
Vigilantes of Dodge City
, which really are nowhere to be found in the town's flat reality. He desperately wanted go to this fantastical land of the movies, bursting with singing cowboys beckoning him to adventure, but unlike the twister to Oz, the Super Chief left him in the ditch with his dog on its way to his American Dream.

T
he summer the
Dodge City
premiere blew into town, Dennis's mother was itching for a change. Marjorie began to teach swimming to the local kids, and per an exclusive contract with the city was promoted to pool manager, a move the
Dodge City Daily Globe
reviewed as “popularly received by patrons of the pool.” Riding shotgun, her husband Jay Hopper worked at Busley's, the local grocery, collecting nickels for ice-cold Coca-Cola in the cooler, the sign instructing, “Serve Yourself. Please Pay the Clerk.” Stacking jumbo cans pasted with bold labels for Tendersweet Sweet Corn, Hand-packed Tomatoes, and Bar-B-Q Prunes, Jay proved himself a valuable addition to the Busley Bros., just as his father, J.C., was a well-oiled cog for Western Light and Telephone.

As Dodge's meterman, making his rounds on the small-town grid, old J.C. would never think about going off in his pickup truck until his job was done. The Good Samaritan made it home every night for dinner with his wife, a noble grand of the Rebekah Lodge, who led the local ladies in the path of righteous women from the Bible. Bertie Bell found it a blessing that their son had inherited J.C.'s mild, even temperament, Jay's one flourish being a taste for loud neckties.

The girls of Dodge City Senior High thought Jay was a jewel of a guy, handsome behind the counter in his spotless white grocery apron, dark and stormy in his
Sou'Wester
yearbook portrait. In less charitable moments, the girls wondered how Marjorie Mae Davis ever landed him in the first place.

“I would say perfect,” said one of Jay's admirers, pondering the mystery. “He was a perfect man. Why would he marry her? She wasn't real pretty. She was just an ordinary person.”

The girls were just jealous. A cheerleader on student council, staff on the school newspaper the
Dodger
, and a performer in the minstrel show providing blackface entertainment for lily-white Dodge, the fiery farm girl screeched in from the egg ranch and sucked the class of '35 for all it was worth. A history buff with an interest in heritage that eventually led to her becoming president of her genealogical society, Marjorie was bred to blaze trails like one of her great-grandmothers, the very sister of Daniel Boone. If only she hadn't married the summer after graduation and immediately gotten pregnant.

Lying flat on her back in the maternity ward of St. Anthony's, Marjorie considered Virginia's favorite son with his leonine white beard and immaculate gray uniform. She just
felt
somehow that Robert E. Lee was related to her newborn. Perhaps the Confederate general's spirit would lead her little bundle, Dennis Lee Hopper, to rebel against the dull tyranny of his father.

“With our country engaged in war,” declared the U.S. Postmaster General, “it is imperative that prompt, efficient, uninterrupted postal service be maintained.”

Receiving orders to report to Kansas City, Missouri, for two years of duty as a subrailway postal clerk, Jay was off to deliver mail for his country. Riding back and forth along the same flat stretch of track between Newton, Kansas, and La Junta, Colorado, he sorted the letters on the westbound No. 7, and about 150 miles into his day whizzed past his in-laws' farm where young Dennis looked out for the train while his mother ran the pool.

Luxuriating in the town's glamorous leading lady role, Dennis's mommy gave a critically acclaimed performance. Dark from baking out in the sun all day in a dazzling one-piece that accentuated her swim-toned, honey-brown thighs and a glistening set of butterfly shoulders, Marjorie put on the best show in Dodge. Exhausted by the time she closed up for the evening, she slept in town while Jay slept in Newton, their Dennis safely tucked away at her parents'.

After riding the rails for a year, Jay was able to squeeze in a midroute quickie, getting off at Dodge to spend three hours a day with his wife, barely enough time to get her pregnant again. Depending on how Marjorie looked at it on a particular afternoon, her lot was better than that of the girls with husbands off in Europe, battling Nazis with submachine guns instead of flaccid mail sacks.

Keeping a cool watch from behind dark sunglasses, Marjorie starred in her fifth season as Dodge City's pool mistress. Turning twenty-eight at the pool, she got ever closer to that day when she'd appear formless and gray in the mirror like her mother, whom the family treated like a saint for taking care of the boys, frustrating Marjorie so much that she screamed, “I don't want to hear it!” Another day, Marjorie told Nellie, her own mother, “Go to your room!” It was a nightmare.

The family gossiped about Marjorie's endless summer, a sticky morass stretching over five long years. What reason could Marjorie possibly have for abandoning her two boys while she played at the pool? It was terrible how she let her mother take her kids along with all the laundry, all the cooking.

“Nellie raised those boys,” Nellie's brother would say. “Marjorie would rather be in the swimming pool than messing with her little kids.”

Boiling in the heat that once brought Bleeding Kansas to the point of slave revolts and killing sprees, the pool mistress watched from her white wooden perch, embalmed from her high school days with her taut brown body and the burn of Daniel Boone's blood in her veins.

Back in winter, Jay had called long-distance from Miami to wish the family Merry Christmas and inform them that he was off to fight in the Asiatic theater of operations. He'd enlisted for the army at Fort Leavenworth and looked handsome in his uniform.

Marjorie was all alone now, and Dodge was just so hot in the summer, the only escape was going to the movies or jumping into the pool.

The kids she once coaxed to climb the rungs of the high dive and plunge into manhood were now emerging from behind the shower wall. Old enough to go beat each other up at the drive-in hamburger joint after football games, then hop into gas-guzzling deathtraps and race blind drunk—a pack of hell-raising delinquents.

Dennis was looking more and more like his father from
The Sou'Wester
, staring back at her with his slicked-back hair and chiseled-face, leading-man looks. He almost seemed lost to Marjorie, loving Nellie like his mother, but what could she possibly do to make him love his real mommy again as he had when he was a baby? Marjorie knew something that might make a difference. Sometimes in bloody Kansas, the only thing to do was sweat and rot or do something crazy. She told her Dennis that his father had been killed in the war.

Ready to prove himself worthy of the war-ravaged widow in an act of bravery witnessed by practically the whole town, the little cowboy climbed the rungs of the ladder up to the high dive, walking the plank until his toes were curled around its springy edge. Practically naked in his swim trunks as the harsh glint of reality reflected off the water, he sniffed in chlorine and the collective nerve of his classmates at stinkin' Lincoln Elementary—of men who had taken the plunge and boys too weak to jump.

The corn-fed jocks who liked to pound on each other stared up at the scaredy-cat kid clogging the pipeline to cannonball glory. Marjorie called from below. She told Dennis if he wasn't going to be a big boy and jump, he'd just have to stay there all day until she shut down.

So began the showdown in Dodge City between the little chickie and the pool mistress—like the time Wild Bill Elliott duked it out with the knife fighter in
Cheyenne Wildcat
. It lasted till Marjorie finally closed up, leaving her hysterical Dennis to climb down the rungs of the ladder at sundown.

[The cameo was completely wrong for the picture. Cut to Christmas 1945. Like the ghost Dennis had read about in
Hamlet
, Dennis's father suddenly reappeared in Dodge City.] Jay wasn't back from the dead but rather Manchuria, where the postman had been serving as a medic in the OSS, America's clandestine spy organization. The curtain closed on this chapter of Dennis's life, and he would never understand exactly why his mother had told him his father was dead.

T
he latest in a line of prospectors and fortune seekers drawn to California, American dreamers came back from the war and flocked to the land of extravagant idiocy, where Walt Disney slapped mouse ears and a happy ending on everything. Dreamers needed their mail delivered, too, and the Hoppers followed, with Jay reporting for duty as the new postman of La Mesa, outside of San Diego. Dennis would finally get to go where the train went.

He was around twelve or thirteen (some three years after losing and oddly regaining a father), and along the way noticed the Rockies weren't anywhere near as grand as the enormous blue-violet movie mountains looming in his head. And weren't bandits supposed to jump aboard as the family blazed through the painted land of Arizona? There wasn't even a Comanche chasing in hot pursuit. When the Hoppers finally did make it to the frontier's end, Buck Jones didn't greet them in a ten-gallon hat. No Wild West Parade either, just a concrete freeway zooming toward a blue version of the golden ocean that stretched beyond the egg ranch.

“Wow, what a bring-down,” Hopper would say of his long-awaited moment. “The Pacific was the horizon line—in my wheat field.”

Cowboys didn't ride past his new home in Lemon Grove with the citrus groves paved over to make way for the dreamers, where the new pool mistress of El Cajon screamed at the new postman of La Mesa. Miserable in his reality, Dennis ran away from home. Seeing as his milk money was barely enough to hightail it to Tijuana, he wouldn't have gotten far in his escape had it not been for the good fortune of finding the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego's Balboa Park.

“Hark ye gentles, hark ye all, time has come for curtain call!” Dennis cried as he ran up the aisle, clanging the bell to start the show.

In this authentic replica of the Elizabethan playhouse, lying among eucalyptus trees and peacocks strutting in the bamboo brake, Dennis found himself dressed in the rags of a Victorian beggar boy in the Globe's 1949 holiday pageant,
A Christmas Carol
. Playing a ragamuffin asking for alms, shoved offstage by the magistrate as the play opened, he settled in backstage, finding a home in the little world of actors in greasepaint. Dazzled, he waited patiently backstage until, on cue, he ran out and snatched a turkey from a redeemed Scrooge. Hearts melted; those beaming, blue-haired grannies would've shit in their hats if they knew what the kid was really thinking. He simply
hated
his dear mother, the scheming liar sitting among them in the audience. Up there onstage, Hopper swore he would show her. He was going to outdo her. He was going to be an
actor
.

A voracious student of his craft, teenage Dennis cast away his prescribed English class reading at Helix High, made up of “About 5% Brains, About 36% Dolls, About 31% Guys, About 18% Screwheads, About 10% Deadheads,” according to the
Tartan
yearbook. Diving into a tome of his own choosing,
Minutes of the Last Meeting
, he pored over this boozy account of a cadre of Hollywood bohemians who boldly drank their way into oblivion in the service of art. Here in the pages lived the finest Shakespearean actor in Southern California, John Barrymore, who drank in life until his liver turned black.

Boldly sucking in a drag of his cigarette, the great Hopper thrust himself onto the world's stage.

In pomaded hair and a too-big gray suit, he played the oily villain in the drama club production of
Charley's Aunt
but, preferring serious fare to such hammy Victorian-era farce, also wrestled down
The Hairy Ape
. He howled in speech club as Eugene O'Neill's filthy brute who haunts decent society. While the deadheads and screwheads squeaked out soliloquies from
The Glass Menagerie
for the upcoming National Forensic League high school dramatic declamation contest, Hopper ambitiously took on the toughest role of them all, the indecisive Hamlet.

At fifteen he was a master of the hambone acting style then at its apex with Sir Laurence Olivier donning a fleshy nose, dandy's wig, and villainous eyebrows as wretched King Richard III. Or Orson Welles, masked in blackface for his film version of
Othello
. Enraptured by his hammy heroes—the great rival fakes of their age—Hopper was on the path to greasepaint glory, but the stars intervened and changed his course.

In one fateful week, Hopper sat glued to a death match playing in theaters across America. In
A Place in the Sun
, delicate Montgomery Clift did his haunting shuffle to the electric chair and, in spite of the sets and makeup and all other things that screamed fake in the movies, somehow managed to be
real
. In the other corner, brawny Marlon Brando slouched in a sombrero and thick mustache as Mexico's Tiger on a White Horse, Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary martyr of
Viva Zapata!

To be or not to be? Would Hopper continue on the path toward the grandiloquent Shakespeareans, last of a fast-dying breed? Or would he dive into dark, unexplored territory? Daring him to leap into the unknown was Kipling's checklist of manhood, “If,” ingrained in his brain from his declamation contests.