Hopper (5 page)

The
New York Times
got the exclusive of his earliest clash with the industry, the epic tale of how a young rebel stuck it to the man,
man
, the most feared force in Hollywood.

“I was going to be either a matador, a race-car driver, or a boxer,” began Hopper. “In Spain, if you're broke and lousy in school, you become a matador. In Italy, you race cars. Here, you box, or act. I boxed and got beat up, so acting was the only thing left.” He explained how the morning after playing the epileptic orphan on
Medic
, five major studios gave him contract offers. “Columbia called first and I was brought into Harry Cohn's huge office.” That's Harry Cohn—the tyrannical Columbia Pictures studio boss, better known as
King
Cohn.

Hopper was dressed up in a suit and tie; there were no Navajo talismans dangling around his neck yet. He had waited in the reception office, a sweatbox set up so that a desperate person might have to wait three days before admittance, the beastly Cohn secretly peeking in to examine his prey.

In the lucky position of being courted for a contract, Hopper was buzzed right through the soundproof portal—discolored from years of sweaty palms.

“And I walk,
swish, swish
—you know, sweating, man.”

He shuffled down the length of plush carpet toward an enormous desk raised slightly above floor level like a stage. Cohn had ripped off the design from Il Duce, whose picture had once hung on the wall, the fascist dictator being the subject of Columbia's 1933 documentary
Mussolini Speaks!
Oppressed by his surroundings, Hopper took in the hundred or so Oscars glinting in an arc behind the movie mogul's desk. (“Like a rainbow,” said Hopper. “I had never seen an Oscar before. I was nervous as hell.”) Sitting down, he picked a crack in the ceiling to stare at as Cohn laid on his fleshy charm.

“I've seen your TV show, kid. You got it; you're a
natural
, like Monty Clift! What else have you done?”

“Shakespeare.”

Cohn couldn't believe it. “
Max!
Send the kid to school for six months. Take all the Shakespeare out of him. I can't
stand
Shakespeare.”

“At that point,” explained Hopper, wrapping up his oft-told tale, “I said to Harry Cohn, ‘Go fuck yourself.' Whereupon I was barred from Columbia. I didn't go back there for fifteen years, until they agreed to release
Easy Rider
. Freaky.”

After telling Cohn where to stick it—the same Cohn who used his Mafia connections to threaten Sammy Davis Jr. with the loss of his only seeing eye if he didn't quit looking at one of Cohn's blond movie stars—Hopper should have been blackballed from Hollywood for the rest of his life. If he was lucky.

But it just so happened that Warner Bros. needed a baby-faced hell-raising type for its upcoming juvenile delinquent picture,
Rebel Without a Cause
. The studio scooped him up for $200 a week for twenty-six weeks. Unlike Warner matinee idol Tab Hunter (formerly Arthur Kelm), Dennis Hopper had the good fortune to remain himself, providing the perfect angle for his first big ink. Biting the hook, Hollywood gossip maven Hedda Hopper typed
NO RELATION
as the headline of her item: “Hear Dennis Hopper has been signed to a long-term contract by Warner Bros.”

With a name in place, the studio machine was ready to crank out a new star on the assembly line. Eager to shine him up like a lucky penny, the publicity folks shot stills capitalizing on the wholesome look of their newest contract player. They posed him waking up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at five o'clock in the morning, making his bed and stuffing a pillow into a fresh white case, drinking a thick-as-Elmer's glass of milk from his fridge, responsibly writing out checks for the bills on his kitchen table. Cornball images perfectly complemented Hopper's upcoming
Rebel
role, making it all the more frightening that any sweet American boy could be swept up in the scourge of delinquency. Still, he couldn't look like a total sissy, so the studio's top flack, an expert forger of backstories on incoming talent, dished up a ripe coming-of-age factoid about fourteen-year-old Hopper helping with the harvesting on his grandparents' wheat farm. The kid not only tilled America's soil but, after getting pounded by a tough customer in the Golden Gloves welterweight finals, landed a broken nose, two busted ribs, and a three-week stay in the hospital.

“Dennis Hopper might have been trading leather in the boxing ring today instead of trading lines in the acting profession,” went the item Warner Bros. sent out for immediate release, “but for a ferocious young man bent on beating in Hopper's head.”

Now that the flacks had roughed the kid up with a little Tinseltown sprinkling of grit, the only thing left was to hook him up with a love interest.

S
tarlet after starlet, including buxom Jayne Mansfield, hoped to play the girlfriend of the brooding loner who hates his apron-wearing father for submitting to his domineering mother. Rain poured down on the Warner Bros. backlot as the girls cozied up to Hopper for their
Rebel
screen tests. All night long he embodied the star-making role of the lost boy who only wants somebody to tell him the truth. Who else could even come close to nailing the part of the troubled teenage hero? Hopper thought he was the best actor in the world, “pound for pound,” but nobody seemed to recognize it.

By the time the cinematographer finished tinkering with CinemaScope, famously dismissed as only good for shooting snakes and funerals, the next big thing felt like a wet, unhappy animal.

After his soggy ordeal on the backlot, Dennis returned home to his apartment on Doheny Drive and slept off the experience. The next day his roommate, trusty Bill Dyer, handed him the phone.

“It's Natalie Wood!”

The child star? Why was
Natalie Wood
calling? Wasn't she in
Miracle on 34th Street
—the little girl who sits on the lap of the Macy's Santa Claus?

“I tested with you last night,” said Natalie. “Do you remember? It was raining.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.”

“I'd like to fuck you, but I don't do anything. I just lay there.”

At breakneck speed, Hopper varoomed his new red Austin Healey convertible, courtesy of his new contract, toward the spired Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip. His first bona fide Hollywood starlet lay in Bungalow 2, the one by the pool, continuing her ongoing audition with the director of
Rebel
, Nicholas Ray, a silver-haired, chain-smoking auteur cursed with a romantic nature and a taste for vice. Doing all she could to be perceived as
wild
by the aging director, sixteen-year-old Natalie hoped to shed that awful sugary nutmeg-wafting residue of child stardom.

Picking up the nubile starlet and wheeling her up winding Mulholland Drive, Hopper parked on a secluded lover's lane in the Hollywood Hills and started to go down on her.

“Oh, you can't do that.”

“Why?”

“Because Nick just fucked me.”

Overlooking the twinkling panorama of Hollywood, Hopper reached the big time, an event duly sent out for immediate release by the studio flack.

“Hopper, Warner Bros. contract player who makes his film debut in
Rebel Without a Cause
, is dating Natalie Wood, pretty filmland starlet. Natalie, incidentally, has tested for a role in the James Dean starrer which rolls shortly.”

It was true. Hopper wasn't the star. He was playing the bit part of a hoodlum named Goon. Hopper had only been a stand-in that rainy night for the
real
star, twenty-four-year-old James Dean, who had been off in New York prowling rainy Times Square, hunched in an overcoat and puffing a cigarette dangling from his Cupid's-bow lips. Dean's pose was inspired by a photo of existential philosopher Albert Camus, grimacing on the back of one of his paperbacks, which were so chic to carry in a back pocket. The resulting pictures went into Dean's upcoming
Life
profile, “Moody New Star,” paving the way for his breakout film,
East of Eden
.

Rumors floated around that Dean actually slept in his dressing room during
Eden
's filming, locked inside the studio gates at night by director Elia Kazan, who wanted his star focused and free from the distraction of zooming around town on a shell-blue Triumph motorcycle. Nobody was allowed to disturb Dean. It was said he kept a loaded Colt .45 by his side as he slept.

Hopper liked to tell the story of how Kazan finally unleashed his hellcat to the cast and crew who were lined up outside the soundstage. “You're gonna meet a boy and he's gonna be strange to you and he's gonna be different,” said Hopper impersonating Kazan. “But no matter what you see, or what you think of him, when you see him on the screen, he's gonna be pure gold. I want you to meet James Dean.” Kazan opened the soundstage door to unveil his freak secret weapon, like 3-D, so real on-screen he grabbed you. Dean came out and screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

One day, feeling stiff in a tie, Hopper met Dean at the commissary where the studio players—cowboys and Indians alike—ate lunch in their costumes. “I didn't believe it. Here was this grubby guy in tennis sneakers, an old turtleneck, and glasses,” said Hopper. “We were introduced, and he didn't even turn around; he didn't say hello. That's how he was, man. Honest. If he didn't feel like talking to you, he just didn't.”

Trailing Dean like a shadow, Hopper became a regular at Googie's, the zippy populuxe-style coffee shop to the stars on Sunset Strip. Googly eyes from the double
O
s of its electric green-blue sign looked down on jittery actors emoting over diner coffee and Stanislavsky while trying not to ogle the self-obsessed farm boy who poured in endless sugars. Gazing longingly at each spoonful as it dissolved, Dean held court over the back booth as king of the “night watch” crowd. This bizarre cast of characters included a spectacled toady rumored to have gotten his nose done to look more like Dean, and Vampira, a goth television hostess who rode around Tinseltown in a hearse or an old Packard convertible, chauffeured as she held aloft a black umbrella to blot out the sun. Such strange customers were attracted to Dean. Vampira took note of the night Hopper secretly followed Dean all around his regular spots, peeking into restaurant windows, looking for him.

“Oh, for God's sake, Dennis!” Vampira told him. “Don't be so San Diego!”

Hopper was coming into his own, without feeling the need to copy anybody. After all, he was Natalie Wood's leading man, drinking black coffee in his very own booth. Despite her intimate rehearsals in Bungalow 2, however, Nicholas Ray hadn't yet told Natalie whether she had gotten the part. And why cryingly not?! Couldn't she play Dean's girl? Hadn't she already acted beside him on the live television show
I'm a Fool
, playing the nice girl to his wandering drifter?

“I know you,” Dean had told her. “You're a
child actor
.”

It was
horrible
! Would she ever lose her Christmasy glow? Jangled up on Googie's coffee, a nervous wreck, Natalie ordered Hopper to take her to the Villa Capri. Dean had just started lurking around this Rat Pack hangout but ate in the kitchen, a new kind of cool that Sinatra and the boys didn't exactly get. They'd send the kid over a glass of milk and a comb, give him the rub.

“Fine man, fine boy,” said proprietor Patsy D'Amore. “Dressed with overalls, like men who dig ditches.”

By nightfall, Natalie was practically sobbing on the checkered tablecloth about how Ray still hadn't called to say she'd gotten the part. She just
wasn't
enough of a bad girl to play a delinquent. Or
was
she?

A randy Hopper took her up twisty Mulholland Drive through the Santa Monica Mountains, haunted by the ghosts of thrill-seeking teens who had turned the dangerous road into a makeshift drag strip, inspiring the harrowing “chickie run” scene in the
Rebel
screenplay. Hopper drank half a bottle of whiskey and handed it over. Natalie puked. It started to rain. Now they were really bad, living the nightmarish drama as they wheeled down a treacherously slick stretch of killer road. Turning a hairpin corner, Hopper plowed his red convertible head-on into an oncoming car, throwing Natalie onto the street. Neighbors ran out with blankets, and the ambulance roared toward her.

“It's all my fault,” groaned Hopper. “I shouldn't have brought that bottle.”

At the emergency room, Nicholas Ray pushed his Goon up against the white wall and slapped him. “Shut up,” said Ray. “And straighten up.”

Looking at Ray's bad, bad Lolita scratched up in a hospital bed, the doctor called her a goddamn juvenile delinquent.

“Do you hear what he called me, Nick?” screamed Natalie. “He called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent!
Now
do I get the part?”

Hopper was amazed. Lying in the street in the rain, Natalie hadn't been calling for her mother but instead rattled off the digits of the Chateau Marmont, repeating, “Nick Ray . . . the number is,” conscious enough to know she was in the throes of a breakout performance that needed to be seen at once.

Stunned at this totally neurotic, completely savvy freak wunderkind on her way to megastardom—practically daring him to one-up her—Hopper prepared to shed any trace of the fresh-faced goody-goody voted most likely to succeed.

On the first day of shooting, Ray sent a dozen roses to Natalie's dressing room. Just like Goon, a
real
delinquent, Hopper freaked out and called Natalie all sorts of nasty names for whoring around with Nick.

“All the guys just wanna screw me,” said Natalie of her silver fox. “He just wants to make love to me.”

Just as the director was about to shoot the planetarium scene at the Griffith Observatory, Hopper ran off to get a hot dog, holding up production and costing the studio plenty. Ray tried to fire him on the spot, but the brat was under contract, so he cut his lines. Hopper moped while Dean moved like a jungle cat in the fight scene, flashing about like a matador, the switchblade quick in his hand against Buzz, the bully gang leader. Dean insisted on using real blades, so real blood ran down his neck after Buzz accidentally stabbed him behind the ear.