Dennis Hopper: Easy Rider Rides Again

“I thought I’d be dead before I was 30. Turning 40 stunned me. Fifty is a major miracle, and I think I may even make 70.” So say other men who have just rounded the half-century mark, but Dennis Hopper is neither joking nor exaggerating. He is telling the sober truth. For a man whose name was once synonymous with drugs and booze to have survived to the age of 50 — and have the audacity even to contemplate trying for the standard threescore and ten — is no minor accomplishment. It is a megamiracle worthy of a Hollywood movie.

Or, to be precise, nine Hollywood movies, the number he has appeared in over the past two years, making him one of the busiest actors in a town that twice blackballed him. “When you’re hot you’re hot,” says his friend Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper helped convert from a featured player to a star with their 1969 film Easy Rider. “As an actor Dennis stands out because of his edge, his sincerity, the honesty he conveys. But Dennis also paints. He takes pictures. He’s got an extremely fine eye for life. He’s a great appreciator with a great vision. And he does things his way.”

Not all of Hopper’s new films are done his way. Some, like last year’s My Science Project and last summer’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, are best left off the resume. But one film — David Lynch’s Blue Velvet — cannot be dismissed. An illustrated guide to Krafft-Ebing, Blue Velvet is perhaps the first film since 1972’s Last Tango in Paris to scandalize its audience. At the end people are as likely to erupt in boos as to burst into applause.

Hopper plays Frank Booth, a murderer, maimer, drug dealer, champion cusser, beer guzzler, helium snorter and Roy Orbison fan. Chiefly, though, Frank is a psychopathic sadist who tortures and humiliates a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) for his sexual pleasure. “When I got the part, I wanted to reassure David that I could handle the role, that I understood the character,” says Hopper. “I called him up and said, ‘I am Frank.’ I’ve been told that that remark caused the other actors some consternation.”

That remark, yes — plus a not altogether undeserved reputation as the Wild Man of Hollywood; Hopper has been shocking and irritating movie people for more than 30 years. Born in Dodge City, Kans., he achieved success at 18 when a TV role brought offers of contracts from seven studios. “I believed I was the best actor I knew at my age,” he says. “That is, until I saw James Dean % on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. I realized I didn’t know anything. I wanted to know his secret. ‘Don’t act it,’ he said. ‘Don’t indicate. Just do it.’ ” Do it Hopper did, in Rebel, Giant and his first downfall, From Hell to Texas. Director Henry Hathaway wanted him to act one way, Hopper wanted to act another, and after 80 grueling takes of one scene, Hathaway won. Hopper was tagged as an uncooperative actor. He was 21, and his movie career was over — for the moment.

He spent the following five years in Manhattan, studying with Lee Strasberg and appearing in more than 140 TV shows. He also met and married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Producer Leland Hayward, and she introduced him to her friend Peter Fonda. Teaming for a series of low-budget motorcycle movies, Hopper and Fonda were ready to turn in their Harley-Davidsons when they decided to make just one more, for the money. “We saw it as a western, only on motorcycles,” says Hopper. “We were the strangers in town, the outlaws.” With Easy Rider, which Hopper directed, these cocaine-sniffing, drug-dealing outsiders became the symbols of the dropout counterculture of the ’60s. Made for less than $500,000, the picture went on to gross more than $40 million. (Hopper and Fonda are now planning Easy Rider II, set in postapocalypse America.)

Hopper’s name was taken off Hollywood’s blacklist, and with studio financing, he went off to the jungles of Peru to make another visionary film, prophetically titled The Last Movie. Image rich but incoherent, it vanished almost overnight and so, as far as Hollywood was concerned, did Hopper, who went into a self-imposed exile in Mexico and Europe, where he acted in a few movies, and in Taos, N. Mex., where he had a house.

Though he had been drinking heavily and taking drugs for years, in the ’70s he became an addict. “Some of the folks alongside me went Establishment or dropped dead. I was more fortunate. I went insane. I became paranoid and schizophrenic. I heard voices and was convinced that friends were being murdered in the next room. Since I was isolated, living in Taos, no one told me any different.” In Mexico to make a movie in 1983, he panicked, tore off his clothes and, after walking naked through the countryside, was arrested and sent back to the U.S. “Dennis tapped the bottom,” Nicholson says of the bad old days. “He was staying at places that didn’t allow visitors. It wasn’t Sunnybrook Farm — no sashay through those rich men’s rest homes. He did the real stuff.”

Hopper’s rebirth came when he entered a drug-rehabilitation program in April 1984. Since then, he says, he has not taken so much as an aspirin and has worked almost nonstop. Besides appearing in Blue Velvet, he will be seen, again playing broken-down characters, in two other upcoming movies, Hoosiers and River’s Edge.

Does he feel bitter about those wasted years? About three broken marriages and a career that only now seems to be moving? In a word: no. “It’s too late to have regrets,” he says. “It happened.” But he would like to play, before he turns 70, something other than psychopaths and advanced neurotics. Perhaps even a born-again actor. Anyone interested in The Dennis Hopper Story?