Dennis Hopper: The Easy Rider’s Gone

In Hollywood, a town that provided a lot of competition for shenanigans, he was one of the foremost cokies, alkies, crazies. At a Houston-area art event in the early 1980s, he nearly blew himself up with 17 sticks of dynamite. Given that for a couple of decades he seemed bent on killing himself for pleasure’s sake, it’s a wonder that Dennis Hopper had such a long success in movies — more than 50 years — and so many other pursuits. Actor, director, noted photographer and art collector, he died today at 74 in Venice, Cal., after a long, public battle with prostate cancer that gave Hopper, so long addicted to melodrama, one last role in the spotlight: on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

When your first movie role is as “Goon” in Rebel Without a Cause, tormenting James Dean, with whom you become close friends… and, when you’re 22, your Method misbehavior so exasperates old-line director Henry Hathaway that he blackballs you from feature-film work for seven years… and when Easy Rider, the little movie you directed, co-wrote and starred in, makes a bundle and becomes the definitive fracture point in the Hollywood studio system… and when your next directorial effort, The Last Movie, is taken as a bird-flip to the industry and crashes like the Hindenburg… when, in your later roles, you’re the least stable character in some very strange and wonderful films, out-nutsying Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet… and when you are found naked and raving on cocaine psychosis in the Mexican jungle. then, even if you’re a teetotaler and a Republican (both of which Hopper became in the mid-’80s), you will attract attention.

(See pictures of Hopper’s life and career.)

Hopper’s movie work is both a cautionary tale and an exemplary one. He brought a tortured authenticity to many of his acting roles, an almost surreal intensity to the films he directed. He was wed five times, including an 8-day whirlwind with the Mamas and the Papas’ Michelle Phillips (“The first seven,” he said, “were pretty good”), and he filed for divorce early this year from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, alleging she was “insane” and “volatile.” She countersued, making similar claims about Hopper. Yet with myriad self-inflicted notches on his pelt, the self-described middle-class kid from Dodge City, Kansas, somehow survived, and thrived, until he was something of a Hollywood elder statesman.

Growing up in Kansas City, Mo., Dennis Lee Hopper studied painting under artist Thomas Hart Benton, and moved to San Diego with his family when he was 13. Five years later he was in movies, appearing with Dean in Rebel and, as the son of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, in Giant. His intransigence on the set of From Hell to Texas, where Hathaway had him shoot the same scene 80 times, got him out of movies. (Hathaway declared the embargo over by hiring Hopper for the 1965 The Sons of Katie Elder.) Meantime, he did dozens of TV shows and a Broadway play, Mandingo; his 1961 marriage to a fellow cast member, Brooke Hayward, lasted until 1969. That was a big year for Hopper, and the new Hollywood he helped hatch with a picture called Easy Rider.

(Read TIME’s 1986 story “Dennis Hopper: Easy Rider Rides Again.”)

In 1967 Hopper had appeared in Roger Corman’s LSD movie The Trip, starring Peter Fonda and written by a sometime actor named Jack Nicholson. Easy Rider, which Hopper wrote from a story that he and Fonda had talked out, blended the psychedelic genre with the biker movie and turned its cross-country drug dealers, Captain America (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) into hipster-martyrs. It also handed the scene-stealing role of an amiable lawyer to Nicholson, earning him an Academy Award nomination for Supporting Actor and speeding him toward stardom. Even more surprising was that the script, a ramshackle thing of improvs, longueurs and excesses, got an Oscar nomination too. When Hopper decided to keep editor Donn Cambern’s temp track, Easy Rider became of the first movies to wallpaper its sound track with rock songs (The Byrds, Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix, The Electric Prunes).

Made for about $1.4 million, most of it spent on securing rights to the songs, and released more than a year after it was shot, Easy Rider grossed a robust $19 million at the U.S. box office. In doing so, the movie rewrote the rules of Hollywood moviemaking. Rather it said there were no rules; just do your own thing, man. The film’s financial success proclaimed that the studio system was dead, and that the town’s burghers knew nothing about appealing to the suddenly-crucial youth market in the crest of the Vietnam era.

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What choice did they have but give the chief lunatic the keys to the asylum? So one of the most venerable studios, Universal, wrote Hopper a blank check to make The Last Movie. He hooked up with Stewart Stern, who had written Rebel, and concocted the frail story of a movie extra who stays on a Western location after the circus has left town. Honorably hallucinogenic and epochally weird, as colorful and intelligible as a peyote dream, The Last Movie was a notorious flop; its title might have predicted the end of Hopper’s tenure in the director’s chair.

Yet he was back behind the camera in 1980, with Out of the Blue, in which he also played an ex-con alcoholic with a lonely, adoring daughter; just guess how awful things get. Colors, in 1988, was more traditional but no less gnarly, giving Sean Penn and Robert Duvall extensive scenery-chewing opportunities as two L.A. cops on a gang detail. Hopper was always trying to amp up the moviegoer’s discomfort, and succeeded again with The Hot Spot, an erotic, sunbaked noir with Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and the blossoming young Jennifer Connelly. In the 1994 Chasers he managed a kind of supergroup collision of Hollywood’s most eccentric actors; his scenes with Crispin Glover and Gary Busey could be a Stanislavski course in How to Go Too Far, And Then Some.

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He matured as an artist — the kind whose work gets shown in galleries — and published several books of his photographs. On July 11 Hopper will be the subject of art dealer Jeffrey Deitch’s first exhibition as the new director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the show will be curated by artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Hopper also had a connoisseur’s eye for emerging artists; his collection included prime works by Warhol, Rauschenberg. Ruscha, Stella, and Johns, most of which he had to surrender in various divorce settlements.

But the money still came from acting. Two 1986 movies showed his eerie range. In David Lynch’s divinely lunatic Blue Velvet, Hopper was the gas-snorting hood Frank Booth, wailing for his mommy while he rapes Rossellini and scares the crap out of all-American boy Kyle MacLachlan. (“I’ll have to send you a love letter! Straight from my heart, f—er! You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a f—ing gun, f—er! You receive a love letter from me, and you’re f—ed forever!”) A few months later he sympathetic and softly nuanced in the inspirational sports film Hoosiers. Hollywood, which loves nothing more than to see a reformed drunk play a reformable one, gave Hopper another Oscar nomination.

(See TIME’s Blue Velvet review.)

As he also reformed into political conservatism, and did commercials teasing his renegade days, he kept playing villains: the maniac who wires Keanu Reeves’s and Sandra Bullock’s bus in Speed, Kevin Costner’s outlaw antagonist on jet skis in the megaflop Waterworld. Casting directors knew he was the apt inhabiter of characters who’d done and seen everything. On encountering the monster Leatherface and his gang in the 1986 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hopper’s choice for his worst movie ever), he soothingly mutters, “Boys, boys, boys…”

By the end he was back in TV, doing extended stints on 24 and in the series version of the Oscar-winning film Crash. Henry Hathaway would have been proud of the way the stubborn young actor became a model senior citizen of the craft. And Hopper must have been more than a little surprised. “I should have been dead ten times over,” he said. “It’s an absolute miracle that I’m still around.”

At the March 26th dedication of Hopper’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, his fellow actor and painter Viggo Mortensen said much the same thing: “He is someone who has seemed to regularly rise out of the ashes of self-inflicted chaos, surprising us with his originality and wit as an artist and defying the odds by somehow staying alive physically and professionally.” Nicholson and Lynch were there, and Hopper too. Frail from cancer treatments and heavily bandaged from a recent fall, he was helped to the stage by assistants and struggled as he thanked all those who “have enriched my life tremendously. They’ve shown me a world that I’d never seen, being a farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas.”

That kid carried a lot of baggage with him, but with the help of untold angels and demons he took many an amazing trip. And now, after a lifetime of detours from death, the Easy Rider’s gone.

Read TIME’s 1973 review of Kid Blue starring Dennis Hopper.

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