Hopper (19 page)

In addition to moving into the Mabel Dodge House, Hopper had purchased the El Cortez Theater, a few miles away in Ranchos de Taos, Taos's little sister community, so that he could screen his masterpiece-in-progress to a crowd of sycophants and locals, at least once a week. He pumped in thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, including a sync-sound system so that the community could experience the full effect of his vision.

On weekends, when he took a break from screenings of the evolving
Last Movie
, he played free Disney cartoons for the kids and art house flicks at night—the new Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini. But he was not happy about the new Buñuel his theater manager had booked.

“You can't show this in a Catholic community!” said Hopper, playing film god.

“Dennis, first of all, the Spanish people don't come to art films! They don't come to Buñuel. Who do you think you are, anyway, censoring movies?”

Obviously the young man hadn't had the experience of being shuttered in a fortified compound, defending oneself against hordes of Chicanos threatening to completely waste Hopper's precious editing time.

Sitting at the El Cortez, Stewart Stern watched the latest editing-incarnation of
The Last Movie
.

“Glorious stuff,” said Stern. “Heart-stopping.”

Tex, played by Hopper, was great. But those actor friends of his that he had improvising their lines in the film, probably high as psychedelic llamas? Not so good. Still, Hopper maintained that he didn't need a script.

“I'm Fellini. I'm a genius. I just need notes. I don't need a screenplay,” Hopper would say.

As a result, the film dragged, going here, there, and nowhere. Visually it was stunning, with lush greens set against the snowcapped savage mountain in the distance, and sometimes there were brilliant moments, but with all the input allowed in, the story structure of, say,
Easy Rider
was conspicuously absent. Hopper seemed unable to cut out anything.

Sitting in the darkened El Cortez as the forty-second hour of film approached, Stern was horrified. Where was the ending? That poignant scene in the screenplay Stern had typed out, illustrating how the villagers are so caught between their real world and this fake movie world, they don't even know which was the real church anymore.

“Dennis,” said an exasperated Stern, “you never
shot the ending
!”

“I want the audience to be responsible for their part in it. They're responsible for
sitting
through it. That's what the movie's about, man.”

Stern worried that Hopper had actually gone insane. Part of the problem was that after the phenomenal success of
Easy Rider
, Hopper had carte blanche to make any movie he'd ever dreamed about, the great American art movie with final cut! And what had he done with the opportunity? He'd turned Stern's carefully crafted script on its head and willingly destroyed their vision. The six or so editors working with Hopper in his editing shack in back of the Mud Palace actually considered turning the forty-two hours of sprawling footage into a
National Geographic
special. With that much footage, it could have been
anything
.

“What you have to do is go back down and shoot it again,” said Stern. “First, get straight. Get sober. Get the way you were when you first submitted it to Jason Robards and Bobby Walker's mother and they wanted to do it. Go back to
that
.”

By then it was too late for Hopper, preoccupied with other things like getting high almost continually and marrying that Mamas and Papas girl, Michelle Phillips. Dennis wanted her to star in
Me and Bobby McGee
.

They married on Halloween night 1970 with glowing orange candles burning in the courtyard in paper bags trailing the way up to the Mud Palace. A witness to the beautiful yet spooky occasion, Stern decided Hopper was definitely insane. And adorable. He couldn't help loving Hopper, but Hopper was so crazy it was terrifying.

Inside the Mud Palace, by the flicker of 150 tapers in silver candelabra, Dennis stood before his half-moon peyote fireplace inlaid in the Palace's cavernous red-and-brown-tiled dining room, filled with pumpkins and friends. He read his Gnostic Gospel—“Have you discovered the beginning so that you inquire about the end? For where the beginning is, there shall be the end”—to the gathered. The double-ring ceremony was officiated by artist Bruce Conner, dressed up this night as a reverend of the Universal Life Church in San Francisco.

The queen of the Mud Palace donned her crown—but not for long. She left after eight days of marriage.

To this day, wishing not to speak ill of the dead, Michelle Phillips remains silent as to what transpired on the final eighth day of her marriage to Hopper, only saying that he did something “excruciating.” A popular account puts Hopper firing guns in the house while accusing a handcuffed Michelle of witchcraft.

“Well, what am I going to do?” asked Hopper when she made her break. “I've been fixing up the new house for you.”

“Have you ever thought about suicide?”

Rather than strip the nursery he'd decorated for Michelle's daughter, Chynna, Hopper left its flowered wallpaper to yellow as the autumn leaves fell on his courtyard. It was the witching season, and a deathly pallor draped over the Mud Palace.

The echoing adobe rooms filled like an overcrowded asylum with Dennis's collection of friends and hangers-on, a lot of Hollywood types who also wanted to make their own Westerns, psychedelic ones featuring their cowboy Jesus, Hopper. Flying in to join the decadent feast one day was the famous psychic to the stars, Peter Hurkos, ready to give extrasensory insight into Hopper's movie.

“You'd better stop,” Hurkos warned Hopper's dinner guests, who tried to expose him as a fraud. “Or I'm gonna tell you when you're gonna die.”

Holding court over the candlelit Mud Palace dining room, Hurkos talked about the Sharon Tate murders. Hopper claimed to know about some weird S&M videos recorded three days before the killings. They'd been filmed, Hopper heard, at the home of Mama Cass, where twenty-five people had been invited to witness the whipping of a drug dealer from Sunset Strip who sold them bad dope.

Hurkos had visited the scene of the Tate murders, 10050 Cielo Drive, and kneeling down on the bloodstained carpet watched in his mind a replay of the killings that shook Hollywood and caused everyone to lock their doors. He envisioned Sharon and her friends tripping on LSD in a violent bacchanal inspired by what he called “goona-goona,” a black magic ritual.

“I see pictures in my mind like on a television screen,” said Hurkos. “When I touch something, I then tell what I see.”

Holding on to the enormous Florentine dining room table that had been at the Mud Palace since Mabel's days, Hurkos started talking to himself, claiming to experience through the wood grains all that had ever happened at that table—for wood holds the vibrations of everyone who handles it.

The chocolate-brown wood harnessed visions of Mabel's long-ago esteemed guests: Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence, struggling to create his utopia. Hopper had heard from the sole survivor of Rananim, the lady with the ear trumpet, how one night D. H., in the midst of a heavy peyote trip, thought he had turned into a coyote and that someone—perhaps his art patron, Mabel—had to chain him up in the Mud Palace courtyard.

Come winter, Hopper sat by the fireplace in his lodge-like living room held up by two giant spiral carved wooden pillars, and chatted with a visiting Playboy bunny while a spacey-eyed girl perched behind him like a Cheshire Cat. The bunny admired Hopper's art collection, one he'd been rebuilding ever since Brooke won his first collection in their divorce. Luckily for Hopper, he had managed to keep his
Easy Rider
profits. Brooke claimed she didn't even try to get a cut because she was scared he'd go after her with a shotgun.

Found among the Roy Lichtenstein comic strip fighter jet painting and “atomic artist” Tony Price's set of hydrogen bomb casings, rescued from a nearby Los Alamos scrapyard and transformed into a set of Tibetan peace gongs, was Hopper's own
Bomb Drop
, a huge seven-foot joystick that moved hypnotically back and forth, perpetually destroying the world in a mushroom cloud. Grotesque Peruvian masks grimaced on the wall near Andy Warhol's
Kiss
, featuring a still from 1931's
Dracula
, with fanged Bela Lugosi going for the throat.

Hopper turned to his bunny, telling her about a visit he'd made to meet Charles Manson in prison a few weeks before. He described it as casually as if he had gone to see a long-lost relative. There were some eerie similarities. After all, both Hopper and Manson had recently appeared on covers of
Life
. As their features revealed, their recent activities had both included their own strange B-movie fantasies played out on Western movie sets.

Manson's set was the Spahn Movie Ranch in the rolling Simi Hills outside LA, a historic movie ranch once used during Hollywood's golden age for filming Western movies and television shows. Amid the dilapidated fake Western facades—the Longhorn Saloon, the Rock City Cafe—Manson, like a lunatic director, had ruled over his hellacious Manson girls, riding around the ranch on armor-plated dune buggies, readying for the apocalypse. On trial for the Sharon Tate murders, Manson summoned Hopper to prison for the purpose of discussing a biopic, a dark and depraved American dream that he wanted Hopper to direct. Perhaps Manson saw Hopper as an outlaw brother who would be able to see beyond the conventional jeer of “madman.”

“Did you see the newspaper? Did you read it last week?” Manson asked Hopper during their visit, explaining how he had stood up in court and started reciting the Declaration of Independence.

Hopper told Manson that he hadn't read about it. Manson seemed very excited.

“Oh? You don't read either?”

Hanging among the art in the Mud Palace was a poster from a Warhol exhibit with one of Andy's famous quotes.

I Never Read

I Just Look at Pictures

Hopper bragged to the bunny how Manson had told him all about what had really gone down at Spahn Ranch.

“He said that, like, you know, he was a big star and like his whole life, he'd been acting out a movie, but there hadn't been any movie cameras there.”

The whole time Hopper spoke to his bunny, a camera was filming them for a documentary titled
The American Dreamer
. Self-proclaimed “idea man” Lawrence Schiller and his partner, Kit Carson, were down in Taos to film Hopper editing
The Last Movie
. The cameramen followed Hopper to the El Cortez Theater, where Dennis delivered lines while watching himself ride his horse through the grasslands of Peru.

On-screen, Hopper as the stuntman Tex looked clean-cut and sexy in his cowboy hat.

Off-screen he appeared feral with Manson-length hair and sex-crazed eyes. It was Hopper's reputed wild sexuality that Schiller was interested in exploring in the doc, which he figured would be like
Nanook of the North
, in a way. Everybody considers it a first-rate documentary while in fact it was staged because Nanook the Eskimo was an actor.

“Every guy wants to have an orgy,” admitted Hopper to the doc guys, so they decided to stage one, even bigger than the champagne bubble bath Dennis once had with Natalie.

Where do you find horny, available, adventurous girls? The doc guys figured the Santa Fe Airport was a good place to start. Girl after girl after girl walked through the Pueblo-style terminal. Schiller went up to them one by one and asked very politely, “Do you know Dennis Hopper?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to have an orgy with him?”

“Oh, yes.”

A few hours later, a station wagon pulled up to the Mud Palace, and the curious girls came out, followed by another car. Assembled inside the living room, two dozen or so girls, picked up at airports and restaurants, began to disrobe. A few minutes later, a prepped Hopper walked in fully clothed.

“What do we have here?” He smiled at the boobs and buttocks, pretending to be surprised.

Going upstairs to Mabel's old bathroom with its windows painted by D. H. Lawrence, each pane adorned with different symbols—stars and sunbursts, Indian feathers and totems, swans and roosters—Hopper lowered himself into the bathtub with two chicks. The scene was terrific. Great stuff. The highlight of the documentary. But after shadowing Hopper for weeks fumbling through his editing of
The Last Movie
, something gnawed at Schiller.

Here's an actor who's making a film for Universal, who's on the upswing of his career, and he's letting it all hang out over the edge, letting the camera capture him wriggling in the bathtub with these two chicks. Why? But on a more serious level, why was Hopper willingly destroying his career? It wasn't the acid. Nobody was forcing him. Nobody had a gun to his head. The doc guys, Larry and Kit, were certainly not holding a check and saying, “Do this scene and we'll give you ten million dollars.” Hopper appeared to be doing it because it was the image that was right to lead to a glorious, spectacular failure. Perhaps a work of art in itself.

“I can sleep on a mattress again. I have friends,” said Hopper, watching himself in the latest cut of
The Last Movie
at the El Cortez. “And if it's nothing more than, like, you know,
The Magnificent Ambersons
, which was Orson Welles's second film . . . I can become Orson Welles, poor bastard.”

The way he talked about Welles and
The Magnificent Ambersons
, Schiller thought Hopper knew what his end was gonna be. Hopper was really fucking smart. He was consciously using his ability as an actor—a movie man—to play the role of an artist who was going to spectacularly, gloriously, magnificently fail. As the doc guys filmed Hopper watching
The Last Movie
in his own theater, Schiller knew that the end of their doc was going to be Hopper's failure. The only question was: How was Hopper gonna get to his end?