Dennis Hopper is small and neat, but looks dangerous. Bright blue eyes hold
your gaze while he chooses his words. Slow walk, slow talk. We meet a few
days after he’s celebrated his 72nd birthday at the local casino, playing
poker with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
His fellow players included Ed Norton, Adrien Brody, Goldie Hawn, Tim Robbins
and a young French actress, whose name he could not recall. “Woody Harrelson
won the game,” he says. “I had two aces in the hole and played them really
well. But it was not enough.”
Hopper’s description sums up his career. He’s part of Hollywood history as the
man who in 1969 made independent movie-making a serious business by
directing and starring in Easy Rider alongside Jack Nicholson and Peter
Fonda. The result was a winning hand that’s kept him in the game ever since,
even though he’s run low on chips. But somehow he’s never quite managed to
establish himself as a big winner. For a good chunk of his 50-year acting
career he has been sidelined by film studios, nervous about his reputation
for drink, drugs and wild behaviour and for speaking his mind.
“I have not had a drink or hard narcotic in 25 years,” he says. “I have been
in over 150 movies. I have only directed seven, unfortunately. I have tried
every year to direct, but could not get financing. I try to be as good as I
can in some bad movies. Then, occasionally, I get a part in a good movie,
but a lot of movies I have done have been pretty grim.”
Within minutes of meeting Hopper, he somehow manages to intoxicate the room.
He doesn’t hold back or draw the usual Hollywood veil of political
correctness over his replies.
“I’ve always had a family and always had to work,” he says. “All those
marriages keep you working. I’m on my fifth wife. There’s no escape. And,
for every divorce, there’s a price to pay to lawyers and everyone, including
alimony.”
Those marriages stretch behind him back to 1961, when he wed the actress
Brooke Hayward, with whom he had a daughter, Marin, now 46. There then
followed a week-long marriage to Michelle Phillips, the Mamas and the Papas
singer. Daria Halprin, the actress, was next, with whom he has a daughter,
Ruthanna, 34. Then came Katherine LaNasa, yet another actress, 30 years his
junior, and son Henry Lee, now 17. That was his longest marriage at 13 years.
He’s now with 39-year-old actress Victoria Duffy, who always travels with him
and their daughter, Galen, 5. He’s philosophical about this and insists that
every time he tied the knot, he did so with the best of intentions. “Each
time, I was marrying for life,” he told me the last time we met. “I also
know that I am the first one to ever get divorced in my family. I’ve more
than made up for it, haven’t I?” It’s clear his short-lived marriage to
Phillips in 1970 came at the height of his drug-taking. “All alcohol and
drugs got me was a lot of misery,” he affirms. “You don’t know it at the
time. I had incredible mood swings, so no one knew who exactly they were
going to be dealing with on any given day.”
It took him years to admit he had problems, he says now, and several more
years to crack the habit. “I was in total denial,” he says. “I thought other
people had problems - not me. Other people were getting drunk and falling on
the floor. I was just drinking all day and if I felt drunk I would do some
more cocaine. It would sober me up.”
How much drink was he putting away? “During the five years before I stopped,
it was half a gallon of rum a day, plus 28 beers on the side,” he reports.
“Then I’d do three grams of cocaine.”
There is a brief silence as I take in the implications of this level of
consumption. I’m looking at him, noting that he is quite slightly built, no
bigger than 5ft 9in tall. “Where did I put it all?” he says,
as if reading my mind. “I could go through the day, just drinking steadily.
Sometimes I would mix it with scotch and soda. If I wanted to get drunk, I
would have neat tequila. Then I’d black out.”
So much for the how, but why? “I had incredible delusions,” he replies. “I
thought I was an artist and had the privilege of being able to take drugs
and it was okay. All the people I admired were either alcoholics or drug
addicts. With that kind of rationale, it is almost impossible for anybody to
talk to you about it and say you have a problem.
“In my mind, I was an artist and writer. The reality was that I was just a
drunk and a drug addict. It wasn’t helping me create. In fact, it hindered
me. It stopped me from getting jobs. I dealt with the rejection by taking
more drink and drugs.”
So when did he finally sober up? “I didn’t come off it all overnight. My mind
and body would have gone into shock. So I did it slowly. I stopped drinking,
but carried on using cocaine. I think the first year of real sober work
would be 1986, when I did Blue Velvet, River’s Edge and Hoosiers - I
was nominated for an Oscar for that. I felt that I was back.
“I didn’t have the mood swings, paranoia or schizophrenia. I have seen actors
since, using drugs to prop them up, like me. I recognise the signs - you
never know who is coming out of the trailer to work with you.
“They are the same as I was. They do the part, won’t hold up production and
there is a method of working to get by. You mix drinks, do a little bit of
coke and level off to maintain appearances. You can come across as a sober
person. But I would not have hired myself at times. I am amazed that anyone
did.”
The fact Hopper has stayed in the game is testament to his unnerving screen
presence. He made his debut in Johnny Guitar in 1954, and appeared in Rebel
Without a Cause alongside James Dean the following year. He went on to star
in dozens of acclaimed films, from cult favourites such as Rumble Fish and
Blue Velvet to mainstream block-busters including Apocalypse Now and Speed.
But somehow his career never hit the heights of old friend Jack Nicholson.
“Hollywood has never embraced me, despite the fact I went and lived there,” he
says. His age means he is unlikely to change that now, despite industry
connections cultivated over five decades. “Some of my friends now run the
studios. But they still have a star system. They still think younger people
can do it better.”
Hopper shows no resentment that his career never quite fulfilled its early
promise. After his role in the 1956 film Giant, with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock
Hudson and James Dean, it was Hopper who was tipped as the one to watch: a
young man with attitude, who could thrill and chill an audience. “I have too
many other things in my life to feel any regret,” he says. “I was in charge
of my own life and decisions.”
He is not slowing down and will be seen in a succession of new movies,
including Palermo Shooting, by Wim Wenders, an old director friend, and
Swing Vote, co-starring Kevin Costner and Kelsey Grammer, another reformed
alcoholic.
It’s a body of work he should be proud of. And yet it’s not until mention of
his other passions that his eyes really light up. Painting and photography
are clearly the things that inspire him most. “I started photography at 18,
when under contract at Warner Bros,” he says. “I was already a painter and
was selling my pictures. It was better than having to go and dig ditches or
wait on tables when I was out of work.”
His art was last year exhibited alongside works by Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Gogh in the Hermitage Museum in St
Petersburg. “I had five rooms,” he says, proudly. “I became the only living
American artist to show there. Andy Warhol was shown there, but he’s dead.”
Hopper allows himself a little smile. “I am just a middle-class farm boy from
Dodge City and my grandparents were wheat farmers,” he says. “I thought
painting, acting, directing and photography was all part of being an artist.
I have made my money that way. And I have had some fun. It’s not been a bad
life.”
