Dennis Hopper Remembered, Elegy for an Effigy

It is with mixed feelings I am hearing and reading accolades to the life and career of Madman Dennis Hopper with the news of his fatal cancer.

NY Times critic Manohla Dargis reflects on a 17 year old Hopper in Rebel With Out a Cause, affected by mentor, idol (my word) James Dean, whose untimely death shortly thereafter made him the Jesus Christ of bad boy actors.

She speaks of how important Easy Rider was, and refers to the “unfortunate” Last Movie, suggesting that Hopper was “Spiralling out of control. That he disappeared and re-emerged with Apocalypse Now”.

Speaking of unfortunate, and bad timing, that was the period in which I met Dennis in Hollywood and was to appear opposite him in Henry Jaglom’s second movie Tracks. I ended up mostly on the cutting room floor and probably owe some of what Henry thought was my ‘bad acting’ to Dennis mentorship:

We were living it out. I have written about the Tracks experience and my own Hollywood “foolish period” and it all comes back now. What I remember most about Dennis Hopper:.

Dennis Hopper beat me up! And I know that I was not the only woman to be the recipient of his rage and drug addled sensibility and physical violence.

Dragis refers to his friend Jack Nicholson being with him at the Hollywood Sidewalk Star ceremony. I recall then, that Jack wouldn’t come near Hopper’s New Mexico retreat, having run from there one crazed night in the past and being more than aware of Hopper’s insanely volatile irrational temper.

I was captivated by this actor who created “scenes” which is how he referred to sex and orchestrated it.

I got an interesting education from him and was certainly there of my own accord, though Henry Jaglom tried to dissuade me from joining Dennis in New Mexico after Tracks was finished shooting.

There were fabulous times. Dennis was a lot of fun a lot of the time and a very contrite lover after he threw me against a table for objecting to his “scene” with another woman when I thought he had brought me “home” – his ‘acting’ bride.

I bruised some ribs and he took me to the clinic and said he must love me because he only lashed out like that at the one he loved. Daddy took me in his arms, on his lap and was forgiven. I don’t blame Dennis for this. I came face to face with my own syndrome.

I have always said that the allure of the ‘bad boy’ is really that we get to be ‘bad girls’ and I was a hippy, a liberated woman, alternative and dedicated to the ‘life of the actor’. I had already been in Goin’ Down the Road and Cinepix’ Love In A Four letter World’ in Canada. Life with Dennis actually made more sense than my previous three struggling Hollywood years. I had arrived, I was making movies again, I was back in the saddle, living and loving and yes learning from a ‘pro’ that “making a movie is a lot like being in love”.

One friend at the time described my behaviour as being blinded by ‘the star’ and living out the American Dream, staring in a movie, albeit a Jaglom film. Really it was about how fascinating Dennis was to me, a little middle-class Jewish girl from Cape Breton, never imaging that a man would ever hit me. Here I was staying in the house of Mable Dodge and Tony Luhan in Taos, New Mexico where Mable had brought D.H. Lawrence, where the Indians chant on the radio at night, where there are Hot Springs and rumours that this is the oldest place on Earth, where pottery shards grew like weeds in the sides of sacred mountains.

It was heaven and it was Hell. Dennis made it so.

He claimed that despite his obvious abusiveness, resentment and love/hate relationship with the female sex, he helped women to find themselves. It was a puzzle for him, and who else besides a shrink you paid took that much interest in your psychology.

Admittedly, I was quite self-fascinated at the time. I was my own mirror into the World of Emotions and Reactions, of studying my own behaviour, my own unconscious to be able to serve as an actor. With Dennis, there was never a dull moment. The drama of entering New Mexico, of the Taos Artist Community that reminded me so much of the Markle/Headly/Raynor/Coughtree fabulous weekend drunks with the Boys from the Three Schools – artists and madmen, my people.

But no one had ever hit me before and the shock of that first altercation with Dennis should have been enough to send me screaming from a situation that I had no ‘smarts’ to handle.

But I loved him..honest to pete, I was crazy about him.

My ribs healed, I went back to L.A. to work on a short film and then, I went back to New Mexico! Because I guess I hadn’t learned the lesson well enough: That a man, you thought cared for you could beat you up and hurt you physically. Call it loss of innocence or a cure for naivety. When I finally ran from Dennis’ House in the middle of the night following a terrifying frightening beating from a freaked out, insane spewing lunatic, I called a cab which ended up dumping me and my trunk in the middle of the dark night Taos road. I prayed to God (fallen from my atheistic pinnacle) that whatever piece of information I was lacking, whatever I needed to learn to not be in this position, whatever I needed to have happen to rescue me, would happen and I would survive and thrive again.

And it did come to pass, I was rescued, I played out a final scene’ with Dennis, called the ambulance to pick him up from an accident of his own causing and moved on.

Dennis may have been right that the women he was involved with all learned valuable lessons in life. That they left him better than they arrived. I can’t speak for other women but I did learn a lesson for my own life that would be beneficial. Oh cruel teachers, I even appreciate your lessons because how ever we learn, we must. For me that period of my life was an opportunity if I could survive Hopper and my own ‘craziness’ – an effigy of my failed self - that little girl was who walked bravely into the lion’s den because she was too stupid to know better.

Still I feel a bit squeamish at Dargis’ revering of Dennis Hopper, that he gets to be lauded and appreciated before he dies. I don’t begrudge it exactly. He’s young to die, though he has packed some serious living into his iconic life. Because Dennis in his insanity did as Dargis said “push it to the edge, gave us “uncomfortable, … to embarrassing” work as an actor, revealing a man on “the verge of losing control”.

Brecht said: “the art of the actor is to expose life”. Dennis Hopper consciously or otherwise gave us a case study of a dangerous man – certainly for me that is what he was. The American Dream gone bad. I think he “blew it” as a human being in certain ways, I think he got away with too much, that he profited from a Hollywood and an World that gave him his success.

Someone once asked me in Dennis’ presence what the Last movie was really about. I said it was about Jesus Christ dying on the Cross. Dennis agreed. Dennis was the quintessential actor/martyr. A classic sado-masochist. We could watch his terrifying antics and laugh and be titillated because at the basis of our obsession with pornography and sexualising and using and abusing, he was Catholic enough to also beat himself up.