Hollywood Hellraisers (18 page)

‘Wow, man, that’s great,’ said Dennis. ‘Jesus, that’s great, man.’

‘I’m going to produce this movie and I want you to direct it,’ said Fonda. ‘Will you do it?’

‘Gee whiz, man, are you kidding me? Wow, babe. Jesus, that’s great. Of course I’ll fucking do it. What’s the title?’

‘Easy Rider.’

‘Wow, man.’

Dennis seized on the project, realising no sane film executive would ever give him the chance to direct his own picture. As Jack said, ‘You know Dennis, you don’t exactly just turn over some money to him and say, no problem, you know what I mean.’

After hiring Terry Southern, a hot writer with
Dr Strangelove
to his credit, to turn their story outline and ramblings into a coherent script, Hopper and Fonda pitched the idea around the studios, but there were no takers. Maybe Dennis’s manic way of describing the story, all shouting and arm waving, scared producers.

So they tried the private sector, in the shape of the reclusive American supermarket tycoon Huntington Hartford. Dennis’s heartfelt pitch to the businessman went down so well that Hartford declared, ‘I will give you the money.’ Denis couldn’t believe it. ‘You will?’ Hartford smiled. ‘Yes, I can see you’re impassioned and this will be a great movie. So I will give you the money. You only have to do one thing for me.’ He looked Dennis straight in the eye. ‘A man with your kind of passion should be able to levitate.’ Dennis was dumbfounded as Hartford carried on. ‘Levitate now, and I’ll give you the money.’ Dennis stood there and for a few seconds genuinely wondered if he’d be able to pull it off. Finally he turned to Fonda and said. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

Jack had a better idea: why not pitch their biker movie to his old
Head
collaborator Bob Rafelson and his producing partner Bert Schneider, who now ran their own production company with links to Columbia? The name of it was BBS. Dennis was already known to Rafelson, after the director had one night almost tripped over him at a party where he lay poleaxed on the floor. ‘This guy is fucking crazy,’ Rafelson announced to Schneider. ‘But I totally believe in him, and I think he’d make a brilliant film for us.’ When Jack chipped in that
Easy Rider
could be ‘the
Stagecoach
of bike movies’ Schneider seemed impressed and handed over a cheque there and then for $40,000, telling Fonda and Hopper to get down to New Orleans and shoot the Mardi Gras sequence as a test. If they didn’t balls it up, he’d bankroll the whole movie.

Great news, but back at the Hopper homestead things weren’t running so swimmingly. His marriage to Brooke was teetering on the edge, and her support for his latest venture non-existent; in fact she was downright hostile, adamant that he was going to fall flat on his arse. ‘You’ve never wanted me to succeed,’ Dennis fired back. ‘You should be encouraging me, instead of telling me I’m going to fail.’ He wanted a divorce, and Brooke was only too happy to oblige. Dennis left to make his bike picture.

Down at Mardi Gras, chaos was the order of the day thanks mainly to Dennis’s self-confessed ego problems; as far as he was concerned he was ‘the greatest fucking film director there’s ever been in America’ and he proceeded to tell his crew exactly who was in charge. ‘This is MY fucking movie,’ he yelled at them. Cruising down paranoid boulevard, Dennis saw conspirators on every corner. ‘Nobody’s going to take my fucking movie away from me!’ This before a foot of celluloid had been exposed. Dennis was hell-bent on making his mark as a director. ‘I mean, talk about obsession,’ he later confessed. ‘I didn’t give a fuck if I ran over people in the street. If they got in the way, then they’d better get out of the way.’ A few of the crew began seriously debating whether all of Hopper’s marbles were present and correct. Fonda grew anxious as his ranting intensified. The shell shocked crew looked to their producer, but Fonda didn’t know what to do. ‘I’m fucked,’ he thought.

As the scheduled five days went on people started quitting. There was confusion and bafflement amongst the three cameramen who’d been hired about what exactly they should be shooting. The tension escalated. ‘Dennis was this semi-psychotic maniac,’ said sound man Peter Pilafian. ‘There would be a couple of handguns, loaded, on the table. He liked that kind of atmosphere.’

Tom Mankiewicz happened to be in New Orleans at the same time, working on a TV music special. ‘I ran into Dennis and Peter by accident. Nobody had any idea that
Easy Rider
was going to become some sort of classic. But, my God, if I’d had the money I wouldn’t have given it to these guys. They were loaded all day long.’

Come the final day the now infamous cemetery scene was shot, featuring Fonda with actresses Karen Black and Toni Basil. Baird Bryant was the sole cameraman on that and remembers Dennis bullying Toni to get undressed and ‘crawl into one of those graves with the skeletons’. It was here that Dennis and Fonda clashed big time. Fuelled by a cocktail of speed, wine and lungfuls of grass, Dennis wanted Fonda to clamber atop a statue of the Madonna and open his heart on screen about his feelings for his mother. At the age of forty-two, after years suffering from mental illness, she’d committed suicide by cutting her throat with a razor in 1950, when Fonda had been ten years old. ‘I want you to ask your mother why she copped out on you,’ said Hopper.

This time Fonda thought Dennis had gone too far, this wasn’t creating art, this was a family tragedy that he was being asked to expose to millions of cinemagoers munching on their popcorn. Reluctantly he did it, getting emotionally strung out. According to Bill Hayward, Hopper’s brother-in-law installed as producer, Fonda never really got over that and a rift developed in their relationship, ‘that never recovered’.

Still paranoid, Dennis demanded that his other cameraman, Barry Feinstein, hand over all the footage he’d shot; he wanted it locked in his room, safe. Pissed off, Feinstein lobbed the film cans at him and the pair ended up brawling and falling through a door into one of the motel rooms. They got up and stared at the sight in front of them, Fonda in bed with both Black and Basil (Black denies this). Feinstein wasn’t stunned for long; he grabbed the TV set and hurled it in Hopper’s general direction.

Karen Black later described the shoot in one word: ‘Insane!’ Not into drugs in a big way herself, she was in another universe from Dennis and co. Dennis would see some guy outside the motel window and say, ‘Hey, man, you see that guy outside the window? I’m gonna get him!’ And he’d go running out and lose all track of time. ‘He was NUTS!’

So it had been an interesting few days in New Orleans. At the end of it Fonda called Brooke and suggested that maybe she and the children oughtn’t to be in the house when Dennis returned. His reasoning — ‘Dennis has gone berserk.’ Terry Southern phoned Brooke with much the same advice: ‘This guy’s around the bend.’ Brooke ignored them both; she’d handled Dennis before and she could handle him again.

But, waiting for him to come through the door, she must have felt like a beach-bar owner waiting for a hurricane to make landfall. Once home, Dennis locked himself away in his bedroom for three days, emerging only to view rushes of the Mardi Gras footage, which, in the opinion of Bill Hayward, was ‘an endless parade of shit’. Not surprisingly, Dennis’s mood blackened further, ably assisted by his increased drinking and drug taking. At this point Brooke categorised him as ‘exceedingly dangerous’.

One night, according to Brooke, Hopper lost it when he found out the kids had eaten all the hot dogs being served for dinner. He began striding menacingly towards Brooke, but her young son blocked his path. ‘Don’t you get near my mother.’ It was the final straw for Brooke. The kids were getting mixed up in all the shit with Dennis and she got out, sleeping with her young family for a week on the floor of a friend’s house.

As Brooke set about getting a restraining order against Dennis, he was arrested for smoking dope while cruising down Sunset Strip and thrown in jail. He protested his innocence in court, saying the cops only pulled him over because his hair was too long and he was driving a battered old car. The cops said he threw a joint out of the window. No I didn’t, pleaded Dennis, how could he when the only joint he had was still in his pocket?

The minute Brooke’s father heard about the impending divorce he called up his daughter. ‘Congratulations. That’s the first smart move you’ve made in six years.’

Suing for divorce, Brooke claimed Dennis had a violent temper, used drugs and had struck her on several occasions. She also charged him with ‘extreme cruelty’. Not surprisingly, she won custody of their daughter, and in the final settlement also received the house and the artwork Dennis had collected during their years together: Warhols, Lichtensteins and many others. Not long afterwards Brooke sold the paintings to private dealers. Today the collection would be worth in excess of $70m and is distributed amongst some of the world’s finest art galleries.

Brooke also revealed that when the divorce finally went through she would have been within her rights to have claimed half of Dennis’s profits from
Easy Rider
. She opted to not ask for a thing. ‘I didn’t want him coming after me with a shotgun.’

Dennis has blamed his behaviour towards Brooke on his drinking and the fact that she was a manic depressive. He claimed she’d be in bed for four or five days, in the dark, then give a party and be all jolly and hyper, then descend back into her moods again. ‘I didn’t know how to cope and I belted her.’ It was a young and stupid mistake he’s since admitted.

Dennis’s behaviour baffled almost everyone who met him. When Schneider bamboozled Columbia into distributing
Easy Rider
Dennis stood up during one meeting and stuffed his finger up an executive’s nose. If that’s how he behaved in board meetings, what was he going to be like on location? Fonda had shown Schneider and Jack footage surreptitiously taken of Hopper ranting and raving out in New Orleans and told them his director had ‘lost his mind’. Relations were bad. ‘Everyone wanted to kill one another, put one another in institutions,’ said Jack. To save the film Schneider decided that, because of his experience working on Roger Corman productions, Jack should be on the main shoot as a sort of sheriff. ‘Just be there, Jack,’ Schneider told him. ‘And make sure that you and the rest of your dope-fiend friends don’t go crazy. See if you can bring this picture in and keep ’em from killing one another.’ And since Jack was going to be on set virtually every day, why not cast him as the third lead, an alcoholic lawyer called George Hanson who teams up with the motorbike drifters.

The role of Hanson was originally earmarked for Rip Torn, that was until Torn and Dennis almost knifed each other to death. Hopper burst into Fonda’s New York town house one night, where the actor was entertaining Terry Southern and Torn, and barracked them all for getting pissed instead of working on the script. He was angry, having just come back from Texas scouting locations and hearing that kids with long hair were being sheared with razor blades like sheep. ‘Take it easy,’ said Torn, who hailed from that part of the country. ‘Not everyone from Texas is an asshole.’ Hopper pushed him away. ‘Sit down, you motherfucker.’ Things then got very serious when Dennis claimed that Torn pulled a knife on him. Torn would recall the event very differently, saying it was Dennis who grabbed a steak knife and waved it menacingly just inches from his head. Torn disarmed Dennis, knocking him back against Fonda, who fell on the floor. ‘There goes the job,’ thought Torn.

Subsequently Torn claimed that Hopper’s version of the knife incident damaged his career, spreading an unjustified image of him as being something of a nutter. In 1994, just as Torn rejuvenated a stagnant career with success on the Larry Sanders sitcom, Dennis repeated his version of the legend during an appearance on a chat show. Fed up, Torn successfully sued for defamation. The judge ruled that Hopper was not a credible witness.

Filming began around California, then gradually hit the southern states and redneck territory, where the cast were subjected to bowel-loosening levels of intimidation. Every restaurant, every roadhouse they went in there was a Marine sergeant or a football coach who started with, ‘Look at the Commies, the queers. Is it a boy or a girl?’ Hopper went into one bar and immediately a guy swung at him, screaming, ‘Get outta here, my son’s in Vietnam.’ Behind him was the local sheriff; his son was in Vietnam, too. As a joke Dennis said, ‘Hi there, I’m hitch-hiking to the peace march,’ whereupon eight guys jumped him.

This was really what
Easy Rider
was about. In the new, radically changing America, if youth were going to wear a badge, whether it be long hair or black skin, they’d better learn to protect themselves. This was the ultimate irony: in a country that talks about freedom and democracy it’s people really can’t bear anyone to be different from themselves. As it said on the poster: ‘A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere’, a tagline that, according to Richard Rush, Jack came up with.

When the crew hit Taos, New Mexico, Dennis and Jack dropped LSD and were driven over to the crypt of D. H. Lawrence, where they started hallucinating at the foot of the grave, imagining insects crawling over their faces. Later, as dusk began to fall, they hit the waffling inanely stage. ‘We’re geniuses,’ said Jack. ‘You know that? Isn’t it great to be a genius?’ Dennis agreed that it was. From somewhere a beautiful woman appeared – luckily for all concerned she was no hallucination — and took them to a nearby hot spring where they got naked. Dennis claimed the woman for his own, leaving poor Jack to return to his hotel alone. So, whacked out, he stood guard for several hours inside his room, convinced he was about to be raided by Red Indians. For a while he listened to the buzz coming off the television set, imagining himself a bunch of electrical circuits, all pumped up with energy. He went outside and started walking and saw that dawn was rising. Clambering to the top of a forty-foot tree, Jack looked down on a vast meadow, pulsating with patterned light. His eyes fixed on a large white rock in the centre. Suddenly the rock stood up and turned into a fabulous white stallion that went tearing around the meadow, throwing its neck up and bouncing and kicking. Then other smaller rocks began to mutate and transform into horses. ‘The moment filled me with fantastic emotion.’ Christ, he was out of it.