Dennis Hopper's life: a hell of a ride

From The Sunday Times
August 31, 2008
Dennis Hopper's life: a hell of a ride
Dennis Hopper’s wild life hurt his acting career, but he has no regrets, he tellsGarth Pearce

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.”