Hopper by Tom Folsom Read Free Book Online Page A

dusty stretch of Taos, New Mexico, a weather-beaten Hopper slammed on his brakes. He was pushing forty. It was sometime in the middle of the seventies.
    Screeching to a stop, he hopped out and planted his boots in the dirt. Decked out in his cowboy hat, a faded denim jacket, and a big goddamn belt buckle and bolo tie, he faced the camera for a James Dean documentary, to climax in a rousing Dean montage to the tune of “James Dean” by the Eagles. By now, he had the tale down of that fateful night at the chickie run scene.
    â€œLook, I really wanna be a great actor, too,” Hopper told Dean. “I want to know what you’re doing. I wanna know what your secret is.”
    Hopper had always been fascinated with Dean, ever since a cold, wet early morning at the end of a long, brutal day of shooting. Lying in the street before a green-eyed windup monkey, Dean watched the toy clank its cymbals until it wound down, then lovingly covered it up with a piece of discarded newspaper for a blanket. Curling up beside his only friend in the world, Jimmy went to sleep. It would be the opening shot of Rebel Without a Cause .
    â€œI have a script in my hand that says this guy’s in the gutter, drunk,” explained Hopper. “Well, first of all, the guy is in the street playing with a toy monkey? And doing baby things—trying to curl up . . . Where did that come from? It came from genius; that’s where it came from. That was all him. Nobody directed him to do that. James Dean directed James Dean.”
    Dennis, Natalie, and Dean , Rebel Without a Cause, 1955
    Archivio GBB/ CONTRASTO /Redux, copyright © Archivio GBB/ CONTRASTO /Redux
    Everything came to a head in the hills of Calabasas, on a thousand acres with pepper trees and thoroughbred horses owned by movie mogul Harry Warner. Called to the Warner Ranch for the chickie run, all the delinquents cheered on two gas-guzzlers in a suicide race toward a rocky bluff with the inky waters below. First who jumped was a chicken.
    Blazing paths in a red windbreaker, Dean somersaulted out of the black ’49 Merc in a death-defying feline leap much too real for Hopper after a long shoot of watching genius unfurl. He realized he didn’t know anything!
    Going after Dean, Hopper threw him right up against that iconic Merc and asked for his secret.
    â€œSo, he asked me, very quietly, why I acted,” said Hopper. “And I told him what a nightmare my home life had been, everybody neurotic because they weren’t doing what they wanted to do and yelling at me when I wanted to be creative, because creative people ended up in bars—which I later found out to be true.”
    â€œHow can I do it?” asked Hopper. “Do I have to go to Strasberg? Do I have to go to New York?”
    Dean had been schooled at the fabled Actors Studio under diminutive acting coach Lee Strasberg, keeper of the Method, the mysterious acting alchemy that spun performances into Oscar gold. But Dean was too much himself to be anybody’s disciple. Guided by his own method, he eked out a bohemian existence in his beatnik pad in Manhattan with bull horns mounted on the wall, bringing him back to the roots of his animal instinct, a reminder to strip away the bark of civilization.
    Strasberg taught many dangerous things, like emotional memory.
    â€œYou are too sensitive,” Dean warned, telling Hopper never to go there. “He’ll destroy you.”
    Was that what had sent Dean howling and writhing on the floor when he tried to win the love of his brothel madam mother in the gut-wrenching scene in East of Eden ? Jesus.
    Maybe Jimmy was right. Hopper shouldn’t play with that sort of thing.
    â€œJimmy and I found we’d had the same experience at home,” said Hopper. He felt just like Jimmy, a lonely farm boy who needed an escape.
    â€œLet me help you a little,” said Dean. Every once in a while, when Hopper didn’t even know he was