Hopper by Tom Folsom Read Free Book Online Page B

watching, Jimmy would mumble, “Why don’t you try the scene this way?” And Jimmy was always right.
    â€œThere’ll never be anybody like Jimmy again, man,” said Hopper. “It was, in a strange way, a closer friendship than most people have, but it wasn’t the kind of thing where he said, ‘Let’s go out and tear up the town.’ Sometimes we’d have dinner. Also we were into peyote and grass before anybody else.”
    In those days, he and Dean would sit around and cook peyote on a stovetop, like a can of Campbell’s Soup, or smoke pot in the Warner Bros. dressing room with brown paper bags over their heads so the stink wouldn’t get out. They looked like small-time bank robbers, but so long as they were stoned? Guaranteed easy access to the moment, so precious for actors.
    Then suddenly Jimmy was gone, leaving Hopper alone to watch the curtain open to vibrant Technicolor, Dean grinning before the green-eyed monkey. Leaping out of the speeding Merc ’49 before it dove into the water, Dean seemed so alive that he seemed to exist somewhere beyond the screen. Hopper could hardly believe he was dead, killed in his silver Porsche 550 Spyder a month before Rebel hit theaters.
    The amputee girl from across the hall knocked on Hopper’s door. Jimmy used to visit her, inspired by her body like a Greek ruin. Standing on her one leg at the threshold, she told Hopper’s roommate it was horrible; there had been an accident. Was Dennis in the Porsche with Jimmy? Bill got really paranoid.
    A strange thing happened when Dennis came home that night from Googie’s. Dennis told Bill, “Jimmy’s in this room with us now.”
    Sitting inert on a shelf was that weird toy monkey, cymbals ceremoniously extended, but silent. Hopper had saved it from the set.
    â€œJesus, that monkey,” said Rebel screenwriter Stewart Stern, visiting Hopper’s apartment not long after Dean’s death. They were just back from their impromptu road trip to Tijuana to see the bullfights. Hauling ass from the border, Hopper had driven his red Austin-Healey at breakneck speeds. He claimed to be an aficionado of the bullfights, but instead of hanging out at Caesar’s, the hotel where the matadors stayed, they’d stayed at a dump and hit the lap dancing joints packed with sailors from San Diego.
    â€œWell, you know,” said Dennis, staring at his friend with a weird glint in his eye. “Jimmy comes to see me still. He does.”
    One day when he’d been taking a nap, an incessant, tinny clanking woke him up. Looking across the room, he saw it jumping up and down on his shelf, crashing its little cymbals.
    â€œAll of a sudden the monkey came to life,” said Hopper. And sometimes when he was shaving, he got the feeling he was being watched. “I look and there’s Jimmy, right on the other side of the window.”
    Around the world, all sorts of strange stories were popping up about Dean. In an Indonesian mountain city, Javanese teens smoked cigarettes and strutted the streets in rolled-up jeans and Rebel -red jackets. Deep in the heart of Arkansas, college students built a fire by a river, sculpted an Academy Award out of mud, flung earth at each other in a bacchanal and chanted, “Jimmy, give us a sign.” A dog howled in the distance. Fans sent eight thousand letters a month addressed to James Dean in care of Warner Bros. Dean’s ghost even beat out the very alive Rock Hudson in a Photoplay poll casting votes for America’s number one star. Jimmy Dean Returns! , an account “written” from the dead by Dean via his dime-store salesgirl lover, sold five hundred thousand copies. He’d been communicating to her through automatic writing. Suffering another one of these ridiculous stories at the end of an exhausting road trip, Stern had his fill.
    â€œDennis, you’re out of your mind.”
    Not long after, he invited Hopper