-Caveat Lector- ISSUE 1562 Saturday 4 September 1999 Fit to be tamed Dennis Hopper has put behind him four wives and addictions to both alcohol and drugs. Now 63 and married to a woman half his age, he is taking care of business again, making three films a year, building up his art collection and planning a worldwide exhibition of his photographs. By Jessica de Rothschild DRIVING down the LA highway isn't quite what it used to be. For one thing, there is the infamous traffic, slowly snaking through the afternoon heat. For another, the aggressive urban sprawl has resulted in a surfeit of ugly shopping malls, fast-food diners and high-rise apartment blocks that appear incongruous in a town obsessed by appearances. Sandwiched between the freeway and the sea is Venice. Traditionally home to artists and artisans, it too has suffered the curse of gentrification. But although the small shops and quirky bars are increasingly under threat from the developers, it still has a reputation as a hotbed of creative talent and hippie ideals. Normally, movie stars prefer to live in Beverly Hills or Bel Air, in large mansions with Gone with the Wind-style staircases, but Dennis Hopper isn't a normal movie star and Venice, with all its diversity, suits him perfectly. Dennis Hopper with his wife Victoria Cane Duffy at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 Hopper lives with his fifth wife, the actress Victoria Duffy Hopper, in a building that looks like a large silver church, a couple of blocks back from the beach. Flanked by a white picket-fence, the building seems to shoot out of the ground like a rocket, and apart from a large door set in the corrugated iron facade, there is nothing to suggest that anyone lives there. It is, in fact, a studio designed by Frank Gehry which, along with two other buildings, combines to make an extensive network of walkways and spaces that are crammed to the rafters with canvases. Hopper is in his office with one of his assistants, checking a seemingly endless list of paintings that have been catalogued for insurance purposes. Dressed in a baseball cap and golfing trousers, he wears a deep tan and is palpably relaxed. The famous gravelly voice which has made numerous audiences squirm is in reality soft and courteous. Nevertheless, that famous 'it' factor, the thing that propels you from waiting at tables to front row at the Oscars, is at full force. Andy Warhol painted the icons of his time. Dennis Hopper is one of the survivors. It is incredible to think that Hopper, now 63, has been involved in the film industry for more than 40 years. Not just because longevity is so rare in an industry which is notorious for its rapid turnover of 'talent', but because Hopper's well-documented addiction to drugs and alcohol kept him away from the Hollywood mainstream for nearly 15 years. Sober and drug-free since 1983, he now makes an average of three films a year, often in the independent sector. His staying-power means that the teenagers who first saw him in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean and as the drugged-out anti-hero in the 1969 film Easy Rider are probably the parents of the whole new generation of fans who were won over by his roles in True Romance and Speed. Along the way he has garnered one Oscar nomination in 1986 for Hoosiers, as a former basketball star who is enlisted to coach the local team, and a reputation for playing some of the most terrifying criminals and madmen on film. But it is for Easy Rider that Hopper will be remembered, the film that along with Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde changed the face of modern cinema. What is not as widely known about Dennis Hopper is that as well as actor and director, he is a photographer, painter and a major modern art collector with more than 200 works in his collection. You only have to look around the house to see the evidence. In one room, which houses a small screening theatre, there are hundreds of black and white photographs stacked against a wall, waiting to be catalogued for Hopper's retrospective exhibition, which will be shown around the world next year. In another room several partitions slide in and out of the wall, all hung with different works and displayed according to mood. Downstairs, even the strange indoor garage which opens on to the sitting-room is filled with portraits, and upstairs the man himself is the subject of a 1971 Warhol that hangs next to the fireplace. 'I've been married five times, so very often the collection stays with the last wife,' Hopper laughs, lighting a massive cigar, probably one of the few vices left that he is allowed to indulge in. 'But a lot of the paintings have ended up in museums or in various universities around the United States.' Hopper's first collection, which he started in 1961, went to his first wife, Brooke Hayward (the daughter of producer Leland Hayward), when their eight-year marriage fell apart. It had included Warhol's first Campbell's Soup tin painting - which he bought for $70 and which sold earlier this year for $1.2 million - and early works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The collection would now be worth $60 million, but Hayward sold it on almost immediately. After Hayward came marriages to singer Michelle Phillips (a union which lasted just eight days), Daria Halprin and Katherine LaNasa. One can't help thinking Victoria has taken on a lot of baggage, but sitting across the table the pair are obviously crazy about each other. When Hopper temporarily leaves the room to take a telephone call, Victoria confides, 'I think it's probably been the most consistent relationship he's ever had. On one level I don't necessarily like being part of that older man, younger woman sort of thing, and I was a little intimidated by him when we first met. It was a lot for a 24-year-old to take on. And how did she meet him? 'It was in 1992. Dennis was sitting in a restaurant a week after his separation from his previous wife, and I was introduced to him,' Victoria explains. 'I knew that there was an exhibition of his photographs on at the time, and I had been longing to go. When I asked him about it, he offered to take me and the rest is history.' More than 30 years younger than Hopper, Victoria is not what you might expect from a Hollywood star's fifth wife. True, she is beautiful, but in an elegant, honed sort of way, rather like one of the thoroughbred horses that she trains for dressage and eventing. Also, she is immensely articulate and assured, although as the daughter of two Harvard professors this is not really surprising. The only child of her parents' marriage, her father remarried when she was eight and her stepmother is a doctor of philosophy at Harvard. To come from such an intellectual East Coast background and marry someone with something of a chequered past must have raised a few Bostonian eyebrows, as Victoria admits: 'My parents were probably concerned and reserved their opinions initially, but they love Dennis now.' Hopper blushes a little as Victoria continues, 'People are always saying to me, "But he's so nice", as if he's the seething bad guy from Waterworld.' Hopper is touchingly honest about his wife's effect on him: 'She has been a very subduing influence on me. Victoria has a tremendous personality - she never gets rattled by anything. If I get too excited she soothes me and she never seems to blow it. Being with her has really been a wonderful experience for me.' Nevertheless, things were initially more complicated. Hopper has his eight-year-old son, Henry, from his fourth marriage living with them and when Victoria arrived on the scene things were not going well. Henry was nearly two years old and the stress of his parents' failing marriage was beginning to show. So how did Victoria cope with becoming a stepmother? 'I had a stepmother myself, so I had a role model. She filled in some of the blanks that both my parents left. I think as a step-parent you have a moral obligation to adopt in your mind. It's not a territorial thing, but I feel that Henry is a son of mine and he will have a place with me as long as I live. Although I am going to have children myself.' She pauses before adding, 'We keep putting it off because there's Henry and we travel so much.' Henry's mother, Katherine LaNasa, a dancer, and Hopper are still on bad terms but relations with the other ex-wives and their children are reasonably good. As well as Henry, Hopper has two daughters: Marin (daughter of Brooke Hayward), who is the fashion director of American Elle; and Ruthana (daughter of actress Daria Halprin), who has just left university and is studying acting. The issue of Hopper's heavy drug use of old obviously makes the parenting and step-parenting job that little bit harder. He recalls, 'We were watching a TV programme they had made about me, and Henry came into the room and sat down. When it had finished he said to me, "Why did they say all those things about you?" and so we talked about it. I guess it's better to hear things from me than from kids at school. Henry knows that drugs are bad and that he should stay away from them.' Despite his other cinematic and artistic achievements, Hopper is aware that his wild past will always be a part of his reputation. During the Seventies he lived in the same house in Taos, New Mexico, that DH Lawrence had once owned, and breakfasted on tequila and cocaine. His home became a haven for the hippie counterculture and one memorable episode ended with him coming round up a tree after an LSD trip. Hopper is very open about talking about his rehabilitation and the effect it has had on his life. 'When I think about it, probably my problems with drugs and alcohol came out of my relationships. When I was younger I was shy and distracted and very confused about women. My greatest fault has probably been my attraction to women - that seemed to lead me into more trouble than anything else has.' He pauses before continuing, 'When you get into the depths of drink and drug addiction, insanity and death are really the only outcomes. I was locked up - incarcerated. You really have no choice. You have to get better if you want to get out and play with the other kids.' Initially, Hopper went into rehab after being found wandering through the Mexican jungle, naked and hallucinating, during filming in the early Eighties. After a few months he re-emerged from a clinic free from drink but not drugs. But by the following year he began to hallucinate again and this time he was committed to the psychiatric ward of Cedars-Sinai Hospital in LA. 'I think it probably had something to do with my father's death. Although this had been a couple of years before, I think deep down his death shook me up to the point that I realised I had to get some help - I couldn't continue in that way. Now I have 16 years of sobriety, so my life has changed tremendously.' It certainly has. Working on so many different projects means that his schedule is already frantic until next summer. 'I'm feeling the pressure of time,' he explains. 'It's no longer loose and fun - it's like, I should be working!' Looking slightly shocked by this statement, he turns to Victoria, who has been sitting quietly for the past few minutes. She says, 'Dennis has often said to me that because of the drug and alcohol addiction there is a sense of lost time and the need to leave a bigger and more important body of work.' So does this mean that Hopper is starting to feel his age? Certainly he bears little physical signs of the excesses of the past. 'It feels ridiculous to be 63 - I don't know how I got here. I look in the mirror and I see my father and grandfather. [Jack] Nicholson and Beatty are like, don't give us any achievement awards, because then you have to accept that you're getting old, so I guess that you do reach a point where you realiseÉ' He tails off for a moment before continuing, 'I mean people advised me against doing a retrospective and I asked them, "Well, how old do you have to be? Eighty?" Now I've got to get everything ready for spring next year and we're off to Venice to the Volpi Ball where I'm directing a film with Lauren Bacall - it's just an art film; there's no money in it. And then friends of mine have a birthday and so we're going to play golf for two weeks and then it's August and nothing's been done.' The blue eyes twinkle as he puffs on the end of his cigar: 'You know what: this social life? It's killing me.' Towards the end of the interview, one of his assistants enters and passes Hopper a magazine. He reads aloud, 'Look, man, Easy Rider. It's just been voted the Stoner Movie of All Time.' In recent years the film has been back in the headlines because of the reported feud between Hopper and co-star Peter Fonda over screenwriting credits. As yet unresolved, it ensures the film's continued notoriety and popularity. Does Hopper still see any of the Easy Rider set? 'Yeah. Jack Nicholson and I are still friends, we go and play golf; Francis Ford Coppola and I are still friends; but Peter and I are not friends and we weren't friends when we made the film.' As he speaks, Dennis Hopper looks around at his unusual home filled with the treasures that mark different periods of his life like a series of extravagant postcards. His beautiful wife is pulling on her riding boots, ready for the photo-shoot, and the crew are charging around the house like contestants on The Crystal Maze. 'It's impossible to be a big star and have a private life,' he concludes. 'It's impossible to be even a small star and have a private life. A great joy to me now is just to spend time here alone.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=001863356114602&rtmo=3qAKS8qM&atmo=99999999 &pg=/et/99/9/4/tlhopp04.html Bard DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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