It was not an easy death.
But then it had not been an easy life.
Dennis Hopper, 74, died today at his home in Venice, California. He had been fighting prostate cancer, which had finally spread to his bones. He had also been fighting his wife, Victoria Duffy, against whom he began divorce proceedings from his deathbed.
When he received a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame on March 26, he appeared emaciated, and wore bandages on his arm and forehead.
It was not a gentle, Hollywood ending - but that should have surprised no one.
In a life that had spanned James Dean dramas and David Lynch nightmares - and took time out for hard drugs, alcoholism, five marriages, left-wing politics, right-wing politics and a couple of career suicides - Dennis Hopper had never done things the easy way.
Never wanted to, either.
It is important to resist the usual Hollywood hagiography early on. After all, isn't brutal honesty what Hopper supposedly stood for, as an artist? No illusions, man. Total truth. This should not be an obituary full of uncritical praise and endless encomiums.
So, yes, Hopper could be weirdly paranoid (according to Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," he once thought Francis Ford Coppola was secretly filming him). He could also be violent - raising his hand to his first two wives, and threatening to kill several colleagues.
And yet, in all the tumult, he had managed to be present for decades of classics - from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "Blue Velvet," from "True Grit" to "Apocalypse Now." He co-created the seminal "Easy Rider," inspired a new generation of directors and amassed a museum-quality collection of modern art.
The eternal Hollywood outlaw was born, fittingly enough, in Dodge City, but moved with his family to San Diego when he was 13. Early interests were painting and drama; he studied with artist Thomas Hart Benton and at the Old Globe Theatre, and, in 1955, made his onscreen debut on TV's "Medic." He was just 19.
There were more formative influences ahead. That same year, he had a small part as one of the juvenile delinquents in "Rebel Without a Cause", then landed a juicier role in "Giant" (as the son of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor). Both films costarred James Dean, and the fledgling Hopper was simply awestruck.
"Jimmy was the most talented and original actor I ever saw work," he remembered years later. "He was also a guerrilla artist who attacked all restrictions on his sensibility. Once he pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I imitated his style in art, and in life. It got me in a lot of trouble."
It nearly ended his career, in fact. Cast in a small part in the 1958 Western "From Hell to Texas," Hopper refused to say a line the way veteran director Henry Hathaway insisted. Refused, in fact, through more than 80 takes. Neither man blinked. It began to draw a crowd.
Finally, Hopper gave in - and, reportedly, after calling "Print," the director told him he would "never work in this town again."
He did, of course, eventually - he even worked with Hathaway, on 1969's "True Grit," mostly because John Wayne got a kick out of the wild young man. But Hopper wouldn't give in again. He found solace in photography; he found a living acting on TV Westerns, and in cheap movies like "Planet of Blood" and "The Trip."
Director Roger Corman let Hopper shoot some of the second-unit stuff on "The Trip"; inspired, Hopper told co-star Peter Fonda that, rather than hire on for yet another B movie, they should make their own. But this time it would be an exploitation movie with a conscience, a biker movie with a message about an angry, polarized nation.
The jobs were quickly divided up. Fonda and Hopper would co-write with counter-culture wit Terry Southern, Fonda and Hopper would co-star, and Hopper would direct. When Rip Torn dropped out of the cast after an argument (according to Torn, Hopper had pulled a knife on him), the friends called another survivor of the Corman schlock factory, Jack Nicholson, and asked him if he wanted to be in their movie.
"Easy Rider," they called it.
If the film looks sloppy and or self-indulgent today - well, it did back then, too. Yet it was extraordinarily important, not so much for its anti-establishment message as for its very anti-establishment being. This was not a bohemian film made, like "The Graduate," by a respected New York director with an Oscar-winning co-star; this was a movie made by barefoot hippies and rich-kid outcasts.
None of the studio heads understood the picture (or the generation it spoke to). But they understood the money it made, and they realized if they wanted to keep selling tickets to young people, they were going to need young filmmakers to help. The decade of the director - Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Spielberg, Lucas - was about to begin.
Overnight, Hopper had gone from being on the margins of the industry to being at its forefront. But in Hollywood nothing is a better predictor of failure than success; a big hit brings more money, more power - and more people hoping you'll fail. It takes a person of unusual fortitude to resist that kind of temptation and flattery. And Hopper was not a person of unusual fortitude.
And so he took the capital, real and symbolic, from "Easy Rider" and sunk it into a new film, called "The Last Movie." An eclectic cast (Hopper, Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Sylvia Miles) was assembled. Production was begun, down in Peru. Inspiration came from marijuana, tequila and whatever else was handy.
It took Hopper a year to edit all the footage. In between, he got married for the second time, to Michelle Phillips (and divorced, after eight days). He also fought acrimoniously with Fonda over the profits from "Easy Rider" (so much for the revolution) and got deeper into drugs and alcohol. Mostly alcohol. ("I only used to do cocaine," he explained later, "so I could sober up and drink more.")
And, by the end of the year, all he had to show for it was a movie the studio didn't want - and a life in ruins.
Hopper continued to act, though, for whoever would have him. He could even occasionally rally (he turned in unpredictable, eyecatching performances in "An American Friend," and "Tracks"). But it was a kind of hold-your-breath high-wire act; when he showed up in the Philippines for "Apocalypse Now," he was incapable of remembering his lines. (Coppola told him to just think of T.S. Eliot, and wing it.)
By 1983, it was clear Hopper's only choices were death or drying out. He chose rehab, and probably just in time. (His recent behavior - erratic even for Hopper - had included a "performance art piece" that involved lying down in a coffin rigged to explode, and wandering off into the Mexican desert).
Newly sane and sober, with a coldly fierce intensity, he was soon back on track and more exciting than ever; in 1986 alone, he played the sad town drunk in "Hoosiers," the creepy drug dealer in "River's Edge" and the sick, violent psycho in Lynch's "Blue Velvet."
Not everyone was forgiving but the industry was impressed; Hopper picked up an Oscar nomination for "Hoosiers," and the actor was soon saying "Yes" to part after part.
He should have said "No" more often. For every solid picture, like "True Romance" (or painless paycheck part, like "Speed") it seemed as if there were ten questionable or even embarrassing ones. "Waterworld." "Space Truckers." "Hell Ride." The quality of the material even embarrassed Hopper's young son, Henry, who once asked his father why he was making an awful movie like "Super Mario Brothers."
Well, Hopper told the toddler, I do movies like this so I can buy you shoes.
I don't need shoes that bad, his son answered.
Hopper - who eventually racked up about two hundred acting credits -- kept showing up in surprising places. Some of the most surprising - at least to older fans - were at Republican rallies. But Hopper had never had any interest in doing what people expected of him.
Hopper, in fact, had been voting the straight G.O.P ticket since the days of Ronald Reagan; in his final years, he happily appeared in the conservative satire "An American Carol" and was an early supporter of John McCain's presidential bid. (Only when McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate did Hopper publicly switch to Barack Obama.)
"A lot of people treat me differently, and they do bring it up," Hopper said of his shift to the right. He admitted that being a conservative in Hollywood made him a bit of an "outcast," and probably cut down on his dinner invitations. But, he insisted, "I don't think it's going to stop me... It can only stop me from eating, not working."
In the last few years, the busy actor had seemed to get even busier. He narrated a stream of documentaries. He had good supporting roles in "Elegy," and "Swing Vote." He even returned to his small screen roots, with a recurring role on the TV version of "Crash." And he began to think there was something more than just luck behind it all.
"I should have been dead ten times over," he reflected a while ago. "I've thought about that a lot. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around."
Eventually, though, Hopper ran out of miracles. Typically he went down swinging (although it was unclear whether the divorce was his fight, or a battle being pushed by one of his heirs). But he still went down, at last, leaving behind four children.
And an entire other generation of progeny - young, reckless and fearless filmmakers who never would have gotten in the door if Hollywood's eternal outlaw hadn't first kicked it open.
Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty@starledger.com or (212) 790-4435.