Outrageous Dennis Hopper Stories That Prove This Man Had No Chill

Hopper's life was controlled by drugs and alcohol in the early '80s. Over the years, he was very open about his alcoholism; in 2009, he told Piers Morgan, for a piece published in GQ, that, at the height of his addiction, he drank about half a gallon of rum and 28 beers, and snorted three grams of cocaine, daily.

Hopper believed the drugs and alcohol made him a better actor, and it never interfered with his job. As a result, no one told him to stop. 

An excerpt from the interview:

"Morgan: That's a lot of consumption for a little guy. I would die if I did that, how did you stay alive?

Hopper: Oh, it's not as hard as it sounds. If you mix the rum, like I used to, then you can drink it all day long, no problem.

Morgan: Yes, but half a gallon? You make it sound perfectly normal, Dennis, but it's not.

Hopper: [Laughs] I used to get thirsty, you got to have a beer or two if you get thirsty... "

During his drug and alcohol-fueled days in the early '80s, Hopper experienced a nervous breakdown in a Latin American jungle, days after trying to climb onto the wing of a moving plane in Mexico City. He was found wandering around naked, and tried to bait police into shooting him. 

Hopper told the Guardian in 2007: "I was making a movie, but I never made it to the set. They found me running around the jungle naked. Before that, at Mexico City airport, I thought I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing. I was out of my mind. It was around then I decided it was time to get into rehab. My liver, my body, my brain were all shot. Hahahahahah!"

Hopper was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles after the incident. Some Hollywood friends got him released, and took him to rehab.

Riding high on fame brought by the success of Easy Rider, Hopper directed and starred in The Last Movie, which was shot in Chinchero, Peru, in 1970. As a piece on the making of the film from Business Insider notes, "The baby-faced Hopper informed Universal that he would be making the movie in Peru. What that studio didn't know was the region had become the cocaine capital of the world. Every coke head in LA wanted to work on the picture in order to smuggle drugs back up north,' author Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls." 

Hopper caused a fracas in the relatively conservative, largely Catholic nation by smoking weed and calling homosexuality "groovy" during an interview in Peru during pre-production of the film, in 1969. As quoted from a piece by Brad Darrach for Life: “Taking a long reflective pull on an odd-looking cigarette, Dennis said he thought everybody should ‘do his thing’ and then allowed that he himself had lived with a lesbian and found it ‘groovy’…Within 24 hours the government denounced the article and issued a decree repealing freedom of the press.”

Darrach goes on to describe the day actors and crew arrived to begin production on the film:

“Somebody made a cocaine connection and a number of actors laid in a large supply at bargain prices — $7 for a packet that costs $70 in the States. By 10 p.m. almost 30 members of the company were sniffing coke or had turned on with grass, acid, or speed. By midnight, much of the cast had drifted off to bed by twos and threes. At 2 a.m. I was awakened by screams. A young actress had taken LSD and was ‘having a bummer.’"

The ranch where the cast and crew stayed was the site or "whipping parties," which began when: "... an actor chained a girl to a porch post and, inspired by the notion that she looked like Joan of Arc, lit a crackling fire at her feet. Another actor swallowed five peyote buds in too rapid succession and almost died.”

As for production, Hopper told Uncut in 2005: “It was one long sex and drugs orgy. Wherever you looked there were naked people out of their [expletive] minds. But I wouldn't say it got in the way. It helped us get the movie done. We might have been drug addicts but we were drug addicts with a work ethic… The drugs, the drink, the insane sex, they all fueled our creativity.”

In 2002, actor and songwriter Kris Kirstofferson recalled: “[W]hat [Hopper] did was what he was filming. He was filming the corruption of a little town by the movie people, and I mean they ruined the town. I think he got a priest defrocked…”

The movie wasn't particularly well received. Roger Ebert's review starts: "Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie is a wasteland of cinematic wreckage. There are all sorts of things you can say about it, using easy critical words to describe it as undisciplined, incoherent, a structural mess. But mostly it's just plain pitiful." 

While filming Easy Rider, Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson spent a lot of time at the headquarters of a production company called BBS. The secretaries knew how to roll joints and inject drugs, as well as prepare tables with cocaine for guests. One BBS executive kept the ashes of his dead wife in a gold dish.

One day, while looking for drugs, Hopper, Nicholson, and Fonda snorted the woman's ashes, assuming they were cocaine.

While working on Rebel Without A Cause, Hopper had a ménage à trois with actress Natalie Wood and director Nicholas Ray. Ray, 43, was Wood's first lover, and Hopper, 18, her second. Hopper admired "the cool way she handled two simultaneous affairs," which he praised as "way ahead of her time." She was the aggressor in their relationship, which was unusual for a young woman in the 1950s, and it turned him on.

According to a piece on the affair from the Huffington Post, one day: "Hopper picked Wood up at the Chateau Marmont hotel, where she spent the afternoon with the 43-year-old Ray, and drove up to a lover’s lane to make out. He was about to go down on Natalie when she exclaimed, 'Oh, you can’t do that.' 'Why?' Hopper asked. 'Because Nick just f*cked me,' she said."

Ray became jealous of Hopper's affair with Wood, and used his position to push the actor around on set. Fed up, Hopper confronted Ray, saying: "Nick, I know you've been f*cking Natalie. You're now using that against me. I know that you've told the studio I'm having an affair with her. This has gotta stop... [or] I'm gonna beat the sh*it out of you right now." 

Hopper's first wife was Brooke Hayward, daughter of Broadway producer Leland Hayward. Their marriage ended in 1969, likely because he beat her up and had a penchant for hosting drug-fueled orgies. Speaking of his relationship with Hayward to the Guardian, Hopper said: "I hit her. There was a moment when I became violent with her. And she was probably afraid of me after that. That was a very young and stupid mistake because I didn't understand her illness... She had an illness. She was manic depressive and I couldn't cope with it."

Hopper was later married to Michelle Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas for eight days. He was on acid when they tied the knot, and didn't realize they were married. Phillips claimed he handcuffed her and fired guns in their home. When she tried to escape, Hopper followed her to the airport and drove on the runway to prevent her from leaving. She ended it purportedly due to the star's "unnatural sexual demands."

In lated decades, as he became reflective, Hopper blamed his behavior on his addictions.