Dennis Hopper: Easy Rider Rides Again

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He spent the following five years in Manhattan, studying with Lee Strasberg and appearing in more than 140 TV shows. He also met and married Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Producer Leland Hayward, and she introduced him to her friend Peter Fonda. Teaming for a series of low-budget motorcycle movies, Hopper and Fonda were ready to turn in their Harley-Davidsons when they decided to make just one more, for the money. "We saw it as a western, only on motorcycles," says Hopper. "We were the strangers in town, the outlaws." With Easy Rider, which Hopper directed, these cocaine-sniffing, drug-dealing outsiders became the symbols of the dropout counterculture of the '60s. Made for less than $500,000, the picture went on to gross more than $40 million. (Hopper and Fonda are now planning Easy Rider II, set in postapocalypse America.)

Hopper's name was taken off Hollywood's blacklist, and with studio financing, he went off to the jungles of Peru to make another visionary film, prophetically titled The Last Movie. Image rich but incoherent, it vanished almost overnight and so, as far as Hollywood was concerned, did Hopper, who went into a self-imposed exile in Mexico and Europe, where he acted in a few movies, and in Taos, N. Mex., where he had a house.

Though he had been drinking heavily and taking drugs for years, in the '70s he became an addict. "Some of the folks alongside me went Establishment or dropped dead. I was more fortunate. I went insane. I became paranoid and schizophrenic. I heard voices and was convinced that friends were being murdered in the next room. Since I was isolated, living in Taos, no one told me any different." In Mexico to make a movie in 1983, he panicked, tore off his clothes and, after walking naked through the countryside, was arrested and sent back to the U.S. "Dennis tapped the bottom," Nicholson says of the bad old days. "He was staying at places that didn't allow visitors. It wasn't Sunnybrook Farm -- no sashay through those rich men's rest homes. He did the real stuff."

Hopper's rebirth came when he entered a drug-rehabilitation program in April 1984. Since then, he says, he has not taken so much as an aspirin and has worked almost nonstop. Besides appearing in Blue Velvet, he will be seen, again playing broken-down characters, in two other upcoming movies, Hoosiers and River's Edge.

Does he feel bitter about those wasted years? About three broken marriages and a career that only now seems to be moving? In a word: no. "It's too late to have regrets," he says. "It happened." But he would like to play, before he turns 70, something other than psychopaths and advanced neurotics. Perhaps even a born-again actor. Anyone interested in The Dennis Hopper Story?