The Roots of Dennis Hopper’s Style

It’s a peculiar brand of American voodoo, a mix of Pabst Blue Ribbon and white Stetson hats and weather-beaten Levis. And a gas mask. It has a lot to do with being dirty.

The roller coaster life of Dennis Hopper points like a weather vane to a half century of pop culture. From buying one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans (tomato flavor) in the early days of Pop Art, to directing the first Hollywood film about the L.A. gang scene, “Colors” (made three years before “Boyz ‘n the Hood“), Hopper had an uncanny knack for latching onto a style before it was even considered a style. Screeching into the American psyche with his 1969 directorial debut, “Easy Rider,” the motorcycle movie inspiring generations of would-be road warriors, Hopper’s madman machismo continues to infect the male imagination. His secrets unfold on a journey through iconic Americana, beginning on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause.”

The root of Hopper Style lies in James Dean, the doomed, brooding actor who, upon entering a party, would immediately take off his brand-new leather jacket and drop it onto the floor, making a statement.

In 1955, fresh on the Hollywood scene from the San Diego suburbs, 18-year old Hopper would peek into the windows of Dean’s regular haunts and stare in slack-jawed awe. “Oh Dennis, don’t be so San Diego!” admonished his friend and fellow Dean-worshiper Vampira, a goth television hostess who rode around Tinseltown in a hearse. A naïve upstart signed by Warner Bros., Hopper became obsessed with Dean while playing a juvenile delinquent on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause” — his first Hollywood film and Dean’s second. By the time Dean’s candy red windbreaker made a Technicolor splash in theaters across the country upon the release of “Rebel,” Dean was dead, sent to the firmament of pop culture after he fabulously crashed his silver Porsche Spider. Desperate to capitalize on the worldwide hysterical-teenage-James Dean frenzy, the studio branded Dennis Hopper the “next James Dean,” daring its fresh-faced contract player to push back against the suits and forge his own style.

Cut to 1968, in midst of Mardi Gras, with the 31-year-old Dennis Hopper about to embark on his low-budget biker flick. As not just the director but also the co-star of “Easy Rider,” Hopper found himself in the unfortunate position of having to angle for screen time against his best friend, Peter Fonda. Wandering the streets of New Orleans in his black leather jacket with an American flag sewn on the back, the tall, lanky scion of Hollywood royalty looked like a walking piece of pop art; a veritable motorcycle god. How could Hopper compete? Somewhere in his memory, in his Dust Bowl past in Kansas on a Saturday morning in 1936, the whole town of Dodge City came out to see the cast of “Dodge City,” chugging in on the Warner Bros. express train. It seemed all of Hollywood had come to the old cow town, and 3-year-old Dennis (in the company of his family) got to see Errol Flynn, wearing a fringed buckskin jacket, riding down Main Street on a white horse. Hopper’s style mash-up à la ’68, featuring a chopper and a floppy outlaw hat, turned the small-town kid from Kansas into a counterculture icon, with delinquents across the globe emulating his incarnation of the shaggy pot-smoking cosmic cowboy Billy (as in Billy the Kid).

Enter the white Stetson, on Hopper’s head as he struts wild-eyed into the Academy Awards ceremony in 1970. “I come from Kansas,” he explained. “All my uncles and my grand-uncles, when they made it, they got a Stetson.”
 Getting into his role, Hopper wore western shirts stitched with roses, and became a regular customer of Nudie, the renowned cowboy tailor in North Hollywood. His clean-cut loopy cowboy chic, to one day inspire Owen Wilson’s portrayal of the Cormac McCarthy-on-acid novelist in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” shocked the Hollywood establishment. Disgusted at Hopper’s impudence, old man Henry Fonda ranted to reporters, “Any man who insists on wearing his cowboy hat to the Academy Award ceremonies and keeps it on at the dinner table afterward ought to be spanked!”

In the ’70s, Hollywood was safe from the shoot-‘em-up shenanigans of Hopper, who to the delight of the studios got his comeuppance after his “Easy Rider” follow-up, a trippy anti-western titled “The Last Movie.” Shut out of the Hollywood system after his spectacular flop and living in exile in dusty Taos, N.M., Hopper played the ragged outlaw to a soundtrack of tequila and cocaine. He packed a .357 Magnum and was photographed for one of his mug shots wearing a jean jacket.

As a clean and sober Hopper famously told director David Lynch over the telephone to seal the deal for the role of Frank Booth, the psychopathic small-town killer with a mommy complex in Lynch’s 1986 surrealistic American fantasia, “Blue Velvet,” “I am Frank Booth.” With his vintage black leather jacket and slicked-back hair, a 50-year old Hopper looks as James Dean might have had he not wrecked that silver Spyder — as if Dean had lived on in Hopper through the years.

Tom Folsom is the author of the new book “Hopper: A Journey Into the American Dream” (HarperCollins/It Books).