Dennis Hopper: Interviews

American Psycho: Lynn Barber / 2001

182 American Psycho Lynn Barber/2001 From the Observer, January 14, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author. A maid lets me in through the steel door, into a sort of auditorium with a large broken sculpture on a stage. It is a Dennis Hopper work called Bomb Drop currently awaiting repair. The seats of the auditorium are all piled high with framed photographs, again by Dennis Hopper, and there is a hologram of a sinister man in silhouette (Dennis Hopper?) overlooking the stage. This auditorium leads into a hangar-like room which has a giant flat-screen television and furniture made of crinkled cardboard. Across the room are several sliding screens for storing paintings, and a steel staircase going up to a walkway above. On the walls all round there is a stunning collection of contemporary American art—an Andy Warhol Chairman Mao, a Basquiat, a Haring, a David Salle, a Julian Schnabel , a Cindy Sherman—several million dollars’ worth of prime museum fodder housed in one of the highest-crime areas in the USA. A young woman introduces herself as Hopper’s assistant and asks me to wait. An older woman in running shorts glides through the room and introduces herself as Hopper’s mother-in-law. Next, a tiny childlike woman in jodhpurs and riding boots appears from nowhere and nervously introduces herself as Victoria—the current Mrs. Dennis Hopper , the fifth. She says that she is sorry she can’t stay but she is going to Topanga Canyon to train her horses. So saying, she walks to the far end of the room where a huge Land Cruiser is parked in the distant gloom, gets in, and starts the engine. A steel wall rolls up, revealing a corridor of metal gates sliding open, and off she drives. It is an incongruously James Bondian exit for such a tiny, fragile-looking woman. After she has gone and the steel wall has clanged down again, I get seriously spooked. The acoustics of the house are most peculiar—the whole place clangs and throbs like a ship’s engine room, there is a con- lynn barber / 2001 183 stant whispery static from the intercom, and voices and footsteps seem to advance and recede overhead, echoing along the steel walkways and pipes. It is a paranoiac’s castle but it also seems designed to induce paranoia —sitting in this blind fortress, it is easy to imagine the Mad Max tanks rolling up the street with their battering rams poised, the advance troops of crazies throwing grappling hooks over the roof, the wire cutters and oxyacetylene torches getting stuck into the steel doors. By the time Dennis Hopper finally appeared, I was fully expecting some gibbering Blue Velvet character in a gas mask, and for a moment failed to recognize the small, neat elderly man (he is sixty-four) in navy blue sweater and grey slacks. For the supposedly “scariest man in Hollywood ,” he seemed disappointingly quiet. His assistant brought us tea but then he decided he wanted to do the interview upstairs, and led me up a clanking staircase across a walkway to another even stranger room, perched on a sort of ledge high up. It had a conventional Christmas tree and a rather kitsch cocktail bar with swirly colored glasses—an incongruously suburban touch in this all-throbbing, all-clanging hi-tech setting . It took me a while to notice that there was a woman lying under a blanket on the sofa. Hopper sat down beside her and introduced her as his eldest daughter, Marin. She uttered a feeble “Hi!” and said she had rung the doctor and was waiting for him to call back. She seemed to have flu, so I offered her an Anadin from my handbag. Marin examined it closely and asked me to name the ingredients. Of course I couldn’t, so we both struggled to read the small print on the packaging. Luckily her doctor rang soon afterwards and Marin asked if it was OK to take Anadin, and he reassured her that it was. I suppose if you are Dennis Hopper’s daughter, you are brought up to be wary of strangers bearing pharmaceutical gifts. It was distinctly odd trying to interview Hopper with his sick daughter lying on the sofa beside him. Once or twice, when I was asking about his drugs and his drinking and his failed marriages, I suggested that we might move elsewhere but he said no, it was...