Dennis Hopper, Errol Flynn, a cardboard cut-out of Anthony Perkins, and a wild night in 1956: “Fuck everyone!”
It’s easy to assume that Dennis Hopper didn’t become Dennis Hopper: Hellraiser until the 1960s, when the counterculture movement entered full swing, but he was always a little bit nuts.
After all, in the 1950s, he told Harry Cohn, one of the most powerful figures in the industry, to go fuck himself, which didn’t do wonders for his fledgling career. Neither did repeatedly walking off the set of From Hell to Texas and arguing with director Henry Hathaway, which saw him blackballed in his 20s.
There isn’t much that can surprise anyone about Hopper, with his drug-fuelled antics and hallucinogenic misadventures becoming woven into Hollywood folklore, but long before he was being bailed out of jail by Willie Nelson and getting lost in the jungle while naked and high, he still knew how to party.
Shortly after he’d lost his mentor and idol when his Rebel Without a Cause and Giant co-star James Dean passed away, Hopper attended a party populated by several actors who’d been pegged as the next big thing. Well, he didn’t really attend the party, but he was there anyway, even though he wasn’t invited.
Ben Gazzara and Anthony Perkins were standing around having a chinwag when suddenly, Hopper emerged from the bushes. “I crashed this party,” he declared. “Fuck everyone!” It was quite the entrance, but that was only the beginning of a wild night that continued taking ever stranger turns from there.
Having struck up a rapport with Gwen Davis, who’d go on to become a multi-talented writer, to whom Hopper introduced himself by saying, “I hate my parents, they are no one,” they left the schmoozing and set out on their own. As it turned out, she lived near his house, and he had a novel way of navigating his way between the two properties.
To do that, he attached a length of rope to Davis’ porch, which he’d use to swing over to his own home, all while shouting, “Fuck Errol Flynn!” as he soared through the air. Hopper also fancied his chances of becoming her paramour, but after discovering she had the hots for Perkins, he took drastic action.
In this case, drastic action meant heading down to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which was screening the future Psycho star’s 1956 Palme d’Or-winning period drama Friendly Persuasion, and stealing the life-size cardboard cut-out of the actor that stood outside the cinema, which he promptly brought back to Davis’ place.
When she woke up in the morning, she could see Hopper sitting in her garden, with the cardboard Perkins next to him. “You’d still rather have him?” he mischievously asked her. The answer was yes, so he got up and left. For most actors, that would be a once-in-a-lifetime night of craziness, but as the years wore on, it became standard practice for the ultimate ‘New Hollywood’ rebel.
