When Dennis Hopper did cocaine in the middle of an FBI raid: “I tried to calm myself down”
If 100 people were asked to name which actor they thought was most likely to respond to an armed federal raid by going upstairs and doing cocaine, Dennis Hopper would probably be near the top of most lists.
One of the industry’s most notorious hellraisers, the things the ‘New Hollywood’ wildman got up to are so ludicrously far-fetched they scan as scarcely believable. And yet, every single one of the stories surrounding Hopper is true, making it seem like a minor miracle he escaped all of them relatively unscathed.
Did he get deported from Australia with a blood alcohol limit that should have declared him legally dead? Yes, he did. Did he wander into the Mexican jungle naked while out of his mind on LSD? Of course. Did John Wayne threaten to kill him? Yep. Did he shoot a tree after mistaking it for a grizzly bear? Naturally. What about being tied to a chair and blowing himself up with dynamite? Definitely.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense for Hopper to respond to an encroaching federal sting by indulging in illegal narcotics, not that he was the guy they were after. In 1983, Larry Flynt’s home was raided by 15 feds after a judge ordered him to be apprehended when he twice failed to produce evidence tied to a cocaine trafficking trial.
The controversial publisher claimed that he was too scared for his life to leave his mansion, and it turns out he had a couple of notable guests. Hopper and his Easy Rider co-writer, Terry Southern, were holed up at Flynt’s palatial estate when it went down, and his recollections also involve live hand grenades.
“I got up one morning and turned on the television, and I swear to god they said, ‘The Flynt house is surrounded,'” he told Venice Street in 1992. “It’s all over the news media that we’re surrounded by the feds. There are helicopters everywhere.” Being the accommodating fellow that he was, Hopper wondered if there was anything he could do to assist.
“I went downstairs and found one of Flynt’s bodyguards, a guy who’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam, a killer, a stone fucking killer,” he explained. “I said to him, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ ‘Yeah. Put this grenade in your mouth and run the wall. Or go back to your room.” Wisely, he chose the room.
With over a dozen federal agents outside, Hopper was understandably on edge. “I went to the room, tried to calm myself down, did some more cocaine,” as one does when something like that happens. In the end, Flynt went to prison, and the actor remained in his house until he was cast in the mystery thriller The Inside Man, which necessitated a relocation to Sweden for the production.
