Dennis Hopper’s classic joke about his eight day marriage to Michelle Phillips
How come the adage about having nine lives is exclusive to cats? Because whoever fashioned that now-established phrase hasn’t spent enough time reading contemporary celebrity history. The 1970s were littered with cool cats who skirted the open embrace of the Grim Reaper on more than one occasion. Keith Richards has rolled the dice with death on a number of occasions, while Iggy Pop pushed the boundaries of human consciousness more times than worth counting. But one name that doesn’t get the airtime it should is one of Iggy’s partners in debaucherous crime, Dennis Hopper.
For one, his consumption habits were of a man who failed to blur the line between the Hollywood immortality he was contracted to portray and the very real-life consequences of hedonism. Once, he was arrested and deported from Australia less than 24 hours after wrapping production on a movie with a blood alcohol level that would have left anyone else clinically dead, while on another occasion, he purportedly snorted the ashes of an industry executive’s wife alongside Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda.
Not satisfied with wrecking his insides, Hopper’s chaos extended to the realms of explosives. One time, he almost blew himself up with six sticks of dynamite. In what was meant to be a harmless exhibition of film production pyrotechnics for Houston, Texas Rice University students ended up in Hopper emerging from the clouds of billowing smoke.
Amidst all this hell-raising, it’s hard to imagine Hopper finding the time to pursue any innocent romances, let alone get married. This is probably why when he did get married, it was a relatively swift affair.
On October 31st, 1970, Michelle Phillips of The Mamas And The Papas married actor Dennis Hopper. Eight days later, she filed for divorce, to which Hopper would later say, “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.”
The pair met on The Last Movie, a film set in Peru, it starred Hopper as a disillusioned stuntman who leaves the world of cinema to fall into the peaceful arms of a local woman. Phillips made her acting debut in the film, starring in a minor part and was rumoured to have swiftly fallen for Hopper, describing it as “this Florence Nightingale instinct (and, just for the record, girls, it doesn’t work.) I was so overloaded emotionally by this point in my life, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
A bizarre wedding soon followed, where Hopper reportedly decorated the whole place with candles stuck in paper bags, in a bid to portray an off-beat mystical theme. It was an appropriately bizarre start to a toxic marriage that was swirled with rumours, ranging from Hopper scaring Michelle and her daughter Chynna by shooting guns within the house to the actor also handcuffing Phillips because he insisted that she was a witch.
Ultimately, it was a whirlwind romance that ended before it began and was but another mere chapter in the chaotic tale of Dennis Hopper’s mad life.
