“Very, very sexy”: Dennis Hopper’s troubling relationship with his mother
Even for a counterculture icon, Dennis Hopper’s relationship with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll can be said to be unusual.
Take, for instance, his eight-day marriage to Michelle Phillips – I’ve eaten older slices of pizza. Then there’s the time he got so high on LSD and tequila on a film set in Mexico that he wandered off into the jungle, naked and alone, and when he was discovered by the police, he was so terrified he begged them to kill him. And then, when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, you also have to take into account that he was beyond competent enough to oddly encapsulate the era better than anyone with Easy Rider.
Peculiarly, it seems both the triumphs and trials of his life were bound to the same sense of restlessness and unease that he felt all throughout his childhood. And when speaking to Mariella Frostrup for the Big Issue in 2004, he candidly revealed that much of this was perhaps tied to his intense sexual attraction to his own mother growing up.
For a man who had four divorces and was actually in the process of a fifth when he died, “What was your earliest introduction to love?” was a very reasonable question. But Frostrup could not have imagined Hopper’s reply to the innocent probe, when he revealed for the first time, “My mother was a sexy woman.”
The eccentric Blue Velvet actor added, “I was kind of attracted to her, which causes guilt of all kinds.” Strangely, it would seem that he was not alone in being moved towards the arts owing to an Oedipus complex that created guilt assuage by creativity – Yoko Ono has long said that John Lennon was similarly troubled by his own attractions to his mother.
“My mother was a swimming instructor, a great swimmer,” Hopper added. “And she was very young when she had me, just 17. She was very, very sexy, and that sets you up in a strange situation.” While the actor, who was born in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1936, never expanded on the situation in great detail, other than to say, “I had total sexual fantasies about my mother,” he was very open about the damaging psychological impact it had on him.
“If you start off being attracted to your mother, you’re off on a different path,” he added. “I was always looking for sexually appetising young women, with a body as good as mom’s. It doesn’t mean me and mom had a great relationship – I did nothing but fight with her and vice versa.”
So, when he did come of age, he pursued independence with more vigour than most, leaving Kansas firmly in the past and heading for the heaving hills of Hollywood. “It was a wonderful time,” he would comment of the counterculture age in LA.
“We were hipper, smarter, more courageous, and more outrageous than any other generation. We took drugs like we were guinea pigs,” he added, drawing a gasp of surprise from absolutely nobody. “‘Gimme that drug! I haven’t tried that one yet! Let me try that!’ As hip and cool as we were, we were cannon fodder for the chemical industry.”
Hopper speaks from experience. If Mick Fleetwood claims to have sniffed seven miles of cocaine, then the late Hopper was firmly in the next town down the road, thinking, yet again, about swimming instructors.
