When Dennis Hopper was convinced a hitman wanted to kill him: “Obviously, I was crazy”
In the 1970s and early ’80s, Dennis Hopper was a man fuelled almost entirely by alcohol, hard drugs, and artistic passion. He spent most of that time holed up in the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, which he’d purchased in 1970 after falling in love with the village while scouting locations for Easy Rider. However, due to the herculean amount of stimulants he was putting into his system during this period, Hopper’s mental health deteriorated dramatically, and he became so paranoid that he carried a pistol everywhere he went. After all, he was convinced a mob hitman had been contracted to whack him.
People who knew Hopper in that period say that it seemed like he was on some kind of spiritual search, and he became convinced Taos was where he would find what he was looking for. As well as the Mabel ranch, he also bought the El Cortez Theatre in Ranchos de Taos. Over time, it stopped operating as a functioning cinema and became Hopper’s art studio, with the actor removing all the seats except for 52. Why that number? Well, because the actor’s studio where he learned his trade in New York had 52 seats.
During his Taos years, Hopper partied almost constantly, married the Mamas and the Papas singer Michele Phillips – for all of eight days – and was arrested for dangerous driving. He also reportedly had countless confrontations with locals in which he brandished the loaded pistol he began carrying as the drugs and alcohol made him convinced someone was out to get him.
Ron Davis, an artist friend of Hopper’s, told Trend magazine, “He was hardcore. He went insane. He’d be up on the Mabel Dodge house roof, shooting at imaginary helicopters. He was parading his addiction. Maybe it was a cry for help.”
Hopper’s days of terrifying delusions and crippling anxiety reached their zenith in 1983 when he convinced himself that a mob hit had been placed on his head. “I was drinking a half-gallon of rum a day, plus another fifth of rum, and going through a half-ounce of cocaine every few days,” he told Vanity Fair. His addled brain figured there was only one solution – he needed to get the hell out of Taos.
“I got my cousin, my brother, and all the people together as an armed escort to get me down to Albuquerque, and get me on an airplane,” Hopper explained. This flight took him to Los Angeles, where he met up with some friends and had an orgy. This sexual escapade didn’t seem to calm him down, though, because he began shooting cocaine for the first time in his life.
“I shut myself up in a hotel for like three days, went through vast quantities of cocaine, shooting it every ten minutes, and vast quantities of women.”
dennis hopper
After that, he jumped on another plane and flew down to Houston – which was where he decided to confront “one of the heads of the Mafia in Texas.” Astoundingly, Hopper claimed he flat-out asked the mobster if a contract had been placed on his life. He mustn’t have liked the guy’s answer, either, because he “pulled a knife on him in a parking lot.” At this point, Hopper said the mobster told his people to leave the actor alone because he was “obviously crazy and was not to be harmed.”
Whether or not this is truly what happened is up for interpretation. Maybe the mob really did want to kill the famously insane Hollywood star, but he made them realise he was too off his rocker to deal with. Maybe no hitman was pursuing Hopper at all, and this mobster simply told the knife-wielding Blue Velvet star what he needed to hear. Maybe Hopper never even confronted the mob at all – or worst of all, he pulled a knife on some poor, unsuspecting businessman in a parking lot.
Either way, in Hopper’s mind, that’s how it all went down – and he felt the mobster actually treated him with sensitivity. “You know, the only thing I can tell you about this is people do have sympathy for crazy people,” he noted. “It’s like ‘don’t hurt the child.’ It’s weird. I mean, obviously, I was crazy, but that’s compassion. In its own way.”
