Hopper by Tom Folsom Page A

final scene. Crashing onto one of the old-time cameras at Fly’s Photographic Studio, he was a portrait of wasted youth. Then he picked himself up, brushed himself off, and walked off the Paramount backlot with fake saguaro cacti and a mountain made of a big hump of gray asbestos. See, he wasn’t really dead. He’d merely shot it out with fake bullets against a fake Wyatt Earp at a fake O.K. Corral.
    Elvis felt duped. “He believed that movie fights were real, and that movie bullets were real,” Hopper recalled. “And when I explained that they weren’t, he got very pissed off at me! And Elvis was twenty-one years old at the time!”
    â€œI’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean,” said Elvis. “I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ’uns, go for us. We’re sullen; we’re broodin’; we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men. I don’t know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.”
    He’d taken in as much as he could of his dead idol—gobbling up a hunka Hopper and a hunka burnin’ Natalie Wood, who dug her claws into his back as he rode around on his brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Nick Adams chugged a quarter mile behind on Elvis’s old one.
    By then, Elvis figured he knew so much about Dean that he had this rebel thing licked. With total conviction, he sang to his girl in his B Western, Love Me Tender , beaten only by Giant at the box office. Elvis didn’t even need to writhe on the floor. He simply refused to smile.
    Chewed up and spit out by this slick hillbilly who loved his mama, Hopper sat in an all-night seedy diner with fellow sweepstakes losers Nick and Natalie like a trio of kids airbrushed into the famous Nighthawks painting by the other Hopper. They prepared to get to work on their extensive study of real-life lonely outsiders—real coffee drinkers, real pie eaters.
    Like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys prowling skid row, the impressionable gang gawked curbside as the LAPD tossed real derelicts into a paddy wagon. Sharpening senses, becoming real artists hip to the underbelly, they took the world as their stage.
    â€œFuck Errol Flynn!” cried Hopper, swinging from a length of rope and landing on the porch of Nick Adams’s home in sleepy Laurel Canyon. Another evening he wrapped himself in Nick’s bearskin rug and paraded through the neighborhood with a movie poster featuring Dorothy McGuire wearing a bonnet. The mad act landed notice in Variety , bolstering Dennis’s wacky, irreverent persona.
    Meanwhile, Hopper and Natalie were becoming a steamy item. Posing in fishnet stockings on a cabaret stool for Look ’s “Natalie Wood: Teenage Tiger,” she offered tabloids an inside peek at the “Real Life Rebellion of a Teenage ‘Man-Buster.’”
    â€œWe got in a relationship where we were going out to parties together and we would score for each other,” explained Hopper. “We had great fun procuring for each other. We weren’t blind to the fact that we could see other people, but we were having sex all through our relationship.”
    Natalie upped the stakes of her blossoming wild-child image by arranging an illicit rendezvous with a married movie star who slipped her a pill, then whipped and savagely raped her. Roaring over to Hopper’s apartment in her Thunderbird, Natalie burst in and caught Hopper in the midst of painting one of his abstracts.
    â€œLay down,” she demanded, grabbing Hopper’s bullwhip. “Let me whip you .”
    Hopper had become something of an expert at the Western art of whip cracking, hoping it would give him a little something extra to further his career. Getting whipped was even better.
    â€œIt was almost that we were naive to the point that if