I Blame Dennis Hopper Read online

  My mom baked me a beautiful little girl’s birthday cake covered with sunflowers. She made the mistake of bringing it down to The Studio, thinking that we could share the celebration with the hippies. Before I could even blow out the candles, a hippie on a motorcycle grabbed a handful of cake. Suddenly, all the hippies were grabbing cake, stuffing a child’s birthday cake into their mouths, not even aware of their actions. More and more after that it seemed that my mom stayed up at the house.

  I remember the day my mother first said we were poor. We were standing on the hill above The Studio. My mother was literally and metaphorically looking down at my father, who was frolicking with all the hippie girls. They all had these cool ponchos, and I really wanted a poncho of my own, but my mom said, “We can’t afford it. We’re poor now.”

  It was the first time I had ever heard her use that expression, and it didn’t sound good.

  “What?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re poor now. We’re poor.” She repeated it over and over again, as if it were a news bulletin, and then she pulled her coat around her and slowly walked back to the house. I ran and found my older brother. He was busy watching the hippie girls who had started to undress to go skinny-dipping in the pond. Their ponchos and jeans hung on the branches of a nearby tree as if it were a dirty hippie Christmas tree.

  I said, “Mom says we’re poor!”

  My brother looked up from the naked girls swimming and said, “No shit, Sherlock.” As the child of Dennis Hopper, I was expected simply to accept our new hippie lifestyle with delight. Didn’t I get to wear headbands and celebrate Earth Day? Roll little joints with my little fingers—separating the seeds in the lid of a shoebox to the delight of all the other hippies? My brother went back to watching the naked girls swimming. Their laughter echoed up the hill as I saw them splash around in the pond. I walked back to the house, and in my own act of rebellion, I poked holes in my father’s Easy Rider poster. Right through Dennis Hopper’s eyes.

  Back when we were rich and socially accepted my mother had belonged to the garden club. Once a month all the ladies would meet at our house. They drank tea, ate little cakes, and talked about floral arrangements. When they saw my mother’s new hippie lifestyle, they looked down their noses at it, so she quit their club. “They were a bunch of snobs anyway,” she said at the time, but years later she confessed that she quit because she was embarrassed to have people see how we were living. We were living with Dennis Hopper and his merry band of hippies from Easy Rider! Who wouldn’t have been embarrassed?

  Here’s how much damage one movie can cause: One day my father unscrewed every chandelier in the house and sold each of them at auction. He needed money to support The Studio. It was the early ’70s, and he was living there permanently now.

  My mother said, “I look up at the ceiling where my lights used to be and all I see are wires.” The rain dripped through the wires into a bucket she had put on the dining room table.

  Just as Easy Rider changed my father, our new economic circumstances changed my mother. She became an Italian Catholic drill sergeant. She took to standing outside the bathroom door while I took a bath or shower. “Time!” she’d yell if I’d run the water too long. I’d barely fill the tub before I’d hear, “That’s too long! We can’t afford hot water. We’re poor now!” That became my mother’s favorite expression. The thermostat stayed at 58, and we wore sweaters and hats to bed; in a letter I sent to my grandmother, I actually asked for a sleeping bag. My mother instructed me to save tin foil as if we were in World War II, carefully folding it out and putting it back in the drawer until it had been used so many times that it disintegrated in your hands. I wanted to try out for my school band, but a clarinet was “too expensive,” so my mother got me a plastic recorder instead. You try learning “Eleanor Rigby” on a plastic recorder. You feel poor!

  She traded our beloved Buick convertible for a used Volkswagen bug. The Buick—the last vestige of our old middle-class life—was gone. It was official: We were hippies. Poor, grimy, Volkswagen-bug hippies! One time I had a party to go to, and the VW—aka the poormobile—couldn’t make it up the snowy hill, so I had to skip the party.

  I blame Dennis Hopper for making me miss that party.

  My mother started taking classes at night and got a teaching job to support us. I used to watch her drive down the driveway in the morning on the way to school, gray smoke billowing out of the poormobile. We got a tip from one of the hippies about free bread, so on Wednesdays we would drive to the Stop & Shop to get the day-old bread that was given away in a large brown bag. Sometimes there were doughnuts. I hid in the car when she got them, but they tasted pretty good back home. I think I became a vegetarian only because I didn’t see very much meat as a child: “It’s too expensive. We can’t afford it! We’re poor now! Have a doughnut!” What’s funny is that my mother got food stamps, but her food choices always got her into trouble. My mother didn’t understand why chicken wasn’t on the government-approved list but Hamburger Helper was. She’d say, “I can buy Hamburger Helper, but I can’t buy a fresh chicken? I can buy fish sticks but I can’t buy a piece of fish?” Food stamps were for poor people. I’m sure they were happy with whatever they got, but it seemed to me that we had chosen to be poor. It was a difficult concept to understand, let alone explain to a beleaguered, underpaid sixteen-year-old cashier.

  My mom could make four sandwiches out of a tiny can of Underwood Chicken Spread or tuna, stretching it with what seemed like a lot of celery. One day she was making me lunch, and instead of asking me if I wanted a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for school she called up the stairs, “Peanut butter or jelly?”

  My mother seemed to enjoy being poor. Maybe it finally gave her an identity. It was hard to compete with being married to Dennis Hopper, who was busy writing poetry and songs and assembling his band.

  I blame Dennis Hopper for the band.

  Of course there was a band! My father started a band called 40 Acres and a Mule. It consisted of two longhair guitarists and a longhair lead singer named Marvin. I remember that they played a lot of Stones covers, which made sense, because they were mostly stoned. They got some songs under their belt and somehow managed to get a few more bookings, so my father bought an old ambulance to drive the band and all their instruments from one gig to another. He and Tom the Hippie and the others painted it yellow, then covered it with flower decals and painted a giant American flag on the driver’s side.

  One day Tom abruptly decided to move on. By that time, hippies were coming and going at The Studio, but I had grown attached to Tom, as he had been a constant in my life, a father figure in a series of father figures who all looked like Dennis Hopper. And now he was leaving us. He was on his chopper wearing his dirty fringe jacket the last time I saw him. I still remember his toothy, mustached grin as he lighted up his last joint. Then he kick-started his chopper and rode down the driveway. We never saw him again. I am sorry to say that not long afterward, we heard that Tom the Hippie had died of a drug overdose. My father said that Tom had been a Vietnam vet and that he was probably suffering from shell shock. I don’t blame Dennis Hopper for that, but I wish I could, because I’d do anything for one more crazy ride in the van with Tom the Hippie.

  I want to mention that the goats had a great life at The Studio. My father had an old Comet, and he took the backseat out and replaced it with plywood so he could take the goats for rides around town. There was no real destination, but he was convinced that the goats didn’t want to be penned in all the time. The goats did look pretty happy hanging their heads out the window, catching the wind just like dogs. It was quite a sight, and it started to draw attention around town.

  One day while I was waiting for the school bus, this very sweet girl named Maggie Cooper asked me, “Isn’t your dad the guy that drives around town with goats in his car?” I pointed over Maggie’s shoulder and said, “Oh look, there’s the bus! We don’t want to be late for school!” I got onto the b
us, and the bus driver gave me a dirty look, muttering under his breath that I lived in a nudist colony with hippies who were all smoking marijuana.

  Damn you, Dennis Hopper!

  At night, bundled in my new sleeping bag, sweaters, mittens, and a knit cap, I would curse you, Dennis Hopper! You took my father away from me. Instead of poring over brochures together and deciding which Ivy League school to go to, I spent evenings at a local bar watching 40 Acres and a Mule struggle through “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” An element of danger crept into our lives when one of the hippies who claimed to be a member of Hells Angels moved in with us. Yes, I had dodged the rut of an upper-middle-class childhood for the sheer excitement of a childhood filled with goats, guns, and rock and roll! But eventually, my Easy Rider childhood came to an end. My father, like Tom the Hippie, decided to move on. He didn’t leave on a chopper, though. He left in a Volkswagen. Not my mom’s black one. This one was blue. He was driving it with his new girlfriend next to him and her two kids in the backseat. He left my mother a note asking her to take care of the goats.

  I blame Dennis Hopper for making me hate Volkswagens.

  The movie was over, and yet its effects continued. My mom was now a single mother on a teacher’s salary. When I entered high school, I had little ambition. Going to college was out of the question. I knew that “We are poor and we can’t afford it…” would be my mother’s answer, so I thought about my options. Well. There’s a lot of drama associated with being poor. I could be dramatic! Also, starving and actress go very well in the same sentence. I decided I wanted to move to New York to become a poor starving dramatic actress! I got into acting school, and I found a cheap one-bedroom apartment. There were four other girls already living in it, but I moved in anyway. I couldn’t afford to buy a bed so I slept on coats on the floor. It was freezing, of course, but I was used to wearing sweaters and mittens and hats at night, and that made me less homesick.

  You never forget your first horrible cheap one-bedroom apartment—or your second or your third. But my first was in Brooklyn. Luckily, acting school kept me from spending a lot of time there. We didn’t have any furniture, so a couple of us found a huge round cable holder down the street, then rolled it to our building, carried it up two flights of stairs, and moved it into the kitchen as a makeshift table. After a few days we realized that it must have been drenched in toxic chemicals, but we kept it because we couldn’t figure out how to roll it back down the stairs. I was never sure if four girls were living there or six, because we all seemed to be on rotating schedules. You would know if someone new had moved in only if you saw a new bottle of shampoo in the bathroom. Just one girl had a job. She worked for a sheet company and contributed sheets to my coats on the floor. For that I will be forever grateful.

  We couldn’t afford to turn on the gas, so we cooked things in a coffee percolator: boiled eggs, hot dogs. Long, tall food worked best. Times were lean and I did some things I’m not proud of. The “sex for food” program was probably one of those things. “Sure, I’ll go out with you. Is there food involved? There is? I find you very attractive all of a sudden. How do you feel about sleeping on coats?” I’m pretty sure I lived on popcorn for an entire year. I remember that we once ran out of toilet paper and that one of the girls brought home this industrial-size roll that she had stolen from the Actors’ Equity lounge. It was like a gigantic wheel of Gouda cheese, only it was toilet paper! I repeatedly dropped it on my toe, and it became a great motivator to get a job. At Christmas I got myself a job at Saks Fifth Avenue department store. A store where I could not afford to shop. All I was supposed to do was hold and display an Estée Lauder Blockbuster makeup kit. Sounds easy enough, unless you’re weak from hunger.

  It was the twelfth day of Christmas, or something like, that I’m holding my Blockbuster, and it’s a blockbuster, all right. It held fifty shades of eye shadow, multiple shades of coral lipsticks, powders, and blushes. This was the ’80s. So they were playing the Philip Glass version of “Hark How the Bells.” I hadn’t had any breakfast—I’m still poor, remember—and I started to get very dizzy. I’m wobbling with my Blockbuster, and listening to the Philip Glass and people were coming toward me and moving away and coming toward me and moving away. In my mind they seemed like colorful fish … that I could eat. All while this monotonous Philip Glass version of “Hark How the Bells” is pumping out: Dum-da-da-dum-Dum-da-da-dum. Dum-da-da-Dum!

  My break was coming up, and I only had a dollar, and I was debating whether I should spend 50 cents on a cup of coffee, which would curb my appetite, or get a hot chocolate for 75 cents, which would be as rich as a whole meal. I could skip lunch and have an apple for dinner or maybe an orange—these are the things you debate when you’re poor. The electronic Christmas music was hypnotizing, and I started to daydream—and all of a sudden I heard this clatter as my Estée Lauder Blockbuster and I hit the ground. I had fainted from hunger on the floor of Saks Fifth Avenue. Just an hour before I had sprayed Kitty Carlisle Hart with perfume, making her laugh when I said, “Come on down, the Lauder’s fine.” Now I was lying on the ground watching coral lipsticks roll by me. I prayed that Kitty Carlisle Hart had seen me faint. She would rush to my side and say, “Why, this girl looks like she’s hungry! When was the last time you had a decent meal? I was an actress once myself, my dear. Tell me everything!” Her butler would magically produce a thermos of hot chocolate, and as I drank, I would explain that although noble of birth, I now found myself in this situation of poverty. Kitty would invite me to live with her in her Park Avenue apartment. There I would live the rich and privileged life I was supposed to have lived. Over tea and biscuits we’d laugh about my poor hippie childhood and how Dennis Hopper had ruined everything. Instead, when I opened my eyes, I only saw my supervisor, Vicky, standing over me hissing, “What’s the matter with you? Are you on drugs? Get up! You’re going to the basement!”

  I blame Dennis Hopper for what happened next.

  Before Vicky fired me she sent me to the basement to wrap like a hundred Blockbusters for rich Estée Lauder customers like Barbara Walters. Bitter, still light-headed, and knowing that my time at Saks was about to abruptly end, I thought it would be funny to scrawl MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM A SAKS SATAN WORSHIPPER! inside all the pre-addressed cards. I want to apologize to anyone who got one. Mystery solved, Barbara Walters: It was I. All around me, poor employees who, like me, couldn’t afford to shop at Saks Fifth Avenue were stealing items to give to their girlfriends or boyfriends as Christmas presents. Yes, it was pretty magical. I took a fifty-dollar Chloé perfume set. I didn’t care that it was stolen. It made me feel special. I vowed to myself that one day I wouldn’t have to steal expensive things to feel special. One day, when I was a rich and famous actress, people would give them to me in the form of gift baskets.

  Oh! Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing I really blame Dennis Hopper for:

  Even when I started making money, even when I had made it, I still felt poor. Like a poor, dirty, Dennis Hopper hippie. Right before Cape Fear came out, I was at my first big movie premiere in L.A., and at the after-party I stood at the buffet just stuffing my face with free food. The director of the film came up to me and asked, “Have you ever met James Woods?”

  And I answered, “Free food! Did you see? There’s free food!”

  And he said, “I want you to tell Jimmy Woods that story you told me about Dennis Hopper. He’ll love it. Let’s go over before he leaves.”

  Now, I was very, very impressed with James Woods. One, because I loved his acting, and two, because he had once smiled and said hello to me at Hugo’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. But I was starving, and there was free food.

  I was faced with a dilemma: I had slathered a huge amount of goat cheese on a cracker and I didn’t want to waste it, but I also wanted to meet James Woods. So I thought, OK, I’ll go over to James Woods, I’ll tell James Woods the Dennis Hopper story, and then I’ll eat my cheese and cracker. Great plan. So the director, my cracker
, and I walk over to James Woods, who is with a lovely young actress. The director sets me up; I tell James Woods the story. Everybody laughs. I’m a hit, and now I can eat my free food.

  Right when James Woods starts in with a funny story of his own I notice something is amiss. The goat cheese is missing from my cracker. I look around and see that my precious goat cheese has landed on James Woods’s really expensive suede loafers. Landed, as a New Yorker would say, in a perfect schmear!

  James Woods gets to the end of his story and everyone is laughing, and his lovely girlfriend is laughing, and he sees that I’m not laughing. In fact, he notices that not only am I not laughing but that I looked puzzled. I was puzzled, all right, because I was thinking, Why the hell did I have to take that cheese and cracker over to James Woods and how the hell am I going to get out of this? But James Woods thinks I’m puzzled because I don’t understand his story. So he says, “Don’t you get it?” and starts to tell me the entire story again. He gets to the punch line–which, for the record, was “Yes, officer, that man is in no condition to drive.” And I start fake-laughing as if to say, “Oh, now I get it. Too drunk to drive … Ha-ha.” And I just throw the cracker over my shoulder to get rid of it. James Woods is savoring the fact that I finally understand his joke, and he’s looking around the room, and he’s looking at his lovely girlfriend, and then he looks down at his shoe, and sees this huge schmear of goat cheese on his very expensive suede loafers and says, very James Woods–like, “Where the fuck did that come from?”