Shot by a Hollywood hellraiser

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN BANVILLEreviews Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967Edited by Tony Shafrazi Taschen, 546pp. £44.99

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to speak of Dennis Hopper and avoid the word icon. Certainly, as this book shows, he lived his life at the centre of the iconic world of 20th-century American culture. Not only was he an actor and a film star: he was also a talented visual artist, and a gifted photographer. Those who, like the present reviewer, assumed that he was the son of the much-feared gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and therefore born with a silver swizzle stick in his mouth, will be surprised to learn that in fact Dennis Hopper had his beginnings in the wheatlands of Kansas, and spent much of his early childhood on his grandparents’ five-hectare farm, just outside Dodge City.

When his father came back from the Korean War the family moved to Kansas City – which, confusingly, is not in Kansas but in Missouri – and there, at the age of nine, Dennis signed up for art classes. The museum where the classes were conducted also had a theatre, and the boy spent much time there, sketching the actors. Or so he said: it does sound a mite too patly prophetic to be entirely true.

In 1949 the family moved again, hopping over the Rockies to California. Young Dennis was not greatly impressed. "When I first saw mountains, I was seriously disillusioned. The mountains in my head were much bigger, and the ocean . . . Hell, I thought, 'that's the same horizon as in my wheat field'." When he started school in San Diego he joined the drama club, and, as in the tritest of Hollywood success stories, success came lavishly and fast: by the time he was 18 he had a part in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause. It could safely be said of him that he wasn't in Kansas any longer.

Although the star of that film, James Dean, was, at 24, six years older than Hopper, the two became close friends, and acted together again, somewhat improbably, in the Rock Hudson-Elizabeth Taylor blockbuster Giant.

It was through Dean, already a legend, that Hopper discovered the Los Angeles art scene; it was Dean too who urged him to take up photography. When the star died in a car crash, in September 1955, Hopper was devastated – “I felt cheated by his death” – and began to have serious problems professionally, even though he was still an apprentice in the Hollywood grind. Eventually his reputation as a troublemaker drove him out. He packed his paintings, had a martini with his agent, “got into a suit and tie” and headed for New York.

There he studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg studio, saw Brando at work, made friends with the likes of Paul Newman and Dean Stockwell, and married the film actor Margaret Sullavan’s daughter Brooke Hayward. Ironically, it was this marriage that brought him back into the Hollywood fold, when the couple moved west and settled in a mansion in Bel Air.

Hollywood, however, was changing, even if Hollywood did not know it yet. Indeed, it had been undergoing a long and subtle transformation: it is possible to see Rebel Without a Cause(1955) as a direct link to Easy Rider, a decade and a half later. That movie, which merely made stars of Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, was Hopper's apotheosis. It also marked the beginning of his devastating decline into drink and drugs, in which he indulged in crazed stunts such as the "Russian suicide chair" event, which he staged at Rice University, in Houston, in the early 1980s. "Basically, you put yourself inside a circle of dynamite, it goes off, and creates a vacuum, and if you're inside, nothing happens. It's like the eye of the storm. But if three of the sticks fail to go off, it doesn't work and you get blown to pieces." It worked. Afterwards Hopper said: "I've had hangovers that were much worse."

It took him a long time to drag himself out of the depths, but by the mid 1980s he had cleaned himself up enough to start working again. His portrayal of the demented Frank Booth in David Lynch's oneiric Blue Velvet(1986) marked his return to iconic status, and his part in Neal Jiminez's River's Edgeearned him an Oscar nomination. Hollywood, though a cruel place, is always willing to welcome back a repentant sinner.

Photographs 1961-1967is an appropriately gargantuan monument to this larger-than-life maverick and escape artist, whose death, last year, got him neatly out from under a welter of writs from hard-done-by ex-wives and lovers. In his photographic work he saw himself as an abstract expressionist – there are a lot of photos of walls here – but it is his portraits of his friends and fellow godlings of Hollywood and the fashionable art world that are most successful and, in a strange way, moving. How beautiful they were, these people, and how innocent it all seems, at this remove. They had such hopes, and such a notion of themselves. Here is Hopper talking to Lifemagazine in 1970: "We're a new kind of human being. We're taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries." Ah, yes: in his head the mountains were always bigger.

John Banville's latest novel is The Infinities