Rebel Without a Cause #2. Goodbye to Dennis Hopper, in his own words

Three quotes from Dennis Lee Hopper [1936-2010], best known simply as Dennis Hopper, about himself. Three quotes to say goodbye to the last of the "terrible boys" who rule Hollywood in the Fifties: Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Nick Adams, Sal Mineo... 

I could keep on and on, while remembering them and their unforgettable movies and movie characters and their quirkiness, and yet they are all gone now.

Some of them succeed in becoming a "beautiful corpse", some of them became a great old young spirit, like Dennis, here portrayed by photographer Bruce McBroom:

I should have been dead ten times over.
I've thought about that a lot. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around.

I've been sober now for 18 years. With all the drugs, psychedelics and narcotics I did, I was [really] an alcoholic. Honestly, I only used to do cocaine so I could sober up and drink more. My last five years of drinking was a nightmare. I was drinking a half-gallon of rum with a fifth of rum on the side, in case I ran out, 28 beers a day, and three grams of cocaine just to keep me moving around. And I thought I was doing fine because I wasn't crawling around drunk on the floor.

In the 50s, when me and Natalie Wood and James Dean and Nick Adams and Tony Perkins [Anthony Perkins] suddenly arrived... God, it was a whole group of us that sort of felt like that earlier group - the John Barrymores, Errol Flynns, Sinatras, Clifts - were a little farther out than we were... 
So we tried to emulate that lifestyle. For instance, once Natalie and I decided we'd have an orgy. And Natalie says "O.K., but we have to have a champagne bath." 
So we filled the bathtub full of champagne. Natalie takes off her clothes, sits down in the champagne, starts screaming. We take her to the emergency hospital. That was *our* orgy, you understand?

Dennis Hopper was a survivor, an icon, an "easy rider".
And a really good actor, director, writer, and painter. However, I think that his masterpiece has been for sure his own real life. When you say "bigger than life", you are thinking about him...
Ciao, Dennis!

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