Friday, July 29, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt twelve)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

My addictive impulses still show up out of the blue in unexpected ways, like the time a few years back when I had to have back surgery from doing too much spinning. It’s a workout they do in L.A. Not something you would necessarily want people to know you’d got hooked on, but I don’t give a fuck. It’s too late now to be hiding anything. Basically, spinning is aerobics on a bike. How it works is you have a bunch of people on stationary bikes, pedalling really fast (not the kind of pedalling I’m usually talking about) and looking at an instructor who tells them what to do. She says get out of the seat and you stand up on the pedals, get down and you go back down. There’s usually loud music as well – not the kind I would normally listen to, either.

Anyway, I got so obsessive about this whole process that I did it six days a week for a fucking year. I even reached the point where I was the guy on the podium and everyone was looking to me for a lead. Look, Ma, top of the world.



Thursday, July 28, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt eleven)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

Meeting Axl Rose was another unlikely landmark on my long road to sobriety. I was on my bike outside the Rainbow on a Friday night – trying to get laid as usual – and Axl just walked up to me. He had a big leather coat on and a military cap and he was fucking goo-goo-eyed about talking to me, which was a nice ego boost. It was all new to him then, and he just wanted to hang out. It must have been at the time when things were starting to take off for Guns N’ Roses, because there weren’t loads of people around him trying to get his autograph, but I knew who he was.

A lot of those dudes from the hair metal and thrash metal bands would say they were into punk when really they were into metal. But while Slash and the other Guns N’ Roses guys came from more rock backgrounds, Duff and Axl were real punk fans. We talked for an hour or so that night, and a few times after. I really liked Guns N’ Roses – they were a real band with a classic rock sound, not like the Poisons of this world. And Axl was cool. He ending up singing on the version of ‘Did You No Wrong’ that was on Fire and Gasoline. Axl does a verse, I do a verse, and Ian Astbury of The Cult does a verse – like bringing three generations together.



Wednesday, July 27, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt ten)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ is one of the best songs ever written about what that feels like. I always loved The Velvet Underground, and there are a few of Lou’s solo records I really like, too: Berlin, Coney Island Baby, Rock n Roll Animal – nothing wrong with any of those. He’s a fantastic songwriter, but he was awful live, especially in the later years. It’s bizarre how catchy those tunes are, because he could barely carry a note. I think maybe he’s one of those guys who was as good as whoever he’d got around him. The reason Transformer turned out as well as it did was that Bowie and Mick Ronson were so involved. If Lou had done it all himself, it would’ve probably been a load of shit.



Tuesday, July 26, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt nine)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

I was actually working with The Avengers when I got the call to say that Sid had died. Obviously Nancy had gone ahead of him to see if she could find a connection in the afterlife. I know that will sound dark, but it was a dark time. I’ve got no inside knowledge of what happened to either of them, but it was fucking grim. When I was told that Sid had died, I didn’t have a lot of feelings about it. I didn’t have a lot of feelings about anything at that stage, to be honest, so when some guy from Rolling Stone called me up, I just said the first thing that came into my head, which was: “well, at least we’ll sell some records now.’

In hindsight it was probably a stupid response, and I could tell that the guy was shocked. But it was also a very Sex Pistols thing to say, which in a strange way – as the idea of the band meant as much to him as it did to any of us – was maybe what Sid would’ve wanted. Later on, I did feel sad about what happened, especially through talking to his mum, who I got on with pretty well. Sid was not an idiot, he was quite an intelligent bloke, but one he was in the band the logic of his situation pushed him down a very dark track. As I’ve said, if we’d called him Sid Kind of Sid Gentle, he might’ve tried to live up to that instead, but I don’t supposed he’d still be on so many T-shirts.



Monday, July 25, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt eight)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

I’m not trying to take the credit away from Glen for the original songwriting, but the reason he and I worked so well together was that he’d come up with something quite fiddly – the ‘fucking Beatle chords’ that drove John up the wall – and then I’d drive a bulldozer through it. You hear some complex chord progressions played exactly right and they go in one ear and out the other. Give ‘em to someone who’s not too bothered about sevenths and elevenths, and all of a sudden they work on a whole other level. Glen was so polite that if he’d played guitar on our record I don’t think anyone would’ve noticed them. Once I took over the chords he’d originally written, we ended up with something that was brutally direct but not simple-minded; an iron fist in a velvet glove.

There was definitely a feeling that we were leading the pack, but a few upstarts were already snapping at our heels. Mick Jones came down to Denmark Street around the time of the auditions for a second guitarist. At the time he was dressing like Johnny Thunders or some other glam guy with the long hair and the platforms. He played along with us and it was exciting because he actually knew what he was doing, to a certain extent. The next time we saw him he’d got his hair cut and he was wearing shirts with writing all over them.

It was the same with Joe Strummer. He was in a band called The 101ers that we opened up for the first time we played at the Nashville. They were like a pub-rock thing but with more of a Fifties style to them – they reminded me of the early days of Let It Rock. I think we made him feel a bit out of date, though, cos he was converted straight away, and the next thing we knew, him and Jones were in The Clash together with Bernie Rhodes managing them.



Sunday, July 24, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt seven)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

Obviously my criminal supersense had not deserted me. I still had my eyes open for a tasty bit of gear. Sometimes I’d go and see a band, decide not to nick their stuff beforehand because I wanted to hear them, and then regret it afterwards, because they were shit. Uriah Heep was one of those, and Genesis, who I saw with Peter Gabriel when he had all the make-up and whatnot, so they were still just about sneaking into the glam category. Imagine all the trouble I could have saved the world if I’d nicked all their stuff!

Just because I was behaving myself at Malcolm and Vivienne’s shop didn’t mean I was neglecting my thieving duties on the fashion side. Knowing them put me on the inside track to some of the good shops that not everyone knew about. There was a place in Covent Garden called City Lights which was run by a guy called Tommy Roberts, a kind of barrow boy/avant-garde type. He’d had other shops, and he may have been involved in the setting up of Let It Rock. He also went on to manage Kilburn and the High Roads, the superior pub-rock band Ian Dury was in before he got his Blockheads together.

Anyway, you could tell this City Lights place was an exclusive kind of deal because Roxy Music got some of their clothes there. I think it was where David Bowie’s Pin-Ups suit came from as well. Also, you couldn’t just walk in off the street, you had to ring the bell and be buzzed up. It was in this strange area round the back of Covent Garden and I can’t remember how, but I worked out a way to get in there. Jimmy Macken and Wally helped me push the door in and empty the gaff into Jimmy’s van. I usually preferred to work alone on bigger jobs. I always felt other people were more likely to bloe it because they didn’t have the Cloak.



Saturday, July 23, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt six)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

I wouldn’t be legal on the roads till more than ten years later, after I’d moved to California. The driving test in America is a piece of cake: you just have to answer a few question and get round the block without killing anyone. Basically, a chimpanzee could pass it. In fact, I think it was specifically designed by the American automobile industry to ensure that morons would still be able to buy cars.



Friday, July 22, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt five)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

I’m trying to imagine what Malcolm must have thought of me when I started hanging out in the shop. He obviously didn’t think I was one of the regular run-of-the-mill kids who would walk up and down King’s Road at that time wearing tight suits and kipper ties and platform boots, although I did go through a phase of doing that. Cookie calls it the ‘Adam Faith in Budgie’ look, but I reckon that was more denim. There was a bit of Hunky Dory-era Bowi going on too, with all the tank tops and stuff, but I wasn’t so into that. Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane were the two big Bowie albums for me – the earlier records when he still had curly hair gave off more of a folky vide, which wasn’t really for me. It felt like something people in squats on Portobello Road would be listening to.

Anyway, back to Malcolm. I guess he would’ve noticed the energy that I had, the way that music and fashion mattered to me, and the element of fucked-up-ness that meant I didn’t give too much of a shit about anything else. They liked damaged goods, Malcolm and Vivienne, but I don’t think it was because they were looking for people they could use to put their ideas into practice. I think it was because they were quite damaged too.



Thursday, July 21, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt four)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

We got our original name – The Strand – from ‘Do the Strand,’ the first track on the second Roxy Music album. In the lyrics Bryan Ferry was telling people to ‘Do the Strandski’ – the idea being that this was the dance that all the cool kids would want to do, so that worked OK. And going up to the Rainbow in Finsbury Park to see Roxy Music on the For Your Pleasure tour in the spring of 1973 was a reall big deal for me and Cookie.

Another big gig for us around that time – well, a couple of month later – was on our old Christopher Wren turf at the White City stadium. That place was usually a greyhound-racing track, which had no appeal to me whatsoever (although, thinking back, I suppose there would’ve been some fat wallets there), but every now and then they’d put a big gig on. I remember this one as being headlined by Humble Pie, but Cookie assures me it was The Kinks. Apparently Ray Davies’s wife had left him and he had a bit of a tantrum onstage and retired from music at the end.

It bothers me a bit that I have no fucking recollection of this whatsoever – or of Sly and the Family Stone, who were on the same bill. Maybe I was pissed. Blackouts seem to have been a feature for me at those White City stadium shows, as Cookie also insists we were there for David Cassidy the next year, when a little girl got crushed to death at the front. What the fuck we’d have been doing at a David Cassidy show I have no idea, so maybe he could be taking the piss with that one. But maybe there was a local event we felt duty-bound to sneak in for nothing.



Wednesday, July 20, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt three)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

The reason I ended up bleaching my hair like Andy McKay of Roxy Music’s was that I’d already tried and failed to make it look like Rod’s. The thick hairdresser’s fucking do that would later save me from becoming a cartoon spiky-haired punk character like Johnny or Sid (much as I wanted to be one) was never going to allow me to tease it up the way Rod did. I had to spray a gallon of Aqua Net on my head to get it to stand up even a little bit. If someone had lit a match near me I’d have gone up like a human torch. It must’ve look fucking ridiculous.

Luckily I could do a better job with the clothes. I used to find out where Rod had got all the gear that he was wearing on the album covers, then head off up over Chelsea Bridge and nick it from the shops on the King’s Road where he’d brought it. I’d usually get the 137 bus, my getaway vehicle of choice. Take 6 was the place working-class people who were doing all right would go to buy the little slim suits with the big kipper ties like the normal cunts dancing on Top of the Pops would wear. It was called Take 6 but I always used to Take 7. Dave Brubeck would’ve stopped at 5.



Tuesday, July 19, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt two)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

Apart from Cookie’s house, another place where I found a bit of sanctuary was going to see Queens Park Rangers play football on a Saturday afternoon. It took me five minutes to walk up to their ground at Loftus Road. A load of other kids from Christopher Wren went and I just followed suit. If there was an away game I’d sometimes go to Fulham or Chelsea – and they’re my team now. I guess that’s a King’s Road thing.



Monday, July 18, 2022

the last book I ever read (Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones, excerpt one)

from Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol by Steve Jones:

Most of my memories of those times are happy ones. Like my nan giving me a bath in the sink, or making those amazing old-fashioned steamed suet puddings where she’d stretch a cloth over the top of the bowl and tie it with a piece of string. She’d fill the bowl with raisins and then cover the whole thing in treacle from a green and gold Tate & Lyle tin. There’s some things which happened last week that I don’t remember too well, but fifty-five years on I can feel how good that pudding tasted on my tongue as if I’m eating it right now.

My nan wasn’t spoiling me, she was just doing what any normal grandparent (or parent, come to that) would’ve done – nurturing, I suppose, is what you’d call it. I don’t remember my mum so much at this time, even though she was there. The flat was pretty crowded, so it was easy to lose track of people, but it’s my nan I remember doing all the cleaning up and making the dinners and checking everyone was all right. She was great.



Sunday, July 17, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt twelve)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

A dinner was arranged at Serendipity 3, the campy Upper East Side restaurant whose aesthetic echoed that of 1712. (Warhol was a regular there.) In attendance were Dennis, Peter, Southern, Gerber, the actor Rip Torn, and the novelist Don Carpenter. Torn was meant to play an alcoholic small-town lawyer in the picture, a role that Dennis had suggested and that Southern had claimed to have modeled on Gavin Stevens, a lawyer in a handful of William Faulkner novels. Dennis had wanted a character who came from the Establishment, and who was a motormouth, while Wyatt and Billy tended to communicate enigmatically, with head nods and “Yeah, man”s. He said that George Hanson, the drunkard lawyer, signified “trapped America, killing itself.”

What ensued at Serendipity 2 was a Rashomon that serves to illustrates much of the development, production, and afterlife of Easy Rider, a film forever enveloped in conflicting recollections, competing agendas, and everlasting grudges.

According to Torn’s memory, Dennis entered the restaurant wearing buckskins, already in the process of turning himself into Billy, and proceeded to threaten Torn with a bowie knife, after some jawboning about Torn and Southern’s home state of Texas. In other variations of the story, the weapon was one of the restaurant’s steak knives. Torn—like Dennis, a hothead who would later attack Norman Mailer with a hammer—was said to have disarmed Dennis using a move he’d learned as a military policeman. At that juncture, Torn remembered, “Dennis jumped back and knocked Peter on the floor, and I said, “There goes the job.” In Peter’s telling there was no bowie knife or steak knife. Instead, the combatants had brandished relatively harmless tableware—a butter knife and a salad fork.

Decades later, Dennis claimed on The Tonight Show that it was Torn who had pulled a knife at Serendipity, not the other way around, thereby triggering a defamation lawsuit by Torn. After years of litigation, Torn won, with Dennis on the hook for $950,000 in damages. Torn never did play George Hanson.



Saturday, July 16, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt eleven)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Dennis was eager to return to Los Angeles and photograph Watts. The conflagration had begun in the distressingly usual way: brutality on the part of white police operating under Mayor Sam Yorty’s and Police Chief William H. Parker’s hard-assed directives in a Black neighborhood. Motorcycle cop pulls over two Black motorists, possibly intoxicated. They turn out to be brothers. One of them—Marquette Frye—doesn’t want to be handcuffed, no fewer than twenty-six police vehicles arrive to assist, the billy clubs come out, the mother attempts to intercede and is pinned to the hood of a patrol car. The ensuing protest lasted six days. Thirty-four people died, many of them shot by police, and more than a thousand were injured. One man, who had been lying in his bed with his wife minding his own business, was shot eleven times by police. (After an inquest, the murder of that innocent man, along with every other at the hands of the LAPD or National Guard, was ruled justifiable.) For African Americans, it was a rebellion. For whites, including the media, it was a riot. In a particularly lurid description, a Los Angeles Times columnist called it “an anarchistic holocaust of shooting and looting ominously reminiscent of the Mau Mau eruption in British East Africa.”

The novelist Thomas Pynchon examined “L.A.’s racial sickness.” Writing in the New York Times, he observed, “While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized folly—the economy of the area in fact depending upon it—the black culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen—and can afford—to ignore.” It was a forty-five-minute drive from Malibu to Watts on a good day. The actual distance was incalculable.



Friday, July 15, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt ten)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Dennis mentioned to Southern that Marlon Brando had invited him to fly to Alabama to join the march with Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery. “Hopper, take care!” Southern cautioned; having grown up in the segregationist South, he knew the potential dangers. “You are spreading yourself thin—in this case, perhaps down to the proverbial mincemeat!”

Dennis flew down, likely during the final phase of the march, two weeks after the Bloody Sunday melee at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, when mounted police had brutalized the mostly Black marchers, sparking national outrage. As at Washington in 1963, a sizable contingent from the entertainment community arrived, most of them marching by day and then returning to a hotel at night, including Nina Simone, Leonard Bernstein, Joan Baez, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Harry Belafonte, who organized a “Stars for Freedom” rally and concert the night of March 24. Dennis, aside from photographing Dr. King (a stunning shot of the leader speaking at a podium bristling with microphones), focused his Nikon on the rank-and-file marchers: African American boys carrying the Stars and Stripes, white marchers clustered beneath a makeshift U.S. HISTORIANS sign, folks gathered on the porches of shotgun shacks, a group under the airport’s grimly iconic WELCOME TO MONTGOMERY sign. The images have the feel of photojournalism if it were practiced by Robert Frank or Walker Evans.



Thursday, July 14, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt nine)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Nick and Lenny’s anniversary party was a sparkling moment in early-sixties Hollywood. Dancing with everyone, Truman Capote stole the show. The writer was staying with the Selznicks on Tower Grove Drive; at a dinner there, he told Curtis Harrington how much he’d loved Night Tide. It was a year before In Cold Blood appeared in The New Yorker, but Capote brought along Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent who had solved the 1959 Clutter family murder case, to the Dunnes’ party. Dewey and Dennis, whose grandparents had leased land from the Clutters, would have had much to discuss.

Two years later, Capote hosted a black-and-white ball of his own at the Plaza Hotel in New York—and over-the-top exercise in exclusivity that was impossibly glamorous and grossly anachronistic, like something out of the Gilded Age. Leland and Pamela Hayward went (they shared a table with Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow), as did Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler, along with five hundred-something other celebrities, swans, and alpha personalities, from Tallulah Bankhead to Norman Mailer. Brooke had zero doubt that Capote had gotten the idea for his famous black-and-white ball from her friends Nick and Lenny Dunne—whom he had not invited.



Wednesday, July 13, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt eight)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

On June 10, Dennis and Brooke finally met Andy Warhol when they went uptown to the artist’s town house at East 89th Street and Lexington Avenue. Irving Blum had arranged the rendezvou with the aid of Henry Geldzahler, the impossibly well connected curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of American Paintings and Sculpture who was also Michael Thomas’s old friend from Yale. The Antwerp-born, gregarious, encyclopedically intellectual Geldzahler was among the few curators who was willing to stick up for Pop Art as a legitimate enterprise. During the proceedings, which included a happy reunion for Brooke and Henry (“It’s all wonderfully conncted,” she thought), two more artists showed up at Warhol’s house: David Hockney, in from London, and his “sexy friend,” the New York painter Jeff Goodman. As Hockney recalled, the artists, the curator, and the couple from Los Angeles hit it off so well that Dennis “invited us to come the next day and watch him shooting a television series he was working on.” After Brooke and Dennis left, Hockney mentioned to Warhol, Goodman, and Geldzahler that Night Tide was playing at the Selwyn on West 42nd Street; they all piled into a cab and headed down to the theater to watch Dennis on the movie screen.

Dennis and Brooke had much to discuss that night. Warhol had taken them to the studio he’d begun leasing earlier that year, a 2,500-square-foot space inside an old firehouse, Hook & Ladder 13, on East 87th Street. There they discovered that Warhol had been daubing paint onto a silver silk-screened image of Elizabeth Taylor. Cleopatra, the over-the-top sword-and-scandals epic, with Taylor in the title role alongside Richard Burton as Mark Antony, would begin its much-anticipated run in theaters the next day. (Miss Mac was scandalized by the affair Taylor and Burton were having.) What Brooke and Dennis were seeing in the studio that day was Warhol’s eureka moment as an artist. After the soup can paintings, he had gone all in on seriality and repetition, harnessing a commercial, mechanical process to machine-produce fine art. “Paintings are too hard,” he allegedly told an interviewer by way of explanation.



Tuesday, July 12, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt seven)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

One morning three weeks later, Brooke went into labor. She tried rousing Dennis as her water broke, gave up, and called a taxi, which took her to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where their daughter was born on June 26. They named her Marin, after Marin Milam, the journalist wife of Hank. Stewart Stern visited the hospital and photographed the tousled Dennis, and Toby, six month pregnant, showed up to wish parents and baby well. Brooke remembered having the feeling that life with Dennis—who was delirious with joy—was finally snapping into place after the trauma of the Bel Air Fire.

While Brooke was laid up in the hospital, Dennis burst in one afternoon, excited to tell her about a painting he’d just committed to buy from Blum: a twenty-by-sixteen-inch canvas by Andy Warhol, the New York painter whose work Blum had shown him in the Ferus Gallery office, along with Lichtenstein’s. It depicted a can of Campbell’s tomato soup.



Monday, July 11, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt six)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Their house was among the first of 484 to burn that day, a level of destruction never before experienced in Los Angeles. Burt Lancaster’s house on Linda Flora Drive was incinerated, but his art collection survived; it happened to be on loan to the County Museum. In Brentwood, Richard Nixon hosed down his roof ahead of the fire; he and his wife, Pat, then set off on foot with nothing but suitcases and Checkers, their cocker spaniel. “I have seen trouble all over the world,” he said, “but nothing like this.” Zsa Zsa Gabor compared the experience to the bombing of Budapest during the war. Fred MacMurray brought home a team from the set of My Three Sons to help save his house and family. The old Fonda place on Tigertail Road burned to the foundation.

It was said that the Bel Air Fire produced the richest class of evacuees since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Wealthy or not, the evacuees fleeing along Bel Air’s twisting lanes might be carrying an infant, a pet Chihuahua, a stamp collection, a baked ham. Dennis joined the stampede, sprinting from door to door and getting people out of their houses, along with their artworks, as he made his way down Stone Canyon. “There was a double-page picture of me in Paris Match—‘Unidentified man, hero of Bel Air fire,’” he recalled, “with a Juan Gris in one hand and a Picasso in the other.”



Sunday, July 10, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt five)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Then the studio loaned Dennis out to 20th Century Fox for Henry Hathaway’s From Hell to Texas (originally titled The Hell-Bent Kid), filming in the rugged Owens Valley of California. It was an opportunity to work with a veteran director. Yet Dennis had his misgivings. “The part was the weak son of the bad man,” he said, “and I didn’t want to do it.” Hathaway, who had begun his career close to the dawn of talking pictures, was a known hothead. “He would lose his temper at the drop of a hat,” said Harry Carey, Jr., who played a ranch hand in the film. Dennis and Hathaway tangled from the get-go. “I walked off the picture three times,” Dennis remembered. “And then he’d take me to dinner and be real charming. The next day he’d come on the set and say, ‘Forget that, it’s fucking dinner talk.’ On the set he was a monster, screaming and yelling.” Don Murray, in the lead role of a cowboy wrongly suspected of murder, watched as the relationship between Dennis and Hathaway unraveled, with Dennis, during one impasse, calling the martinet director “a fucking idiot” to his face.

What ensued during the making of From Hell to Texas would prove to be a Rubicon in Dennis’s acting career. As he told it, Hathaway’s insistence on insultingly microscopic direction only egged him on in his pursuit of Strasbergian greatness. It was as if James Dean’s honor were at stake. The final showdown came during the shooting of a minor scene in which Dennis was to deliver a straight-forward, informational line. “He insisted on doing it his way,” Dennis said. “I insisted on doing it my way.” The number of takes mounted as the hours went by. Around lunchtime, Jack Warner got Dennis on the phone: “What the fuck is going on? Do what fucking Hathaway says.” Hathaway pointed to an imposing stack of film canisters. “I have enough film in those cans to work for a month,” he snarled at Dennis. “We’re just going to sit here until you do this scene exactly as I tell you.” It went on all day and into the night, until Dennis finally broke down, crying. “We shot it 85 times,” he remembered. “Finally, on the 86th take, I cracked and did it his way. When it was all over, he came up to me and said, ‘Kid, there’s one thing I can promise you: you’ll never work in this town again.’”

That was how Dennis Hopper got himself blackballed from Hollywood. The story of his eighty-six-take martyrdom at the hands of Henry Hathaway is one of the central adornments of his outsider, rebel image: the impressionable Dodge City boy—under the spell of his hero, James Dean—broken on the wheel of Hollywood.



Saturday, July 9, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt four)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

For now, it was a time of thumping on bongos, lazing around coffeehouses, rolling joints, reading poetry, thinking about art, listening to jazz. For Dennis, the 1950s were “a great melting pot for the races,” and he got to meet some of his Black musical heroes: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and Miles Davis, who became his sparring partner in a boxing gym. Miles would taunt Dennis with profundities as they shot jabs at each other, to which Dennis would spit back, “So what? So what?” Davis used Dennis’s retort as the title of one of the most revered compositions on Kind of Blue. Dennis would say of his aesthetic foundations, “I’m really from jazz.”



Friday, July 8, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt three)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

At Madeira, Brooke cast herself as an “artistic eccentric, outside the bourgeois concerns that governed the rest of the student body.” Her tastes ran to cigarettes and J. D. Salinger. She worked at oil painting, her magnum opus being a canvas titled Nervous Breakdown. She starred as the pleurisy-afflicted Laura Wingfield in a school production of The Glass Menagerie, which aroused in her the first stirrings of a desire to explore a career on the stage—a notion that alarmed Maggie, who naturally forbade it.

The girl’s inspiration, and object of desire, was Marlon Brando. In the summer of 1954, while visiting Leland and Slim in Los Angeles, Brooke drove around town with Jane, Jill Schary, and Josie Mankiewicz, trying to hunt down Brando, “that hulking brute with the poet’s face,” as Jill described him. They were not successful. But Brooke did get to watch James Dean filming the Ferris wheel scene for East of Eden and went to a party hosted by David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones in Malibu, at which Cole Porter handed her a cigar. It was perhaps during this trip that Brooke and Jane found themselves with Selznick in his limousine when the bespectacled legend who had produced Gone with the Wind made a pronouncement that neither of the best friends would ever forget.

“Brooke will be the movie star,” he declared, “not Jane.”



Thursday, July 7, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt two)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

The Newport wedding was the third for Leland. He had already been married twice, to the same woman, a Texas debutante named Inez Gibbs, known as Lola; the first of those was an elopement when he was nineteen. In order to marry Maggie, he had broken off an affair with another of his clients, Katharine Hepburn. Or perhaps he hadn’t. When the incensed Hepburn learned of the marriage, she sent a telegram to the bride: “Dear Maggie—You have just married the most wonderful man in the world.” The recipient set fire to the cable as Leland watched. “He loved it,” Brooke said. “He told us that story all the time.” Brooke believed that her father continued to oscillate between the two headstrong actresses in defiance of his wedding vows. She recalled once finding herself on an elevator with Hepburn when a mutual acquaintance introduced them. “You are Maggie and Leland’s daughter?” Hepburn asked, sizing the girl up with mock horror. “I remember thinking, ‘This is a nightmare.’

By the time of the wedding in Newport, Maggie was pregnant.



Wednesday, July 6, 2022

the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt one)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

His parents were essentially Dodge City townies. Marjorie Mae Davis was a teenage swimming phenom; she was known in the family lore as being a state backstroke champion who had aspirations to compete in the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. In photographs, Marjoie is lithe and athletic, with apple cheeks, vivid eyes, and a broad smile. Dennis’s father, Jay Millard Hopper, worked at a grocery store, Busley Brothers IGA, and eventually rose to manager. A picture of the young Jay shows him with upswept hair and a full beard, standing beside a Coca-Cola delivery truck and wearing a clerk’s apron. He made this workaday outfit dashing with an Art Deco-patterned shirt, a neckerchief, and a proud grin. (Jay’s father had been a grocery store clerk as well, eventually making a living as a meter reader for the Kansas Power Company.) Marjorie and Jay were good-looking kids, and they got married in a hurry, on August 21, 1935.

Their son, Dennis Lee, was born almost exactly nine months later at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Dodge City on May 17, 1936. Marjorie and Jay named him after Dr. Foster Leonard Dennis, the hospital’s chief of staff. His middle name came down from Majorie’s maternal grandmother, Lee Masters McInteer, known as “Mammy Mack”—intense, eccentric, funny, given to strange habits. She practically lived off Sucrets throat lozenges and liked to carry a shillelagh, whacking people if they crossed her. Jay liked to tease Marjorie that she took after Mammy Mack. He was nineteen years old and Marjorie eighteen. Marjorie would say of their young family, “We all grew up together.”



Tuesday, July 5, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt fifteen)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Monday 24 March

All the same, life in Kiev has more or less gone back to normal. As well as the weather forecasts, Kievites are also carefully following the news each morning on the exchange rates of the dollar and the euro. In spite of promises to open the European market to Ukrainian goods, the hryvna continues to fall. For now, the trend cannot yet be described as catastrophic, but it is certainly not encouraging. Rallies involving pro-Russian forces continue to be held in the south and east of Ukraine, but they are attracting far fewer people. Several major operations by Ukrainian security services – which ended with the arrests of Russian secret service agents in possession of weapons and money intended for separatists – have reassured the east’s inhabitants about the SBU and the police’s determination to genuinely defend the state in Russian-speaking regions. Members of Pravy Sektor and self-defence groups, who took part in the Euromaidan movement, continue to enroll in the National Guard, which is already assisting the border guards in their task in the east and north of the country. The flow of contraband over the Russian–Ukrainian border has suddenly fallen tenfold, and in certain areas has dried up altogether. Many people in border villages are extremely unhappy, as they have lived off this illegal activity for more than twenty years. But it appears that the border will no longer be transparent. An increasing number of politicians are talking of the need to introduce a system of visas with Russia. If Europe does indeed get rid of visas for Ukrainians over the next two years, then the visa system with Russia will become a reality. That will not please the inhabitants of eastern Ukraine, of course, who are used to going to Russia on a regular basis for work. But there can be no return to the old ‘good neighbours’ policy. That is clear. Personally, I am not frightened by the possible introduction of a visa system with Russia. What frightens me is a possible Russian intervention in the east and south of the country. It would be wonderful not to have to think about the possibility of a war, but a day has not passed without that possibility crossing my mind. Even the first stirrings of spring – the earth warmed by the sun, the flowers suddenly blooming – are not enough to distract me from politics. I would dearly love to turn away from it, though. And I am not the only one.



Sunday, July 3, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt fourteen)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Tuesday 18 March

Thousands of Maidanistas and members of the self-defence have already begun military training. When the radio announces this news, the sense that war is imminent is only intensified. Before, the news was merely bad, focusing on sad events. Now it is bellicose and full of enthusiasm.

In recent days, the governor of Donbas, Serhiy Taruta–a businessman and one of the country’s less rich oligarchs–announced that he had paid for a twelve-foot-wide ditch to be dug along the Russian border and for a six-foot-high earth rampart to be built. Concrete fortifications have been constructed on this rampart, intended to stop the Russian tanks. The ditch extends over the entire border that the Donetsk region shares with Russia, a distance of at least seventy miles. If I ever describe this ditch in a novel, I will be sure to fill it with water and to populate it with crocodiles capable of biting through the Russian tanks’ armour plating.



Saturday, July 2, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt thirteen)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Saturday 1 March

Liza reacted without surprise to the appearance of satellite television in our country house. I explained that I had bought it because we may all have to leave the village if the situation becomes increasingly serious and dangerous. The calm and orderliness in Kiev are false. People everywhere suddenly have guns. Thieves and robbers are returning.

I went to the village post office, thinking of buying some khrenovukha–vodka with horseradish. I still find it strange that alcohol is sold in rural post offices; this never happens in Kiev. But this time they didn’t have any. All the other products you usually find there were on the shelves: sunflower oil, tins of fish, buckwheat kasha, margarine … But I felt like buying a bottle of vodka and a stamp, so I could stick the stamp directly to the label and give it to someone as a souvenir …

What if Ukraine became civilised overnight and alcohol was no longer sold in country post offices? I don’t believe that will happen! Something of the past must remain. Although, the less that remains, the better off we will be.



Friday, July 1, 2022

the last book I ever read (Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, excerpt twelve)

from Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev by Andrey Kurkov:

Monday 24 February

What will happen now? For the moment, Ukraine has other fish to fry, although everyone is concerned about a possible Russian military intervention in Crimea. Crimea is really the only pro-Russian region of Ukraine; the main Ukrainian patriots there are the Tatars, who number only 300,000. The Russian-speaking Slav population is about one and a half million people. The Party of Regions has infested almost all the regions. In Crimea, as in the rest of the country, all public offices–even those of district prosecutor and chief tax inspector–were assigned to people from Donbas, birthplace of the president and his party. Officially, the Party of Regions has around 1.4 million members, and 430,000 from Donbas alone, out of a population of seven million. But in general, it is a party of dead souls. Nikolay Gogol would have loved it. His character Chichikov would have had no trouble buying these virtual members of the party, subscribed by mines, factories, entire companies.