How James Dean Helped Create Dennis Hopper

On January 5, 1955, Variety reported on its front page that an 18-year-old actor named Dennis Hopper, who had made a splash playing an epileptic on an episode of NBC’s Medic, was signing with Columbia Pictures. Hopper’s agent, Robert Raison, had, in fact, taken Hopper to meet Columbia’s titan, Harry Cohn. But the meeting had not gone well. Cohn’s very presence—bald head, cigar, brusque manner, office full of Oscars—caused the nervous teenager, visiting a movie studio for the first time in his life, to break out in a sweat. “Come on in, kid!” Cohn shouted with gruff bonhomie. “You’re the most naturalistic actor I’ve seen since Montgomery Clift. What have you been doing recently?”

“Well, I’ve been down in San Diego, playing Shakespeare,” Dennis said. He had been something of a fixture at the city’s Old Globe since he was 13, winning a raft of declamation and acting trophies along the way. Cohn grimaced. “Shakespeare? Oh, no,” he said. He turned to Columbia’s veteran head of casting, Maxwell Arnow, the man who had discovered Humphrey Bogart. “Send him to school for a while. Take all that Shakespeare out of him! We don’t do that in movies!”

Dennis stopped sweating and looked Cohn straight in the face. “Go fuck yourself,” the boy told the head of Columbia Pictures. And that was that.

The previous spring, Dennis had graduated from Helix High School, in La Mesa, outside of San Diego. His family had moved to the area in 1949 from Kansas; Dennis had spent most of his boyhood in Dodge City. When he showed up in Hollywood that fall, a friend from Helix drove him down Sunset Boulevard, showing off Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood. “I just couldn’t imagine the wealth,” Dennis remembered. He always saw himself as a farm boy. Before he’d left for L.A., his father, a postal worker, had handed him $200, saying, “When that runs out, come home.” Before too long, as his younger brother David Hopper recalled, Dennis came home “in a brand new Cadillac convertible and gave us our first TV.”

Right off the bat, Hollywood had seemed a cinch. The first job Dennis landed was playing a Civil War amputee in an episode of ABC’s Cavalcade of America. He wrote home to his parents, saying that the director “couldn’t believe it was my first time.” The work, he noted, was “really easy”—a breeze compared to acting in the theater. “Just think,” he wrote, “$75.00 for 45 minutes work that’s almost 2 dollars a minute.”

Dennis Hopper in Los Angeles, 1956.By Richard C. Miller/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images.

As the incident with Cohn suggests, Dennis had a penchant for boldness. In order to win the part on Medic, he had consulted with an expert in grand mal seizures and faked an epileptic fit in the casting office. It was so real it caused a panic. But it got him the part. In the episode, Dennis looked like a kid who was born to be a movie star, all cheekbones and pleading eyes, sweet yet troubled—a smooth-faced teenage Clift.

After the Cohn fiasco, Raison took his young client to meet with the Warner Bros. talent scout Sully Biano, who said that the director Nicholas Ray was working on a movie for the studio that might be a good fit. The star of the film, like Dennis, had grown up in a farming community in the heartland; his name was James Dean, and the picture was Rebel Without a Cause. Ray agreed to cast Dennis. Ten days after the appearance on Medic, Hedda Hopper announced in her syndicated column that Dennis Hopper had signed with Warner Bros.

“When I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop making art,” Dennis later reflected. “I could live a cultural life.” For now, he didn’t need to think about flipping burgers or working construction or living up to his parents’ hopes that he might someday become a doctor or lawyer or engineer. David thought there was no way that Dennis—who was also mad for painting and poetry—could ever live that way. “He was an artist on a conceptual level,” David said. “He wasn’t a worker.” While his Helix friends began making their way through college or taking lunch-pail jobs, Dennis set out on a very different journey.

That was clear from the first day he began work on Rebel Without a Cause in early 1955, cast in the minor but conspicuous role of Goon. Nicholas Ray asked Hopper to read with various actresses trying out for Judy, the female lead opposite Dean’s Jim Stark. The next day, Dennis and his roommate, Bill Dyer, also an aspiring actor from Helix, were sitting around their apartment near the Hollywood Ranch Market when the phone rang. Bill grabbed it and told Dennis that a Natalie Wood was on the line looking for him. “Oh, she’s a star—Miracle on 34th Street,” Dennis said as he raced to the phone. When he said hello, Natalie asked, “Do you remember me?” He did. “I would like to have sex with you,” she told him, adding, “I want you to know that I don’t do anything but just straight fucking.”

“I was astonished,” Dennis remembered. “I came from a very conventional, middle-class family … and this was the 1950s, when girls … just didn’t do things like that.” He was more accustomed to the ways of Diane Phillips, whom he had dated at Helix, had showered him with flowery missives, which he had saved: “I love you and I want you.”

That night, Dennis picked Natalie up and they drove to Mulholland Drive, a prime necking spot. As he remembered it, he gamely attempted to go down on her. “Oh, no, no, no you can’t do that!” Natalie said. “Why not?” “Because Nick Ray just fucked me.” It was an education.

Natalie officially got the part of Judy after she and Dennis survived a car wreck on a rainy night coming down the steep and snaking Laurel Canyon Boulevard. They’d been drinking; Dennis was behind the wheel. In that instant, Natalie had proven she wasn’t the cute girl from a Christmas movie anymore. But the love triangle between the director and his two young actors—which had begun during pre-production, conducted in Bungalow 2 of the Chateau Marmont—created acute tension on the set of Rebel Without a Cause. While they were shooting the famous “chickie run” scene, with a pair of drag racers speeding toward a cliff, Dennis confronted the 43-year-old Ray about the deplorable fact that he had seduced a much younger Natalie Wood. “Someday you are going to have to start learning how to use your head and not your fist,” Ray told him. Dennis was in his first credited film role and already found himself perceived as a troublemaker.