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 The rains came to the Northeast on Sunday
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| Workman's glove in the rain. 10:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
January 18, 2010. Martin Luther King Day. Fair weather for mid-January in New York. The rains came to the Northeast on Sunday and New York got its share.
Friday Night I went to Elaine’s with Paige Peterson. This wasn’t a special occasion although I tend to think of a trip to Elaine’s as that. I’ve been going to Elaine’s longer than a lot of us have been on the planet. Elaine, however, is ageless and so is Elaine’s. What it is is pure Noo Yawk. Literary New York too, I might add. I doubt there’s anyone of that tribe who still doesn’t find it a bit of a thrill being there, at some time, and with the lady presiding.
It’s like that. The room is a monument to literary and creative New York. It is also a club. It is also a neighborhood pub. It is also the domain of its chatelaine, and it’s chateleine is from Brooklyn, boys. It’s one of the only watering holes I’ve ever known where there’s always business. And a lotta talk.
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| The scene at Elaine's this past Friday night ... |
On this night Elaine came over to sit with us. There’s always a lot to talk about with her because she loves New York and she knows it, and she knows the players. And then some.
While we were talking Paige went off with the digital, which I always think is a good idea. The result: if you’ve never been to Elaine’s, this is what it looks like and what it feels like.
I love talking to Elaine because she’s part of New York history at the center of nighttime New York for ... a very long time. She’s knows. I talk. As you can see from Paige’s pictures. And talk and talk. |
| I have opinions. So does Elaine ... |
| Paige with Stan Dragoit. |
The chef finishing up the night. |
Hopper in love. In the men’s room of Michael’s Restaurant, there are framed black and white photographs taken by Dennis Hopper. There’s one over the john of Brooke Hayward, his first wife, wearing an oversized crown (probably from a costume house) with a price tag attached to it. She looks like she’s in her 20s. Women often get taken to the men’s room at Michael’s to see Dennis Hopper’s pictures. Sometimes when I lunch there with Brooke, who is a friend of mine, I get to see the Before and the After. Those zany hazy Hollywood days, and Now. All very intriguing is life.
On the wall to the right of the sink in Michael’s is a black and white photograph of four men who look to be in their early to mid-thirties: Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Jeff Goodman, a close friend of Hockney’s. That day had significance. It was the first time Hockney met Geldzahler and Warhol. Dennis Hopper took this picture. They would be giants.
I’m one of those people who’d known Dennis Hopper only for his monumental paean to the changing cultures which we now call “The 60s.” And wasn’t that enough? Only those of us who saw “Easy Rider” when it first came out know what that film did to America’s psyche.
In the ensuing years, this man became a movie star, a director, a producer, as well as a canny art collector. His genius was his artistry. However, this has been widely recognized, which is why there has been so much talk among his friends far and wide of what is going on in his life right now.
He’s very ill with cancer. He reportedly has no illusions about his condition. The wild guy in his 20s and 30s who made a fortune off Easy Rider is a man facing steep realities, and that shrewdness which created that film and this Life is now fully employed.
He filed for divorce last week from his present (and fifth) wife Victoria Duffy. The media reports that the wife believes he did it for financial reasons – to deprive her of her “fair share” of a huge (at least to you and me) estate -- because of Hopper’s enormous contemporary art collection.
That aforementioned photo he took of Hockney, Warhol et al was taken several years before Victoria Duffy was born, to give you an idea of how long he’s been in the contemporary art scene.
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| Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and David Goodman photographed by Dennis Hopper in 1963. |
The reason that Hopper filed for divorce, I’ve been told, is that his days are numbered, and he wants to get his wife out of his hair and leave him in peace. Otherwise nothing has changed. He’d like to see their daughter, a six-year-old, and he’d like to be assured that no matter what else is going on, he can spend time with her without the addition of any kind of mental harassment from the missus who now seems preoccupied with property.
Evidently the Hopper marriage hasn’t been in good shape for quite some time. Mr. Hopper’s complaint I’ve heard more than once was “indifference” and “abandonment,” especially in the last few years of their almost fourteen-year marriage. I don’t know what Mrs. H’s complaints would be but no doubt she has them. After all, it was a marriage.
Ironically, he never complains about Mrs. Hopper’s spending. Astronomical in the shopping department. Out there in the land of Lives-of-Poor-People-As-told-by-Rich Hollywood-Stars, you hear the wildest stories about people’s pet habits (or hang ups). Someone said a million a year she spends, (although no one would confirm) if you counted the horse ranch in Brentwood that her husband bought for her.
Late last year, as her husband’s health declined precipitously, she got a lawyer and demanded a reading of the Will. Unusual, yes. Nevertheless her husband complied. The estate is divided 25% for her, 15% for their six-year-old, and 20% for each of Hopper’s other three children, two daughters, 47 and 37, and a 19-year-old son. All different mothers, the extended family of the nuclear age. Mrs. Hopper was originally the executrix of the Will.
After that unusual demand, Mr. Hopper decided to remove his wife as executrix, assigning it to his eldest daughter (by Brooke Hayward), Marin; who is 47, and four years older than her stepmother.
As you read here last week, things got so stressful with the missus around the Venice Beach compound that doctors advised Hopper to put up somewhere where out of the fray. He moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel.
On December 15th while he was entertaining his six-year-old daughter and his four-year-old granddaughter (by Marin Hopper) at his suite for the child’s birthday, Victoria Hopper ordered the removal of art, silver and personal possessions from the house, evidently claiming they were hers. After that she reportedly told her husband she was going with their daughter to Boston indefinitely. |
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| Enoc Perez, Dennis Hopper, Bill Miller, Peter Brant, Owen Wilson, Tony Shafrazi, Carol Perez, Stephanie Seymour, Victoria Hopper, Marilyn Minter, and Hiroko Onoda at The 2007 Guggenheim International Gala. Photograph by Patrick McMullan. |
Two weeks later, at the end of the year, Hopper was back in the hospital for treatments. Mrs. Hopper returned. She moved back in the house with her mother. There she stayed with her mother and daughter behind locked doors. Presumably so that her husband couldn’t come in at night.
Friends of Victoria Hopper have been quoted in the media as saying she was only concerned about getting her fair share of the will. The guy has cancer that is terminal so she’s just being practical, no? What she’s getting in the will is what evidently was settled when she signed a pre-nup when they married almost 14 years ago: 25% plus 15% for her child.
The problem here is that it sounds like a story where wife five is making a last stab to increase her share of what is obviously a very large estate. Have we heard that song before? Uh-huh. The woods, it sometimes seems, are full of ‘em. |
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| Victoria and Dennis Hopper at the After Party for Dennis Hopper "Signs of The Times" opening, September 2009. Photograph by Patrick McMullan. |
Irony is everywhere. Dennis Hopper has had five wives. This is a guy who has lived, who has tasted the wines. Don’t feel sorry for him. And don’t think he was always a day in the country. Five wives? The odds are not in his favor. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself either. He knows he’s lived and tasted. That was his karma, and in the end, the stroke of genius.
When he met Victoria Duffyin the mid-90s she was a waitress or a hostess in a very nice little restaurant in Venice, not far from the beach or Casa Hopper. She was in her 20s and he was ... not. She was a pretty New England girl out there in that exotic, erotic, beachside land of make-believe and act-now. What transpired was a marriage.
It looks like this was a marriage that had been coming apart at the seams for a long time. Money, however, changes people. The innocent little lamb who showed the Great Man (or the Big Bad Wolf) to his table in the Venice beach café is no longer that little girl. And he is just a man at the end of his time. An amazing time. |
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