The loco gringo

Flush with his take and an Oscar nomination from the $40 million-grossing “Easy Rider,” the loco gringo/auteur had bought Taos legend Mabel’s adobe house as an editing shack in 1970, although he had originally leaned toward Bing Crosby’s Elko, Nev., ranch.

Taos summoned him with its flaming sunsets, ancient pueblo and the sprawling compound where Luhan played doyenne of the arts as the Gertrude Stein of the West. He said her ghost chased him around what he’d christened “The Mud Palace.”

He also claimed to have encountered the spirt of writer D.H. Lawrence during drug-infused hallucinations. His living guests included Jack Nicholson, Joni Mitchell, Bo Diddley and George McGovern. In 1970, he married the Mamas and Papas’ Michelle Phillips on Halloween night in the home’s cavernous red-and-brown-tiled dining room before a Native American “half-moon peyote fireplace.” She left after eight days.

Hopper was just 33.

There seemed to be no limit to the anecdotal gold to be mined from his carnival life.

For Tom Folsom — author of the first Hopper biography from a major publishing house — Hopper was both an inscrutable literary character and a modern day incarnation of the American Dream.

Born in the already mythical Dodge City, Kansas, Hopper appeared in “Rebel Without a Cause,” was the first art patron to buy one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans and directed “Easy Rider,” a commercial smash that was the toast of Cannes. Bloated with bluster and jive, Hopper claimed he never read books and learned everything he needed from the Museum of Modern Art.

“The greatest role he ever played was himself,” Folsom said. “He was a bad boy during (his time in) Taos. But at the same time, people said he could be charming, too.”

Dennis Hopper, left, appeared in “Rebel Without a Cause” with Natalie Wood and James Dean.

Folsom will discuss that legacy and his book “Hopper: A Journey into the American Dream” (Harper Collins, $26.99) at four book-tour stops in New Mexico in April.

When Folsom, the New York author of “The Mad Ones” (a biography of mobster Joe Gallo), approached Hopper’s literary agent, he learned that at least four or five versions of the actor’s life story had been stagnating for 30 years. “He had that outlaw quality,” Folsom said. “Being a movie buff, I loved the same things Hopper had: James Dean, Orson Welles and Elvis Presley. I started stalking the streets of Hopperland.”

Fueled by his early success, Hopper had bet it all on an elliptical “Easy Rider” follow-up, “The Last Movie.” Universal pulled it after it spent a week languishing in theaters. Hopper’s name became synonymous with counterculture casualty.

Shooting a tree

A 1975 Taos police mug shot shows the disheveled actor after he had won some acid in a poker game at the La Fonda Hotel. Hopper stepped out onto the plaza and shot (with a .357 magnum) what he thought was a giant grizzly bear. (It was a tree). He sprinted back toward The Mud Palace, only to be handcuffed and thrown into the same jail where he had filmed the drunk tank scene with Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider.”

Folsom spent three months in Taos collecting stories, then flew to Venice, Calif., to talk to Hopper’s art buddies.

The actor died of prostate cancer in May 2010 and was buried south of Taos. Folsom launched his research a month later.

“I got banned from the funeral,” he said. “But so did Peter Fonda, so I thought I was in good company.”

Fonda and Hopper had been estranged ever since Hopper sued his co-star for points on “Easy Rider.”

It seemed everyone had stories to tell; the interviews became almost confessional.

“They wanted to talk,” Folsom said, “just trying to figure this guy out.”

In 1976, Hopper tried to kill director Harry Jaglom with a catsup bottle.

“You couldn’t tell if he was playing a role or if he was really nuts,” Folsom said. “Someone said, ‘Oh, he’s playing his psycho Dennis Hopper act.’ What happens when you live your whole life like a cowboy maniac?”

Dennis Hopper was arrested by Taos police in 1975 after he shot a tree on the town’s plaza.

Hopper had discovered the mountain hamlet of Taos while location scouting for “Easy Rider.”

“He literally wanted to be the cowboy,” Folsom continued. “What better place to play cowboy than Taos?”

Hopper was the chopper-riding hippie outlaw. The prophetic jungle madman in “Apocalypse Now.” The psychopath of “Blue Velvet.” One of the kids gone wrong in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The fledgling actor taken under James Dean’s wing. The quintessentially American dreamer who longed to be the next Orson Welles. The hell-raising director who both revolutionized and infuriated Hollywood.

He also studied Shakespeare, worked for the famed Pasadena Playhouse and attended the legendary Actor’s Studio.

He was married five times, scored a nasty cocaine and alcohol habit, and went to rehab.

He once confessed to snorting three grams of coke a day as he drank a half-gallon of rum, with a fifth on the side, plus 28 beers.

Key to the city

Toward the end of his life, the city of Taos presented Hopper with the key to the city. Thirty years earlier, officials there would have gladly thrown it away and tossed the actor in jail.

“The (Taos) locals tell the tales of the Chicano-hippie wars of the ’70s,” Folsom said. “He’s not the guy who brought the communes to Taos, but he’s a good scapegoat.”

In fact, members of the New Buffalo Commune refused to allow Hopper to film an “Easy Rider” scene there, so he recreated it in Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon.

His friends saw him as a kind of folk hero and artistic savant who painted, sculpted and photographed when he wasn’t acting, writing or directing.

“People say this guy was poised to become the next Fellini or Bergman,” Folsom said.

Hopper grew up with his grandmother, watching the trains chug by in the old cowtown of Dodge City and dreaming about the movies. He never forgot seeing Erroll Flynn and Humphrey Bogart in 1939 as they campaigned for the movie of the same name.

Hopper’s mother ran the local swimming pool after essentially dumping him with her parents and telling him his father was dead. In reality, Jay Hopper was working for the O.S.S. during World War II. His son would never understand why his mother lied to him. “I think the key to him is this ‘Wizard of Oz’ existence,” Folsom said. “All he has to do is watch the trains go by and look West and dream of going to where the cowboy movies were made. He wanted to be in that magical cowboy land.”

Hopper once told Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes II” that Taos was the worst mistake of his life, a remark Folsom discounts.

“You have Charlie, almost like your stern father,” he said. “And here’s Dennis trying to get acting gigs still. Sometimes, it’s easier to say, ‘Oh, yes, it was really bad.’ ”

Hopper would eventually sell his Mud Palace after the IRS began confiscating his art collection. He kept the town’s old movie house as an artist’s studio.

“He wanted to be buried in Taos –– in a Penitente cemetery,” Folsom said. Hopper got his wish when he was interred near the famous San Francisco de Asis Catholic Church in Ranchos de Taos. “There’s no doubt it was his spiritual home,” Folsom said.