But he also got into acting, watching westerns in the town’s silver-screen movie theaters and, during his high school years, taking drama classes in La Mesa, outside San Diego. Introduced to art by “a Rocky Mountain watercolorist,” the rambunctious farm boy naturally gravitated to it, learning to sketch from life in art classes at the Kansas City Art Institute. If life’s dice had landed differently, the restless youth from Dodge City might have become an artist instead of an actor. Leaving himself open became a survivalist’s credo: a way to rebound and reinvent himself, time and time again, by simply rewriting the rules of his own game. Some were as focused as the relentless interstate highway that crosses his native state of Kansas others were as unpredictable as the path of a skittish horse. The trail may not be going that way.” 2 The many trails that Hopper blazed during the course of his remarkable life didn’t always lead to a pot of honey. It’s not like my life is some miraculous thing, I just leave myself open. “I sort of follow the bee, you know, to the honey. “I’ve never had a lot of direction in my life,” the spry seventy-three-year-old admitted with a laugh during our interview at the Harwood three days before the celebration. Surrounded by well-wishers, Hopper seemed to relish the moment as an auspicious gift.
If you live long enough, most of your detractors disappear and most of your notorious deeds are forgotten. But on that calm spring day in 2009, a jubilant assembly of artists, reporters, politicians, and supporters packed the Harwood Museum of Art to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the release of Easy Rider and to preview the exhibition that Hopper had organized around the work of his longtime friends and fellow Taos settlers Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price, and Dean Stockwell. To local Taoseños, Hopper and his crew appeared like an alien invasion, a perception amplified by his countercultural encampment a few years later at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House during postproduction on The Last Movie (1970–71). Forty-one years earlier, when the long-haired first-time director stormed the town to film Easy Rider and cruised through a deserted Taos Pueblo with Peter Fonda on a pair of choppers, such a tribute would have been unthinkable-akin to handing over Gotham City to the Joker.
No one looked more surprised than Dennis Hopper on the morning of May 6, 2009, as he was appointed honorary mayor of Taos and presented with a key to the city.