My father, Dennis Hopper, believed that being on the road in search of something was very American. You had to keep moving forward no matter what. Ride into town, gunfight at high noon, then off into the sunset. “Easy Rider,” he said, was really a western with motorcycles instead of horses: bad boys, bikers and beads.
Traveling by car is the only way to get around if you live in sunny California. In 1969, I got to drive with my dad, his then-girlfriend, a willowy Native-American beauty named Felicia, our friends Bob and Toby Rafelson and their kids, Julie and Peter, to a seemingly faraway place called Taos, N.M. My father had discovered Taos during one of his many scouting trips for “Easy Rider,” which he had shot the year before.
My dad was 32. I was 6.
...According to my dad,
Taos was sacred. It was the land of American Indians and their
mountains, their beautiful Pueblo and their blue lake, which was meant
to be so spiritual you could land in Tibet if you bore a hole through
the bottom of it. He also told me more than once that rattlesnakes
refused to go to Taos because of its extraordinarily high altitude. They
instinctively knew not to travel past Santa Fe.
As we drove, my father
rattled off the names of adventurers who had populated the Taos
landscape over the years — artists, writers and activists like D. H.
Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Millicent Rogers, who had
resided there since the 1920s. They didn’t seem like regular people but
figures out of myth, characters who had bucked society to find their
own way in their own world, forming a grand community of outsiders,
together. Sounded good to me. No snakes — just artists, mountains and
Native Americans.
...Once we arrived in
Taos, we stayed at the Kachina Lodge. Giant-size kachina dolls stood
guard outside the hotel over the miniature versions housed inside. Some
were adorned with feathers, others with tiny turquoise and silver
jewelry. Julie and I found them all deeply enchanting. At this time,
Taos was a wonderfully sleepy Southwestern town nestled at the foot of
the beautiful Sacred Mountain. I was in awe of the particularly carved
wooden pillars that were placed in front of many houses and buildings,
and of the unique hand-painted beams inside them. The smell of burning
firewood was ubiquitous, and carefully applied murals made one feel as
though each home was a stand-alone one-of-a-kind.
A year later, in 1970,
my father bought Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos house, Los Gallos, from her
granddaughter, with all of Mabel’s original furnishings inside. He also
rented the house Mabel had built for her husband, Tony Luhan, on land
next door that belonged to the Taos Pueblo. Los Gallos was a place where
(from the 1920s to the 1950s) Mabel had invited artists, dancers and
writers like Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather and Marsden
Hartley to participate in the artist colony she had created there. Mabel
had great flair for mixing up pieces of furniture she had brought to
Taos from her time living in Florence, with Navajo rugs and pottery as
well as fine Venetian silks and Fortuny fabrics.
After he bought that
house, my father decided to live in Taos and leave L.A. for good, and
following in Mabel’s steps, to create a creative counterculture where
his friends — artists, actors, musicians — could come and gather in the
Mud Palace, as he liked to call it. Los Gallos had more than 10
bedrooms, a guesthouse and a carriage house — plenty of room to have
friends come and cross-pollinate their ideas. He wanted to set up an
editing room so he could work on “The Last Movie.” He also bought the
old Taos movie theater, El Cortez, across from the Ranchos de Taos
church, and used it to screen different cuts of the movie as he was
finishing it.
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