Marin Hopper's Malibu Memories

When I think of what I love most from my childhood, I think of two magical places in Los Angeles. The first is the Malibu of the 1960s, where my family often spent weekends with Jane Fonda (who was best friends with my mother, Brooke Hayward, growing up), Jane's husband, Roger Vadim, and her brother, Peter Fonda, with whom my father, Dennis Hopper, later made Easy Rider.

Jane is my godmother, and I really looked up to her. She is this mix of sporty American and delightful European. She and Roger had been living in France for a few years, and I remember thinking she was very sophisticated. She wore her hair in a chignon and would make bouillabaisse and French garlic bread for Sunday lunch, which she would serve at a long farm table. It seemed very exotic. All sorts of people would stop by—you'd have Terry Southern (who co-wrote Easy Rider), Teri Garr, and the gallerist Irving Blum, along with Irving's artists like Ed Ruscha. I remember that for a man who uses words a lot in his paintings, Ed was always quite shy.

Malibu was very relaxed then, without any paparazzi, and there was a real sense of an artists' community. All the houses were these cottage-y shacks right next to one another, and the beach was like a big shared backyard. People were always wandering in and out of each other's houses in their bathing suits, drinking wine.

There was an easy glamour to it all. When I smell Bain de Soleil, it reminds me of my childhood. My mother's yoga teacher would come to the house. And when I was about five, I remember Jane prepping for Barbarella, doing archery in her bikini.

At the time, Diana Vreeland had hired my father to take pictures of people he thought were cool. Between acting jobs he'd have his camera with him all the time, and he loved going out to Malibu to document the whole scene. The world had converged: Artists and actors and musicians were all in L.A., and my father was very into taking pictures of them. My older brother Willie even used to draw my father with a "camera head" because he always had a camera in front of his face.

Most afternoons, Peter Fonda would start playing the guitar, and lunch would break down into a sort of party. We'd take long walks on the beach as a group—the adults would bring their wine, and we'd go into the tide pools and collect shells. The actress Jennifer Jones was a close family friend, and she showed me how to draw big fans in the sand with sticks, and we'd decorate them with seaweed and shells. She always wore caftans. Jennifer had the same "Oh, darling, let's just sit on the floor and eat grapes" kind of glamour that Jane had. Her house always smelled of Rigaud candles. I still think of her whenever I smell one.

It was around that time that the idea of Easy Rider was born. My dad and Peter were talking on the beach one day, and they both loved motorcycles, so they said, "Let's do a movie about motorcycles."

My other favorite place was our house on North Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills, which we called the "Pop House." My parents envisioned it as a new kind of environment for us to grow up in and scoured junk shops, galleries, and antiques stores to decorate it. It was an incredible mix of high and low. There was a 12-foot clown my father found in Mexico that was mounted on our living room ceiling above a Victorian sofa, a black-and-white barber's chair, and an Eames chair; a giant street lamp from Paris inside the entrance of our house; and circus posters from floor to ceiling in the circular foyer. Our fireplace mantel had a gum-ball machine sitting on it, and my parents bought a yellow Checker cab to drive around. People on the Sunset Strip would shout "Taxi! Taxi!" as we rode home from school.

There was a real sense of experimentation in the air in those years. There were a lot of parties, and people were always sleeping over. I remember coming downstairs one morning and there were all these Hells Angels in sleeping bags on the floor. My mother told me, "Those are some friends of Daddy's."

My father was a great collector of people and art, and he used to boast that he went out and bought one of Andy Warhol's soup cans for $75 the day I was born, in 1962. This was before Warhol was famous, of course. When I was a baby, my parents even threw Warhol a party to welcome him to L.A. Even as a kid, I loved the art. I learned to hula hoop standing in front of Ed Ruscha's Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, and we had Roy Lichtenstein's Sinking Sun in the living room. I thought it was like a cartoon come to life. There was also Warhol's Double Mona Lisa, a Jasper Johns, and a Marcel Duchamp called Hotel Green. My father had an incredible eye.

Once, when my father was shooting a western, he came back from the set with the station wagon full of big rubber cactuses and boulders, which became our backyard decoration. And my parents even wallpapered the bathrooms with cutouts from billboard ads: I recall my mother standing there in a bikini and extravagantly large pearl earrings, papering the walls with ads of women applying lipstick and combing their hair.

My mother and Jane both had an elevated sense of style. Jane would wear maybe an Yves Saint Laurent poet's blouse and some little cigarette pants. My mom loved James Galanos or Rudi Gernreich for going out at night, but for day she'd wear embroidered Mexican peasant blouses and huaraches. She was more traditional than my father; I remember he took me to Disneyland, but we got stopped at the front gate because of his long hair and weren't allowed in. And I'll never forget him going to a movie party in a purple velvet tuxedo and a matching hat.

But my parents were divorced by then. Easy Rider marked the end of their marriage and, sadly, the end of the Pop House and Sundays in Malibu. My dad had some wild years after that, but he had a great sense of decorum. He was the most generous, kind guy, with an incredible sense of innocence and exuberance. I miss calling and talking things over with him. Just walking from the front door to the car was an adventure with him, and he made all of Los Angeles an adventure for me.

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Pictured above: Dennis Hopper with daughter Marin in 1964.

Jane Fonda on the beach in Malibu in 1965, photographed by Dennis Hopper.