His other memorable appearances included the crazed photojournalist in Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979); an alcoholic father, again for Francis in Rumble Fish (1983); another alcoholic, this time a basketball star well past his sell-by date in Hoosiers (1986) – for which he received an Academy Award nomination – and a memorable scene-stealer opposite Christopher Walken in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993). His screen performances totalled over 200, against just eight shots as a director. One wonders if his was dissipated in this constant scrambling up a greasy financial pole erected in the cause of alimony and art purchases.
In the midst of continuing professional crises regarding his directing ambitions, his private life seemed to be weaving an almost parallel course. In 1961 he married Brooke Hayward, the aforementioned daughter of Margaret Sullivan and the infamous Hollywood agent Leland Hayward, a union which lasted eight years. During this time he began to collect art, almost exclusively American contemporary. He was one of the first people to purchase a Campbell’s soup can by Andy Warhol, for the princely sum of $75. Against a total outlay of just $28,000 he amassed works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and further pieces by Warhol, whom Dennis came to know personally. As part of his divorce settlement with Hayward, he was forced to give up his collection, which she sold for three-quarters of a million dollars (equivalent to over $50 million today). Dennis had to begin collecting again from scratch. He lost his second collection to another former wife, and now his third and final one is the subject of bitter dispute amongst family members even as I write.
At the height of his alcohol and drug abuses, Dennis married Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and Papas, a union which lasted exactly one week (he is reputed to have said “The first six days were great”). She accused him of “unreasonable sexual demands”. Then came a string of dancers, singers, and singer-dancers ending with Victoria Duffy, who was allegedly recently spotted (while Dennis was in hospital receiving chemotherapy) slipping out of the family house with various pieces of contemporary art. Dennis’ attempt to place a restraining order on her preventing her from coming within ten feet of him was apparently ongoing at the time of his death. Sadly his final appearances looking like a frail King Lear was probably a role he was actually close to playing in his own disrupted household.
The work Dennis achieved as a photographer and artist has, in my view, been disgracefully overlooked, especially in Britain. However in a typically perverse Hopper-type finale, The Hermitage in St. Petersberg gave him a one-man show in 2008. Some of the work there had been on show in LA. Dean Tavoularis (Oscar-winning Production Designer on most of Francis Coppola’s major pictures) and I made a point of dropping by the Ace Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard on a typical day, with only a few spectators present. The most shocking pieces were the enormous monochrome canvasses, some as large as 10’ x 20’, literally eating up vast walls. Knowing Dennis’s photographic work quite well, we realised that they were painted representations from 35mm frames, enlarged vastly and painted on canvas.
Dean and I looked at each other in disbelief. The scant catalogue and information on the walls seemed to indicate that Dennis had painted them himself. Dean exclaimed, “Dennis would never have had the time or patience to paint all these!” Anyone who knew him well would have known this immediately. So how had the work been achieved? By nosing around the gallery and putting two and two together, it became clear that Dennis had employed other artists to work under his guidance. And who were these artists? Why, those painters of Hollywood signs, like the good old Malboro Man who used to nestle alongside the Chateau Marmont on Sunset in the 1970s and 80s. Long since made redundant by laser and computer technology, these skilled craftsmen were employed because of their ability to project an image onto an enormous canvas whilst keeping perspective and proportions under control.
What a great idea, we thought, but rather than trying to hide the work’s gestation, why didn’t Dennis use it as a way to make a virtue out of the concept, and to integrate these pieces, basically of poster art, within the tradition he was celebrating? By so doing surely he would have appealed to a wider public, and why he didn’t explain the concept and execution of this unique new work more explicitly remains a mystery for Dean and myself to this day. So we left, shrugging our shoulders and muttering, “Well that’s Dennis for you, I guess.”
Dennis’ involvement in the art world included strong friendships with David Hockney and Andy Warhol, amongst others, and occasional bizarre events such as the incident in a field in Houston, Texas in 1983. Dennis had been to an opening of Out of The Blue and had announced that he wanted to blow himself up. As he started to wave sticks of dynamite around – I can only assume he meant it to be an “art happening” – city officials bundled him into a car and drove him to a field well outside the city’s limits and its fire regulations. Here, with the help of a stunt co-ordinator and various assistants, Dennis entered a flimsy-looking cardboard structure covered in foil to sit himself on a “Russian Dynamite Death Chair” placed over six sticks of dynamite. There was an agonising pause while he failed to ignite three matches. Then a tremendous explosion occurred, followed by plumes of white smoke, through which Dennis emerged unscathed apart from damage to his eardrums. “Wow, man.” He was heard to mutter, “That’s worse than being hit by Mohammad Ali!” His theory was – and who can now dispute it – that the force of the explosion would be outwards, away from him, and the flimsy plywood structure would insure an even dissolution of the shock waves. Well, I guess he proved his point but he couldn’t hear properly for three months, and as far as I know, the event was never included in his canon of art works (although it can be seen in grainy 8mm on YouTube).
