The one time I worked with the late Dennis Hopper was when he cut the voice-over track for the TV documentary based on my book The Black Leather Jacket. I had to fly with the TV sound crew to Glenwood Springs, Colorado because Hopper was shooting the movie Flashback in which he played an Abbie Hoffman-like character who had been hiding from the feds for over twenty years – and also delivered the lame and less than prophetic line, “The 90's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's.” Although it strained the documentary’s budget I was happy to spend a few days in the Colorado Rockies because I knew Doc Holliday was reputedly buried in the Glenwood Springs’ Linwood Cemetery (although no one’s too sure) after dying in the local sanatorium. My objective was to make a pilgrimage to his grave, but, I was regretfully defeated by my unwilling lungs. At close to 6000 feet the air is kinda rarified (and you get drunk real easy) and when I discovered that Linwood Cemetery was three quarters of a mile up an overgrown rocky trail up a serious mountain, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. Returning to the hotel, I encountered Hopper in the lounge. When I recounted my tail of failure and thwarted plans, he laughed. “Hell, Doc made it up there.”
But when I replied that Doc was already dead and must have been carried up the trail, he saw my point.
Click here for The Black Leather Jacket
The secret word is Altitude
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5 comments:
I thought Doc Holiday ended his days in NYC as a sports writer and was buried here.
No, my friend, that was Wyatt Earp.
nice story
I think if I was Doc, I would have been well and truly pissed off with the world. He moved West when he was about twenty but knew that he was already dying. Imagine that, at twenty, knowing your days were numbered. It's a crappy hand to be dealt. But Doc was a gambler, played his hand and lived on the edge as long as he could. Here's to him.
Holliday died in his mid thirties so he did manage to stretch his doom watch for a full decade and a half of mayhem and decadence before finding his naked toes funny in his deathbed. Not too shabby. Bat Masterson became a sports writer in NYC--there are movies about it, too--and Earp did referee a boxing match (badly) post Tombstone, traveled a bit with Josephine, and settled in LA, where he made pals with the founders of the movie industry--Ford, Tom Mix, Harry Carey, etc. Earp and Josephine sold his story (pretty much) to Stuart Lake, who laid the groundwork for all the Earp movies that followed. He's buried in a Jewish cemetery south of San Fransisco which requires no climbing whatsoever, unless you have to climb over the barricade after the cemetery has closed, like I did.
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