Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips: What Really Happened in Their 8-Day Marriage

Nov 8, 2023

7 min read

Updated: Oct 10

Collage of Dennis Hopper in a white cowboy hat, Michelle Phillips and the couple hugging, with the title Michelle Phillips and Dennis Hopper's 8-Day Marriage

On Halloween 1970, Dennis Hopper married Michelle Phillips in an adobe mansion in Taos, New Mexico. He read the ceremony out loud himself, by the light of candles stuck in paper bags. Eight days later she was gone. She filed for divorce the following day.

She’s barely talked about it since. He turned it into a one-liner. In between sit a film that was falling apart, a house full of guns and hangers-on and a set of allegations that Hopper answered, decades later, in about the worst way he could have.

Quick Answers

When did they marry? 31 October 1970, at Hopper’s house in Taos, New Mexico.
How long did it last? Eight days. Phillips says she filed for divorce the day after she left.
How did they meet? On Hopper’s film The Last Movie, shot in Peru in 1970. Phillips had a small part.
Why did it end? Phillips has never said publicly. Later accounts describe guns fired indoors and Phillips being handcuffed.
What did Hopper say about it? That seven of the eight days were pretty good.

Dennis Hopper sitting in a clawfoot bathtub in a sunlit room with painted windows, Michelle Phillips beside him

Who Were They in 1970?

Hopper was 34 and, for about a year, the most bankable wild man in Hollywood. Easy Rider had made him a director the studios couldn’t ignore, so Universal gave him money and control for whatever he wanted to do next. He’d also spent most of the 1960s taking photographs that are now treated as serious art. His first marriage, to Brooke Hayward, was over.

Phillips was 26. Born Holly Michelle Gilliam in Long Beach, she’d married John Phillips in 1962, sung on the Mamas and the Papas’ hits and had a daughter, Chynna, in 1968. The band broke up that same year. Her divorce from John came through in 1970, which means she walked into the Hopper story with a toddler, no band and a marriage only just behind her.

How Did Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips Meet?

They met on The Last Movie, Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider. He’d wanted to shoot it in Mexico, but the Mexican authorities didn’t like the idea of a film showing village poverty, so the production went to Peru instead. The American Film Institute’s catalogue entry lists Phillips as “Banker’s daughter”, a brief appearance that counts as her first film role.

The shoot was based in Chinchero, a mountain village about 11,000 feet up. The crew got there by a two-hour taxi convoy every morning. Dean Stockwell later reckoned that around three quarters of them went down with altitude sickness, a detail from Uncut’s oral history of the film, which also has the cinematographer László Kovács falling flat on his face on a gentle slope. There wasn’t much of a script left by then. Hopper preferred to improvise.

He wasn’t hiding how the cast and crew were spending their evenings either. At a press conference in Lima he was asked whether he’d given up drugs. “Why should I stop doing drugs just because I’m in Peru?” he said, a line preserved in a Daily Mail profile by Glenys Roberts.

Phillips has been blunt about her own judgement. She told The Strange Brew that she knew the film was going to be a disaster but was very interested in its director, then added that starting an affair with him was a really bad idea. Elsewhere she put it down to “this Florence Nightingale instinct”, with a warning to other women that it doesn’t work.

Inside the Mud Palace

Hopper had fallen for Taos while filming part of Easy Rider there in 1968. In 1970 he bought the Mabel Dodge Luhan house, a sprawling adobe built by the arts patron who’d once hosted D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O’Keeffe. Lawrence famously painted the bathroom windows. Hopper renamed the place the Mud Palace.

It filled up fast. One local history of his Taos years lists Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jack Nicholson and Allen Ginsberg among the visitors, along with a much larger crowd of people nobody had invited. Hopper set up an editing room in a log cabin in the grounds and bought a cinema in town to screen his footage.

Black and white photo of Michelle Phillips and Dennis Hopper, who is wearing a white cowboy hat, at an evening event

There was a lot of footage. He’d come back from Peru with about 40 hours of it, a team of 12 editors and a studio that was getting angrier by the week. Stockwell remembered him as being fond of guns at the time, the sort of fond that meant firing into the sky or the ceiling. Lawrence Schiller, who was at the house making the documentary The American Dreamer, described a man living as his Easy Rider character, stoned all day and carrying a rifle around.

In late October 1970 Hopper sent for Stewart Stern, the Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter who’d co-written the film, to help him make sense of it all. It took Stern two days just to watch everything. His verdict was that the film had no ending.

That’s the week Hopper got married.

A Halloween Wedding by Candlelight

The wedding was on 31 October 1970, at the house. Local accounts put it in the solarium. Because Stern happened to be there for the editing crisis, he became the main witness to it, which is why nearly everything known about the ceremony comes from his account in Uncut.

Hopper ran the whole thing himself. He read from the Gospel of St Thomas, an early Christian text, then read the marriage service too. He’d decorated the room with candles in paper bags, which sounds stranger than it is. They’re farolitos, a New Mexico tradition, though usually a Christmas one. Stern’s summary was “just craziness”.

One tabloid telling has Hopper waking up the next morning so out of it that he didn’t recognise his new wife. That comes from a single newspaper profile and nobody who was there has backed it up, so treat it as part of the legend.

What Happened During the Eight Days?

Two people knew for certain. One of them is dead and the other won’t say.

What Phillips has said is short. She’s called the week excruciating. And she’s said how it ended: “I scrambled out of Taos, New Mexico, and never saw him again.” She filed for divorce the next day. Her father, who’d urged her to do it quickly on the grounds that men like Hopper don’t change, was delighted.

Dennis Hopper in a paisley shirt smiling at the camera with his arms around Michelle Phillips in a timber-beamed room

The rest comes from other people. Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls says Hopper fired guns inside the house, terrifying Phillips and Chynna, then handcuffed Phillips because he’d convinced himself she was a witch. Stockwell’s memory of the indoor gunfire fits that picture, even if he wasn’t describing the same week.

Newspapers have spent 50 years repeating a different explanation, that she left because of his sexual demands. It’s always second-hand. In the interviews where Phillips discusses the marriage at all, she refuses to give a reason and points out that the eight days are a matter of public record.

Hopper did respond to the handcuff story once, in a 2004 interview with Ginny Dougary for The Times. His denial was this: “I didn’t handcuff her, I just punched her out!” In the same conversation he insisted he’d never beaten women up and that nobody had ever been truly hurt by him. Both statements can’t be true, which tells you most of what you need to know about how reliable he is as a narrator of his own marriage.

What Did They Say About It Afterwards?

Hopper had a line ready for the rest of his life. “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one,” he’d say. The wording drifted over the years. In The Scotsman’s version it’s “The first seven days were great.” The joke stayed the same.

Phillips got the other end of it. She’s recalled acquaintances asking what kind of woman divorces a man after eight days, as if the length of the marriage was the scandal. More than 50 years on she still won’t use his name. When Rolling Stone raised the subject, she called him “the name that shall never pass my lips”.

Black and white photo of a bearded Dennis Hopper hugging Michelle Phillips, whose eyes are closed

What Happened to The Last Movie?

It didn’t recover. By March 1971 Hopper had been editing in Taos for seven months, had only got his 40 hours down to five and a half and was five months late. The budget had crept from $600,000 to $950,000. Universal talked about taking the film off him.

It finally premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 29 August 1971 and won a prize there. Then it opened in America and sank. It lasted two weeks in New York and Los Angeles and three days in San Francisco. Hopper didn’t direct another film for about a decade.

He stayed in Taos for years, drinking and using at a pace that should have killed him, before working his way back as an actor. His turn as the babbling photojournalist in Apocalypse Now was shot while he was still deep in it. He married five times in all. When he died in 2010 he was buried in Ranchos de Taos, a short drive from the house where the shortest of those marriages began.

What Happened to Michelle Phillips?

She did what she’d gone to Peru to do. Jack Nicholson told her that if she wanted to be an actress she should join every workshop she could, advice she still calls the best she was ever given. In 1973 she played John Dillinger’s girlfriend in Dillinger and got a Golden Globe nomination for it. Later came a long run as a regular on Knots Landing.

Chynna, who was two that autumn, grew up to be a third of Wilson Phillips. Michelle is now the last surviving original member of the Mamas and the Papas. She’s happy to talk about almost all of it. Just not those eight days.