Rocky Dennis: The Real Story Behind the Film Mask
Updated: Sep 21
Rocky Dennis was handed a deadline as a toddler. Doctors said the disease in his skull would take his eyesight, then his hearing, then his brain, and that he wouldn’t see his seventh birthday.
He lived to 16. He went to an ordinary school, graduated junior high as an honour student and left behind a mother who’d fought every doctor and teacher who tried to write him off. Seven years after he died, Cher turned that mother into a film star in Mask. What happened in between, and behind the scenes of the film, is a stranger story than the movie tells.
Quick Answers
• Who was Rocky Dennis? A California teenager (1961 to 1978) with craniodiaphyseal dysplasia whose life inspired the 1985 film Mask.
• What was his condition? An extremely rare bone disorder that thickens the skull and face. Orphanet puts its prevalence at fewer than one in a million.
• How long did he live? Sixteen years. Doctors had predicted he’d die before he turned seven.
• Who played Rocky and Rusty? Eric Stoltz played Rocky and Cher played his mother.
• What happened to Rusty? She died in 2006 aged 70, about a month after a motorcycle accident.
• Did the film win awards? Mask won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Cher won Best Actress at Cannes.
A skull X-ray and a deadline
Rocky was born in 1961 and looked perfectly healthy. Then, when he was about two, an X-ray technician spotted irregularities in his skull. Tests at UCLA Medical Center followed, and they turned up something almost nobody had heard of: craniodiaphyseal dysplasia.
It’s a rare sclerotic bone disorder, and the word to hold onto is thickening. The bones of the skull and face keep laying down more bone than they should. The National Institutes of Health traces it to mutations in a gene called SOST, and says the extra bone narrows the openings in the skull where nerves pass through. MedlinePlus adds that it can press on nerves in the head and neck and raise pressure around the brain. In a child, that can mean severe neurological problems.
For the Dennis family it meant a timetable. Doctors expected Rocky’s eyesight and hearing to fail, his headaches to worsen and the pressure to destroy his brain before he reached seven. Families of children with visible differences have faced hard choices about how much of them to show the world, and some chose far darker paths than the Dennises did. The story of the hidden Bowes-Lyon cousins is one example.
Rusty Dennis: a fighter from Brooklyn
Rusty Dennis was used to doing things her own way. According to her Los Angeles Times obituary, she grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a truck driver. She started riding with bikers at 14 and left school at 15 to work as a dancer at Coney Island. At 17 she married a truck driver, Tommy Mason, and their son Joshua was born.
In her late teens she joined a motorcycle stunt team called Speedy Babs and his Cyclettes, and later went back to Coney Island as an exhibit hawker. Then she married a painting contractor named Roy Dennis and moved with him to Covina, California in 1959. Rocky was born two years later.
It was an independent, hard-edged start in life, and it gave her something her younger son would badly need. She wasn’t intimidated by authority, so when the experts spoke she wasn’t easily impressed. If you want a feel for the biker scene she moved in, we’ve covered photographs of the Hells Angels taken by Hunter S. Thompson.
Refusing the prognosis
Rusty simply didn’t accept the deadline. When doctors said Rocky’s poor eyesight would keep him from learning to read, she ignored them. When teachers tried to steer her away from putting him in a public school, she disregarded them too. The family lived in Covina and Glendora, and she insisted her son live as normal a life as possible.
It worked better than anyone had predicted. By the time Rocky finished junior high he was an honour student who had learned to accept his appearance and had a knack for making friends. Anna Hamilton Phelan, the screenwriter who’d later tell his story, was struck by his happy-go-lucky attitude.
She said Rusty wasn’t a conventional mother, but she was the perfect one for Rocky because she never made him feel sorry for himself.
October 1978
Rocky’s health didn’t hold. He died in Covina in October 1978 at the age of 16, about nine years after the doctors’ deadline had passed.
His mother’s obituary confirms the age and the place but not a medical cause. Some accounts list complications of his condition. Others cite sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder.
Turning Rocky into Mask
Seven years later his story was on cinema screens. The screenplay came from first-time writer Phelan, and according to the American Film Institute catalogue, Peter Bogdanovich was hired to direct in January 1984 for producer Martin Starger at Universal Pictures. Cher played Rusty and Eric Stoltz played Rocky. Sam Elliott played the biker father figure Gar and Laura Dern played Rocky’s love interest.
Rusty had mixed feelings about the result. In a 1986 Chicago Tribune interview she said she’d always hoped Rocky’s courage would help disabled children and their parents, and hadn’t expected the film to be about her as well. But she conceded that Cher’s performance made her come off as something close to a heroine.
The industry took notice. Mask won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, and Cher won Best Actress at Cannes.
The fight over Springsteen
Behind the scenes, the film nearly tore itself apart over music. Bogdanovich had cut it to Bruce Springsteen songs, reportedly Rocky’s favourite singer, and Springsteen had approved their use during development. Then the licensing got messy. As the AFI catalogue records, Springsteen’s representatives at CBS Records wanted a percentage of the film’s videocassette earnings. Universal refused, fearing it would set a costly precedent.
The studio acted while Bogdanovich was away. In December 1984, as he spent Christmas out of town, Universal cut ten minutes of Springsteen songs and replaced them with tracks by Bob Seger. It also removed two scenes, all without his consent. Bogdanovich owned five percent of the film’s profits and believed it would flop without the Springsteen soundtrack.
He hit back a month before release with a $19 million lawsuit against Universal and Starger, arguing the studio had violated his right to final cut. He later secured CBS approval to use the Springsteen songs for two screenings and, urged on by a professional standards committee, withdrew the suit. The theatrical release kept the Seger tracks. It took until 2004 for Bogdanovich to restore the Springsteen songs in a director’s cut on DVD.
After Rocky
The film left out Rocky’s older half-brother Joshua, as far as we can tell, and it was kinder to Rusty than her real life always was. Joshua died of AIDS in 1987 at 32. Rusty, by then working as a psychic counsellor and living in a trailer park outside Los Angeles, told People magazine in 2001 that people who mourned her sons’ short lives had missed the point. “My kids lived every day of their lives,” she said.
Her own later years were harder. She had several brushes with the law over drugs and, according to her obituary, finished a prison sentence for possession of methamphetamines in April 2005. She was living in Glendora with her sister and niece when, on 14 October 2006, the right tyre fell off her three-wheeled motorcycle in Azusa. She lost control, the bike hit a curb and she was thrown into a telephone pole. She died of an infection on 11 November at a Montebello hospital. She was 70.
Like Rocky, Ronald Hunkeler became famous for a story attached to him rather than for who he really was. Rocky Dennis is the same. The film’s version is a warm drama. The documented one is about a teenager who ignored a death sentence and a mother who refused to hear it.
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• Grace McDaniels: The Remarkable Life of the Mule-Faced Woman, another life lived in the shadow of how people reacted to her face
• The Dark History of the Circus Freak Show, for the world Rocky’s story pushes back against
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