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If you’re rich, starry and feel the
need for speed, the Guggenheim Motorcycle Club is the fastest place
to socialize on earth. It counts Dennis Hopper, Lawrence Fishburne,
Keanu Reeves, Jeremy Irons, Lauren Hutton and the American IT mogul
Peter Norton among its swelling membership, the famous and the
fearless of a two-wheels-good, four-wheels-bad celebrity sect who
every so often gather and thunder off down the world’s prettiest
roads towards somewhere even more fabulous than the last place
they torched.
Inaugurated in 1998 when New York’s Guggenheim Foundation
launched its exhibition The Art Of The Motorcycle - one of the
museum’s most successful shows ever – the GMC equates
to a ton-up Gumball Rally by way of the Venice Biennale on the
set of Rumblefish, only with a more famous and cultivated
cast. Art fanatics, speed freaks, gourmands, reformed hellraisers
and serious thesps to a man and woman, GMC members aren’t
the fussy, velvet-roped Oscarcentric kind of star. Instead they’re
a crew of kindred celluloid souls who understand that the thrills
of torque, altitude, expanse and distance just can’t be experienced
on Rodeo Drive or Sunset.
The mission of the GMC is to ride to exotic destinations as stylishly
as possible and take in some art once they arrive, in the process
experiencing the kind of ‘normal’ that superstars rarely
get to feel. Their gran turismo has taken them to Lisbon,
Bilbao, St Petersburg, Novograd and Las Vegas via a parched run
through Death Valley, initiating new members as they go. In September
2003, GQ cruised with them from BMW’s Munich HQ to enjoy
the Monza Grand Prix, passing en route through Salzburg, the Dolomites,
St Moritz, Milan, the island of Lenno on Lake Como, several castles,
numerous villas and art galleries, and an unquantifiable number
of splendid views over the undulations of mediaeval Europe.
The GMC fraternity is anointed in a passion for culture, company
and adventure, and their bond runs deep, since it was sealed in
blood during 2001 when member Lauren Hutton veered off a highway
and crashed into the Californian scrub on the club’s run
to open The Art Of The Motorcycle at Rem Koolhaas’s The Venetian
casino in Las Vegas. The 25-times Vogue cover star sustained
concussion, a broken wrist, a fractured sternum and multiple cuts
and bruises necessitating seven hours of surgery, none of which
prevented her from later commenting, ‘I love the feeling
of being a naked egg atop that throbbing steel. You feel vulnerable
but so alive.’
Which describes exactly the frisson you experience when you climb
onto the back of a gargantuan BMW iron horse, one autumnal Wednesday
afternoon, as the GMC roll onto the autobahn to Salzburg in a fireball
of paparazzi flash and megawatt Hollywood starriness astride quantum
motorcycle engineering that makes anything the Wachowski Brothers
dreamed up for The Matrix seem as advanced as Meccano.
To the left, fridge-sized Lawrence ‘call me Fish’ Fishburne
sits on the vast 98bhp K1200 LT tourer and fixes the distance in
a thousand-yard stare; to the right flank Jeremy Irons manoeuvres
a glinting R1150 RT whose CD player pipes Bruce Springsteen, while
the GMC’s hulking president Tom Krens disappears on a R 1150
GS Adventure.
And it goes without saying that the prototype Easy Rider himself,
Dennis Hooper, sapphire eyes ablaze under a helmet he’s stickered
with a stars & stripes decal, rides the hottest machine: a
R 1200 C Montauk. He winks conspiratorially, which he does a lot,
dumps the clutch out and roars off into the vanishing point in
a way guaranteeing you’ll never look at your commuter-model
50cc Piaggio Zip in quite the same way ever again.
*
For the typical cash-rich, time-poor and experience-hungry A-lister
existing in the celebrity airlock, motorcycling represent the purest
kind of abandon. It packages speed, solitude and an edge of outsider
cool onto two wheels. A twist of the throttle instantly parachutes
the rider in the mindzone mapped out in Easy Rider, The Wild One
and Steve McQueen’s bunny-hopping Great Escape sequence,
a cinematic legacy whose appeal transcending the perimeters of
the screen. Motorcycling permits Hollywood heroes to ride together
in the kind sociable anonymity that would be impossible otherwise.
Doing so through Europe, meanwhile, promises the kind of
culture and cuisine that just can’t be found between Key
West and Miami Beach.
At the other end of the autobahn, 100 kilometres away in Salzburg,
Jeremy Irons is describing the genesis of his affection for motorcycles
in the bar of Schwartzstrasse’s Hotel Sacher. Louche and
leathery in more than just his choice of outerwear, The Mission star
loves to ride big bikes, and is apt to pronounce on his adventures
in actorly couplets (‘I’ve walked the Alps, I’ve
ridden the Alps…’ being just one.)
‘I bought my first motorbike when I was 28,’ he says
he says between roll-ups. ‘It wasn’t until I saw how
they used motorcycles in China there that I realised what they
were for. I remember going to Harrod’s behind her was the
dog, a small pointer. That taught me about the freedom. It changed
my life completely.
If you would like to get into the motorcycle club there are, of course,
initial capital you have to put down to purchase the equipment you require.
This would include not just the cost (either in full or installements) of
your motorcycle but all associated accessories including safety helmets and
the like. Many of us don't have the high initial funds required, immediately
at least, to afford such equipment. We would strongly stress you, at the least, read through the link provided
and see if any of the apps are suitable for your initial capital needs.
‘On my fortieth birthday – the classic time – I
bought a second-hand BMW RT100. I’d never ridden anything
so fast in all my life. I was doing 90 and no idea how to stop
this. One day I picked up a friend - she came out in long skirt
with a split up the front, flung her leg over the machine, and
I thought, ‘it’s worth the money already.’
No-one can seriously argue that serious motorcycling doesn’t
make or keep you attractive to women, which is arguably the reason
most of Equity got into the profession in the first place. That
doubtless accounts for the sizeable brigade of ‘bitches’ -
their term - on this five-day burn. We have completed a
bitcoin evolution complete review
of systems. Typically, no GMC rides goes
without a fabulous dusting of international sirens. The American
multimillionairess magazine publisher Louise McBain rides pillion
with Jeremy Irons. Catherine Nouvel, the icy-on-the-eye and stridently
Parisien wife of French architectural magus Jean Nouvel, keeps
Tom Krens’ back end warm. Meanwhile Mrs Lawrence Fishburne,
the actress Gina Torres, keeps her husband to a sensible speed
as we wind through the cols of the Dolomites. More sensibly still,
Dennis Hopper’s fifth wife Victoria and their newborn daughter
Galen rides behind in a 5-Series BMW.
‘We get on very well,’ Irons adds. ‘We started
with a few more – Bob Geldof rode with us to Bilbao, but
he never really bit. We make each other laugh. Americans usually
love to travel with large entourages, but we just enjoy slumming
it, being normal, and travelling light with no fuss.’
At all times, nevertheless, the ‘Bitch/Bastard’ power
dynamic is invoked through a relentless routine quips, barbs and
innuendo that leads to Louise McBain declaring ultimately that
she requires ‘her own bitch’. ‘If you want a
bitch,’ Lawrence Fishburne wisely points out, ‘you
need a long dick’ (presumably he’d know.)
This evening the stars take the airs through Salzburg without
being mobbed, hassled for autographs or assaulted and head to the
gallery of Thaddeus Ropac, a former Warhol associate and friend
of Hopper’s, for a private view of German sculptor Anselm
Kiefer’s new work.
‘Usually I’m surrounded by a whole bunch of security
staff,’ says Lawrence Fishburne notes, casting around to
note the uncommon absence of minders, agents, hangers-on. ‘We
rode together to Bilbao to open the exhibition there, and Dennis,
Lauren, Jeremy and I spend a couple of hours walking round at night.
It was incredible. That kept me going for a couple of years.’
‘When we’re together, I don’t think of us as
famous,’ Dennis Hopper concurs. ‘We live such privileged
lives, but I know if we weren’t doing this we’d all
be digging ditches.’
Ropac’s exhibition in his spacious townhouse conversion
produces rapture in Hopper. Far too wise these day to speculate
with narcotics, women or wheels, at 67 he pours his connoisseurial
appetite for living into modern art. An impishly compact figure
and warm conversationalist, he is full of questions about how his
friend Damien Hirst is getting along in London, and about the YBA’s
sculpture in Hoxton Square. He is avuncular, amusing and strikingly
sane, even though the way his laser-beam gaze lingers a nanosecond
or so too long hints that the lunatic within hasn’t been
fully exorcised.
He promptly puts in a bid for a sizeable Kiefer sculpture. ‘I
always wanted to be an artist,’ he muses, ‘but I ended
up being an actor. Abstract expressionism was my thing. I was photographing
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg back then, I bought the
first Campbell’s Soup can for picture for $70 bucks. Do I
have any regrets? Nah, but there’s a few years where I wish
I’d been more creative.’
If Dennis Hopper has been canonised as Hollywood’s singular
motorbike outlaw, he never particularly meant it that way. He created
rules by breaking others, beginning with the US Federal highway
code. He made a career on top of a motorbike, but in 67 years characterised
by towering successes and ignominious plummets, he’s also
fallen off plenty of them. As a young actor he crashed Vespa scooter
on which he and Steve McQueen were tearing around New York City.
Some fool opened a car door, and the young actors found themselves
in the road with a mouthful of tarmac. McQueen split, being late
for a rehearsal, leaving Hopper to clean up the mess. Naturally,
neither had licences.
Hopper still didn’t have a licence by the time he directed
his motorbike romp The Glory Stompers in 1968, and then Easy
Rider a year later. ‘Before Easy Rider I had a really
bad accident going 30 miles an hour down Sunset Boulevard. I had
a younger woman on the back. There was oil on the road and the
bike turned over. It was such a stupid thing and nothing do with
going fast or anything crazy, so I needed to stay in the hospital
during ten days with a broken ankle.’
‘For me motorbikes were always work,’ he says. ‘The
only time I ever rode a motorcycle was in a movie. I directed Easy
Rider from the back of a motorcycle, before that I made the Glory
Stompers. The best ride I did was riding down a valley I was directing
Easy Rider going to Valley trying to get a last shot before the
sun came down for Easy Rider. It was an incredible ride this, personally,
because I was alone on the trying to get there and the camera crew
and everybody were following me.’ When the California Highway
Patrol eventually arrived to disentangle Lauren Hutton after she
crashed in 2001, it turned out Hopper still didn’t have the
correct documentation, and he spent the next three days wrangling
with the CHiPs.
*
A more measured through no less thrilling affair, the next two
days of riding through the mountains at an average of 1600m above
sea level provide oohs and aahs of a different kind.
‘We have one bone of contention in the club,’ Jeremy
Irons tells me at a pitstop near the Swiss-Italian border, ‘Dennis
and Fish are very slow. They’re American riders. They sit
on big fat hogs and go along the highway at 50 mph. I can’t
concentrate driving slowly. I just get cold and fed up. Speed is
what it’s all about: it’s like motor racing. Something
happens, I get the bit between my teeth and change mode.’
Breathtaking panoramas of the Austrian Tyrol give way to breathtaking
panoramas of the Italian Dolomites as the motorcade snake professionally
up mountainsides, along ridges, down valleys and around desperate
S-bends at terrifying speeds with regular contests for the lead
that doubtless leave their pillions damp at the gusset. The stars
rhapsodise fulsomely every vista and view as we stop for coffee,
cigarettes or adjustments. ‘It don’t get no better
than this,’ Fishburne notes at one particularly Zen-like
instance of motorcycle maintenance, looking over the Dolomiti d’Ampezzo
to Monte Civetta in blazing sunshine.
At the exclusive Majun Residence later in Badia Alta, Irons arrives
late for dinner dressed in full-length smock, leather sandals and
a rough leather belt, and messianically serves red wine to everyone.
At a service station near Trentino Lawrence Fishburne in Morpheus-style
shades shakes out his limbs with some kung-fu moves and does the
splits, before speeding off towards St Moritz at 160kmh, which
is as fast as it is chilly. The lavish seven-course lunch at Il
Castello Bruno near Cison di Valmarino, a magnificently restored
fortress dating to the Roman era, is representative of the hospitality
Italian gentry display towards roaming celebrities who show up
on motorbikes. And following an arduous nighttime dash through
mountains and rain to St Moritz, Louise McBain throws a midnight
dinner party at her chalet where Lawrence Fishburne, amid a fog
of Cohiba smoke, politely refuses GQ’s request for a performance
of his seminal dance to ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ from Apocalypse
Now.
Because celebrities on holiday are like anyone else on holiday:
wealthier, starrier and, on machines like these, considerably faster
than your average tourist of course, but focused on feeling among
the elements and the ground beneath the feet again. It takes 500-miles
a blast along the autostrada at breakneck speed to feel like you’re
walking at a normal pace again.
To Milan tomorrow and Monza to watch Montoya finish second to
Schumacher the day after. Dennis, Lawrence and Jeremy are already
plotting the next adventure, which could be Mexico, though everyone
wants to make for China and ride from Beijing to Moscow. The only
problem being that there aren’t any roads connecting the
two cities.
‘No roads,’ Jeremy Irons nods. ‘You’ll
love that Dennis.’
‘Oh Brother…,’ Hopper grins. ‘I’m
off the road already.’
© Kevin Braddock 2004
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