Everybody Thought We Were Crazy
Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
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3.9 • 16 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
National Bestseller
"A landmark and long-overdue cultural history." —Vogue
The stylish, wild story of the marriage of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—a tale of love, art, Hollywood, and heartbreak
“Those years in the sixties when I was married to Dennis were the most wonderful and awful of my life.” —Brooke Hayward
Los Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple—Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—lived out the emblematic love story of ’60s L.A.
The home these two glamorous young actors created for themselves and their family at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills became the era’s unofficial living room, a kaleidoscopic realm—“furnished like an amusement park,” Andy Warhol said—that made an impact on anyone who ever stepped into it. Hopper and Hayward, vanguard collectors of contemporary art, packed the place with pop masterpieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol, and welcomed a who’s who of visitors, from Jane Fonda to Jasper Johns, Joan Didion to Tina Turner, Hells Angels to Black Panthers. In this house, everything that defined the 1960s went down: the fun, the decadence, the radical politics, and, ultimately, the danger and instability that Hopper explored in the project that made his career, became the cinematic symbol of the period, and blew their union apart—Easy Rider.
Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is at once a fascinating account of the Hopper and Hayward union and a deeply researched, panoramic cultural history. It’s the intimate saga of one couple whose own rise and fall—from youthful creative flowering to disorder and chaos—mirrors the very shape of the decade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A scintillating romance plays out against the febrile backdrop of 1960s L.A. in Vanity Fair contributor Rozzo's luminous debut, a history of actors Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward's famed and fraught relationship. The unlikely pair met in New York in June 1961 while performing as the two leads in the play Mandingo; Hayward, a recently divorced "ingenue on the upswing," and Hopper, "a self-sabotaging hard case" who'd staked a name for himself as a Hollywood bad boy, were instantly drawn to one another and hastily married before relocating to the Hollywood Hills. Together they became a formidable force in the art and film worlds, hosting glamorous countercultural salons at their home, where drugs, art, and ideas were exchanged among the likes of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Joan Didion, and Ike and Tina Turner. But as Rozzo reveals, the couple's stardom slowly began to sour when Hopper's career took a turn, cycling him through "the all too familiar phases outlined in an old Hollywood joke... ‘Who's Hopper?'... ‘Let's get Hopper!'... ‘Who's Hopper?' " As Rozzo traces the marriage's demise, fueled by Hopper's alcoholism and physical abuse of Hayward, he delivers a captivating drama of clashing egos and artistic struggles that captures the oft-volatile vicissitudes of love. Film buffs should snatch this up.
Customer Reviews
More than movie stars
One realizes when reading this excellent book that the 60s pop art scene was juiced by the excellent taste of Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper. But Hayward is the hero of this story.