When Dennis Hopper met Brooke Hayward on a Broadway stage in 1961, you wouldn’t have expected the two actors to connect, get married and help shape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles in the ’60s.
Mark Rozzo’s new book, “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles,” explores the fascinating role of the couple and their Laurel Canyon home in the emerging world of art in Southern California in that decade. The family of actors Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward, their infant daughter Marin, and Hayward’s sons Jeffrey and Willie from a previous marriage, is seen here in a 1962 holiday photograph. The new book “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles” tells their story and how their lives and home came to influence the rise of emerging art, film and music that decade.
“The Ferus Gallery artists, the Warhol crew, Ike and Tina Turner…Gosh, you know, Miles Davis and Terry Southern, and occasionally a Black Panther. And then the Hells Angels show up for a sleepover, 20 of them with their sleeping bags around the living room. The house becomes a third character in his book. Andy Warhol marveled that it was “furnished like an amusement park” when Hopper and Hayward hosted a party for his debut L.A. gallery show. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees remembered it like “a tattoo … just burned into my mind.”
In the ’90s and early 2000s, as a Los Angeles Times book reviewer and musician in indie bands, one of them deeply influenced by the Laurel Canyon music scene, his interests deepened, and a vague idea of a book took hold. “The more that she talked about crazy stories of her childhood and her parents, it really began to dawn on me that Brooke and Dennis were the way into that 360-degree cultural history of Los Angeles in the ’60s,” Rozzo says.
“I loved just the idea of these artists creating all this new work out on the frontier, all that underdog spirit,” he says of artists such as Ruscha, Bell, Ed Kienholz and Billy Al Bengston. “I was really romanced by it.” “It could be Jane or Peter Fonda, or even some Hollywood legend like Jennifer Jones,” he says. “It could be Joan Didion or Tina Turner.