Episode 37: Mark Rozzo on Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward in 1960s L.A.

Mark Rozzo’s astute and engaging new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1906s Los Angeles, published by Ecco Press, documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood’s It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles scene in the Sixties. Rozzo poignantly captures the vivacity of the heady days in the early 1960s, just as the underground culture of the Beat Generation was about to explode into the mainstream counterculture of the latter part of the decade—the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll mantra was born in the late 1960s. Sixties Los Angeles was a new center of gravity in culture; there was a new consciousness, a West Coast symmetry between art, underground cinema, music and civil rights that had never happened before, and has never happened since. Hopper and Hayward were not only up-and-coming actors in the early 1960s, they were also cross-cultural connectors who brought together the best of underground Los Angeles art, music and politics, under one roof—literally—1712 N. Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. This modest Spanish Colonial was the meeting ground, as Rozzo illustrates, for a who’s who of that time: Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, Jasper Johns, Tina Turner, Ed Ruscha, The Byrds and the Black Panthers. Their art collection, showcased at this house on Crescent Heights, as well as the house itself, is the backdrop of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy. Rozzo tells the story in a straight-forward, dual narrative, that helps fill in large parts of Brooke’s story, which compared to Hopper’s, hasn’t been as well documented or explored in other books. Rozzo finds the right balance. As a decade-ending benchmark, Hopper’s directorial debut Easy Rider became the emblematic proto-New Hollywood independent film, alongside Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. These films help illustrate the promise and loss of that generation and that era. There isn’t a happy ending in those films or in Hopper’s marriage to Hayward, unfortunately—the couple divorced in 1969 just at Easy Rider was about to make cinematic history. After the divorce, Brooke eventually sold the house, broke up the art collection and moved back to New York, where she still resides. Hopper died in 2010. Rozzo’s wide view of Los Angeles in the 1960s is essential reading for anyone interested in the unvarnished history of that period. Here’s my conversation with Mark Rozzo discussing the life and times of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward.