Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles

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. (May)