Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles
by Mark Rozzo (Ecco, $30)
Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward were, throughout most of the 1960s, “the hipster power couple,” said Ty Burr in The Wall Street Journal. Though the two young Hollywoodbased actors didn’t make many movies or bankroll many creative ventures of any kind during those years, they occupied the hub of the era’s counterculture, making the introductions that spun out endless innovations and provocations in film, art, music, and photography. He was a mercurial Method actor from Kansas; she was the cool, confident offspring of Hollywood royalty, and in this “exceptionally wellresearched and well-written book,” they are the VIPs who usher readers into every corner of the decade’s cultural revolution. “Who isn’t in this book?” It’s hard to say, because Hopper and Hayward “seem to have known everyone.”
“That this book reads almost like a magical-realist fairy tale is not surprising,” said Patrick Brennan in the Chicago Review of Books. Hopper and Hayward’s world must itself have felt like fiction, as they made in-the-beginning connections with a string of icons that included Andy Warhol, the Beatles, Jane Fonda, and Miles Davis. But for all the “dizzying glory” of their eightyear union, it was rarely less than rocky, and it ended sadly, with Hopper descending into substance abuse and violence before scoring his first screen comeback, with 1969’s Easy Rider, just a month after the couple’s divorce became final.
“To wish for a different ending is precisely the point,” said Matthew Specktor in The Atlantic. Hayward never reached her potential on screen because of Hopper’s jealousy; Hopper never reached his because he was so combative. Each of them did great work in other fields—Hopper in photography and Hayward as a memoirist. But the sense of what might have been is one of the bittersweet pleasures of this book. It enables you to feel all this potential “before it evaporates, and before this improbable, fleetingly beautiful union—just like that period of promise that would occur for the movies merely a year or two later—goes shooting down in flames.”