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

Written by Mark Rozzo

Narrated by Jason Culp

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. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780062940001

Mark Rozzo

Mark Rozzo is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair . He has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, the Oxford American, the Washington Post, and many others. He teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia University.

Reviews for Everybody Thought We Were Crazy

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everybody Thought We Were Crazy by Mark Rozzo is an example, for me, of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. And the parts are quite good to begin with.Make no mistake, you will be frustrated with Hopper and almost everyone else in their circle, even those you probably like as artists. Such is the nature of nonfiction; these aren't characters that the author can make more likeable as the story goes on. During this particular period these people made some less than wonderful decisions but also made immense contributions to LA society and society as a whole.As a biography, albeit one of a specific portion of the subject's lives, the book is quite good. If I only thought of this as a biography I probably would have been happy with it but given it a slightly lower rating. But as a cultural history and documentation of this period it moves from being just a biography to being the story of the 1960s through a focus on a pivotal couple of the period. Together, as a biography and a cultural history, this book moves beyond either one alone.Rozzo weaves the personal story of Hopper and Hayward with the other stories they touched to create a biography of the time and place rather than just of these two individuals. I so enjoyed this book that I am looking forward to reading it again. I have a feeling another reading will have me following a slightly different thread through the book.Highly recommended for those who enjoy hybrid biographical works that highlight a place and time as much as it does the people at the center of the narrative. This will be of particular interest to those with an interest in the United States in the 1960s, and if you lived in the LA area as I did during some of these years, you may have a few moments of nostalgia, though admittedly many steps removed from their experiences.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.