On January 14, 1962, CBS aired an episode of the anthology series General Electric Theater called “The Hold-Out,” hosted by Ronald Reagan. It opened with a pair of twentysomething lovebirds bounding down the steps of a courthouse. You assume they’ve just pulled a marriage license. They stop and the camera zeroes in. They’re all-American attractive and they can’t keep their hands off each other.
It’s a TV-by-the-numbers moment from the era of Dr. Kildare. Yet even when viewed through the small-bore, latter-day portal of YouTube, the kiss puts out serious B.T.U.’s. The couple in question — rushing into marriage against the wishes of the girl’s wise-owl father (the improbably cast Groucho Marx)—were played by Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper, two young actors who themselves had been married a few months before, following a similarly impulsive courtship.
Most viewers in 1962 wouldn’t have known that these two performers—an ingénue on the upswing and a self-sabotaging hard case sliding downward after roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant—were already becoming, as one chronicler noted, “the coolest kids in Hollywood.” Theirs would be the emblematic love story of 1960s Los Angeles, that golden epoch of postwar California at its sunny apex. Hayward and Hopper (“an extremely unlikely couple,” Hayward has said) would be prime catalysts and connectors in a cultural moment we’re still making sense of, when Hollywood upstarts, art-world superstars, and the emerging, shaggy aristocracy of rock rubbed up against one another and threw off sparks.
During their eight years of marriage, Hayward and Hopper embodied the collision of Old Hollywood and New, of bohemian chic and street-level hip. The household they created on North Crescent Heights Boulevard, a sinuous byway in the Hollywood Hills above the Sunset Strip, was the repository of one of the era’s greatest private collections of contemporary art: Lichtensteins and Warhols, Kellys and Ruschas. The place was, in a way, an art piece itself, in which Hayward’s experiments with design and Hopper’s eye for Pop-art masterpieces created an environment that, five decades on, no one who ever stepped into it can forget.
Jane Fonda, who was Hayward’s best pal growing up, told me, “Dennis knew all the artists and had the paintings, but Brooke knew how to put it all together in a way that would become magical. It really was a magical house.” When I asked Michael Nesmith, the songwriter, filmmaker, and music-video trailblazer, then a guitar-picking cast member on The Monkees, about his recollections of the Hayward-Hopper house, he was emphatic: “Well, I would hardly classify it a ‘recollection.’ It was a tattoo. I mean, it just burned into my mind. I walked into that house and I thought, Holy moly! Where have I landed?” Irving Blum, the impresario of the Ferus Gallery, the epicenter of L.A.’s emergent art scene, said of the trail the couple blazed, “They were virtually unique, you know? There was nobody else doing it in the way that they were doing it.”
In Hayward and Hopper’s living room, the drama of an entire era would play out: the artistic upheaval, the social jumble, the radical politics, and, ultimately, the instability and danger that Hopper would reflect in the project, launched 50 years ago, that made his career and undid this inspired, and ultimately combustible, partnership—Easy Rider. Looking back now, Hayward shakes her head at it all: “It was a great time to be in Los Angeles. I miss those days. I even miss Dennis.”
When I went to visit Hayward at her house in rural Connecticut, she handed me the draft of an unpublished essay she wrote about that time. It contains this line: “Those years in the ’60’s when I was married to Dennis were the most wonderful and awful of my life.”
Hayward became an octogenarian last summer, not that you would know it. The coltish aura is intact. She is mischievous, conspiratorial, lissome, with a movie star’s charm she nudges to incandescent levels when the mood strikes. She is, after all, the oldest child of the actress Margaret Sullavan. Her father was Leland Hayward, the Hollywood superagent, Broadway producer, aviation pioneer, and serial husband to a succession of women who each achieved icon status: Sullavan, Slim Keith, Pamela Churchill (later Harriman). There’s also her trademark steeliness and pinpoint wit, qualities Hayward put to work in her best-selling 1977 memoir, Haywire, which documented her coming-of-age amid show-business glory and family tragedy: a peripatetic bi-coastal life, her parents’ broken marriage, and, horrifically, the twin deaths—overdoses that were presumptive suicides—of her mother and her younger sister, Bridget, in a single annus horribilis, 1960. All of 23, Hayward was the mother of two toddler boys, Jeffrey and Willie, from her then unraveling first marriage, to curator Michael M. Thomas (later a best-selling novelist). “I wept for my family, all of us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family,” Hayward wrote, equal parts heartache and sheer guts. “I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies.” Hayward’s brother, William, known as Bill, would take his life in 2008.
Hayward lives in a converted 19th-century schoolhouse on the outskirts of a tiny Connecticut village. In contrast to the famous house she kept in Los Angeles in the 1960s, here reigns simplicity, order, and quiet, along with self-sufficient, self-imposed solitude. (She was married for 23 years to the society bandleader Peter Duchin; they divorced in 2008.) There are overstuffed chairs and a vast coffee table piled high with books. Framed photographs of times past—a party with David Hockney, a visit with Blum—are tucked here and there. The broad fireplace remains resolutely unused. Having survived the cataclysmic Bel Air fire of 1961, why would she want to experience another conflagration? One potential bonfire she avoided was writing a follow-up to Haywire, which would have chronicled her years with Hopper. Hayward’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, urged her to go for it, but Hopper threatened legal action. Hayward respected his wishes and got on with life.
“We got married in ’61,” Hayward says. “It was probably in September. I believe it was September. Yes. September.” It is curious that nobody seems to know exactly when Hayward and Hopper were married, but Hayward does recall her father’s fury: “He called me that morning at six and said, ‘There’s no reason to go through with this!’ ” Actors, Leland Hayward felt, were not for marrying, and certainly not this one, who had notoriously knocked heads with director Henry Hathaway on the 1958 Western From Hell to Texas, effectively getting himself blackballed from the film business. (Hopper would bump along with roles on such television shows as The Twilight Zone and The Rifleman and in the occasional B movie.) The wedding was a sparsely attended rite, held in the massive Christ Church, at 60th and Park, in Manhattan. The couple hadn’t bothered with a reception, so, Hayward says, they shuffled over to Jane Fonda’s apartment for sandwiches afterward.
Hayward had met Hopper that spring during rehearsals for the Broadway production of Mandingo, an overheated, libidinous drama set on an antebellum Alabama plantation. She instantly loathed the guy—unwashed, unprepared, too cool for school. She had been a debutante, a Vassar undergrad, a Vogue cover girl. He had been a wide-eyed boy (nicknamed Clodhopper) from Dodge City, Kansas, with a talent for dramatic monologues and trouble. Naturally, she soon found herself crazy for the handsome 24-year-old with what she calls “the profile of a classic Greek statue.” They shared an ardor for everything visual. “Dennis had the greatest eye of anybody I’ve ever known,” Hayward says. With her help, Hopper soon began taking photographs. The aesthetic bond between them was conspicuous. “He was the very essence of avant-garde,” Jane Fonda says. “And Brooke, to the marrow of her bone, is an artist.”
“It was like walking into a carnival, with a candy-store energy,” the artist Ed Ruscha says of 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard, the Spanish-style, circa-1927 house that Hayward and Hopper bought in April 1963, after the Bel Air fire destroyed 484 homes, including their own. In the months after the fire, the uprooted family had bounced around, staying, for a time, at David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones’s estate, on Tower Grove Road, where silent-screen idol John Gilbert had once lived with Greta Garbo. As they scouted for a new house, an insurance agent told them the safest investments would be in art and antiques. Hopper was known to tool around with a the ONLY ISM FOR ME IS ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM bumper sticker on his Plymouth. Now he and Hayward went into aesthetic overdrive.
They became regulars on the Monday-night art walks along North La Cienega Boulevard, the town’s gallery district, whose epicenter was the Ferus Gallery. This unassuming shop front was the home to a clutch of painters and sculptors who would put L.A. on the global art map, among them Ruscha, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, and Ed Kienholz, who founded the gallery in 1957 with Walter Hopps, the visionary curator, who, in his memoir, The Dream Colony, claimed that Hopper “was the first person in the film industry to get involved with the new abstract art—Frank Stella and others, and particularly Pop Art.” (Blum bought out Kienholz in 1958.)
An eye-popping, diagonally striped Stella dominated the living room at 1712. It was accompanied by a tidy haul of masterpieces (many of them bought from Ferus), including an Ellsworth Kelly over the fireplace, a smattering of Kienholz assemblages, and an early Roy Lichtenstein cartoon painting, Mad Scientist (now in the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne). There were works by Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg. Whatever it was, Hopper and Hayward seemed to get there first. In June of 1962, when Hayward was laid up in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica following their daughter Marin’s birth, Hopper burst in, excited to tell her about a new painting he’d just secured, a curious 20-by-16-inch canvas by a New York painter named Andy Warhol.
It was a painting of a tomato-soup can: the first Warhol soup-can painting ever sold, the poppiest Pop-art icon of them all. Ferus, Hopper explained to his wife, was hosting Warhol’s first solo show, 32 Campbell’s-soup cans, one for each variety. Blum had lured the Hollywood-infatuated artist west by telling him that all the big stars hang out at Ferus. “Complete lie.” Blum says. “Movie stars, with the exception of Dennis, never came into the gallery.” Hopper had agreed to buy the painting for $100. (“With my money!” Hayward says.) Only a handful of the paintings sold, so Blum begged Hopper to relinquish his in order to keep the collection intact. He did. In 1996, Blum took the 32 paintings to the Museum of Modern Art for a reported gift and sale of $15 million.
Hopper met Warhol, in New York, the following summer, inviting the artist along to a Harlem soundstage, where Hopper was shooting an episode of the CBS courtroom drama The Defenders called “The Weeping Baboon.” Ferus, it turned out, was ramping up a second Warhol show for September 1963. Hayward and Hopper decided they would launch the show—and Warhol himself—with a blowout at 1712 North Crescent Heights. It would also be a coming-out party for the house.
While Hopper was reeling in the art (thanks to Hayward’s bank account, kept topped off by acting jobs and a modest trust fund), Hayward was amassing other treasures. She was amazed at what was gathering dust in such L.A. antique emporiums as Scavenger’s Paradise and Don Badertscher. “People in Los Angeles didn’t want antiques,” she says. “They wanted copies of antiques. Because that way they wouldn’t be dirty and misused by other people.” It was open season and Hayward made a safari of it, bombing around town in her station wagon and loading up on authentic Tiffany lamps (a couple of hundred bucks a pop), ornate turn-of-the-century French lamp posts, Victorian spool tables, enormous Belle Époque advertising posters, Art Nouveau panels, stained-glass windows. She found a small fountain for the backyard that turned out to have been sculpted by Daniel Chester French. (It was joined back there by a fiberglass car, retired from a billboard, and fake rocks and cacti from movie sets.) Hayward packed these objets, plucked from musty obscurity, into the modest dimensions of 1712, placing them in kaleidoscopic equilibrium with the blue-chip, futuristic art pieces. It was new and old, high and low. It was young and witty and camp when camp was barely a thing.
“Brooke had such original and off-the-wall ideas,” says Toby Rafelson, the production designer—and former wife of Bob Rafelson, producer of The Monkees (his company, Raybert, would release Easy Rider)—who rode shotgun with Hayward on these hunts. “She really took it to a different level in playfulness.” Rafelson believes Hayward’s taste in décor reflected a taste in life that made her stand out from the local crowd. “Brooke was never going to go the usual way that people would want to go in Hollywood,” she told me, “which was to know celebrities and hang out with them. She’d been there, done that. She’d gone to college. She was educated. She had taste.”
She also had gumption. “As much as my father had a vision,” Marin Hopper says, “she was completely fulfilling it. She would make it happen. He’d say, ‘I think some tile would be good here.’ He didn’t expect her to do the tiling!” But Hayward did do it, going to work, Marin says, “in her pearls and her bikini,” with tiles she’d hauled back from Tijuana. Marin recalls her father marveling decades later at his wife’s D.I.Y. energies: “He was like, ‘It was crazy! It was wild.’ ” Jane Fonda agrees: “No question. Brooke would roll up her sleeves and do it herself, and, being an artist, she could.”
Jeffrey Thomas, Hayward’s older son, from her first marriage, calls 1712 North Crescent Heights “a collaborative effort.” It was one that bowled over Hopper and Hayward’s guests, none more than Warhol himself when he rolled up for the party on Sunday, September 29, 1963. The artist found himself in a surreal fun house teeming with fellow painters and Hollywood players who looked like living Pop art—Sal Mineo, Troy Donahue, Natalie Wood, Russ Tamblyn, and Peter Fonda, who struck him as a “preppy mathematician.” Warhol saw his own work, and that of his friends and peers, on the walls, liberated from galleries, and a bathroom papered with cutouts from actual billboards, selected by Hopper; it was like walking into a James Rosenquist painting whenever you needed to pee. (Blum says, “Brooke hated it!” Hayward says it was “brilliant.”) The whole scene—including the circus posters, papier-mâché fruits, and an eerie 18-foot Mexican mojiganga, or clown puppet, hanging from the ceiling—caused Warhol, as Hopper would recall, to stand agog and emit the ultimate Warholian words of approval: “ooh! aah!”
“He loved it!” Hayward says, relishing the details: the hot-dog vendor serving New York street food, the likes of Patty Oldenburg, the wife of Claes, and Warhol “superstar” and Droopy Dog look-alike Taylor Mead dancing the twist and the mashed potato. “He was simply dazzled. That was his first big entrance into L.A.” As Warhol later wrote, “The Hoppers were wonderful to us.” Warhol would cast them in his screen tests and in the film he shot during his brief 1963 stint in Los Angeles, Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of. A week after the party, the newfound friends hung out at the preview bash at the Hotel Green for the Pasadena Art Museum’s landmark Marcel Duchamp show. Warhol drank too much pink champagne and barfed, while Hopper, in a flash of inspiration, removed a hotel sign from a wall, persuaded Duchamp to sign it, and took this spur-of-the-moment Duchamp readymade, now christened Signed Sign, back to 1712, where he and Hayward hung it in the living room. (In 2010 Signed Sign sold at Christie’s for $362,500.)
Yet the house was no museum. It was extremely lived-in, populated by three rambunctious children and, over the years, an unending stream of visitors: neighbor kids, rock stars, actors, artists, writers, fashion people, Black Panthers, Hells Angels (20 of them, in sleeping bags). Marin Hopper recalls honing her hula-hoop skills beneath Ruscha’s 10-foot-long Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, which covered nearly an entire wall of the den. (“My mother would say, ‘Don’t get so close!’ They were so casual about it.”) In 1965, the writer Terry Southern paid a visit to do research for “The Loved House of the Dennis Hoppers,” which appeared in Vogue. In the piece (with captions by Joan Didion, Hayward says), he described 1712 as a “harmonious nightmare of Gothic surrealism.” While Southern was there, the kids gamboled into the living room and knocked a Kienholz assemblage askew. Hopper loved it: “Let’s try it like that for a few days.” Jeffrey Thomas recalls a butter stain on Roy Lichtenstein’s massive Sinking Sun, presumably the result of a flying piece of toast. (Hayward finds this amusing but implausible; the painting, which she unloaded in the 1970s, sold in 2006 for $15.7 million. Hayward says they had bought it for $3,000.) Marin was terrified of Kienholz’s The Quickie, a mannequin head mounted on a roller skate (“I thought she was decapitated”), and Jeffrey remembers a Bruce Conner that was pornographic enough to be declared off limits to the children—but not enough to be removed. “It was embarrassing, frankly, to bring friends over,” he says. “I didn’t want people to see this house. Now I’m like, ‘Look how cool this house was!’ Like everyone else, we just wanted to be normal. And here we were, living with the crazy people!” He was equally embarrassed by the Pop-art car his parents chose for the family ride: a yellow Checker cab. The other kids would taunt “Tax-i! Tax-i!” when they rolled up at school. Marin puts it succinctly: “I felt like Marilyn in The Munsters.”
Even so, the children adored their parents. Marin wanted to be around her father constantly, and Jeffrey says, “He was probably the nicest member of our family.” In one of Roddy McDowall’s radiant home movies of the 1960s Malibu scene (the Hayward-Hoppers spent weekends out there, usually at Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s place), there’s a beautiful shot of Hayward. She’s bent down at lawn level with Marin and a little friend, aglow with warmth and care. “You really see Brooke’s mothering there,” Jeffrey says. “You see her love.”
Life at 1712 North Crescent Heights, meanwhile, was documented in a kind of ongoing home movie, strung out in a stream of stunning black-and-white stills. These were Hopper’s own photographs. Their immediacy remains startling: Jeffrey sprawled on the den’s carpet watching TV, a painfully cute Marin climbing a chaise longue with Warhol’s Double Mona Lisa over her shoulder, Blum and Jasper Johns sharing a belly laugh, and, in one particularly arresting image, Hayward caught in mid-ascent on the steep front steps of 1712 (which she had tiled herself), a luminous dual portrait of spouse and house. (The photographs remained largely buried until the appearance of 1712 North Crescent Heights, a sumptuous volume that Marin shepherded to publication in 2001.)
Around the time of Mandingo, in 1961, Hayward, wowed by Hopper’s visual sense, plunked down $351 for a Nikon, nearly depleting her bank account. This whopping 25th-birthday gift remade Hopper’s day-to-day existence. “He wore the camera around his neck all day long and all night,” Hayward recalls. “It was like a second head.” In fact, her son Willie made a drawing of Hopper in which his stepfather’s head was a camera.
“My lens is fast and my eye is keen,” Hopper liked to boast. As his acting languished, he began shooting everything in sight. The fashion model Peggy Moffitt, married to photographer William Claxton, remembers the avid Hopper trailing her husband. “He stood behind him to learn how to take pictures,” she says with a ringing laugh. “My husband was very gracious about it, but probably a little annoyed!” (Claxton used 1712 as the backdrop for a 1965 Cosmopolitan shoot.) Hopper documented on-set antics, languorous Malibu weekends, jaunts to Tijuana, the Sunset Strip riots, the civil-rights marches in Alabama. He shot for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Artforum. His portraits of artists are invaluable documents: Warhol behind a flower centerpiece, Ruscha in front of a radio-repair shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. (“It took 10 minutes,” Ruscha says.) Hopper shot his 1961 Double Standard, of a Standard gas station, that ubiquitous icon, through the windshield of a car. It cemented his visual kinship with Ruscha; Blum even used it to advertise a Ruscha show at Ferus. The work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Hopper’s lens also captured the vanguard of pop music, including Buffalo Springfield, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, and the Byrds, whose chiming folk-rock poured forth from the hi-fi at 1712 and whom he posed at the then new plaza of LACMA. It was the ultimate 1960s Los Angeles tableau: Hollywood actor shoots America’s biggest rock group at art museum. “Dennis was a spark plug,” the Byrds’ leader, Roger McGuinn, told me. “He was a wild man. He was brilliant and undisciplined—but in a lovable kind of way.” (McGuinn wrote and sang Easy Rider’s bittersweet theme song, which he developed from a few lines scratched by Bob Dylan.) Ruscha recalls Hopper going all out with his photography adventures. “And then he was like, ‘By the way, I got a call sheet that tells me I have to be gone at five in the morning for an acting job,’ ” Ruscha says. “Talk about a working man!”
In the master bedroom of 1712, there was another Lichtenstein: a cartoon portrait of a woman looking like a nervous wreck. Seeing a photograph of that wall now (Hopper shot it for Southern’s Vogue story), it’s difficult not to think of Hayward. As the years progressed, the young wife found herself subjected to the stresses of her husband’s—and the decade’s—accelerating weirdness and the needs of three children. When she talks about it now, the word “nightmare” creeps into her speech.
Hayward’s acting career had been steadily building, with roles on Bonanza, The Rogues, The Twilight Zone—“all that shit,” she says. But in 1964 a male co-star gave her a ride home, sending Hopper into a rage. “He was very resentful of me being an actress,” she says. “So I gave it up.” There were other issues. “He was totally alcoholic,” Hayward says, with palpable sadness.
“Dennis always had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and always had a Coors or Olympia beer in his hand,” Jeffrey Thomas recalls. “He smelled like alcohol morning and night.” The boy found pot in his stepfather’s film canisters; his own first toke came at age 10, when Hopper took the family to the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival at Mount Tamalpais, in June of 1967. Hopper kindly gave members of the Jefferson Airplane a lift, and one of them passed a joint to Jeffrey. Hopper later summed up this period: “I wouldn’t think of going through a day without smoking at least eight joints.” By comparison, Hayward, for the most part, got about as wild as a margarita would take her. “She wasn’t running around being drugged or drunk or out of control,” Toby Rafelson says. “That was not the kind of thing that she was interested in at all.”
There was the time Hopper fell asleep in bed with a lit joint, incinerating the mattress. Marin recalls the surreal sight of a red-hatted fireman addressing the family, assembled before the enormous Ruscha in the den, and of the jettisoned mattress languishing in the backyard out by the jungle gym and fake cacti. There was also the lost, coked-out weekend in Mexico with Swinging London gallerist and substance enthusiast Robert Fraser. It was jolly enough, but, Hayward would recall, “Robert had some kind of weird speed, and we all got crazy, completely raving mad, and were unable to go to sleep for about three days. I was angry about it, because I had three children and really another life.” Hayward could hang with the boys to a point, but there were responsibilities to attend to. It’s a reminder that, even in the liberated 1960s, it was still a man’s world.
Hayward talks of this turbulent period now with taut dignity, the rawness long hardened over. Something was going awry with the intensely talented man she loved. There was the incident, in early 1968, after a rehearsal for the Los Angeles production of Michael McClure’s gleefully obscene The Beard, in which Hopper was to play the lead role of Billy the Kid. Hayward attended (and presumably put up with watching her husband go down on his pretty blonde co-star, as the play required), but when she had to leave immediately afterward to take care of the kids, Hopper flipped out and kicked in the windshield of their Checker cab. And there was the most notorious Hopper-Hayward dustup of all, over one of his proof sheets. “One day he said, ‘I’ve decided this is the best photograph,’ ” Hayward recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t happen to agree with you.’ And he went ‘pop.’ And broke my nose. I don’t think he meant to. But I had to go pick the children up at school with a broken nose.”
Hopper’s growing fondness for firearms didn’t help. According to Jeffrey Thomas, his stepfather “chased us with a gun to kill all of us. We were going from house to house, trying to lay low. I mean, it was seriously a psychotic episode.” The children weren’t sure what was up. “We all thought it was a great adventure,” he says. “I think Mom even put it that way to us.”
Another great adventure was underway, one that would restore Hopper to industry glory, virtually defining what we now know as the New Hollywood: Easy Rider. With his collaborator, Peter Fonda, Hopper hot-rodded a cartoony B-movie genre, the biker flick. Michael Nesmith recalls Hopper repeating a Duchampian riff: “In the future . . . anything an artist points to will become art.” Hopper and Fonda had both mucked about in the depths of trash, with films such as The Trip and The Glory Stompers (sample Hopper dialogue: “We accidentally snuffed out your old man”). Now they pointed at this low-down cinematic found object, elevating it with Pop-art panache and countercultural swagger. In time, the world would call Easy Rider art, too.
But the ride was rougher than a chopped Harley on a gravel road. When filming began, at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, in February 1968, Hopper’s Napoleonic side, along with paranoid flare-ups, made everyone nuts. “I got a phone call from Peter Fonda,” Hayward says, “and a second one from my brother, Bill, who was the producer, saying, ‘Brooke, get the children out of the house! Get out. Dennis has gone berserk.’ ” Hayward thought they were out of their minds. But Hopper did come home from the shoot disturbed. “Give me food or I’m going to kill you,” he told his wife, with the children looking on. She got him out of the house long enough to escape with the kids. Hopper was busted for pot shortly thereafter and went on an extended scouting trip for the film, giving Hayward the breathing room to file for divorce. She phoned her ex-husband, Michael Thomas, in New York, forcing herself to ask that he take Jeffrey and Willie back to a more normal world. “She sounded totally beat,” Thomas says.
When you see Hopper in Easy Rider, as the mustachioed Billy on his hog, he is riding away from 1712 North Crescent Heights forever. As Ruscha puts it, “He was destined to push on.”
A nimbus of nostalgia surrounds 1960s Los Angeles as interest in the art and artifacts of that time—golden, complex, painful—grows with each year. Ruscha works, for instance, ascend skyward in price and renown. (The National Gallery in London will host a Ruscha show in June.) Hopper’s reputation as a photographer, and as a key chronicler of the era, is flourishing, helped along by an ongoing series of books (The Lost Album, Drugstore Camera) and museum showings. Hayward and Hopper are lauded as vanguard collectors, and Haywire continues to find new readers.
Toby Rafelson still drives past 1712 North Crescent Heights, looking up at the stucco façade and taking in what she calls “the eye of the center of the storm around Brooke and Dennis.” She thinks about that “brilliant, wild, disturbed culture” of the 1960s: “It’s still with us, that era.” As for Marin, she says, “When I drive by, it looks so little. It looked enormous when I was small.” The creative atmosphere of the place rubbed off: in addition to guiding the Hopper Art Trust, she is emerging as an important American designer, having founded Hopper Goods and Hayward, twin fashion enterprises that express her complex family legacy. Her brother Jeffrey is an art consultant and curator based in Portland, Oregon.
For decades, Hopper kept the memories and contact sheets from those days at 1712 in a vault. “I was trying to forget,” he wrote. “The photographs represented failure to me. A painful parting from Marin and Brooke, my art collection, the house that I lived in and the life that I had known for those eight years.” He survived his demons, kicked his habits, and lived to repent his violent ways. Hayward says she has not seen the place since she left, in 1977, after Haywire was published. She has come to realize the importance of what she and her husband created there: “We were somehow at the center of what was going on in that town.” She lauds Easy Rider and rejects Hopper’s claim that she likened the project to “fool’s gold.”
Hayward sold 1712 to Walter Hill, the film director. It later had a stint as the home of the original Daily Show host, Craig Kilborn. Last summer, the British interior designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard bought it. When I went to visit him there in the fall, the house was empty, like a stage set: a few workers quietly milled around, working on the bare walls, skim-coating—the usual stuff of renovation. A single framed photograph was the only thing adorning the famous living room where Warhol oohed and aahed, Marin learned to walk, Hells Angels crashed in sleeping bags, and Hopper and Hayward created a life like no other. It was Hopper’s photograph of Hayward on the steps in front of the house, circa 1965—young, gorgeous, full of can-do spirit, the house fresh, the day bright. Bullard bought the print for Kilborn, having been hired by him to work on the house in the early 2000s, and here it remained. As a designer who has created interiors for Elton John and Cher, Bullard is plugged into Hollywood legacies. He had always been besotted with the one at 1712 and pounced as soon as the house came on the market again. “It was fate,” he said, excited to give a tour of the place, with some of Hayward’s touches still intact.
In late 2009, Hopper was battling the prostate cancer that would take his life. He got in touch with Hayward, asking her to come visit him at his house in Venice, California, at her earliest opportunity. There was urgency in the request. They had rarely been in touch since the divorce, in 1969. The winter holidays came and went, and then Hayward flew out in January 2010, not knowing what she was in for. When she reached Hopper’s compound on Indiana Avenue—with three Frank Gehry–designed condos and filled with the art collection he’d amassed since he got sober and finally achieved a sustainable Hollywood career—she was ushered upstairs. Here she found her former husband, now 73 and with only a few months left to live, in his bed. He sat up the moment Hayward entered.
Mark Rozzo is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
