By Steve Matteo
Mark Rozzo’s first book, Everybody Thought We
Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco
Press/Harper Collins), is about Hopper and Hayward and the Los Angeles art,
film and music scene in the 1960s. The paperback edition will be published on
April 18. The dean of non-fiction Gay Talese said of the book: “Mark Rozzo, an
electric and virtuoso storyteller, resurrects the relationship between icons
Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward to dissect their marriage and its fallout, and
takes many fabulous detours along the way with the artists and stars who
crossed paths with Hopper and Hayward.”
Rozzo
is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, was also an editor with Town
& Country and teaches non-fiction writing at Columbia University. His
writing credentials are extensive, with bylines in the Los Angeles Times,
the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, Vogue,
the Wall Street Journal and the Oxford American. As if that was
not enough, he has been a musician with several prominent rock groups,
including America and Bambi Kino. Bambi Kino is known for playing Hamburg-era
music that the Beatles performed during their German wood-shedding days. Along
with Mark, who fronts the band, the group consists of members of Nada Surf,
Guided by Voices and Cat Power. His book features an often-overlooked aspect of
how the Los Angeles movie scene of the 1960s intersected with art and music and
reflects how Hopper and Hayward were at its vortex.
The
following is a condensed version of an interview with the author conducted earlier
this year.
Steve
Matteo: You're primarily a New Yorker. What is it about
Los Angeles that so intrigues you?
Mark Rozzo: I knew I
wanted to do a cultural history of LA someday, and I knew that it would be set
in the 1960s. What made Los Angeles during that decade so dynamic and unique was
the concurrent revolutionary ferment in contemporary art, popular music, and
Hollywood: like a revolution in triplicate. I gradually found that Dennis
Hopper and Brooke Hayward, more than anyone else, seemed to connect those three
realms. They knew all the artists, they went to the rock shows, and they were
so immersed in Hollywood.
SM: Did you ever have a chance to meet Dennis
Hopper?
MR: Dennis died in 2010 and I never got a chance to
meet him. But I was the first writer—and I believe still only—given access to
his personal archives, along with his photographic archive, the Hopper Art
Trust. I was also fortunate in that the Jean Stein Papers at the New York
Public Library opened in the fall of 2019, a critical point in my research time
line. Jean had been interviewing Dennis since the early 1970s and hers were the
best interviews I’d ever read with him. Since they were old pals, and on the
same page culturally in so many ways, he opened up to her more than he ever did
to anyone assigned to write about him at, say, a film magazine.
SM: How hard was it getting Brooke
Hayward to cooperate on your initial story? Were you ambivalent about her
participation at any point? Did you feel her cooperation would in any way
possibly make the story less objective.
MR: With Brooke, I had to go up and talk to her at
her house in Connecticut. The first time was with her and Dennis’s daughter,
Marin Hopper, and Marin’s husband. They were the wingmen. We were there to
convince Brooke to let me write about her for Vanity Fair. I knew from
talking to Marin, whom I’d befriended several years before, that her parents
were the way in to the story I wanted to tell about LA and that a big piece for
Vanity Fair would be a crucial first step. Brooke was hesitant at first (she’s
very good at playing hard to get) but as we talked and as we asked her
questions—"What about the party you guys threw for Warhol and buying the
first Campbell’s soup-can painting? What about hanging out with Oldenburg? What
about going to see the Byrds on the Sunset Strip? What about Joan Didion? What
about starring in The Twilight Zone?”—she started to understand that
what I was after was a cultural history with her and her husband at the center
of it, not another retelling of marital trauma and woe. I never felt beholden
to her point of view or restricted in any way. She and the family opened every
door and gave me free rein to tell the story.
SM: Motherhood and supporting
Dennis seemed to derail her acting career. Do you think if she hadn't met
Dennis, she would have had a more fulsome film career?
MR: It’s so hard to know.
Brooke had obviously inherited talent from her mother, Margaret Sullivan, and
had been granted admission to the Actors Studio. Her career was taking off in
the early 60s, whereas Dennis’s had tanked. That was probably why Dennis was
jealous of her and freaked out in 1964, asking her to stop, which she did. But
Brooke had always felt ambivalent about Hollywood and knew that someday she’d
get back to doing what she loved as a kid, which was writing. And she did. Her
book Haywire came out in 1977 and was a huge bestseller. It’s probably
the greatest Hollywood memoir of all time.
SM: Your book reflects how the
post-war years, particularly beginning in the late 50s and early 60s, so an
emergence of the co-mingling of high art and pop art. Hopper and Hayward seemed
to be at the center of this explosion.
MR: They really were. And it
became their focus during that time, more than acting. And for this, they stood out in Hollywood. They were different. Their tastes
were unusual. There were only two people working in Hollywood who regularly
showed up for Ferus Gallery openings: Brooke and Dennis. As Irving Blum, the
Ferus impresario, told me, “They were virtually unique. There was nobody else doing it in the way that they were doing it.” And they bought stuff, offering crucial early support to such
artists as Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein… it goes on
and on. Their house, 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard, was as avant garde
as any museum or gallery in the world at that time. And since people like the
Fondas, Ike and Tina Turner, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, Miles Davis, even
Hells Angels were coming through the house, that new art—mostly Pop Art—was
exposed to an ever-larger circle. I should maybe note that their collection
today would be valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Not bad for two
semi-employed actors!
SM: What do you feel is his most significant
contribution to film?
MR: As Dennis would have said, it came down to a
handful of projects over a very long career: Rebel without a Cause, Giant,
Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider (of course), The Last Movie, Apocalypse
Now, Blue Velvet. Those would be the biggies, more or less. I do think he
was a very special, one-of-a-kind actor who came out of the Shakespearean
tradition, had his mind blown by the Method, and created his own thing. He
never won an acting Oscar yet perhaps he accomplished something more than that.
As the critic Jenny Diski once put it, “As charm is to Cary
Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so
malevolence is to Dennis Hopper.” And then too was his stance in
Hollywood—rebel, maverick, artist, survivor. There’s never been anyone quite
like him in the history of American moviemaking.
SM: How significant is Easy Rider to the
evolution of American film and how influential was it on American film in the
70s, which seems like a golden era?
MR: It’s massively significant. It was the movie that propelled what we call the New Hollywood—that era
of ambitious, artful American filmmaking—into the 1970s, the decade of
Scorsese, Coppola, Altman, and Spielberg. It’s a movie that’s been picked
apart, dissected, and subjected to near-exegetical analysis and interpretation.
And yet also, in some quarters, it’s been dismissed as a period artifact. It’s
certainly the film that turned Dennis into an icon, even an icon that
transcended Hollywood—at least for a while. And it proved for the first time
that a movie could be made about the counterculture and still make a ton of
money. It represented a whole new kind of Hollywood math: a movie shot for well
under $500,000 hauls in something like $60 million. Beyond that, it’s forever a
part of our collective memory of the summer of 1969, along with the Apollo moon
landing, the Beatles crossing Abbey Road, the Manson murders, and Woodstock.
It’s an enduring cultural touchstone. And it has an amazing soundtrack!
SM: He and Peter Fonda had an interesting
relationship to The Byrds. It has been said, that for Easy Rider, Fonda
borrowed a little from Roger McGuinn and Hopper borrowed a lot from David
Crosby.
MR: That was certainly corroborated by my research,
including conversations with Roger McGuinn. Roger loved the movie so much that
he said to Peter Fonda something like, “I wish I’d been in it!” Peter replied,
“But you were!” He explained to Roger that he and Dennis had developed their
characters based on him and his irascible bandmate in the Byrds, a band that
represented a lot of the cultural change in LA in the 1960s.
SM: The Last Movie was a film that gestated for years, but
then became one of the key films of the 70s American film renaissance, but also
signaled how the end of the 70s would be a time of excess and the end of that
kind of creative film-making.
MR: Yes, The Last Movie. That project became Dennis’s Waterloo
after the outsize success of Easy Rider. He had initially been trying to
make that film in 1965 and 1966. But, after causing excitement throughout
Hollywood, it came to nothing. Dennis was distraught; if he’d have made The
Last Movie then, it would probably have been considered the first New
Hollywood film, coming before Bonnie and Clyde. But the project fell
apart. Executives didn’t want to pay Dennis Hopper, of all people, to direct a
movie. Brooke said that if Dennis had been able to make that movie then, he
wouldn’t “have fallen into the abyss.” Dennis’s alcoholism really started to
accelerate after that.
SM: What would Dennis make of the world of movies today?
MR: That’s a stumper! I think he’d either have been
totally appalled at the Marvelization of Hollywood… or he’d find it to be the
greatest Pop Art happening ever. Dennis was always so engaged in his time,
whether it was the 1960s or the 1980s or the 2000s. He would have found a way
in. He always did.
Click here to order
(Steve Matteo is the author of the books "Act Naturally: The Beatles on
Film", to be published on May 15, 2023, "Let It Be" and "Dylan". He has contributed to the collection "The Beatles in Context" and has written for
such publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New
York, Time Out New York, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Salon. @MatteoMedia)