"Everybody Thought We Were Crazy" with author Mark Rozzo and Gerald Howard

“Those years in the sixties when I was married to Dennis were the most wonderful and awful of my life.” —Brooke Hayward

Please join us on Wednesday, September 13th in the Parlor Room for a fascinating book talk on Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles with author Mark Rozzo and Gerald Howard. After the program, the conversation and conviviality will continue over dinner downstairs.

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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.

A national best-seller, 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 first telling of Hopper’s life to benefit from access to his personal archives. And 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.

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Bar: 5:30pm (Wiggins Bar Room)

Program: 6:30pm (Parlor Room)

Dinner: 7:30pm (Dining Room)

There will be an a la carte menu to choose from. You can pay for your meal with a card or your membership account (no cash). Enjoy!

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Members and their guests are welcome. Please RSVP.

Email Brittney at coffeehouseclub@hotmail.com with any questions.

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Gerald Howard is a retired book editor who is currently working on a biographical study of the editor and critic Malcolm Cowley.

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Mark Rozzo is the author of the cultural history Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco Books, 2022), a national best-seller. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (where he previously served as deputy editor), and has also been a contributor at The New Yorker and a columnist at The Los Angeles Times Book Review. His essays, criticism, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Oxford American, The Washington Post, Esquire, Vogue, Gourmet, Town & Country, Architectural Digest, BookForum, and Air Mail.

As a musician, he has released albums with various bands and has created music for TV and films, including Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and soundtracks for Audible. He teaches nonfiction writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City.