Saturday 28 May 2022 12:16 AM Dennis Hopper's wild life thrilled Tinseltown - but not his poor wives and ... trends now
It was 10 o’clock one night and actress Brooke Hayward had just got her three children settled and was finally relaxing in bed with a book. Her husband, Dennis Hopper, had other plans, however.
He suddenly appeared in their bedroom with Jane Fonda and the actress’s husband, the French director Roger Vadim. The priapic Easy Rider star wanted them to have a foursome.
‘They got into bed with me. I was just furious. I said: “Get the f*** out!” ’ Hayward recalled.
Dennis Hopper in 1970, a maverick actor, director, artist and photographer regarded by some as a genius and others as a maniac, managed to destroy every facet of his career with his arrogant and pugnacious behaviour
It was certainly not the most conventional domestic behaviour but, then again, the Hoppers would have been horrified to be called conventional. As revealed in a new book — Everybody Thought We Were Crazy by Mark Rozzo — the pair were the uncrowned king and queen of Tinseltown in the Swinging Sixties.
Their Hollywood Hills home at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard — known to many simply as 1712 — became the drug-fuelled beating heart of Los Angeles’ counter-culture scene, where Hells Angels and Black Panthers rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones and Hollywood stars from Natalie Wood and Jack Nicholson to Paul Newman and Groucho Marx.
In a decade when the champions of ‘radical chic’ regarded the movie industry as irretrievably bourgeois and uncool — the Sound Of Music rather than the sound of rock ’n’ roll — Hopper and Hayward came to the rescue.
Not for nothing were they dubbed the ‘coolest kids in Hollywood’ but, for their own kids, life wasn’t so great.
Hopper, a maverick actor, director, artist and photographer regarded by some as a genius and others as a maniac, managed to destroy every facet of his career with his arrogant and pugnacious behaviour. And the self-described enfant terrible certainly brought his work home with him — his terrified children would often hide from him in cupboards as he hit their mother and brandished a handgun when he went on drug and drink-fuelled rampages.
Hayward managed to stay with him for eight increasingly chaotic and dangerous years before she finally took the children and fled.
‘Those years in the 60s when I was married to Dennis,’ Hayward would recall, ‘were the most wonderful and awful of my life.’
At least she could measure her marriage in years. Hopper’s second marriage, to the beautiful Mamas And The Papas singer Michelle Phillips lasted all of eight days, with her saying she dumped him over his ‘unnatural sex demands’. His first wife knew all about those.
Dennis Hopper and Natalie Wood in 1954, he had a torrid affair with the man-eating Natalie Wood when, aged 16, she rang him out of the blue after he’d read for a role with her and propositioned him
He and Hayward met while performing together in a Broadway play, Mandingo, that was so awful it closed after five days. By then, Hopper — who’d become a teenage star in the 1950s with roles in Rebel Without A Cause and Giant — had moved in with Brooke and her two young sons from a previous marriage.
Their friends were gobsmacked given their drastically different backgrounds. She was Hollywood royalty, the daughter of actress Margaret Sullavan, ex-wife of Henry Fonda, and Hollywood super-agent Leland Hayward.
Her stepmother, the social-climbing socialite Pamela Churchill Harriman, ex-wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, wanted Brooke to marry someone far more elevated than rough diamond Hopper and encouraged Leland to end their romance.
It’s certainly true that Hopper came from a very humble background in Dodge City, Kansas, where his voracious sexual appetite alarmingly extended even as far as his mother, Marjorie. He once admitted that, as he came into puberty, he noticed she had an ‘incredible body’ and he developed a ‘sexual fascination for her’.
In his teens, he had a torrid affair with the man-eating Natalie Wood when, aged 16, she rang him out of the blue after he’d read for a role with her and propositioned him.
The pair later appeared together in Rebel Without A Cause. They and a male friend from the cast once decided to have an orgy in a bath full of champagne only for the alcohol to burn Wood’s crotch so badly she needed to go to hospital. So it’s fair to say Brooke Hayward had her work cut out becoming the first Mrs Hopper.
He claimed he’d warned his wife-to-be that she might be in for a challenging time, telling her: ‘I won’t be easy to live with. I go off on strange tangents. Why, I might not even come home for three days.’ It would be much worse than that.
The couple at least shared a passion for contemporary art. They filled their Hollywood Hills home with cutting-edge artwork, turning it into a ‘surreal fun house’ that served to further entice famous guests to their exotic parties.
Hopper was one of the first people to buy a work by Andy Warhol, one of his Campbell’s soup tin paintings, which his unimpressed wife insisted had to go in the kitchen. In the sitting room, a 14ft devil-like Mexican festival clown strung with firecrackers leered down from the ceiling.
Hopper also had a macabre collection of glass eyes and filled up a bath with dozens of fake heads.
And yet this was a family home in which they were bringing up three young children — Hayward’s sons from her previous marriage and their own daughter, Marin.
The latter says she was ‘terrified’ of an artwork in the living room called The Quickie that consisted of a mannequin head mounted on a skateboard, which she was convinced was a real decapitated head.
Even the couple agreed some of their art was pornographic but never removed it from the house.
American actor and writer Brook Hayward had her work cut out becoming the first Mrs Hopper but they filled their Hollywood Hills home with cutting-edge artwork, turning it into a ‘surreal fun house’ that served to further entice famous guests to their exotic parties and had a daughter together, Marin
Hayward’s son Jeffrey recalled how he and his siblings were too embarrassed to ever bring school friends back. ‘Like everyone else, we wanted to be normal,’ he said. Marin said she felt like she was living with the Munsters.
Hip Hollywood, however, lapped it
