“He stood behind him to learn how to take pictures,” she says with a ringing laugh. As his acting languished, he began shooting everything in sight. Dennis has gone berserk.’ ” Hayward thought they were out of their minds. “We all thought it was a great adventure,” he says. She also struggled with her mother's and siblings' mental issues and eventually had to face their deaths. He got in touch with Hayward, asking her to come visit him at his house in Venice, California, at her earliest opportunity. 'Following this, Brooke was seen as a sea ship captain's daughter in an episode of the 'NBC' western 'Bonanza.' Several decades after ‘Haywire’ was published, Brooke started opening up about her turbulent marriage through articles and journals. But Hopper did come home from the shoot disturbed. Right here at FameChain. “He was a wild man. The hallway features one of several lamp posts that adorned the house; on the living-room wall, a print of an Andy Warhol Mona Lisa hangs above Marcel Duchamp’s 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. She had a younger sister named Bridget (born in 1939) and a brother named William "Bill" (born in 1941), who was a renowned producer and lawyer.At the age of 7 years, Brooke and her family moved to a farm in Brookfield, Connecticut. “I was trying to forget,” he wrote. They got married in 1985 and separated in 2008. 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. He sat up the moment Hayward entered.Amid the golden dream of 1960s Los Angeles, one couple made a life—and household—like no other: Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper were the connectors and catalysts who brought together Old Hollywood and New, rock heroes and Hells Angels, and the artists, including Andy Warhol, who defined an era. I mean, it was seriously a psychotic episode.” The children weren’t sure what was up.
Brooke had a disturbed childhood. “Movie stars, with the exception of Dennis, never came into the gallery.” Hopper had agreed to buy the painting for $100. Marin Hopper recalls honing her hula-hoop skills beneath Ruscha’s 10-foot-long Even so, the children adored their parents. The fashion model Peggy Moffitt, married to photographer William Claxton, remembers the avid Hopper trailing her husband. 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. 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. (She was married for 23 years to the society bandleader Peter Duchin; they divorced in 2008.) The two had a daughter, Marin Brooke Hopper. (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 “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. “It was probably in September. 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 “Dennis knew all the artists and had the paintings,” says Jane Fonda. Now he and Hayward went into aesthetic overdrive.Hayward with her two sons, Jeffrey and Willie Thomas, and her daughter, Marin Hopper, in the backyard of 1712.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. I believe it was September. “She wasn’t running around being drugged or drunk or out of control,” Toby Rafelson says. “You really see Brooke’s mothering there,” Jeffrey says. She’s bent down at lawn level with Marin and a little friend, aglow with warmth and care. 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. In 1950, her mother married importer and producer Kenneth Wagg. 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. 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). She is, after all, the oldest child of the actress Margaret Sullavan. It was wild.’ ” Jane Fonda agrees: “No question. It looked enormous when I was small.” The creative atmosphere of the place rubbed off: in addition to guiding the For decades, Hopper kept the memories and contact sheets from those days at 1712 in a vault. Brooke Hayward is an American stage, film, and TV actor, who is also the author of the bestseller 'Haywire.' 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). She rose to prominence primarily because of her book, ‘Haywire,’ which is her childhood memoir.