I paired Viertel’s book with Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, by Mark Rozzo. The Hollywood home of actors Hopper and Hayward, much like Viertel’s thirty years before, became headquarters for creative types, in this case including painters Andy Warhol and David Hockney, sculptor Claes Oldenburg, musicians Ike and Tina Turner, and virtually everyone in the movie business.
The surprising thing about those gatherings, and the book, is that they were more about L.A.’s exploding Pop Art scene than about movies. Hopper, besides appearing in Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider (he is shown here on the right, with Peter Fonda), was a fine, highly stylized photographer, and he seemed to know everyone in the art world. The walls of their home on North Crescent Drive were crowded with the work of friends, much of which can be found today in museums.
I grew up in L.A., and though I no longer live there, the place exerts a powerful pull on my imagination. I loved revisiting it in the pages of these books.
|