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Inside the swinging ’60s home where Dennis Hopper’s marriage unraveled

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“Everybody Thought We Were Crazy” (Ecco) by Mark Rozzo.The house, known as just “1712,” was owned by actress Brooke Hayward and her enfant terrible husband Hopper during eight tumultuous years of marriage, and filled to the brim with her found objects and his collection of contemporary art that, as Joan Didion remarked, “seems the result of some marvelous scavenger hunt.” The house “embodied the collision of Old Hollywood and New, of chic bohemia and burgeoning counterculture,” Rozzo writes, where you could as easily run into the Black Panthers as Jack Nicholson.

Jane Fonda called it “a magical house.”But with magic sometimes comes monsters.1712 was also where Hopper unraveled. A place where the three children would sometimes have to cower in closets to hide from their increasingly unhinged father, who drank and drugged to extreme excess, who liked to play with firearms and sometimes took his rage out on their mother.As Hayward once wrote, “Those years in the ’60s when I was married to Dennis were the most wonderful and awful of my life.”Writer Terry Southern, who penned “Dr.

Strangelove,” would sum up the dynamic between Hopper and Hayward with one perfect sentence in 1965: “She is a Great Beauty and he is some kind of Mad Person.”The two were the unlikeliest couple when they met on the production of the ill-fated Broadway show “Mandingo” in 1961.

Hayward was Hollywood royalty — the daughter of super-agent Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullivan. She was nursing the wounds of a recent divorce and the dual deaths of her mother and sister, both by suicide.

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