Hollywood in the ‘60s, Through a Rebel’s Lens

When Dennis Hopper started taking pictures with his first camera in 1962, he was a struggling actor who had yet to make “Easy Rider” and become synonymous with the rebel culture of the 1960s.

But with that $351 Nikon, a gift from his new wife, Brooke Hayward, he not only chronicled his personal life, but also captured the ascent of Hollywood’s ‘60s generation and Pop Art’s first. Now those long-buried photos have been edited by Marin Hopper, their daughter from their eight-year-marriage, into a new kind of child-of-celebrity book. It’s an affectionate one, not a whiny tell-all.

The book, “1712 North Crescent Heights: Photographs by Dennis Hopper 1962-1968,” (Greybull Press, 2001, $75) has the size and feel of a coffee-table book, but its images document something more than the youthful famous faces and fashions of the time. It is both a sentimental view of the era and a de facto family album by a daughter who described her parents as “prominent on the scene, very happening, interesting, cultured, sophisticated and young and cool.”

The 39-year-old Marin, who lives part time in L.A., has her own cool pedigree. The granddaughter of producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, she is well-known in New York as the former fashion director of Elle magazine. One of her godmothers is Jane Fonda. More than a year ago, she had been approached by Greybull Press publishers Roman Alonso and Lisa Eisner to create a book about her family.

She later happened upon the book’s direction when she walked into her father’s L.A. office while he was editing proof sheets. She discovered dozens of photos of her early childhood and of her parents, who divorced when she was 6 years old. The shots reflected a time when Hopper couldn’t get any acting jobs and used the camera, he said in the book, “as my only creative outlet.” The photos and the stories behind them were rarely mentioned in the family.

“I never printed any of the pictures of my personal life during that time because of bad memories,” the actor wrote in the foreword. “I was trying to forget. These photographs represented failure to me.” Hopper became an alcoholic in the early ‘60s and eventually lost his wife, child, art collection and that special home above Chateau Marmont.

Little of that personal discord is reflected in the book, however. The carefully edited images portray an innocence, glamour and nostalgia in shots of a young Jane Fonda on the Malibu beach or Phil Spector making what we now know as musical history in his recording studio. The casual and sensual poses of the famous subjects also offer lessons in style, particularly shots of their young Hollywood friends lounging on tennis courts or in front of enormous Pop Art canvases. “As a fashion editor,” Marin said in an interview over Starbucks coffee, “you fantasize a million times about having a shoot look like that.”

Reviewing the photos with nearly 40 years’ distance became a healing process for the family. “This really is a celebration of my daughter and a look at photos that I refused to look at after the divorce from her mother,” Hopper said in Paris at the book’s October launch party. The actor described the era documented in the book as “

Though Hopper gave up shooting stills from 1968 through the early 1980s, his skill with a camera earned two museum retrospectives in Europe this year and a previous photo book in 1986, “Out of the Sixties.” The personal shots had never been published.

“These photos were something that were missing from history,” said Marin, who called them the visual counterpart to her mother’s 1977 memoir, “Haywire.” “I feel good about [the book] because there was so much misinterpretation of what happened in the ‘60s and with Dennis.”

To uncover the truth behind the images, on Easter this year Marin staged a three-way telephone conversation with her parents. To her surprise, she easily extracted the stories of their meeting, their marriage and how the couple came to occupy the intersection of L.A.’s film, music, fashion and burgeoning Pop Art world in the early 1960s. An edited version of their hours-long talk is the book’s main text. At only 11 pages, however, the reader yearns for more. The interview reflects an adult’s interpretation of the passions that drew her parents together, and split them apart.

“I’d always heard stories about them. Dominick Dunne is an old friend of my mother’s and father’s. He always said they were this most amazing couple,” Marin said. “I think every divorced child wants to examine what had happened. It’s not a rewriting or re-creating of history or piecing it back together. It’s from the horse’s mouth,” she said. “It correctly aligned history with what happened. It was a very healing process.”

She heard how just days after the newlyweds moved into their first house in Bel-Air, it burned to the ground in 1961, along with 483 others. Homeless, they moved in with Vincent and Mary Price and their collection of Pop Art.

Marin’s parents “were very influenced by this house and its crazy mix of Spanish tiles and modern paintings,” Marin said. Soon Hopper and Hayward would be buying Andy Warhol soup can paintings and hosting a party for the artist in their own new Spanish house on Crescent Heights. Her father papered the bathroom walls with giant billboard panels for the occasion.

These photos chronicled Marin’s early childhood and the infancy of many entertainers’ careers. Hopper trained his camera on Bill Cosby in his first week in L.A.; on Ike and Tina Turner as they frolicked on his porch; on parties with Pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein; and on the sculpted wedding cake pieces that Claes Oldenburg made for a Pacific Palisades wedding.

The fond, but realistic, tone of the photos and text are somewhat unexpected in the age of the tell-all. But Marin is a grateful child. Her last words to her parents in the book? “Thanks for being so cool.”