Inside the home where Dennis Hopper’s marriage unraveled

Pop Art masterpieces were askew on the wall, a creepy 18-foot clown puppet hung from the ceiling, 20 Hells Angels huddled together in sleeping bags on the floor as Dennis Hopper sashayed down the stairs in a flowing caftan robe.

It was just another day in the life at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in the sixties, a time and place that is the subject of the new book “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. She initially loathed the unwashed and unprepared Hopper.

“He terrified me,” she told Rozzo.

Hopper was the furthest thing from a scion — born in Dodge City, Kansas, he was nearly banished from Hollywood for clashing with the director of the movie “From Hell to Texas” before his 25th birthday.

Despite it all, the two started a passionate romance, bonding over a shared love of the visual. Hayward bought Hopper a Nikon camera for his birthday, starting a lifelong pursuit of photography. (His photographs of ’60s figures like Paul Newman and Timothy Leary have been featured in major galleries around the world.) Overnight, it seemed, the two had become “the coolest kids in Hollywood.”

The couple initially moved into a house destroyed in the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles in 1961. They then moved to 1712 North Crescent Height Boulevard, a Spanish style home built in 1927 that would become the beating heart of the growing counterculture.

Hopper had a natural eye for art and was one of the first actors to put his wallet behind the growing Abstract and Pop Art movements. Incredibly, the first painting Hopper purchased (with Hayward’s money) was Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans in 1962. (When Hopper described the piece, Hayward was unimpressed. “It’s going in the kitchen!”)

Hopper spent his free time perusing the nearby galleries, amassing one of the greatest private contemporary art collections of the era — paintings and sculptures from artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein.

Hayward did her part in augmenting the surreal décor, collecting treasures at flea markets and antique shops around Hollywood — Tiffany lamps, Victorian spool tables, stained glass windows, a fiberglass car, and an old billboard. She worked on the house herself, tiling the entranceway, for example, wearing only pearls and a bikini. The result was a mishmash of brilliance and surreality that mirrored the mood of the time.

To celebrate Warhol’s arrival on the West Coast, Hopper and Hayward threw a party with members of the art world and actors like Natalie Wood and Peter Fonda. Warhol was gobsmacked — the people looked like “living Pop Art” while his own work was “liberated from galleries” on the walls. He literally “oohed and aahed.” 

“There was a constant…