Wonderful ... A rollicking tale ... Which brings us to Rozzo’s greatest authorial gift. By centering his book on the juxtaposition of opposing worlds...Rozzo makes each world, each character and each reality both shocking and believable, both ridiculous and sublime.

... a Hollywood book about everything except the movies ... Mr. Rozzo keeps racking and re-racking his focus, from the art galleries of North La Cienega Boulevard to the rock clubs that revitalized the Sunset Strip with the sounds of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield; from the sybaritic celebrity paradise coalescing out in Malibu to the bliss-outs and freak-outs up the coast in San Francisco. The author wants to take in the entirety of the ’60s cultural revolution through the lens of Southern California and two protean people who lived there. Remarkably, he succeeds, juggling names and events with the skill of someone intimately familiar with the turf. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is an exceptionally well-researched and well-written book, and if the tsunami of information at times overwhelms, it’s not Mr. Rozzo’s fault that his subjects seemed to have known everyone.

Rozzo is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, and his articles there have been heavily cribbed for this book. That’s fine; if I had read the original articles there I would certainly have been left with a thirst for more research into the exuberant Sixties, and Everybody Thought We Were Crazy manages to keep up their engaging pace ... ust as engaging and rewarding to a desultory reader as to a more programmatic one. As I read this book cover to cover, I found myself flipping ahead from the early Sixties to land on a surprise appearance by the Jefferson Airplane, and as I neared the end, I treated myself to reliving an early party with Marcel Duchamp and Vincent Price, and some eyebrow-raising sexual experimentation with Hopper’s castmates from Rebel Without A Cause ... I came away from this book in awe of Hopper and Hayward, not so much for their considerable contributions to their arts but simply for their serendipity and seeming ability to have experienced firsthand everything the ‘60s had to offer. At times the book feels unreal because it resembles films like Almost Famous or Forrest Gump, whose hapless protagonists accidentally stumble into every defining event of their generation and fortuitously find themselves at parties with its brightest lights and scions. But so it was—and it is a delight to read about ... one hundred percent true, exhaustively researched, and yet more similar to a delirious romance movie than anything our sad, quotidian lives will ever contain.

It is a tale driven more by encounter than incident: Hopper and Hayward collide herein with just about every major cultural personage of the American mid-century—including Miles Davis, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr., David O. Selznick ... If you want narrative complication, look elsewhere, but if you want a vibrant depiction of how some of the most substantial creative figures of the 20th century jostled against and inspired one another? Look here. What makes Rozzo’s book exciting is not just the collective artistic firepower of the various names involved, but the many surprising ways in which these names interact, and the ways in which these interactions occasionally give rise to significant cultural events ... These encounters are thrilling (the discovery of the Byrds, and Rozzo’s descriptions of their vertiginous, druggy, and erotic allure suddenly lighting up the Sunset Strip, are particularly so), and go a ways toward balancing the story’s grimmer aspect: the horrendous decline of the marriage as Hopper conducts his full-blown slide into alcohol- and drug-fed mania, finally arriving at scenes of abuse that are as awful and frightening as you can imagine ... he finds his way to an unexpectedly elegiac conclusion ... The triumph of Rozzo’s book is that one ultimately feels this sense of possibility at its full extension. The mother lode of anecdote and gossip these pages contain is one reason to enjoy them. Another, perhaps more substantial, one is to feel all this potential before it evaporates, and before this improbable, fleetingly beautiful union—just like that period of promise that would occur for the movies merely a year or two later; that electric moment in which they told the truth about America, and about themselves—goes shooting down in flames.

... as much a biography of a marriage as it is a microcosm of the chaotic decade of the 1960s. Hayward and Hopper are fascinating individuals on their own, but together, they were intriguing and explosive. Author Mark Rozzo has penned a remarkable dual biography that was hard to put down, as the subject matter never ceased to be illuminating.

Extensively footnoted and drawing on current interviews and previously published sources, the book paints a detailed picture of the iconic Hopper and his relationship with Hayward, the daughter of legendary producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan.

Readers of Rozzo’s book will come away deeply impressed by the couple’s efforts ... Drawing on diligent research and an excellent array of interviews, Rozzo brings 1960s LA to life in all its joy, creativity, and chaos ... Rozzo documents a roller-coaster ride of big ideas, big failures, lasting successes, and lost projects. Recommended for anyone interested in the culture of the 1960s.

A scintillating romance plays out against the febrile backdrop of 1960s L.A. in Vanity Fair contributor Rozzo’s luminous debut ... As Rozzo traces the marriage’s demise, fueled by Hopper’s alcoholism and physical abuse of Hayward, he delivers a captivating drama of clashing egos and artistic struggles that captures the oft-volatile vicissitudes of love. Film buffs should snatch this up.

Rozzo delves deep into his characters’ lives, making a strong case for their enduring cultural influence ... Telling all the right tales, this story of 'the coolest kids in Hollywood' proves their artistic significance.