Legendary Survivor: Brooke Hayward Was Born to Hollywood Royalty, Married Dennis Hopper, and Lived to Tell the Tale

Brooke Hayward's Haywire begins with every advantage American life can confer: her father was superagent-producer Leland Hayward, her mother the luminous actress Margaret Sullavan, the family friends a roll call of mid-century Hollywood and Broadway. By the book's end, her mother and sister are dead — probable suicides — her brother has been institutionalized, and Brooke is the one left standing to write it down.

Published in 1977, Haywire became a sensation precisely because it refused the two available registers: score-settling and nostalgia. Hayward writes about privilege with an accountant's eye and about catastrophe with unnerving calm. The reissue, with a new introduction by Buck Henry, confirms how far ahead of the celebrity-memoir curve she was.

Her own life supplied a second act the book only gestures at: an eight-year marriage to Dennis Hopper that ended just as Easy Rider made him a counterculture deity — she has said, with characteristic dryness, that she financed the revolution and missed the payout.

CBS adapted the memoir as a 1980 television film with Lee Remick as Sullavan and Jason Robards as Leland; it's a curio worth seeking out, though the book remains the definitive account. Both are cataloged on the Haywire page.