They Were Reckless and in Love, and They Were the New Hollywood

American idylls have unusual roots, and so it’s no great surprise to consider that the “New Hollywood” that found its full flourish in the early 1970s had origins all the way back in 1961 with the improbable union of two artists who met and married that year. To understand the last great period of widespread creative freedom in mainstream American cinema, a period in which the movies offered not just ambiguity and complexity but an almost infinite sense of possibility resounding through the culture at large, we might look to the turbulent story of this couple, whose own artistic capacities might have seemed, for a moment, likewise without limit.

Brooke Hayward was a blue blood: The daughter of a debonair talent agent and the actor Margaret Sullavan, she’d grown, when they met in New York City, cast together in a play called . Brooke loathed Dennis, Dennis fell in love, and—once Brooke came around—one of the more colorful and consequential alliances of the ’60s was born.