Coast ALONG

Vanities / Books

In postwar Cape Cod and 1960s L.A., art, love, and politics collide

TAKE A TRIP to the beaches ofWellfleet on the spiraling hook of Cape Cod, Massachusetts: The year is 1910, and an enclave of artists and writers is forming. John Taylor Williams's The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960, from FSG, traces the "flawed, rowdy, careless bohemians" who left Manhattan's Greenwich Village for the cheaper coastal towns up east—or bounced between the two. From Charles Webster Hawthorne's Provincetown Art Association; to socialist leanings turned communist sympathies; to Bauhaus houses spread with Anni Albers rugs; to the 1950s softball games staffed by Edwin O'Connor, Norman Mailer, and Edmund Wilson (who batted but "refused to run"), Williams captures half a century of creative thought lashed with salty sea air.

Pick up the temporal thread across the country with V.F. contributor Mark Rozzo's Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, out from Ecco. The book, which began as a 2018 article for this magazine, serves as a portrait not only of a marriage but of a critical American artistic awakening during the years that Hayward once called "the most wonderful and awful of my life." Rozzo paints a neon picture of the pair's milieu: their 1963 West Coast coming-out house party for Andy Warhol, replete with circus posters and a chili dog stand (and Hayward's later "screen tests" with the artist); Hopper photographing the Selma march; substance abuse battles; the couple's friendships with Ed Ruscha and Jane Fonda—a life and time in Technicolor.

KEZIAH WEIR