Wanderer –
Sterling Hayden
What might be considered classic about a memoir by a
not-terribly-well-known Hollywood actor?
Sterling Hayden seems fiercely honest. Honesty is
timeless. Honesty is a model. So that is why I consider this a classic not only
with a one-word title but a classic written by non-writer, up there with James
Webb’s Fields
of Fire and Albert Ellis’ A Guide to Rational Living.
Probably best known as mad general in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove,
Sterling Hayden (1916 - 1986) was also in The Asphalt Jungle,
Kubrick’s The Killing,
the noir Suddenly, and played a bent cop in The Godfather. Knowing full well that he had all the acting chops
of, say, George Raft or Robert Stack, Hayden wasn’t really at ease with his
image as the hunky, strong, stolid type. When Paramount Pictures signed him up
in 1940, they dubbed him ''The Beautiful Blond Viking God. '' Hayden wasn’t
easy with that but he said “the money was good.”
He married a Hitchcock ice queen Madeleine Carroll. But they
didn’t see much of each other because he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps under an assumed
name. He didn’t want to be seen as just a Hollywood actor poser. As John
Hamilton, he earned both the Silver Star and Bronze Star. He served with the
ur-CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, in Yugoslavia, Italy and Germany –
one of the very few Marines not in the Pacific for WWII. He knew Wild Bill
Donovan, founder of the OSS, and had dinner with FDR.
War affects different people in different ways (see Suddenly). War
solidified Hayden’s belief in nonviolence, civil disobedience, and his
identification with poor and the oppressed people. War also briefly made him a Communist. He
joined the Party but was not active because politics interfered with dating and
romance. In 1951, after being summoned by the House of Un-American Activities
Committee, he named names of Hollywood friends who had naively dabbled in
communist / left groups after WWII.
If I have any excuse, and
it's not a good reason, the FBI made it clear to me that if I became an
"Unfriendly Witness" I could damn well forget the custody of my
children. I didn't want to go to jail, that was the other thing. The FBI office
promised that my testimony was confidential. And they were very pleasant. So I
spilled my guts out, and the months went by, and I was on some shit-ass
picture, and I got a subpoena. The next thing I knew I was flying to Washington
to testify. The worst day of my life. They knew it already, and there is the
savage irony.
The government knew it already but wanted to humiliate
him, just like they wanted to torment Edward G.
Robinson into saying he was a dupe even when he never acted out of being
duped. Stories like this make me amend the Irish invocation, “God between us
and evil” to “… us and the goddamn government.” After the HUAC, Hayden lost his
lefty buds and had a B-movie career though John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle keep him in the public eye.
Hayden writes in a unique style, to produce a sprawling
hodge-podge of a book. Over the course of 400+ pages, though some memorable passages
are well-realized, the melodramatic tone takes patience, parts in need of
strict editing a time-pressed reader just has to skim. But as I said above,
without being embarrassing, he is honest and the parts about sailing would
really appeal to a sailor.
You are on track to be the first to complete the Back to the Classics Challenge again!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this review. Hayden sounds like an interesting person. It is all too easy to assume that everyone in the 50s and 60s were happy consumers with no worries...back when everything was "great".