HE WAS THE MOST ICONOCLASTIC OF ACTORS. IN AN INDUSTRY where it is very fashionable to claim that you care nothing about money and don’t really enjoy acting, he truly didn’t care about either. He had a dysfunctional upbringing during the Depression and left home at the age of sixteen to go to sea. By the time he was twenty years old, he had sailed around the world as first mate on a schooner. Despite having no professional training as an actor, he successfully marketed his handsome looks and impressive physique, and in a matter of months, he was starring in a major Hollywood production, titled Virginia. After his second movie, Bahama Passage, he simply walked away from the film industry.
He considered himself a coward, yet he volunteered for commando training in Europe before the United States entered the Second World War. He turned down a commission from the United States Navy, but shortly thereafter enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Feeling constrained by rigid military discipline, he appealed to America’s spymaster, Gen. William J. Donovan, and was accepted into the Office of Strategic Services, better known as the OSS. He would distinguish himself in combat alongside the Yugoslavian and Albanian Partisans and fall under the spell of their communist philosophy. He was an idealistic young man looking for a cause in which to believe.
Sterling Hayden’s brief membership in the Communist Party of the United States would come back to haunt him, and he would become enmeshed in the battle between Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee in public testimony. He would be the first Hollywood star to name names and would hate himself for the rest of his life for this. He would emerge with his career thriving and would soon engage in other battles: a vicious battle for the custody of his children with his second wife, with alcoholism and substance abuse, and the persistent battle against his self-doubt and self-hatred.
With only a tenth-grade education and no formal training as a writer, he would publish his first book, his autobiography Wanderer, at the age of forty-seven and it would be a critically acclaimed bestseller. His second book, a novel called Voyage: A Novel of 1896, was published when he was sixty years old and it, too, was a critically acclaimed international bestseller.
Although remembered today primarily as a “B-actor” with occasional flashes of brilliance, such a description does not tell the real story. Novelist and film scholar Jake Hinkson has offered a richer, more nuanced assessment of his acting skills: “His voice, a kind of rapid-fire bellow, is made for the clipped dialogue of a suspicious cop or a surly thug. His shopworn good looks and imposing physical presence make him a natural to play men stalking darkened city streets at three in the morning. What he lacks in nuance, he makes up for in essence. In crime films, he’s as natural as cheap carpet and cigarette smoke. No, he couldn’t act, he could only be. And that being is the key to why he was a great actor. Among noir heroes, he may well be the most intrinsically existential.”1
Despite a lucrative film career, followed by a successful writing career, he was frequently broke and in debt. He never invested a penny of his earnings as he didn’t believe in accepting money that he didn’t actually earn with his own labor. He could be gregarious around family and friends yet he continually sought solitude. Perhaps the best description of Sterling Hayden was offered by his stepson Scott McConnell, who wrote shortly after his death: “He was the natural center of any room he occupied. Curious, kind, capable of mordant self-mockery, he was blessed with the ability to make those in his company feel that they were close to the center of all that was interesting in the world. None of these gifts, it would seem, ever brought him a fair portion of satisfaction.”2
It would be a mistake to dismiss Sterling Hayden as just another eccentric Hollywood personality. In Sterling Hayden’s Wars, I explore in detail this complex man who was full of self-doubt and proved to be an adept nonconformist who was able to accomplish a great deal in various fields in spite of himself. His wartime records, which are examined in detail for the first time, and an in-depth investigation of the HUAC hearings, provide the framework on which to attain a true understanding of this unique man. Helping to flesh out the narrative are interviews conducted with members of the Hayden family, as well as material from Hayden’s personal papers that are maintained in the Sterling Hayden Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. The adjective “unique” is the key—Hayden was always too much of an individualist to truly belong to any one organization or to fit into conventional society. Whether it was his dysfunctional childhood, battling Hollywood, the Nazis, the HUAC, his ex-wife, alcoholism and substance abuse, his life was a series of wars that he was engaged in, including the most difficult one of them all—the war that Sterling Hayden fought with himself.