CHAPTER SIX

Walking Out on Hollywood

TO THE CASUAL OBSERVER, IT WOULD SEEM THAT STERLING HAYDEN had it made. Only twenty-five years old and having no prior acting experience, he was now making his second Hollywood film and was in a starring role. Once again, his leading lady was the elegant and beautiful Madeleine Carroll. However, the doubts that he had already felt while filming Virginia only deepened. Once again, he realized that he didn’t enjoy the process of acting and felt foolish performing. In his mind and in his heart, he belonged at sea. And now, during the filming of Bahama Passage in August of 1941, another complication arose to add to the anxiety and confusion that he was already feeling. The physical attraction that he felt towards Madeleine Carroll was turning into love.

It seemed an unlikely pairing. He was a self-educated man without a high school diploma who had spent the past ten years as a seaman. The elegant British actress, who was already an established movie star, was ten years older than Hayden and a college graduate, fluent in four languages. As one director recalled, “You could not have found a more mismatched couple. Madeleine was beautiful, gay, witty. Sterling was humorless. All he wanted to talk about was boats.”¹ Yet the physical chemistry between these two beautiful people was palpable. As he had learned when he had an affair with Carroll during the filming of Virginia, she seemed to detest Hollywood as much as he did. Career-wise, both Hayden and Carroll similarly “marched to the beat of a different drum,” as their future career decisions would soon indicate.

When he arrived on Stage 31 at the Paramount lot that August day for shooting, he saw Madeleine sitting there with her new boyfriend. Hayden described him as “lean and tall and he looked like a man should look. He had been ferrying bombers across the North Atlantic.”² They shot their scene together, but Hayden acknowledged that whatever they had between them personally was, by then, over. Yet he also realized that “suddenly and for the first time, I knew what jealousy meant.”³ When the shooting wrapped for the day, he had to escape, to try and clear his head. He got into his car and drove to the coastal highway and headed south. He didn’t stop until he reached Capistrano, over fifty miles away.

After the end of this pointless drive, he turned around and headed north back towards Los Angeles. At that moment, all he could think about was his first love—ships and the sea. His mind shifted to a ship that he had spotted before, so he headed north and drove to Los Angeles harbor. Climbing over the barrier fence, he went down the dock until he arrived at the prize he now sought—the two-masted schooner Oretha F. Spinney. The ship had been purchased by MGM in Gloucester for the purpose of filming background shots for the movie Captains Courageous, starring Spencer Tracy. After being brought out to the West Coast for the filming, the ship was retired to the dock in Los Angeles harbor. This ship, lying in disrepair, had become Hayden’s obsession. After inspecting it that evening, he inquired as to the price. It was for sale for $18,000—money that Sterling Hayden didn’t have. He proceeded to fall asleep in the starboard bunk and when he awakened, he had already decided what he was going to do.

Driving back to his home as the sun was starting to rise, he imagined the interaction he would have later that day with Y. Frank Freeman, the head of Paramount Pictures. In his mind, he tried to visualize the confrontation. He would acknowledge how generous and accommodating Paramount had been to him personally. “I also know you have a great deal of faith in my future,” he imagined telling Freeman. “But, sir, there are things busting loose inside of me that I simply cannot explain. You know, I want to buy a schooner and you’ve told me to be patient. Well—I’m sorry, sir, but I just have to have that vessel. Right now!”⁴ Noting that two weeks of shooting were left on Bahama Passage, Hayden would make a serious threat to the studio head. “It so happens that I appear in almost every scene. This means you cannot finish the picture without me. Unless Paramount buys Oretha F. Spinney from MGM and hands her over to me, I shall refuse to report for work.” If the studio did buy it for him, he would agree to be the most cooperative actor in the studio and arrange a repayment schedule. If he was unable to make the payments, he would work for free. “I mean that, sir,” he would reassure Freeman. “I never meant anything so much in all my fucked-up life.”⁵

That morning, the shooting went well on the set. From Hayden’s demeanor, Madeleine sensed that something was brewing in her co-star. Without revealing the purpose, he told her he had scheduled a meeting with Frank Freeman that noon. Gathering up his courage, Hayden reported to Freeman’s office at the appointed time. The two growling boxers in the office did little to reassure the young actor. Neither did Freeman’s somewhat curt and distant manner. Hayden re-created the conversation in Wanderer: “Well, Sterling, what’s on your mind today?” Freeman brusquely inquired.

“Mr. Freeman, I just wanted to have a few words with you about this schooner we were talking about last month.”

“My God, Sterling, do we have to go through this again? You’ll have your precious boat when the time comes. Nobody’s going to run off with it. Metro has no use for it, I have no use for it, so just control yourself and concentrate on your acting.”

When Hayden countered that he’d have nothing to do when the shooting finished in two weeks, Freeman left the room for a minute and returned to his leather chair. He stunned the young actor with his next statement. “All right now, Sterling, I’ll tell you what. I’ll try and buy that schooner today. While you’re still here if I can. When you finish your work on Bahama Passage, you will get a fifty percent interest in the boat as a—as a sort of bonus. You have some peculiar ideas but you’ll outgrow them. As a matter of fact, if I was your father I’d be right proud of you.”⁶

The surprised Hayden could not even begin to articulate his appreciation, but the studio head told him to forget it. If the actor would complete one additional picture for Paramount, the boat would be entirely his. A beaming Hayden watched as Freeman picked up the phone and called Eddie Mannix, the head of MGM. “You’ve got a boat somewhere down at the harbor called Oretha F. Spinney,” he inquired of his rival studio head. “That’s right. How much do you want for her? Eighteen five? I’ll buy her.”⁷

Hayden now had the boat that he had obsessed over. But he was far from content. His inner turmoil would soon cause him to commit to what was tantamount to career suicide.

• • •

The shooting wrapped up on Bahama Passage in late August. The next day, Hayden saw Madeleine off at the Pasadena Station, where she was beginning her journey back east to be with her “bomber man” once again. After saying their goodbyes, a downhearted Hayden left for the harbor to do a thorough inspection of the Spinney. The dilapidated condition of the ship depressed him even more and he laid back on a stained mattress, staring at the overhead while jealously thinking of Madeleine. In a few minutes he was sound asleep. It was 9:30 p.m. by the time he awaked. Looking around at his cluttered, filthy ship in need of multiple repairs, he decided he couldn’t deal with it at the moment. He spontaneously decided that he would visit an old acquaintance from Gloucester who had since relocated to the San Francisco area—Sausalito, to be exact. This would be the first of two visits to an old friend that would come back to haunt Hayden in the years after the war.

Sterling Hayden had last seen Warwick Tompkins in June of 1936 before Tompkins and his wife and two small children set sail from Gloucester and traveled to San Francisco by way of Tangier, Rio, Cape Horn, and Talcahuano in Chile.⁸ He published his best-selling book Fifty South to Fifty South describing the heroic voyage in 1938. Since relocating to Sausalito, Tompkins had sailed his schooner Wander Bird to Hawaii twice and Tahiti once. Tompkins was a master sailor, as well as a published author with an engaging and persuasive manner about him. Hayden admired the man although he readily admitted that he was somewhat intimidated by his intellect. As Hayden described Tompkins: “The only thing wrong was a rumor that he was becoming a radical, but all the same, I envied him his belligerence, his brusqueness, his ability as a writer, and his way of making a go of things even when he was broke. He also had a knack of flouting minor conventions.”⁹ When Hayden testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1951, he would describe that visit to Tompkins thusly: “I felt kind of lost in Hollywood, not really being an actor by inclination, and one time when I was feeling particularly low I decided to pay him a visit. I went to San Francisco and saw him. He was at that time, or previously, had become, I believe, an open and avowed Communist. He made no bones about it. He talked about very little else, and he started to deluge me with propaganda.”¹⁰

Hayden was delighted to be in Sausalito, which he regarded as a true “sailorman’s town.” Tompkins and his wife Gwen appeared to be the same genuine couple he had seen several years before, and they graciously invited Hayden to stay aboard the Wander Bird with them. He gladly accepted the invitation. Being aboard a sailing vessel worked its magic on Hollywood’s newest star. “Without a struggle, I surrendered myself to the sea: to the wind sounds and the smells of tar and salt, to the feel of splicing tools and marline, to the quiet hours of painting under the lee of the bulwarks and to lying on the deck in the sun, watching the birds perched on pilings pinned to the sky.”¹¹ However, the serenity that Sterling Hayden felt being back in a maritime environment was muddled by his dinner discussions with Tompkins on his first night aboard, which added to the disequilibrium that was already tormenting him.

Hayden had just complimented Tompkins and his wife Gwen on how they appeared unchanged since their last encounter and how the Wander Bird, too, appeared to be unchanged. Tompkins startled his young guest by replying, “Oh yes, the old Bird is fine no doubt, but one of these days, my boy, you are going to find you can turn your back on the sea with scarcely a backward glance.” Hayden suddenly realized that the rumors about the radicalization of Tompkins were very likely true—he appeared to have swallowed the communist line and now he was “as Red as they come these days.”¹² His initial instinct was to feel sorry for his older colleague, but Hayden described the epiphany he subsequently experienced in his autobiography Wanderer. “But a strange thing happened; I found myself in the grip of a new excitement, anxious to discover just what this power was that had taken my friend and dammed the river of his mind in such a way that it no longer ran to the sea.

“I sensed I was about to stumble upon the key to what was wrong in my life, for the older I grew the more convinced I became that I was flawed in some way beyond my understanding.”¹³ Hayden continued to describe this newfound conflict that had been awakened by Warwick Tompkins. “I want both worlds at once, the world of ships and the world of social struggle. I was late, too, and I knew it—twenty-five years old, and for all my fighting and searching and voyaging I had yet to come to grips with life … Was I too scared to face reality? Too stupid perhaps? Well, then, the best thing I could do was listen to Tompkins with an open mind, and to hell with conventional thinking.”¹⁴

Years later, Hayden would only be able to recall the name of one of the many people that Tompkins had introduced him to during his stay. At a luncheon one day, Tompkins told Hayden that there was a man he wanted to introduce him to, describing the man as “an old warrior in the class struggle.”¹⁵ He introduced the man as “Pop” Folkoff. Hayden didn’t know anything about the man at the time. Born in Latvia in 1881 and having emigrated to San Francisco in 1904, Isaac Folkoff and had gone as a delegate to the founding congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1919, and was a founding member of the California Communist Party.¹⁶

During his visit, Warwick Tompkins took Hayden to Oakland to participate in a labor protest at the waterfront. The International Longshoremen’s Union was picketing a ship that was loading scrap iron bound for Japan. Tompkins knew some of the longshoremen, who were invited to have coffee with them. Initially, Hayden was simultaneously intimidated and impressed, thinking, “I felt ignorant and soft, a tourist for the first time in my life. These longshoremen belonged, and I was a phony on the outside looking in.”¹⁷ As the meeting progressed, Tompkins dominated the conversation and at times tried to pull Hayden into the discussions. The young actor felt very much out of his league and too uninformed to be a part of the dialogue, and for the moment he very much resented what he perceived to be Tompkins’s arrogance and uncompromising opinions.

That evening, Tompkins invited about a dozen guests to the Wander Bird for further political discussions. Once again, Hayden felt out of his league as the discussions seemed far beyond his scope of knowledge and awareness. For the first time, he heard about International Brigades that had fought in the Spanish Civil War. A whole new vocabulary was revealed to him, as well as a new group of people. “They kept using words I didn’t know—working class, Fascism, solidarity, imperialist, monopolist. It occurred to me that I was in the midst of some very dangerous people, yet they didn’t seem dangerous. They seemed different, that’s all—more intelligent than the rest, and above all, more concerned.”¹⁸

Hayden, who felt humiliated by his ignorance of these issues, dared not speak. The time passed with agonizing slowness for him as the lively conversations continued all around him and he just listened and observed. Later in the evening, Tompkins turned to him and invited him to talk to the group about his past experiences. After all, reasoned Tompkins, none of the other guests were seamen and they would likely appreciate Hayden’s descriptions of his hardworking life at sea. Obliging his host, the young man began to talk and his spoken recollections not only clearly intrigued the other guests, but suddenly they seemed more important to him; they seemed to have taken on a new perspective. They were not merely anecdotes, but real working-class stories that seemed to bring into focus several of the concepts that the rest of the guests had been talking about all evening. The more he spoke, the more relaxed he felt.

The guests seemed truly moved by his recollections, and some were angered by the struggles of the young man who had gone to sea at the age of sixteen. “I shared a part of my life;” he would recall, “and felt a new kinship with them. If I could only feel this way in front of the cameras, I’d turn into one hell of an actor. Perhaps I could revolt and still belong.”¹⁹ He came to the realization that he was right about the shallowness of Hollywood, that it wasn’t wrong to have dreams and ideals and to want more out of life than an office, a house, and all the other possessions that many aspired to. And in his own antiestablishment way of thinking, he reasoned, “what could be more unusual than the sometime schoonerman who of his own volition tells conventional Hollywood to go to hell and goes back into the world to contribute something to life.”²⁰

When he left Sausalito, he had made up his mind to pursue a course that would seem to many self-destructive, and certainly it appeared that he was at the very least committing career suicide. But Sterling Hayden never looked at things in a conventional manner. Money and prestige never mattered to him that much. Coupled with his tendencies toward self-hatred and feelings of unworthiness, he decided to embark on a path to redeem his self-respect and to “contribute” to the world in a manner that was revealed to him by Warwick Tompkins and his friends.

He was also determined to win the love of Madeleine Carroll.

• • •

Sterling Hayden would recall the exact date when he performed two life-changing actions.²¹ The morning of September 15, 1941, he wired Madeleine who was staying in Stamford, Connecticut. He announced his intentions with a wire that announced: “HAVE ABANDONED THE SHIP DRIVING EAST AT ONCE WILL PHONE FROM BOSTON MUST SEE YOU DO NOTHING RASH STOP LOVE.”²² Later that day, he found himself back in the waiting room of Frank Freeman’s office at Paramount. His agent, Bert Allenberg, emerged to speak with him first. He informed Hayden with the expected news that both Freedman and Henry Ginsberg, the head of production at Paramount, wanted to meet with him individually. Before Hayden went to Ginsburg’s office, Allenberg hinted at some of the sweeteners that Paramount was considering to offer if Hayden remained with the studio.

“Let me slip you this one thought,” offered Allenberg. “I’m not supposed to let on, but just between the two of us, if you stay Paramount is prepared to give you the lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Hayden admitted to Allenberg that he had not read the Hemingway novel. Undaunted, Allenberg continued: “And, sweetheart, they’ll tear up your contract and write you a new one, three pictures a year, thirty thousand dollars a picture. I can’t believe it myself, but I happen to know it’s true.”²³ Hayden didn’t say anything when his agent finished and got up to head over to Ginsburg’s office as instructed.

Hayden knew Ginsburg by reputation, describing him as the “hatchetman” of the Paramount executives. When Hayden entered his office, Ginsburg did not rise from his chair or offer his hand. As the young actor sat down, Ginsburg immediately began to live up to his reputation as a tough taskmaster. “Hayden,” he began, “I am supposed to convince you not to quit. I’m not going to bother. I haven’t the slightest sympathy with you. You are not an actor. You never have been. I doubt you ever could be an actor. You are what we call a Personality.

“We have brought you along until you are what is known as a hot property. You might go a long way in this business. If you would like my opinion, I would say that the odds are against it. You have to care in this business, and you don’t give a damn. If you walk out on us, you will never work in pictures again.”²⁴ Ginsberg went on to assure Hayden that he would in all likelihood be hit with a breach of contract suit. Then, after laying out the gloomy picture, he asked the young star if he would consider changing his mind. Hayden replied no, and he was then dismissed from Ginsburg’s office and told to report to Frank Freeman’s office.

He found Freeman sitting at his desk, puffing away on a large cigar. Freeman immediately pointed out the awkward position in which Hayden had put him. He quickly reminded his young star how well he had been treated by Paramount and by Freeman personally. “When this thing with the boat came up a few weeks back, I acted on my own initiative because I wanted you to calm down and be happy out here on the coast. I may be boss of this studio, but the Board of Directors and the stockholders don’t take it lightly when we present newly discovered actors with eighteen-thousand-dollar boats.”²⁵ Hayden readily acknowledged how well the studio had treated him.

Freeman offered to take his young star to lunch to continue the discussion, but Hayden told him that it wouldn’t be necessary. Freeman decided to cut to the heart of the matter. Urging the young man to be direct and reminding him that he was his friend, Freeman told him to stop beating around the bush and to get to the matter that was driving his decision to walk out on the studio. Initially, Hayden replied that he didn’t feel right as an actor and just wasn’t cut out to be one. He also mentioned that with the war raging in Europe, he felt that he had to get out now. Freeman wasn’t buying his explanations. He quickly pointed out: “You wanted the boat so we gave you a boat. We jumped your salary. We starred you in two of our biggest pictures. What more do you want? This war thing is nonsense. Our country isn’t in the war yet—if it was, then I’d be the first to understand.”

“Goddamn it, sir,” Hayden replied, “but I can’t act and keep my self-respect. It’s the only thing I have and I guess I’d better hang on to it.”²⁶

Again, Freeman wasn’t buying the explanation. He continued to puff on his cigar and complimented Hayden for his lofty thoughts, but he could sense that there was a deeper reason behind the young actor’s motives. And, Freeman mused, he could understand the lure of a woman like Madeleine Carroll. As an older, more experienced man, he recommended that Hayden step back a bit, assuring him that his fixation for Madeleine would pass with time. Don’t act out of passion without calming down and reasoning it through, he advised.

“I don’t have to think about it. Madeleine is a big part of my decision, I admit,” the young actor confessed. “But I would rather gamble on the thousand to one shot that I’ll walk out this door and do whatever it is I have to do,” he said as he wiped his eyes. Freeman looked back at him and asked him if he should even bother to make any further offers in an attempt to get his young star to reconsider leaving. Hayden told him not to bother—his mind was made up.

Walking Sterling Hayden to the door, Frank Freeman turned to his now former-star and said, “Good luck. We’ll take care of the schooner, and if there’s anything I can do, let me know.”²⁷ It was just about noon when Hayden left Freeman’s office. He made a beeline to his car and in moments he was off, heading east.

Heading to Madeleine Carroll.

• • •

Hayden journeyed east, stopping only to sleep an hour or so at a time in the back of his car. After several days, he had made it to his destination: Boston, Massachusetts. Shortly after he arrived at T Wharf and the home of his mentor and drinking buddy Larry O’Toole, he was surrounded by reporters who began to deluge him with questions. The word had gotten out that he had walked out on Hollywood. The reporters asked him if the rumor that he was going to be offered the lead in For Whom the Bell Tolls was true. They also grilled him on the rumors that his pursuit of Madeleine Carroll may have had something to do with his seemingly rash decision to walk out on his screen career.

“Put yourself in my position,” he replied. “You come off the deck of a vessel and they sign you up to a contract and they powder you down and doll you up and Christ—I mean, end up nothing more than a dummy. I couldn’t take it, that’s all. It’s as simple as that.” Asked what his plans were, Hayden told them he was going to run down to New York for a few days and after that, “I’m a sonovabitch if I know.”²⁸

But Hayden did in fact have some immediate plans for the future. First, he would win back Madeleine from her lover from “Bomber Command,” as he referred to him. Then he would make what he would regard as a token visit to the war zone. He described his intentions in Wanderer, referring to himself in the third person: “Having led an irregular life, he would wage an irregular war—vague imitations of danger, but just this side of bloodshed. Excitement, but no hardship. Good publicity for a cause that was not yet our concern.”²⁹

He did indeed win the heart of Madeleine Carroll, snatching her from her pilot. They were driving just outside Stamford, Connecticut, when he pulled over. The couple got out to walk in a field not far from Long Island Sound. It was late in the morning of October 3, 1941, and Hayden revealed his plans to Madeleine. Earlier that morning, he had called the father of his old friend David Donovan, who had sailed around the world with him aboard the Yankee, then-Col. William J. Donovan, who in July had been named by President Roosevelt as Coordinator of Information. In that capacity, he would develop and head up the United States’ first foreign intelligence agency.

“This morning I spoke on the phone with Colonel Donovan,” he told Madeleine. “He is sending me to England for three months of Commando and parachute training.”

“And then?” asked Madeleine.

“Then I’ll come back to help train more civilians until we get involved in the war. And then, we might get married. Maybe we could even keep it a secret for a little while.”

“We might,” she quietly replied.³⁰

• • •

In mid-November, Hayden departed for Europe as a passenger in a convoy of forty-seven ships, escorted by five World War I vintage destroyers. Their destination was Glasgow, Scotland, and from there Hayden would proceed to London. He would be traveling with Col. Robert Solborg, who would be acting as his supervisor and mentor. Solborg had been appointed by Donovan as his first chief of Special Operations.

After studying the British MI6 model of organization, Donovan had decided to create a similar, two-pronged intelligence organization and created the Special Intelligence Branch, or SI, which would be charged with espionage—the secret collection of intelligence information—and the Special Operations Branch, or SO—tasked with sabotage and liaison with underground movements.³¹ Donovan would write to FDR on December 22, 1941, to expound on his ideas on the covert warfare that the SO would undertake. First, he explained that in order to harass the occupying Axis troops, two types of guerilla warfare were necessary for different purposes: to set up small bands of fighters under definite leaders, and second, to establish these forces in a military framework in order to satisfactorily carry out their missions. “The principle laid down is that the whole art of guerilla warfare lies in striking the enemy where he least expects it and yet where he is most vulnerable,” he explained. Donovan further suggested “that there be organized now, in the United States, a guerilla corps independent and separate from the Army and Navy, and imbued with a maximum of the offensive and imaginative spirit. This force should, of course, be created along disciplined military lines, analogous to the British Commando principle, a statement of which I recently sent you.”³²

OSS (as the COI would soon be renamed) training camps in the United States were not established until 1942. Hence, Hayden was sent to Scotland for his training with British SOE counterparts. Midway across the Atlantic Ocean, he recalled taking part in an antiaircraft drill. Assigned to man and operate a .50 caliber machine gun, he glibly recalled his short Hollywood career as he thought, “If they could see me now, Fred and Bing, and Bob, glued to a fifty-caliber antiaircraft gun, bound for Glasgow, on a secret mission.”³³ They arrived in Glasgow on December 7, and while awaiting their train to London, Hayden noticed residents scurrying about and talking in hushed tones about the latest tragic war news. The news had something to do with the United States naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After inquiring with one of the passing people, Hayden first learned of the Japanese attack on American soil. He didn’t believe it at first, thinking the British were as susceptible to gossip and rumor-mongering as Americans. His reaction was: “The Japs bomb Pearl Harbor? Preposterous.”³⁴ He quickly learned that the rumors were true.

The team arrived in London the following day and reported to the American embassy where, to their surprise and annoyance, they learned that no one was expecting Hayden—nor did they know what to do with him. “What the hell is going on?” recollected Hayden in his autobiography. Describing himself in a third-person narrative, he recalled, “He had sacrificed his career, security, and the company of his tentative fiancée to assist in the war, and nobody gave a damn.”³⁵ Solborg decided to take the matter into his own hands. For about three days, he took Hayden around to different British officers who conducted interviews and briefed Hayden as to the type of work he would be doing. None of the officers were introduced by name, with the whole organization operating in great secrecy.³⁶

Hayden had a couple of days to kill before he reported to his first training assignment in Scotland. During that time, he became introspective as he realized that his plan, in essence, to go through the motions of involvement in war and to skirt real danger had rapidly changed with America’s declaration of war on Japan and the simultaneous declaration of war on America by the other Axis powers. Inwardly, he felt he was a coward. Recalling his reaction in the third-person, he admitted, “He knew, too, that his burlesque days were numbered, for now that his country found itself in the war there was bound to come, sooner or later, an end to the leeway he needed to operate in. (What I’ll have to find is some pretext to detach from the COI. Then I’ll simply fade for the duration. I have no business being here, to begin with.)” He angrily reflected that it was the influence of Warwick Tompkins and his “dialectical and historical materialism, and all that crap about the brotherhood of man,” that had largely been the major influence on him to pursue the course on which he now found himself.³⁷ He was a “windjammer man” and would be until the day he died. Adding to his turmoil was the thought that he really couldn’t picture the glamorous movie star Madeleine Carroll being married to the captain of a South Seas schooner. With all of these thoughts tearing at him, he left London to begin a three month’s training course taught by the SOE. Two weeks of parachute school would follow.

• • •

The Lochaber district was a sparsely populated region of the County of Inverness on the coast of the West Scottish Highlands. With its remote location and limited access, it was an ideal place to set up the Special Operations Executive training schools; the entire Lochaber region was requisitioned by the British government for exclusive use by the SOE. Two miles from the village of Arisaig stood an isolated stone mansion built in 1864 and known as Arisaig House. Arisaig House became the SOE Special Training School, designated STS21. On December 15, 1941, an overcast day, Sterling Hayden arrived at Arisaig House.

The school was staffed by combat veterans of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, an infantry regiment of the British Army. Sterling Hayden reported in to the impressive-looking, thirty-six-year-old commanding officer, Col. Edward G. Young. Young expressed his delight at seeing an American at the school—up to this time, they had not trained any Americans, nor would Hayden train with any other fellow countrymen at the SOE schools. Young quickly got to the heart of the matter by stating: “You have no military background, I am told.”

“No, sir.”

“Are you by any chance trained as an engineer?” Young inquired.

“No, sir,” was again Hayden’s reply.

“Just what, Mr. Hayden, is your background?” asked Young, likely wondering what he was supposed to do with this strapping young man with no apparent useful military skills. It was not obvious to him at all why Hayden had been sent there.

“Well, sir, I grew up in small sailing vessels in New England and I went around the world two or three times under sail and then three years ago I took command of a small brig and delivered her from Boston to Tahiti and—”

“But what have you been doing recently?” interrupted the increasingly confused commanding officer. In response, Hayden provided a startling explanation, one that undoubtedly Young had never heard anything remotely similar to from any prior students at the school.

“Well, sir, this is going to sound kind of strange, but a few years ago Colonel Donovan suggested I go out to the West Coast and become an actor.”

“Go on,” invited Young.

“I guess it had something to do with my being able to use the acting thing as a cover in case we got in the war.”³⁸ With that incredible explanation, Young formally welcomed Hayden to the school.

As he began his training, Hayden noticed that he was training with men of various European nationalities, virtually all of whom had served in combat. As per SOE Training School protocol, men of each nationality were housed in separate schools for security reasons for the duration of the curriculum.³⁹ The training at Arisaig House lasted for three weeks. In addition to intense physical training, topics taught included silent killing, weapons handling, demolition, map reading, compass work, field craft, elementary Morse code, and raid tactics. The training would commence with a hard run over the unwelcoming terrain of the Invernesshire, a most difficult trek that both men and women trainees would have to complete.⁴⁰

The training was physically demanding, but Hayden was up to the challenge. As part of his regimen while under contract with Paramount, he had a regular program of weightlifting. The success of that program was evident in the bare-chested photographs of Hayden that the studio released. His physical strength no doubt held him in good stead for the demanding hand-to-hand combat training taught at the school. The weapons training and unarmed combat training was designed for close combat only. For this, the students were instructed in the art of “silent killing” by the true masters of the trade: the legendary William Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes.⁴¹ Fairbairn had developed a system of close-in combat while a police officer in Shanghai in the 1920s that came to be known as the “Fairbairn Fighting System.” He and Sykes had created the combat knife that would become standard issue for commandos throughout the war. Fairbairn would soon be commissioned by Wild Bill Donovan to set up the hand-to-hand commando combat training in the United States for the Office of Strategic Services in 1942.

Hayden and his fellow students were trained in the use of the Colt .45 and .38, as well as the Sten gun. Their handgun instruction was tailored for close-in killing, based on the Double Tap system of firing two shots at their target while tucking their firing arm into their hip instead of the standard arms extended double hand grip.

The nearby West Highland Line was used to train the students in railway sabotage. The railroad had supplied the school with a train that the students used as they learned to plant dummy explosives and jam communications, and then stealthily slip away undetected.⁴²

Hayden trained hard. “So they told him to train and he trained,” he would recall, “a pale figure in British battle dress, minus insignia, wearing American hunting boots and no hat—all wrapped up in a Hollywood trench coat. He trained with Dutchmen and Poles and Belgians and French and Danes and Norsemen, all of whom,” he noted with admiration, “had been in combat.” Despite the growing camaraderie he felt for his fellow European trainees, he became increasingly wracked with self-doubt, feeling that he was going through heroic motions, but knowing that he was not cut from the same cloth as his classmates. He missed the relatively carefree life he had experienced in California with Madeleine and began to feel he had become “hostage to an image of heroism.”⁴³

Hayden decided that he wanted to remain a civilian and avoid the military when he returned to the United States. He felt he had at least earned some bragging rights that he could use back home. In his autobiography, he reflected on the canned speech that he could give to admirers back home. “Well, the fact is, folks, I’ve been over in Scotland training with some Commandos from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. That’s right. What? No, I was the only American there at the time; and then they sent me to Ringway Field near Manchester, where I made a dozen or so parachute jumps. What’s that? Oh, it’s quite a sensation all right. No, you don’t get used to it.”⁴⁴

At the end of three weeks, Hayden completed the initial training. In a November 1944 narrative that would become part of his personnel file, he reported that he had enjoyed not only the challenges that the commando training presented but also the camaraderie amongst all the students. He described his relations with the instructors who had driven them for the past weeks as “extremely good. They were very, very cooperative and helpful in every way.”⁴⁵ Once his training at Arisaig was completed, he traveled to his next SOE training school for more advanced training in commando techniques.

For the last phase of his SOE training, Hayden was sent to Ringway Field near Manchester, England, for parachute training and qualification. Ringway had been designated as the top parachute-training school in the Royal Air Force shortly after the war began. All European allied paratroopers received their training there, as did SOE operatives. At Ringway, the students continued with their rigorous conditioning program. As one paratrooper recalled, “At Ringway we lived hard. Before breakfast each morning we went for a three mile run, followed by thirty minutes PT. After breakfast we normally had a 12 to 15 mile ‘parachute march.’ This meant covering at least 11 miles every two hours and it took some doing while carrying full equipment.”⁴⁶

Hayden reported to the jump school on January 4, 1942. His first jump was completed from a balloon at an altitude of five hundred feet. Poor weather prevented him from jumping from an airplane until his fourth jump. On his fifth jump, from a Stirling bomber on January 11, he landed on a frozen cart track, injuring his left ankle, the base of his spine, and his left knee. He was admitted to the Davyhulme Military Hospital and discharged later that day. His discharge diagnosis was “sprained ligament left knee.”⁴⁷ Due to his injury, his jump school curriculum was cut short and he was assigned further training on the pistol range.

Hayden clearly impressed his British instructors. His evaluation from parachute school stated that he was “a keen and intelligent student.” Praising his courage and enthusiasm, it was noted that he jumped without hesitation, but was “inclined to open his legs on landing.”⁴⁸ The school’s commandant further commented that “Sterling Hayden acquired a full knowledge of all the instruction given at this school.” Despite his injury and an abbreviated curriculum that was marred by bad weather, he further said, “He was, however, satisfied himself and satisfied us that he had a good practical knowledge of parachuting.”⁴⁹ From Ringway, he was sent back to the COI office in London, where he filed a report on his experiences and training in Scotland. In London, he received more medical treatment and was issued crutches (that were “much too short”) to help him get around.

His parachute school instructors were not the only SOE instructors to be impressed with Hayden. On February 18, 1942, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert E. Sherwood, who had joined the COI to head up the propaganda division known as the Foreign Information Service, wrote to Col. Solborg to pass along some of the excellent feedback on Hayden that the COI had received from Great Britain.⁵⁰ “We have received from London, the following report on Mr. Stirling [sic] Hayden, which we should be glad if you would pass on to Mr. Solborg. London has also heard personally from the Commandant of the School how well Mr. Hayden is doing.” Another comment read: “This gentleman is showing the greatest enthusiasm in all branches of our work at this School. He has personality and is very popular. He is sparing no pains to learn everything which is likely to be of use to him, and, with further experience, should develop into a first class instructor.”

On January 15, 1942, Fisher Howe, the executive officer of the London mission of the COI, cabled both Col. Solborg as well as William Whitney, director of the London mission, that Hayden would be departing via sea transport for the United States on January 17. Interestingly, he included William Donovan on the message’s distribution.⁵¹ Shortly thereafter, the COI sent Hayden to Liverpool where he boarded a freighter bound for New York City.

On January 26, 1942, Howe followed up with a message to Thomas G. Early, head of administration for the COI office in Washington, announcing that Hayden’s ship would arrive at St. John, New Brunswick, on about January 27, adding that he would be reporting immediately to Washington, DC⁵² Once again, Donovan was included on the distribution list, indicating his high level of interest in his son’s friend.

On his voyage back to the States, Hayden was once again faced with the reality that perhaps he wouldn’t be able to conveniently “hide” from the war effort as he thought he might. The skipper of the freighter, although only thirty-two years old, had survived a torpedoing on a run to Murmansk while he was carrying a load of high-octane fuel. His hair had turned white overnight as a result of that trauma.⁵³ While midway across the Atlantic, sirens went off indicating that a submarine had spotted them and was preparing to attack. The skipper darted from the wardroom table for the bridge to direct the evasive zigzagging maneuvers. Watching the skipper act so authoritatively and observing the calmness of the mess stewards as the ship started its evasive actions, Hayden was also struck with another self-realization that he was grappling with. He was scared. He, the trained commando, felt his blood “congeal.” “A stroke of terror stunned him. And all at once he knew that the thing he feared the most was true. He was yellow.”⁵⁴

• • •

Arriving back in the Unites States, Hayden returned to Washington and reported in to the COI headquarters at Twenty-Fifth and E streets on Navy Hill where he was offered a commission in the United States Army. He refused the offer, explaining that he did not wish a direct commission.⁵⁵ At this point, his involvement with the COI was effectively over and he returned to civilian life. The COI calculated his government service to be from November 7, 1941 (when he was sworn into government service to attend SOE training) though January 29, 1942. For this he was paid a per diem of six dollars per day and was issued a check for $504 on February 21, 1942.⁵⁶ During his training, he had formulated his plan to avoid military service and perhaps just train future special operations recruits at home in the States. However, the rest of his future plans remained murky. He was in the same situation he was in when he walked out on Hollywood. He only seemed to be able to focus on the here and now, and not on the future. There was only one immediate goal that he wanted to pursue and for this he headed immediately for New England.

Madeleine Carroll was indeed waiting for him and they drove up to a vacation lodge on a frozen lake near Peterborough, New Hampshire, where they were married on February 14, 1942. The newlyweds quickly set up housekeeping in South Norwalk, Connecticut. With his injured leg propped up and facing a roaring fire in their fireplace, Hayden had found some of the contentment he sought. Having gotten through some of the most demanding training on earth, achieving status as a trainer of warriors, and having married a glamorous Hollywood star, it would appear to any observer that young Sterling Hayden was a lucky man. However, once again, large doses of self-doubt and self-hatred would eat away at him. The contentment he felt was only temporary.

He was extraordinarily brutal with himself. As he relaxed at his Connecticut home, his self-analysis once again began to torment him. “Now, where do I go from here?” he asked himself. “I’m flawed inside and I know it. But why did it have to be me? Why, why, why, why, why? Roosevelt was right: we have nothing to fear but fear. Could it be perhaps that this is a trick of fate to compensate for my being tall and strong and good-looking enough to intrigue every girl I meet? Is this a malignancy grafted into my spine to offset the fact that I’m equally at home in a drawing room or a fo’c’sle? If so—what a hell of a price to pay.” He asked himself, “Isn’t it true that I’ve been living a lie for years? … When is an unemployed victim of the depression not a victim at all? Perhaps when his life is a charade. When is an actor not an actor? When the bulk of his acting is offstage.”⁵⁷

He soon found some solace from the haven he had always turned to—the sea. Hayden traveled to Bayonne, New Jersey, and began to work for the Elco Boat Works. Elco, a successful shipbuilding company, had built its Bayonne facility after being acquired as a subsidiary of the Electric Boat Company. At the outset of World War II, the company contracted with the United States Navy to build hundreds of small boats that would achieve legendary status during the war—the Patrol Torpedo boat, better known as the PT boat.

The potential of the PT boat was already capturing not only the attention of the Navy, but the American public as well. Enamored with the exploits of a brash young PT boat commander, Lt. John D. Bulkeley, against the Japanese Navy, the PT boat’s successes provided some of the few bright spots in otherwise gloomy news coming from the Pacific theater in early 1942. Among the feats that Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3, commanded by Bulkeley, had achieved was the rescue of Gen. Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor and his delivery through five hundred miles of Japanese-controlled waters to safety.

For several weeks, Hayden worked with the test crews at Elco, where they “rammed PT boats up and down New York harbor.” Hayden enjoyed the work. After all, he was back on the water and in an environment where he felt genuine and could excel. After several weeks, he realized that maybe this was the way he could contribute to the war effort and perhaps not be the outside viewer that he had already planned he would be. He decided to apply for a commission in the United States Navy. He wanted to go to sea in command of a PT boat. He would be disappointed by the Navy’s response.

Sterling Hayden was offered a commission by the Navy, but it was for the rank of ensign, the lowest rank of a commissioned officer. He was somewhat insulted by the offer. Given his vast experience at sea and the fact that he had been master of ships, he felt that he should have been offered a commission as a lieutenant. The Navy didn’t agree. In addition, Hayden conceded, “lieutenancies weren’t given to men whose education had stopped halfway through tenth grade.”⁵⁸ In the end, he turned down the Navy’s offer, but would take some solace in the admiration from his friends for, in essence, telling the Navy to go to hell. That night, he and Madeleine dined in a little café where he proposed a toast to his wife after she announced that she was going to lend him the money to buy out Paramount’s share in the Oretha F. Spinney. As his self-doubt continued, he mused over the type of husband that she could have married. She could have married anyone, but she had chosen him, and he was beginning to wonder why. Nonetheless, he was formulating a plan for the immediate future and it involved going back to sea.

• • •

Now that Madeleine had provided him the funding, Hayden headed out to California to pay off Paramount Pictures for their half-interest in the schooner. Orthea F. Spinney was now completely his, and he had a lucrative plan not only to make money but to serve the war effort as well. Having obtained an unlimited draft deferment, “on the logical grounds that a man might do more good packing cargo under the auspices of the War Shipping Administration than packing a rifle,”⁵⁹ he planned to obtain shipping contracts hauling needed wartime materials, including munitions and explosives. Whatever potential danger that might be posed by German submarines, such work would certainly be counterbalanced by very generous remuneration. If all went smoothly, Hayden figured he could gross between $8,000 and $11,000 per voyage.⁶⁰

He put the schooner in dry dock in Los Angeles and flew on to New York City to negotiate contracts. Given the relative shortage of adequate shipping assets available at the beginning of the war, he was able to quickly secure a contract to carry ninety-five tons of explosives from Port Everglades in Florida to San Juan, Puerto Rico. He next flew on to Nassau and signed up a ten-man Bahamian crew.⁶¹ After the repairs in the dry dock, the new crew left Los Angeles and three and a half weeks later they were transiting the Panama Canal. One of the canal pilots had some sobering advice for Hayden as they arranged the transit. “If I were in your shoes, Hayden, I’d go the rest of the way under sail. If you don’t turn that goddamn diesel on, the U-boats may not know you’re around. I hope you’re well insured anyway.”⁶² When Hayden replied that the cost of insurance was prohibitive and hence he didn’t have any, the canal pilot just shook his head.

Heeding the sage advice he had been given, Hayden captained the schooner out of the canal and made the rest of the journey under sail. Fortunately, they encountered no enemy submarines and after ten days, they arrived in Miami. Having dodged the potential bullet of encountering Nazi submarines, they now had to struggle with the United States Navy. Naval officers boarded the Spinney soon after she docked, informing Hayden that because of wartime necessity, they were requisitioning his boat. He argued fiercely with the officers, pointing out that the schooner (serving in its current capacity) was an essential and integral part of the war effort. The Navy wasn’t buying the young skipper’s arguments and announced that in several days, the ship would be taken by the Navy.

That evening, Hayden assembled his crew and revealed his plan—they would not be going up to Port Everglades, but instead they were leaving that night. Stealthily, they departed from Miami before the Navy realized they had left. The Spinney set course for Nassau, arriving shortly at the Paradise Island marina in Hurricane Hole. Madeleine flew down to be with her husband, apparently the first time they acknowledged their marriage in public. Hayden set out to salvage his business venture. Within two days, he had sold all of the schooner’s mechanical equipment for $10,000 in cash. He also hired a new crew after the original crew quit upon arriving in Paradise Island.

Three weeks later, the Spinney departed for Port Everglades to pick up the cargo of explosives that Hayden had contracted for. Madeleine departed when they reached port and Hayden and his crew commenced loading the explosives onto the schooner. This time, it was the United States Coast Guard that stepped in. Before they could carry aboard the first load, an officer informed Hayden that he was required to have two watertight steel bulkheads and a specially constructed steel case on the deck for stowage of the explosives and the detonators. Hayden was, of course, running his operation on barebones expenses and could not afford to comply. However, he saw great opportunity in this new dilemma. “This was all the excuse I need to default on the explosives contract,” he would humorously recall. “I had long held the Coast Guard in high esteem, but never as highly as now. My sailing-ship luck still held.”⁶³

There were still numerous materials that needed to be transported. Hayden had contracted to transport 112 tons of general cargo for Curacao. In addition to the cargo stowed below, the deck was covered with an additional fifteen tons of rivets and bolts.⁶⁴ They were sailing rapidly down the Windward Passage when disaster nearly stuck the schooner in the form of a white squall near Haiti. For the next nineteen days the ship was tossed about and the crew nearly mutinied out of fear of capsizing. Finally, after thirty-two days at sea, they approached their destination—Curacao’s capital city, Willemstad. The city’s Queen Emma Bridge, the famous pontoon bridge, swung open as the Oretha F. Spinney was towed in to a berth. On the left side of the harbor, Hayden could see the large Shell Oil refinery overlooking the harbor. He had no way of knowing it, but the refinery was about to dramatically change his life.

• • •

After the Spinney pulled into its berth in Willemstad, Hayden hastily proceeded to unload his cargo. Because of the terrible sea conditions encountered during the transit from Florida, his cargo was pretty much soaked. He had to engage in “endless consultations with brokers, agents, insurance adjusters, and customs inspectors.”⁶⁵ Business practices and financial matters were things that he had little interest in and even less talent for handling. Nonetheless, he finally managed to sell off his cargo and complete his business in Curacao. Shortly after concluding his negotiations, he met six off-duty United States Marines who were part of Force 1291, the US military unit in Willemstad assigned to protect the Royal Dutch Shell oil refinery. Describing them as broke, bored, and tough, Hayden immediately hit it off with the Marines and he invited them back to the schooner.

Aboard the Spinney, the seven men congregated in the aftercabin, and Hayden broke out a case of Haig and Haig Pinch scotch and handed each of his new friends a bottle. He was getting along famously with the Marines and quickly developed a deep sense of admiration for these men dedicated to the Corps. The hard-drinking skipper was in his element with his new buddies, and after finishing their bottles, they decided that the night was still young and they headed ashore to continue. Ending up at the bar in the Hotel Americano, they became rowdier as they became even more drunk. Finally, by 3 a.m., the hotel manager intervened and tried to evict them. He recognized Hayden as a movie star and was willing to cut him some slack and tried to get him to get his drunken Marines friends to leave. The Marines, however, were in no mood to acquiesce to the request so the manager called the police. At this point, Hayden grabbed the manager and threw him out to into the street just as the police arrived. For his noble action in diverting the attention away from his new found friends, Hayden was thrown in jail.

By the following morning, Hayden had sobered up. After calling the agents that he had dealt with in selling his cargo, they arrived at the jail with the money to bail him out. Once again, Sterling Hayden had come up with an impulsive career move. After quick negotiations, he sold the Oretha F. Spinney to his Curacao agent for $14,000. He called his new Marine friends to bid them goodbye. Apparently the admiration was mutual, as all six Marines escorted Hayden to the airport to bid him farewell. He was off for New York City.⁶⁶

It was the middle of the night when he landed in New York. He arrived at the Beekman Towers Hotel in Manhattan in the early morning hours of October 26, 1942, where Madeleine was waiting for him. They had champagne with their breakfast as they watched the sunrise from their terrace overlooking the East River. The impulsiveness of his next move indicated the important effect that his newly found Marine friends had on him. “At nine sharp I picked up the phone directory, got the address of the Marine Corps recruiting station, and within the hour I had enlisted for boot training at Parris Island in South Carolina.” His self-pride in this action was expressed thusly: “My image shone brighter than ever.”⁶⁷

• • •

Interestingly, at the same time her husband was changing his life’s direction, Madeleine Carroll had recently made an important career decision of her own that was to change her life. Although one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies ever since Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film The 39 Steps, she had always preferred to work on the stage, and she was not enamored with Hollywood in general. In the fall of 1940, a personal tragedy struck Madeleine’s family that inspired her new journey, one from which her film career would never recover. In a Luftwaffe bombing raid over London on October 7, 1940, Madeleine’s younger sister Marguerite, or “Guiguite” as she was called, was killed.

Madeleine would never truly recover from the death of her sister. In a letter to her parents, she promised she would do everything possible to avenge her sister’s death.⁶⁸ While visiting British Columbia in November of 1940, she gave an interview to the press where she declared, “I have a personal debt to pay Hitler. I can’t be a soldier, but there are ways to pay the Germans back and I shall do just that in all possible ways.”⁶⁹ She began formulating a plan to leave Hollywood and pursue her personal interests. Ironically, her plan would come to fruition immediately after once of her greatest film triumphs.

Paramount had cast her opposite Bob Hope in the comedy My Favorite Blonde that began shooting in the fall of 1941. At the time, Madeleine was the highest paid actress in Hollywood, earning about $250,000 per picture. The filming wrapped in January 1942, at which point she stunned the Paramount executives, much as her future husband had done the previous September, by requesting that they release her from her contract. She wanted to more vigorously support the war effort, convinced that the conflict was the greatest challenge her generation would ever have to face. She wanted to do more than participate in the usual bond-selling tours to aid the war effort.⁷⁰ In 1940, she had already donated the chateau that she owned outside of Paris for use as an orphanage. She still wanted to do more. After initial reluctance, the studio heads relented and released her from her contract. Less than a month later, she flew to the East Coast and traveled to New Hampshire, where she and Sterling Hayden were married in February, 1942.

My Favorite Blonde was released in April of 1942 to strongly positive reviews. Madeleine received high praise for her performance, and the film became one of her biggest box-office successes. But she was not interested in making films in the immediate future. She joined the USO and toured the country to raise money for the war effort on bond tours. It became a goal of hers to return to Europe as soon as it was feasible. Meanwhile, she also became a spokesperson on behalf of merchant seamen, no doubt being influenced by her husband’s background. At a charity function held in New York City to raise money on behalf of the Seaman’s Service in early 1943, Madeleine was the featured speaker. Among her exhortations to the crowd were: “We have the ships, let’s not beach them this time.” To a reporter who asked her if she was angry over the relatively little credit and attention given to merchant seamen, she replied, “Of course I get angry, we do not give enough to these courageous men.”⁷¹

In November 1943, just as she had obtained American citizenship, Madeleine was finally able to return to Europe. After a brief reunion with her family, she embarked on a mission to support the war effort in Europe that was most unusual for a Hollywood star—as unusual as her husband’s activities.