Discover an actor’s forgotten war stories
Well-researched biography details WWII veteran’s service
Sterling Hayden, American actor, author and mariner, is largely forgotten today, his name known almost exclusively by film buffs. But he had major parts in some important films and wrote a highly regarded memoir and a popular novel. In addition, he led a fascinating if fractured life, torn between his love of the sea and his need to make money in Hollywood and torn too by the idealism that led him to be awarded the Silver Star for his WWII service and later to join the Communist Party.
A well-researched biography by Suffolk’s Lee Mandel may help to rescue Hayden from obscurity. Its title refers to the many “wars” that Hayden fought — the literal war in which he served with distinction as a Marine Corps officer and the figurative wars he fought with alcohol and drugs, his three spouses, and ultimately with himself. He lost all but the literal one, but even in defeat he left an important legacy as a Hollywood actor. Unfortunately, his acting career — the one thing that makes Hayden’s life of interest beyond his circle — receives insufficient attention in this otherwise worthwhile book.
You have probably seen Hayden in more movies than you think. He played Air Force Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove,” corrupt police Capt. Mark McCluskey in “The Godfather,” and alcoholic writer Roger Wade in “The Long Goodbye.” Tall (6 feet 5), strong, and silent like John Wayne, he was also like Wayne in that he had a limited range as an actor but within that range could and did deliver powerful performances.
Born Sterling Relyea Walter, in New Jersey in 1916, he was adopted by his stepfather at age 9 and renamed Sterling Walter Hayden. Faced with a difficult home life, he dropped out of school at 16 and went to sea — his first love forever afterward. He served with distinction on a variety of sailing and steam ships and went around the world several times. A Boston Post photo showing Hayden in the 1938 International Fisherman’s Cup sailing race caught Hollywood’s attention. Paramount offered him a seven-year contract and publicized him as “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies” and “The Beautiful Blond Viking God.”
Hayden met English actress Madeleine Carroll, his first wife, when they appeared in his debut film, “Virginia,” in 1941. The same year they were reunited for “Bahama Passage,” after which he volunteered for wartime service. He enlisted in the Marine Corps, using the name “John Hamilton” because he did not want to trade on his movie-star status. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant, assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), and served in the Balkan Theater, where he worked with Yugoslav partisans, many of them communists. For his brave service, which, according to the U.S. citation, included “making hazardous sea voyages in enemy infested waters, and reconnaissances through enemy held areas,” he was awarded the Silver Star, and Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz “Tito” awarded him the Order of Merit.
Hayden admired the partisans with whom he had served and, in an impulsive decision he came to regret, joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1946. That membership, though brief, led to his testifying before the notorious House UnAmerican Activities Committee, naming names that, as Mandel shows, the committee already knew. Hayden quickly regretted his testimony, saying later that he had done it only so that he might have custody of his children after a looming divorce from his second wife and to avoid being jailed for refusing to testify.
The movie career he had resumed after the war hit a slump until director John Huston picked him for what is probably his finest part, Dix Handley, a criminal gang’s designated “hooligan” in the heist movie “The Asphalt Jungle,” a minor hit at the time but now a crime classic (with Marilyn Monroe in an early role). Hayden chose to make just enough movies and TV appearances in the 1950s and ’60s to finance a succession of underfunded ships, one of which he sailed to Tahiti and back with his first four children aboard, defying both the vociferous objections of their mother and a court order forbidding him to take the children out of the country. In 1960 he characterized himself a “sailor or writer” rather than an actor, and in 1963 he published a well-received memoir, “Wanderer,” on which Mandel relies heavily.
Mandel is a retired Navy physician with an interest in history whose two previous books include “Moryak: A Novel of the Russian Revolution” and who was featured in the History Channel’s “Ten Things You Don’t Know About” series. Despite a few minor grammatical errors, “Sterling Hayden’s Wars” is an interesting read by an author who is obviously fond of his subject but is able to resist the biographer’s temptation toward hagiography.
Unfortunately, this book has a significant flaw: It focuses too much on Hayden’s wartime service, his flirtation with communism, and in particular his congressional testimony, while giving only cursory treatment to his acting career — the one thing that makes Hayden’s life worthy of a full-length biography. If Mandel, who shows no sign here of being a film buff, believes that Hayden’s movies have received enough attention elsewhere and that therefore he does not need to discuss them in depth, he does not say so. Perhaps Mandel is only following Hayden’s lead — near the end of his life the actor said most of his films were “[e]xcrement.” In any event the reader is left wanting a lot more information about Hayden’s films. For example, Mandel does not even mention Hayden’s starring role as Rear Adm. John Hoskins in “The Eternal Sea” — an ironic omission for a former Navy officer.
In the 1970s Hayden lived on a river barge in Paris with his third wife and their two children, smoking hashish in an attempt to curb the out-ofcontrol drinking that bedeviled him most of his adult life. (As early as 1944, Mandel claims, Hayden was “well on his way to becoming an alcoholic, albeit a highly functioning one,” and Hayden fought but never beat the disease.) His 1976 seafaring novel “Voyage: A Novel of 1896” garnered good reviews, and he appeared in a few more films before dying in 1986 of prostate cancer. He was 70.
Hayden may not have known it at the time, but his laconic last line in Stanley Kubrick’s first major film, “The Killing,” encapsulates both Hayden’s attitude toward his unsought and unwanted movie career and the essence of the noir films to which his presence added much: “Eh, what’s the difference?” Lockhart is a Norfolk lawyer, a retired Navy Reserve captain, and author of the novels “Smith” (Stark House Press, 2017) and “Pirates” (Stark House, due in April).