Don’t Be Bonin’ Me: The Life of Sterling Hayden

Chris J. Robinson

This man was born in the wrong century. He should have been a sea captain in the 1800’s.

          -- Sterling Hayden’s Agent

What confuses me is I ain’t all that unhappy. So why do I drink, I don’t know.

          -- Sterling Hayden

It must have been in the early 1990s when I first came across this strange figure called Sterling Hayden.  A friend was taking a film noir class and they were showing the films at a local art house theatre. There were two films that night: Underworld U.S.A by Sam Fuller and The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. The Killing struck me most because of its bizarre plot, bizarre characters, played by bizarre B actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Timothy Carey. Most notable though was the protagonist who delivered dry, monotone lines as if he had a million better places to be. He turned out to be Sterling Hayden. I rented a few of his other films like Dr. Strangelove and The Asphalt Jungle and found equally captivating apathetic performances.

Hayden, as it turns out, was an interesting fellow off the screen.   In life, Hayden had sailed around the world by the age of 20, ran guns for Tito, ratted on fellow commies during a HUAC hearing, headed out to sea again, against court orders, to Tahiti with his four kids, wrote two acclaimed books, was an alcoholic, got busted for weed possession in the 1980s, all the while beginning to resemble a Greek god with his long white hair and freakish moustache-missing beard.

To look at Sterling Hayden, you’d be tempted to open up a bag of clichés: “he was a man’s man”, “after him they broke the mould.” But beneath his macho armour was a feckless boy. He was the classic ‘live for the moment not in the moment’ kinda guy, always running off towards the next destination before finding time to savour his last achievement.  He ran away from home to go to sea. He ran away from sea to go to Hollywood. He ran from Hollywood to go to war so he could make Madeleine Carroll long for him. He stood 6’4”, had blond hair and was a guy who captured people’s attention. He joined the commies to show a woman, who he probably wanted to sleep with, that he wasn’t all talk. He ratted to save his floundering career.  He was one of those guys who always needed drama and when it wasn’t around, he’d create it. Then when life fucked him over, as he expected it would, it only confirmed his belief that life was a piece of shit.  He couldn’t even keep his name straight. At different periods, he was known as Montaigu Walter, Sterling Walter, Buzzy Walter, Sterling Hayden, Stirling Hayden, and John Hamilton! In short, Sterling Hayden was a fucked up human being just like you, your dad, and me.

He was born Montaigu Relyea Walter, but a godfather apparently convinced the boy’s parents to call him Sterling. His dad gave up the ghost when he was nine, his Mom married a guy named James “Daddy Jim” Hayden, and Sterling Walter became Sterling Hayden. Life with Daddy Jim was no picnic. Daddy Jim was a loser. He was eternally on the verge of landing ‘the big deal’ that would elevate the family from poverty to wealth. At different times, he even set the family up in a posh hotel, enrolled Hayden in a rich kid’s school, and bought two cars in one go. The pot of gold never came and instead the family moved from town and town, often in the middle of the night, to avoid creditors. Hayden’s life was, not surprisingly, fairly miserable until they moved momentarily to a place called Tumbler Island in Maine. In this seaport town, Hayden found escape from the sour, frightening loneliness of a depression that ate away at his parents. After Daddy Jim turned deadbeat and bailed on the family, Hayden ran away and landed a few small jobs on ships. Despite constant advice that he return home, Hayden was sea driven. Over a fairly short amount of time, he proved himself a worthy seaman and by his early 20s had sailed around the world. As he became more known, local papers began to follow his exploits. It was here that the demon seed of Hollywood was first planted.

After winning a boating race in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a newspaper article featured a shot of Hayden and talked about his Hollywood good looks. The lack of economic and domestic stability that came with a life at sea led Hayden to consider the Hollywood possibility, but not before he first helmed his own ship. When that ship went tits up, Hayden, already insecure about his sailing abilities and feeling pressured to help out his financially and emotionally starving mother, went to New York and through some friends managed to land a screen test with Paramount producer, Edward Griffith.   While he figured he flopped his screen test, apparently Hollywood knew better, and signed him.  His first role was opposite Madeleine Carroll. The two fell in love almost at once and from there on Hayden listened to his groin rather than his head. After begging his producers to loan him money to buy a schooner, the insecure Hayden, fearing that Carroll was falling for another man, decided to quit Hollywood and join the war effort to impress the cause-loving gal.

Hayden’s war years alone would make a good yarn. He went to England for commando and parachute training, returned to the U.S. after he busted his ankle, tried to become a Lieutenant in the Marines, but was rejected. He returned to sailing briefly, married the now suitably impressed Carroll, changed his name to John Hamilton, and joined the Marine Corps.  Deciding he loathed the service, Hayden pulled some strings and got himself hooked up with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S.’s first intelligence unit. As an OSS member, he found himself all over the Mediterranean running supplies and guns, primarily to the Yugoslav partisans through German occupied areas. By 1946, he was back in Hollywood with a Silver Star, a citation from Tito, a fascination with communism, heavier drinking bouts, and, ironically, an ex-wife.  All this nonsense for a woman who was long gone by the end of an adventure he started to win her affection.

During 1946, Hayden gets a couple of acting roles, buys another boat, continues to flirt with communism, and drinks and fucks his way through most nights. Finally, when a Hollywood gal tells him he should shit or get off the pot, Hayden once again succumbs to his fear and joins the Communist party.  He goes to a few meetings, stays quiet and listens loathingly to the hyperbolic pretensions of the other members. “The appeal was manifold.” Hayden told Tom Snyder. “To begin with I just came out of a couple of years of WW 2. I wanted to appear to be tough. I had profound admiration for the partisans. I came back to Hollywood and part of me believed in the ideas that these people were fighting for, but I also enjoyed the fact that I could go to dinner parties and begin talking this way. I got out because I’m not a man who can take discipline.” He realized, too late, that he’d made a dreadful mistake. 

Meanwhile, Hayden was about to make another poor decision. In 1947, he met and married Betty-Ann de Noon, a young woman he met on Laguna Beach. Within the year, Hayden realizes he’s mistakenly joined another party. Meantime, the doomed couple live on a ship, he makes more films (“abortions,” he calls them) and she bears him a couple of sons.  In the next decade, the couple marry and divorce three times, have four children together, and go through a nasty custody battle.

The 1950s started out pretty well. Hayden was offered a part in John Huston’s film, The Asphalt Jungle playing hoodlum Dix Handley, a farm boy eager to earn money anyway he can so that he can return home to buy the family farm.  Hayden had hoped that Jungle would lead to a flood of good offers, but none came. He began to wonder if his communist activities (however superficial) might be a cause.  As such he arranges to meet with FBI officials so he can clear his conscience and clarify his relationship with the communist party. Afterwards, he finally understands Faust.  He has sold his soul to save his ass.  But he was wrong, his confidential meeting reaches the press and just when he thought the commie bullshit was behind him, he is called before the House of Un-American activities. During the 1951 session, aired on CBS-TV, he ratfinks his way back to work. “I did it because I was weak. I didn’t want to go to jail,” Hayden told Tom Snyder. The roles begin to pull in for the stoolie. America’s new golden boy is even offered the role of Tarzan—but turns it down—and then makes a series of interesting films that expanded his range ever so slightly: Andre De Toth’s Crimewave, Joseph Lewis, Terror in a Texas Town and two more very fine roles as the title character in Nick Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and another Johnny, Clay this time, in Stanley Kubrick’s early masterpiece, The Killing (1956).  Despite his rapacious success, Hayden was drinking steadily, seeing a shrink, buying and selling boats, and struggling to avoid financial collapse, in part because of a long and nasty custody battle that finally saw him ‘win’ his children in 1958. But by 1959, he was on the run again.

In the spring of 1958, Hayden again decided to bail on Hollywood. This time he would sail around the world. He planned to take a crew and his four children aboard his schooner, Wanderer and set sail for the South Seas. Problem was that his wife got wind of the plan and had her lawyers ask for a court order to prevent Hayden from taking the children on the voyage.  When the ruling came down in favour of the wife, Hayden ignored it, borrowed some money, and in January 1959 sailed to Tahiti, a fugitive from justice. Along the way, crewmembers bail, he is stranded in Tahiti with no money, fails to write the great novel that is in him, and is unable to make a promised documentary film of the experience. He returns in 1960, where he is forced to go to court again for another custody battle. Amazingly, he turned up a winner again. He was sentenced to five days in jail and ordered to pay a fine of $500, but the sentence was suspended.

In late 1960, Hayden met and married another woman, Catherine (Kitty) McConnell. McConnell seems to have understood Hayden more than his past wives and the two remained together until his death in 1986. By this time, Hayden was taking on fewer acting roles. However, he did take on a couple of notable roles including the lead in a John Frankenheimer adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Old Man (Hayden was so terrified of the live aspect of television that he began fasting to calm his nerves), and a towering performance as Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Hayden’s beautiful psychotic Ripper was largely influenced, again, by his inability to feel comfortable on Kubrick’s set. “My father had to do one scene about 40 times.” Says son, Andrew, “He couldn’t get the scene right, but Kubrick said that’s what he wanted, the terror and intensity.” Ironically, Hayden’s Ripper was a fanatical anti-communist convinced that the communist had infiltrated the drinking water of America.

Hayden, at long last, found his writing chops, scribbling the candid autobiography, Wanderer (1963). Following the completion of Strangelove and Wanderer, Hayden turned his attentions almost entirely to writing. “I immediately thought I’d try a novel.” Hayden said. “I worked for five years, about as hard as I was able. I had $68.000 in advances from Doubleday. I did 2 complete 1500 page manuscripts.” For whatever reasons, Hayden was dissatisfied with the manuscripts and turned more and more to alcohol. “There’s something glorious and savage about that direct relationship between cigarettes, alcohol and writing.” By this time, Hayden had purchased an 1890’s railway car and was using it as an office. There were days when he didn’t drink until the afternoon, and there were days when he was spiking his morning tea with booze. He’d stop drinking here and there, but when he began to feel well again, he immediately returned to the bottle. Hayden’s fear of sobriety was common. He was terrified that he would become a dour dullard. “When I say I’m gonna make a force drive to stop or go dry out somewhere in Pennsylvania, does this mean that I’m never gonna go to Paris, sit in a café, drink and laugh and watch the world go by. Let’s face it, alcohol has a million good functions.” But the good it apparently brings was nowhere near Hayden as he found himself unable to write anymore. He went for treatment, attended AA meetings, but nothing did the trick. “The diabolical thing is you’re always more drunk than you know. The way you feel is where you are and booze could take me higher in fifteen minutes.”

Finally, around 1968, a concerned friend came over and told him he was killing himself and that he should maybe try some grass. Hayden was reluctant because his book was a ‘booze book’ (he was also drunk throughout most of the writing of Wanderer). During another visit, the friend left behind some grams and a few months after that, Hayden puffed the weed. “I was down, really down, baby blue, BABY blue. I took my VW and hid it, locked the door [of the railcar] and made a note to myself to remember where I put the keys. I smoked a couple of clay pipes full and I thought what everyone else thinks: nothing’s happening. So I got up to get some red wine, but thought, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ So I sat back and…’well…ok.’”

Of course, grass didn’t solve the problem. Instead Hayden began to mix the two. “Grass in my experience takes me up so high and I find it’s so beautiful I just wanna cool it and you can’t smoke anymore so that’s where the wine comes in.” Hayden’s love of the weed became so profound that he began smoking almost everyday and logging his feelings during each high. Every once in a while, Hayden would continue to fast “on grass, water and headphones.” He felt that it was the best way for the body to get some sleep, to allow it to slow down and rest.

Meanwhile, Hayden grew weary and depressed. He decided to drift. “If the wind goes north, I’ll go south.”  He drifted through Europe by car, motorbike and finally a barge (called, The Who Knows?), which he subsequently parked along the Seine in the middle of Paris. He ignored calls from his agent and didn’t read cables. Naturally it was hard on his wife, Kitty. She was social, she liked the land, and here she was, being pulled all over the place by a lonely alcoholic desperately in search of the harmony and serenity that vanished when he was nine years old. “It was difficult on my wife.” Said Hayden. “I really wanted to get away then. I let everything go by, though I was broke. I wanted to write again, but was in no great hurry.  It’s a lovely way to live.”

Hayden didn’t see his drifting as escaping. He felt that those who work 9-5 and have two weeks of holidays were the ones escaping. “The home guard. He’s the escapist. An escape into the security of the job.” Hayden was a man of the senses. We have the power to see and feel and yet so few of us do. “Unselfishness is a form of death. You gotta go as best you can. You gotta go alone…or if you’re lucky, you go with a loved one, whatever sex or form…whatever…let her rip.”

“I work when I get broke or when something comes along that has some integrity or guts.” With the exception of a handful of roles including The Godfather, 1900 and The Long Goodbye, Hayden was generally accepting roles for the first reason.  His role in Robert Altman’s Noir parody, The Long Goodbye was probably the most memorable of his latter roles. In it he played, appropriately, an alcoholic Hemingway-like writer. It was one of the few roles that Hayden looked back upon with fondness and he attributed his success to “the prodigious powers of pot”. Hayden was stoned throughout the shooting of the film. “That was first thing I ever did that I could actually stand to watch on screen-the first time I wasn’t acutely mortified.”

Hayden was supposed to get the role of the fisherman Quint in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, but the IRS levied his acting monies so he was reluctant to take the role in a half-assed film without seeing a goddamn dime. (They also took his vintage railcar and impounded it).  Around the same time, Hayden finally completed his first novel, Voyage, which became a massive best seller.

The 1980s provided more of the same. Hayden took on a few roles including a couple of absolute duds (Venom, 1982—which Hayden left because he was too drunk to work, and Gas with Howie Mandel!). In April 1981, Hayden, now 65, was busted at a Toronto airport was possession of weed.  "I had 3 1/2 ounces of Lebanese hashish in my pocket,” Hayden told film critic Gerald Peary. Hayden cut off, once again, with no fine and no probation. “I’d only been arrested twice and that was in civil rights demonstrations.”

His final film appearance was as the subject of a German documentary called Lighthouse of Chaos.   The film was shot aboard Hayden’s barge and he was in a constant alcoholic stupor throughout the film. When he wasn’t gripping a bottle, he was smoking hash and rambling on about life.

By 1982, Hayden was finally convinced by a doctor that he had to toss the sauce. “It makes combat look like going down an elevator.” He began to settle down as best he could, living a few months on the barge and the rest of the time in Connecticut or California, where he died on May 23, 1986 of cancer.

Hayden could never completely settle down mentally or physically. He tried too hard to find meaning in life. Even if it seemed like he was carefree, he was actually unable to just let go and embrace the stupidity of existence. For all Hayden’s talk about doing what you want and experiencing the natural beauty of life, he was also drunk or stoned much of the time. Hayden was no better than the home guards he criticized, they escaped through domestic security, while he got drunk and fell off barges.   Drinking was less a disease than a crutch for Hayden. It’s almost as if he needed uncertainty and instability, but he was smart enough to ensure that his life never completely came unhinged. In the end, he couldn’t even fully embrace a past he longed for because that past never really existed. The past Hayden sought through sailing and writing was the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Hayden became a man in an unfound present looking for something that never was. He was homeless in his homeland. He was homeless in himself.

The root of his frustration and fears may have been the death of his father. Maybe he wanted to show his father he was someone, hell maybe he wanted to succeed where Daddy Jim failed at every turn.  Hayden seemed so scared of becoming an average, normal guy. But he failed to see that that was an average, normal fear. We want to carve our own paths. Ironically, Hayden’s struggle to find his rhythm was simultaneously what made him unique and just like every other schmuck. And yet, this is what makes Sterling Hayden so special. He never pretended. He never tried to hide the cracks, the inconsistencies or the darkness that lurked within him. He was just like us.

Some say he was born in the wrong century, but I don’t agree. However unrealistic Hayden’s view of the past might have been, he at least acknowledged their roots. He was exactly what that the amnesic 20^th century needed, a man who saw the power in origins. With each vessel he sailed, Hayden embraced the breezes emanating from a time forgotten; he carried them forward with hope that we too might hear their voices.

~

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