Wanderer

Just replace the word 'Wanderer' with 'Philosopher' throughout this book and you will get the idea of what the author is unconsciously trying to say. The autobiography WANDERER (c.1963, 2000) by Sterling Hayden, is a narrative written in the first and third person of a man who became enamoured with working sail at an early age, and in its pursuit, acquired a multitude of diverse life experiences few people have achieved, and/or, depending on your viewpoint, would want.
The author has compiled a litany of accomplishment simply by writing about the lifestyle he loved best. Sterling Hayden was a dory fisherman in the Grand Banks as a teenager; captained a two masted brig from Boston to Tahiti at age 22; he then became one of the youngest Master Mariners at age 24; sailed around the world twice; sailed to Tahiti several times; was the protege of the top men in his field such as: Robert O. White (Instrument Maker); Irving Johnson, Lincoln Colcord, and Ben Pine. He was also a mate on board the Gloucesterman 'Gertrude L. Thebaud' in its historic race against the big Canadian saltbanker'Bluenose'. He dined with the President of the United States; became a movie star; married a movie star; starred in two Stanley Kubrick productions; became wealthy and became broke; was an enlisted man then a Marine Corp officer; test-ran some of the first PT boats for the U.S. Navy; became an intelligence officer in the Balkans during W.W.II with the nascent O.S.S. and met with its founder 'Wild Bill' Donovan; and testified before the Senate Committee investigating un-American activities in Hollywood. Even from his best jobs Sterling Hayden would willingly descend down the social ladder as drifter, vagabond, and working sailor, because to him they were all interchangeable.
Taking his natural abilities and high innate intelligence for granted, Sterling Hayden essentially gravitated to the forefront of every occupation he fell into, and didn't know why. This is one source for the author's angst, that is, his unconscious attraction to the elite, and then when excelling in that particular field with a talent he is unaware and doesn't understand, developed a mental fugue and leaves.
Such is the nature of the existentialist who collects life experiences to build his character rather than material goods to increase his mercantile wealth. Sterling Hayden measured his wealth in a different way and just as a rich man might judge a man who lacked money, Sterling Hayden judged men throughout WANDERER who lacked character.
Yet Hayden fled from a broken home and his nomadic existence and unstable environment came with a price; the author suffered from alcoholism, depression, conflict, obsessive guilt, and anxiety neurosis. His autobiography is tinged with regret.
But Sterling Hayden's autobiography is valuable for the first hand view of Grandbanks fishing schooners during the 1930s; the actual terminology of the fishermen he represents; his first hand accounts of depression era Boston - his experiences in East Boston and South Boston, his employment with fisherman on Boston's old 'T' wharf; and his friendship with Lawrence Patrick Joseph O'Toole (of the South Boston O'Tooles) who pushed Hayden into his acting career; and Hayden's account of Hollywood agents and 'B' movie contracts.
The autobiography WANDERER by Sterling Hayden, should be required reading in any philosophy, sociology, psychology, or political science course; and it also makes fascinating reading of the interesting life of a complicated man.

Just replace the word 'Wanderer' with 'Philosopher' throughout this book and you will get the idea of what the author is unconsciously trying to say. The autobiography WANDERER (c.1963, 2000) by Sterling Hayden, is a narrative written in the first and third person of a man who became enamoured with working sail at an early age, and in its pursuit, acquired a multitude of diverse life experiences few people have achieved, and/or, depending on your viewpoint, would want.
The author has compiled a litany of accomplishment simply by writing about the lifestyle he loved best. Sterling Hayden was a dory fisherman in the Grand Banks as a teenager; captained a two masted brig from Boston to Tahiti at age 22; he then became one of the youngest Master Mariners at age 24; sailed around the world twice; sailed to Tahiti several times; was the protege of the top men in his field such as: Robert O. White (Instrument Maker); Irving Johnson, Lincoln Colcord, and Ben Pine. He was also a mate on board the Gloucesterman 'Gertrude L. Thebaud' in its historic race against the big Canadian saltbanker'Bluenose'. He dined with the President of the United States; became a movie star; married a movie star; starred in two Stanley Kubrick productions; became wealthy and became broke; was an enlisted man then a Marine Corp officer; test-ran some of the first PT boats for the U.S. Navy; became an intelligence officer in the Balkans during W.W.II with the nascent O.S.S. and met with its founder 'Wild Bill' Donovan; and testified before the Senate Committee investigating un-American activities in Hollywood. Even from his best jobs Sterling Hayden would willingly descend down the social ladder as drifter, vagabond, and working sailor, because to him they were all interchangeable.
Taking his natural abilities and high innate intelligence for granted, Sterling Hayden essentially gravitated to the forefront of every occupation he fell into, and didn't know why. This is one source for the author's angst, that is, his unconscious attraction to the elite, and then when excelling in that particular field with a talent he is unaware and doesn't understand, developed a mental fugue and leaves.
Such is the nature of the existentialist who collects life experiences to build his character rather than material goods to increase his mercantile wealth. Sterling Hayden measured his wealth in a different way and just as a rich man might judge a man who lacked money, Sterling Hayden judged men throughout WANDERER who lacked character.
Yet Hayden fled from a broken home and his nomadic existence and unstable environment came with a price; the author suffered from alcoholism, depression, conflict, obsessive guilt, and anxiety neurosis. His autobiography is tinged with regret.
But Sterling Hayden's autobiography is valuable for the first hand view of Grandbanks fishing schooners during the 1930s; the actual terminology of the fishermen he represents; his first hand accounts of depression era Boston - his experiences in East Boston and South Boston, his employment with fisherman on Boston's old 'T' wharf; and his friendship with Lawrence Patrick Joseph O'Toole (of the South Boston O'Tooles) who pushed Hayden into his acting career; and Hayden's account of Hollywood agents and 'B' movie contracts.
The autobiography WANDERER by Sterling Hayden, should be required reading in any philosophy, sociology, psychology, or political science course; and it also makes fascinating reading of the interesting life of a complicated man.

I bought my copy of "The Wanderer" when it was first published in 1964, because Sterling Hayden was one of my favorite actors. I especially enjoyed his work in The Asphalt Jungle, Johnny Guitar, The Killing, Suddenly, and Terror in a Texas Town, among others. Now, 40 years later I have decided to reread the book, and I forgot how good it was. The central theme of the book is Hayden's escape from Hollywood, with his young children in tow, on the schooner for which the book is named. He made this voyage to the south seas against orders of the court, who considered it too dangerous for the children. As he tells of this less than idyllic voyage, he intersperses fragments of his life, concentrating mostly on his late teens and twenties when he was a working seaman. He is very stylistic in his writing, and sometimes his switching from first to third person narrative is quite jarring, but the effect is emotionally charging. As he ages into his thirties and beyond, Sterling finds his life falling apart. He becomes a Hollywood heart throb and detests his work and lifestyle. He becomes a Communist for a few months, but never really gets with the program, and to save his hated career, he goes before the HUAC and bares his soul and names names, an action he quickly and forever regretted. He seesaws between impotency and affairs, he can't communicate with the women he loves, he struggles with no notable success with psychotherapy, he finds his life adrift with no anchor in sight. All of these travails he lays out with such frankness, I felt embarassed for him. Hayden holds nothing back as he displays his warts and finds no joy in his life, except with his children. Does he simply settle, or does he come to some kind of compromise he can live with? I hope it's the latter, because after all his trials he deserves it. But I feel it is the former. Yet, shortly after the book is completed, he films one of his most important roles as Jack Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove." I won't wait 40 years to read this book again.

It took a chapter or so for me to get use to the author's writing style...but it was completely worth it. Wanderer has become one of my favorite books, a tale of a man who defined the saying, "All Who Wander are Not Lost." Hayden refused to be defined by what he did for a living, which is almost impossible for any man to achieve (myself included).

The story of his early life is very interesting and in some cases, stranger than fiction. Hayden grew into a man who determined that there was more to life than being a movie star and chose to forfeit being an icon in order to live life on his own terms. He was a flawed man who was quite candid about his failures and shortcomings, yet cared deeply for his children, the Wanderer and the promise of adventure. I didn't completely agree with all of Hayden's actions and decisions...but then again, he probably wouldn't have agreed with all of mine either. If you aren't familiar with sailing vessels, some of the terminology used in the book may be confusing. I would encourage you to bear with it and continue reading, as you will be richly rewarded.

This is an absolutely amazing read. I plan to read it once a year, it now holds a treasured place in my heart.

"Shortly after midnight she came to the end of the road and, with Venus Point Light bearing due south, three miles distant, we hove her to till dawn. And the ship slept under a blanket of stars and so did most of her crew. But not the one in command. He paced alone, alone and lost in memories of the time..." Wanderer, page 247.

Hayden wrote The Wanderer (1963) and then Voyage (1976). Both books read like Conrad and Melville with Hayden living the life of an adventurer before and after Hollywood. He is both Melville and a character from Melville. Hayden ran away from home at fifteen to sail the Great Banks of Newfoundland: sailed around the world the first time at twenty-one, captained a square-rigger from Gloucester to Tahiti at twenty-two, and he was the navigator for the schooner Gertrude L. Thebaud in the Fisherman's Cup the following year. News coverage of the race had led to Hollywood calling the sailor west, but he refused initially. He would sail around the world a second time before he reported to Paramount Studios in 1941. He married and seemed to settle down to a staid but secure income and life. Paramount awarded him a seven-year contract starting at $250 a week, which was very good money then. He would break his contract in less than a year. He felt the wind and left the shore. Wanderer.

Hayden was not a man easy to miss in the crowd: at six-five, with rugged good looks that earned him the moniker "The Beautiful Blond Viking God," he managed to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps, see action, earn both the Silver Star and Bronze Star and other combat decorations, get on a first-name basis with "Wild Bill" Donovan of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, and run numerous covert gun-running and rescue operations into Yugoslavia before it had become known that he was some two-bit actor from Hollywood. In other words, Hayden had enlisted using a false name. He had dined with FDR as John Hamilton. That's acting. Hayden's missions for the nascent CIA were not declassified until 2008.

Hayden was an interesting man. As an author he, like another actor who loved the sea, Humphrey Bogart, knew his Conrad, London, Melville, and Stevenson inside and out. Wanderer, in typical Haydenesque style, began as an open act of defiance. Defying a court order, he took his four children and sailed for the South Seas. He set sail with no radio. Wanderer is not a celebrity rendition of life on the lam with all the posh accoutrements; it is literary fiction drawn from living the hard life at sea with children; and Hayden demonstrates the breadth of his maritime knowledge and the depth of his reading, for the book opens with a pivotal incipit from Walter de la Mare. Substitute Wanderer for `Traveler' and you see Sterling Hayden, the author and man, who loved his children and the sea. He was both Ishmael and Ahab.

This book is as convoluted as its author. It maintains a flow of semi-stream-of-consciousness from start to finish, and what emerges are the memoirs of a man whose love of seafaring and considerable self-deprecation ("self-loathing" is a little too strong a term) has brought him to a sea voyage to Tahiti with a pick-up crew and his four children in violation of a court order. Hayden's story is it's own animal, going from the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine, to the forests of Yugoslavia, to courtrooms and congressional chambers and movie sets and finally to the high seas and South Pacific islands with a strain of fatalism and regret throughout. It should make for a downer of a read; instead, I found myself staying up and turning the pages to see what happened next. A great book.

"Wanderer" is not just one man's tale. A schooner bum from Maine, initially wooed and later repulsed by the glamour of celebrity, caused to reevaluate his own ethics. It is a tragic and nostalgic glimpse into the human side of the land of the Titans. We visit both the hidden decadence of Hollywood that turns people into playthings and the personal desperation that drives Hayden to kidnap his own children for a two year trip through the South Pacific.
We are also, as sailors, given a sea-level view of those we have only come to know by name and legend: Irving Johnson, Spike Africa, Warwick Tompkins' Wanderbird, and Sausalito's NoNameBar. More than anything, Hayden reaffirms that, like ourselves, they were but men: simple, flawed, and determined.

I rarely ever read autobiographies; most are essentially auto-hagiographies which probably don't reflect anything like the actual life experiences of the author.... or, they whitewash essential elements of their lives, providing a distorted and biased picture of what they are all about.

So, what prompted me to read an autobiography of an actor, long dead, written nearly 50 years ago?

I got interested in Sterling Hayden by chance, after reviewing some historical stuff about the early 50's, the 'Red scare', and McCarthyism. Sterming Hayden was somewhat involved in this, as someone who was compelled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee... and who named names... although he later said it was the greatest regret of his life.

Unbeknown to most people, Sterling Hayden was a lifelong sailor, committed to, and loving of, boats and the sea. His upbringing was not a happy one; after his father died when he was 9, his mother remarried, to a man who proved to be a grifter and con-artist, and the family was constantly on the move, living in boarding houses, one step ahead of creditors after leaving debt in their wake. He shipped out on a freighter at the age of 16, and throughout his life, had a nautical wanderlust which dominated his life. He hated acting, resorting to it only in order to make enough money to indulge his love of sailing, although he was indeed a good actor. He served in the Marines, and in WWII, served heroically in the OSS, helping the partisans in the Balkans oppose fascism.

This is really not a typical biography, at all. While lacking in an education beyond the tenth grade, Hayden was a remarkably gifted writer. While he wrote only two books in his life (this one, plus a novel called 'Voyage', which I read some years ago, and was a gripping tale of the voyage of a coal freighter), his writing was remarkably literary in style, and his autobiography reads at a vastly higher level than one would expect. Hayden attributed his education to the more than 500 books, many of them literary classics, which he kept aboard his various vessels.

The 'ruse' of the autobiography begins in 1959, when in the midst of a bitter, acrimoneous divorce, he ignores a court ruling and takes his four young children, plus another half dozen adventurers, on a voyage from Santa Barbara, California, to Tahiti. In the context of this rebellion, he details the story of his life, his adventures, the times he turned down significant money to star in numerous pictures, and the times he was bankrupt, or nearly so.

I'd recommend this book, for no other reason, than the nautical tales, although Hayden was a complex and fascinating character, in his own right.

Sterling Hayden always fascinated me because he seemed like a real person of substance, not merely a movie star. I remember passing him on Madison Avenue in the 1970s as he was coming out of Brooks Brothers, a tall man with a scraggly patriarch beard and the cane that became his trademark in his later years, and what remains in my memory is the impression of how different he was from everyone else on that street in New York on that day. His autobiography, Wanderer, has confirmed that my instincts were correct. "I'm a professional irregular," he once confessed. "The only way I can get by in life is not to be like anybody else." And he wasn't. His life was one adventure after another, beginning with his stark upbringing during the Depression, moving around with his con man stepfather and emotionally needy mother, running away to sea on the sailing ships of New England, suddenly being discovered by Hollywood, marrying a famous movie star, serving in the OSS in Yugoslavia, appearing before the McCarthy people, turning in some fabulous acting in top films (Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, and The Long Goodbye are my favorites), and taking his four kids on a schooner to Tahiti in defiance of a court order. Two things impressed me about Wanderer. The first is his eloquent command of the English language and his gift for description, which are all the more astounding given his lack of formal education. The second is that unlike so many celebrity tell-all books that reveal who they screwed (literally and figuratively) and who screwed them, Hayden's revelations are about himself. He holds no punches in revealing his demons, which were legion. Wanderer reads like a novel, all the more captivating because it was all true.

Hayden was one of those force of nature types who, sadly don't exist in sufficient quantities to make the world a really interesting place. In this book, he tells his life story, while telling the story of his last voyage on the 100 foot schooner, Wanderer. His prose is lovely and has the rythm of the sea; like other great works of sea literature (like Moby Dick). I'll give a high point of his prose before I complain:

"What does a man need ---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in --and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all --in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where then lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be, bankruptcy of purse of bankrutpcy of life?"

Hayden was a child of the depression who worked his way out of bad circumstances by a combination of stubbornness, physique and leadership skill. He is eventually given a job a an actor, after being spotted by the media during a sailboat race in Glocester. He abandons this due to a love affair with an actress who fancies herself concerned with serious social issues. He joins the war and does OSS/CIA type operations in maritime support of partisans in Yugoslavia. He returns to his acting. Makes many movies. Marries an evil shrew. Divorces. Gets the kids. Chucks it all for a trip to Tahiti in his 100 foot yacht. All this is well and good, but the man reveals too much about himself. His self loathing isn't interesting. It is certainly not edifying, and though he seems to abundantly pity himself, I cannot feel sorry for him. The man had many fine opportunities. He had fine charachter qualities; I admire the fact that he chucked it all, just because he didn't like it. But he was not a fine man: he was petty and ugly -he couldn't even treat his own widowed mother decently, and though his ex wife was probably no better, I rather doubt as being around such a tormented spirit was good for his kids. In that way, he is a tragic figure; all the more tragic because he doesn't seem to realize it himself. It is no suprise he never did much with himself after he wrote the book. I don't know this to be true, but I suspect he drown himself and his self-loathing in booze.

Still, it is a beautifully written book. In a way, the book is his triumph over it all. It is doubtless a finer thing than any of the movies he made, and his great "the heck with it all" dramatic gesture is probably better than any he made on camera. I know I will read the book again. Perhaps when I am older I will think differently of Captain Hayden. Amusingly, a visit to Sausalito revealed that I had known Hayden as the demented General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove."