The Reluctant Idol

WANDERER by Sterling Hayden. 434 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

He had no screen career to speak of --nothing to compare with Cooper or Gable or Bogart. But Sterling Hayden was a celebrity of sorts in Hollywood. His irresistible appeal was that he was the authentic article. He had gone to sea at 17, dory-trawling for haddock, hake and scrod from ramshackle schooners on the stormy Newfoundland banks. At 22 he was a master mariner. His first command was a brigantine, which he sailed to Tahiti. He spent the war as an OSS officer operating with the partisans in Yugoslavia rather than on the Warner Brothers lot. And periodically, to prove that he was sincere,-he ran away from Hollywood.

Hayden tells his story with honesty, humor and considerably more literary flair than is summoned by the ghostly hacks who write most Hollywood memoirs. He was one of the last beneficiaries and victims of the star-building system that died with television, and he describes the system's absurdities with the relish of a man who never really belonged. Hollywood's effect on Hayden was curious: whereas most leading men (Flynn, Bogart, Wayne) began after a time to believe their own roistering publicity, Hayden found himself beginning to disbelieve in everything he had ever done.

Jump Ahead. Son of a New Jersey advertising salesman, Hayden caught his first glimpse of the sea in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where his mother and stepfather had fled a jump ahead of the creditors. Before long he was slipping down to the Gloucester and Boston docks to beg a berth on the beam trawlers. By the time he got his skipper's papers, he was something of a local hero (LOCAL SAILOR LIKE MOVIE IDOL headlined the Boston Post). A well-meaning friend sent a letter to a Hollywood agent: "There's a young fellow back here named Hayden. He is twenty-four years old, six feet four inches tall, weighs 220 . . ."

Nobody fooled himself that Hayden could act. Week after week he sat idly around the lot drawing $600 a month from Paramount Pictures and lifting weights in the studio gymnasium. Finaly he was given the second male lead, Behind Fred MacMurray and opposite Madeleine Carroll (whom he later married) in Virginia, and the big publicity boom was on.

But he was restless, and although paramount promised him an $18,000 schooner to keep him happy, he wiggled out of his contract to go off to war. When he returned, he was starred in a dreary succession of B pictures, but the pay in those last palmy days was considerably higher--upwards of $160,000 a year.

Off to Tahiti. It only made Hayden more restless. He lived on and off boats, consulted a psychiatrist and watched his career slide. He describes how he was asked to play Tarzan by a zealous producer who had heard he had a flaming desire to save the world: "Maybe you don't realize that Tarzan represents the free man who stands alone against the forces of evil. Perhaps you could strip to the waist . . ." The troubled Hayden returned to the sea--loading his children aboard the schooner Wanderer and, in defiance of a court order, taking off with them for Tahiti.

What sets Hayden's story apart is his obvious, anguished integrity. He admits candidly that he was deathly afraid during much of the war. He wonders, with the insistence of a man probing a throbbing tooth, why he was always a loner, why his first two marriages failed, whether he had ever been anything but an actor: "Wasn't I a fo'c'sle dweller who was not a fo'c'sle dweller? A student who was not a student; a doryman unlike any other doryman? I am flawed inside and I know it. 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?"

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