The Story of the Western Movie Star Who Quit Hollywood to Bomb Tokyo During WWII (Hollywood Goes to War)

And we continue with Our American Stories. Our next story is about the man who played Captain McCluskey in The Godfather. Here to tell another Hollywood Goes to War’s story is Roger McGrath. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Hoighwoman, and Vigilantes. You hear him and see him on the History Channel. He’s a regular contributor to Now American Stories. Here’s McGrath.

Sirdling Hayden appeared in fifty-nine movies, often as leading man, and made another eighteen appearances and various television productions. At six-foot-five with a large frame and I had a blonde hair, he was nicknamed The Viking. His movie career began in nineteen forty-one and didn’t end until nineteen eighty-two. Despite all this fine work earlier in his career, he’s probably best remembered for his role as General Jack Ripper in Doctor Strangelove, a satire ridiculing the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“Do you recall what Clemanso one said about war?” “No, I didn’t think I know that.” “I,” he said, “war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that fifty years ago, he might have been right, but today war is too important to be left to politicians. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communists subversion, and the International Communist conspiracy happen and purify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

Little remembered about Sterling Hayden is World War II service as a Marine officer attached to the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. Sterling Hayden is born in nineteen sixteen to George and Francis Walter in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Young Sterling lives a typical boy’s life in that era, although he’s more mischievous than most boys and occasionally finds himself in trouble. When he’s nine years old, he fires a slingshot at a neighbor. Greatly upset by Sterling’s behavior, his father whips him, but while doing so, collapses from a stroke.

Three months later, his father dies. Sterling blames himself and mourns the loss of his father for months. Sterling’s mother finds employment at Good Housekeeping magazine and is able to support herself and her son. She later marries James Hayden, and her new husband adopts Sterling, who now becomes Sterling Walter Hayden. When the Great Depression hits, the Hayden family falls on hard times and moves often. The teenage Sterling is often absent from the various schools he attends, and after the tenth grade, he drops out permanently. While searching for a job on the Boston Wharves, he learns that the schooner Puritan is hiring crew for a voyage to California. Sterling signs on as a ship’s boy at ten dollars a month. He’s excited to have landed the job and is off to sea at sixteen years old. The young lad takes to life at sea with ease, and during the next four years, sails on schooners and trawlers, moving up through the ranks from ship’s boy to first mate. As first mate, he ships aboard the schooner Yankee, which takes him on around the world voyage. In nineteen thirty-eight, at the age of twenty-two, Sterling Hayden is given his first command of a ship, the Brig Florence C. Robinson, in port at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ship was sold to a Copora trader in Tahiti, and it is Hayden’s job to sail it there. It’s a bit of a lark, and he assembles a crew of experienced sailors, but others who are less sailor and more adventurer. Of the eleven on board, Hayden is the youngest at twenty-two, and Lawrence O’Toole, an artist and writer, the oldest, at thirty-three. Days out of Gloucester, young Captain Hayden finds himself in a hurricane with winds of one hundred miles power and waves of forty feet. It’s a supreme test for all aboard, especially Hayden. He guides the wooden ship through the fierce storm, but Flossi, is nicknamed for Florence C. Robinson, is damaged, and Hayden puts in at Jamaica for repairs. From Jamaica, they sail to Panama and pass through the canal, picking up a parrot who can talk a blue streak along the way. They next put in at the Glopagus Islands, where they are surprised to find a small colony of Americans, Norwegians, and Germans among the larger population Ecuadorans from the Galopogus Islands. It’s thousands of miles and several weeks of open sea to Tahiti. Hayden navigates by shooting the stars with his sextant. The horizon seems endless, and the night sky is stunning. When word reaches Boston that Florence C. Robinson arrived safely in Tahiti after a seventy-seven hundred-mile voyage, the Boston Herald said, “These are not boys young men. They are young men made of the stuff that makes America great. They are doers of constructive deeds. Their assignment was to deliver the brig to Tahiti. They delivered the brig to Tahiti.” Once back in the United States, Hayden addresses the Adventurers Club in New York City and then heads up to Massachusetts, where he participates in an annual sailing contest, the International Fisherman’s Race. In the spring of nineteen forty, a photo was snapped of the handsome six-foot-five and two-hundred-twenty-pound Hayden with his blonde hair tousled by the wind. The photo goes on the cover of a magazine. An agent with Paramount Pictures sees it and immediately arranges for Hayden to come out to Hollywood for a screen test. Hayden later says, “I was completely lost, ignorant, nervous. But the next thing I knew, Paramount made me a seven year a contract beginning at two hundred and fifty dollars a week, which was astronomical. I got my lovely old mother and bought a car, and we drove to California. I was so lost that I didn’t even think to analyze it. I said, ‘This is nuts, but damn, it’s pleasant.’ I had only one plan in mind, to get five thousand dollars. I knew where there was a schooner, and then I’d haul ass.” Bearmount promotes Sterling as the beautiful blonde Viking god. He’s in his first movie, titled Simply Virginia in nineteen forty-one. The movie stars Madeleine Carroll and Fred McMurray, but Hayden virtually shares the male lead with mc murray. In a second movie in nineteen forty-one, Bahama Passage, Hayden is the male lead. The female lead again is Madeleine Carroll. “Let father can do anything.”

“I only hope I can be half the man is.”

Hayden becomes one of Hollywood’s most talked-about and successful young stars, and several movies are waiting for him. In nineteen forty-two, however, in a sneak attack, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and American is suddenly in war. Hayden quits Hollywood and his wife as the beautiful blonde Viking god enlist in the Marine Corps. He declares, “I don’t want to go on imitating men, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Ebsen is back. ‘Good man, do nothing’ is the chief danger of our time.”

Haiden’s performance in boot camp at Paris Island is outstanding, and together with the years of experience on the high seas, which include earning his Master’s certificate, meaning he could captain a ship, and sailing around the world, the Corps now sends Hayden to Officers School. By April nineteen forty-three, he’s a second lieutenant. Because of Hayden’s background, General William Donovan of the OSS now wants Hayden attached to his clandestine organization.

And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath tell the story of Sterling Hayden. When we come back, more of Sterling Hayden’s story, our Hollywood Goes to War series here on Our American Story, and we continue with Our American Stories and with our Hollywood Goes to War series with Roger McGrath telling the story of Sterling Hayden. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

The Marine Corps lends Lieutenant Hayden to General Donovan, and Hayden is trained at OSS quarters in Washington, D.C. From there, he’s sent to the OSS Office in Cairo, Egypt. Three months later, Hayden is operating out of a small coastal town, a monopoly near the southeastern tip of the Italian Peninsula. He organizes a fleet of 14 sailboats, and during dark nights in late December nineteen forty-three and early January nineteen forty-four, ferries weapons and supplies through the German-patrolled Adriatic Sea to marshall Joseph Tito’s Communist guerrilla forces in Yugoslavia. Hayden has awarded the Silver Star for displaying great courage and making hazardous sea voyages in enemy-infested waters and reconnaissance trips through those enemy-held areas. From mid-February to April 1, nineteen forty-four, Hayden makes ten more clandestine trips, firing guns supplies from southern Italy to Yugoslavia. He describes a typical trip to the island of Thesee, just off the Yugoslavian coast: “By plunging through the Allied minefield the late of an afternoon, a schooner always had a chance of reaching this at dawn, barely in time to be backed into a precipitous cove where she could be hastily camouflaged with pine boughs festooned in her rigging, unloaded the following night, the camouflage repeated, and then driven toward Italy as soon as the weather served.” If dodging Allied mines and German patrol vessels was not enough, Hayden’s next assignment is even riskier. With a Marine gunnery sergeant and a Navy radio operator, Hayden on loan to the OSS, Hayden parachutes into Yugoslavia and makes contact with partisan forces. “We hooked up with about thirty of the toughest bastards on earth,” said Hayden. “None of them had had a bath in years. All had been in the thick of the fighting and marching all up and down Bosnia and Croatia. They would only take a cigarette at a time, which they passed around in circles.” During his next several months behind German lines, Hayden makes contact with two dozen downed American and British airmen at various locations and leads them to the Adriatic coast, where sailboats take them to safety in southern Italy, now occupied by the Allies. Late in nineteen forty-four, Hayden is working with General Courtney Hodges and the first Armies pushed into Germany. Hayden’s OSS team seeks out anti-Nazi Germans for work with the OSS. In February nineteen forty-five, Hayden is promoted to captain. Following V-Day in Europe, he’s test with assessing bombing damage of ports along the coast of the North Sea. Captain Sterling Hayden is released from active duty in December nineteen forty-five. His decorations include a Silver Star in two bronze arrowheads. Hayden is back in the movies in nineteen forty-seven, appearing in Blaze of Noon and Variety Girl. He appears in another fifty-five films during the next thirty years, including the lead in the highly acclaimed The Asphalt Jungle in nineteen fifty I.

“Got a chance to work in a picture called Asphalt Jungle, which you may have heard of with John Houston. So I went up to Mandeville Cranyon and rented a house. Malan and Roe lived there. Later she was in Asphalt Jungle. That was her first film, I believe, her first primary film. Huh. Of the day she came on the set. Yeah, stop business, everything stopped.”

And the lead in the equally highly acclaimed The Killing in nineteen fifty-six.

“All right, there’s a parking lot less than three hundred feet from the northwest corner of the track. From a car parked in the southeast corner of that lot, you get a perfect view of the horses as they come around the fire corner and start into the stretch. A man sitting in a car parked in that spot, using a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight should be able to bring down any given horse with a single shot. Red Lightning will undoubtedly be leading in the stretch, because that’s the way he runs. So he goes down, a couple of other horses pile up on top of him. There’ll be plenty of confusion. I can get and tell you that.”

Despite these roles and dozens of others as a cowboy, a seafarer, a military officer, a detective, or an outlaw, his most famous role is that of General Jack D. Ripper in The Great Satire, Doctor Strangelove, in nineteen sixty-four.

“I’ve seen very little of myself on film, usually because I feel uncomfortable in what I see, even when it’s good, even what passes for being good. When I worked with Kubrick in Strangelove, and Lord knows, it was a magnificent picture, and we all know that, and apparently I pulled my weight in it. But I went through the worst day of my life, the first day on that picture, because I began to blow in my lines and I went forty-eight takes. And now we’re doing, as you know, what to call pickups, and I can’t even do one damn line. Eh, and I’m pouring sweat and they’re mopping me off. Now, beautiful thing happens. Speaking of Stanley Kubrick, I finally got up. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I walked up to him and I said, ‘Stanley, I apologize to you.’ And he said this to me, one of the loveliest things any man has ever said to me in my life. He said, ‘Sterling, I know you can’t help what’s going on, and you know I can’t help you,’ he said, ‘but the terror in your eyes, on your face, may just be the quality.’ And now he said, to love, he said, ‘the quality that we want in this jackass, General Jack Ripper.’ He said, ‘if it has not come back in another couple of months, then we’ll do it all over again.’ Now, that was lovely, wasn’t it? I’ll never forget that. Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

“Ah? Yes, I have had of that.”

“Jack is. Yeah, well, you know what it is. Yeah, all right. Now, you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face, Serling.”

Haiden’s first wife is Madeline Carroll, who is the female lead in Aiden’s first two movies. There are four years of separation during World War II; ends the marriage. He marries Betty Ann Denon in nineteen forty-seven, and they have four children before divorcing in nineteen fifty-eight. He gains custody to the children, but it’s supposed to get keep them in California. Instead, he loads the kids aboard a sailboat, the Wanderer, and sets out for Tahiti. A photographer, Dodie Weston Thompson, tags along, documenting the entire trip, including their time in Tahiti. In nineteen sixty, Aiden marries Catherine Divine McConnell and has two more children. Catherine has a son from her first marriage, Scott McConnell, who years later becomes one of the founders and the editor of the American conservative magazine Sterling. Aiden stays married to Catherine until he dies of cancer in nineteen eighty-six at age seventy in his home at Saucelito. His ashes were spread over San Francisco Bay. Aiden never liked Hollywood or acting, but it was an easy way for him to make money. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with being an actor if that’s what a man wants, but there’s everything wrong with achieving an exalted status simply because one photographs will and is able to handle dialogue. In the final analysis, an actor is only a pawn. Brilliant sometimes where you’re in talented, capable of bringing pleasure and even inspiration to others, but no less pawn.”

“For that, I didn’t think it was really… I couldn’t take it seriously because it seems so ridiculous. It seems so crazy, you know what I mean? Because I don’t think there are any other businesses in this world where you can be paid very good money and so calls semi-starred, and you don’t know what you’re doing. I started in nineteen forty at Paramount. Then when I got that thing with Houston with John, something said to me, ‘Hey, if you’re going to be here, maybe you should learn what the hell you’re doing.’ So then I was sort of serious.”

US remembered as a movie star, Sterling Hayden was most at home sailing the high seas or on gearing missions as a Marine officer with the OSS.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Roger McGrath. He’s the author of Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. A U.S. Marine always former history professor at UCLA. And you know him if you watch the History Channel. What a story he told about Sterling Hayden. My goodness, the things he loved, sailing the high seas and serving his country in combat and the most dangerous combat missions of them all, of course, are involved in counterintelligence and espionage. And imagine trying to figure out which Germans really are, really are people who hate the Nazis as opposed to spies themselves. And then you are dead. The American spy is dead. And the story of Sterling Hayden, Silver Star recipient in World War II, a man who served his country like few others working for the OSS. His story here on Our American Stories.