Sterling Hayden: The Romantic Trapped by the Leading Man

“Lost, indeed! Don’t talk to me about finding yourself. Only as you are lost is there any hope for you.” -Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (x)

     Sterling Hayden was always the tough guy. Hired time and again to portray gangsters and the seedy underworld they inhabited, he often, through voice and gesture, was able to imbue this world and these characters with nuance and depth. He was able to create portraits of men, haunted and desperate for the past. With grace, he portrayed men whom society had deemed dangerous, giving them space and a voice, and challenging the narratives that society and Hollywood had been disseminating for decades. It was the sensitivity of his every movement that made these characters unforgettable. It is probably 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle for which Hayden is best known. In it he plays Dix Handley, a petty criminal whose whole adult life has been a prolonged attempt to get back to some sense of peace, to a bucolic past of fields and horses, to recapture a beauty and an innocence that has been lost. Beneath all the posturing, his past lends his life meaning. Hayden plays this masterfully, his performance a seeming indictment of society and the censors that would damn all filmic criminals to execution for their misdeeds, no matter how insignificant. He lends Dix a startling humanity that skewers the way in which Hollywood dealt with crime and its villains. It is a master class in turning the status quo on its head, interrogating the stories we tell about ourselves and others. And it makes sense that he was able to do that. He had always been an outsider in Hollywood.

     Sterling Hayden always said that he went into acting just to buy a boat. While indifferent to acting, sailing was his true passion. It is this disinterest that made Hayden a good star. Reluctance, while bad for the psyche, is good for the star. It shows in their work. They are enigmatic, they project an indestructible aloofness to their audience. He was clearly a man not made for Hollywood, but for adventure. A romantic, in the true sense of the word, in his later years he was surrounded by books of poetry and was known to quote from them extensively. Having traveled throughout the world seeking adventure, he cultivated an almost Hemingwayesque persona for mischief: at fifteen, he was aboard a fishing boat and by World War II, he was parachuting into war zones. Sailing seems to have been an extension of this, the wildness and ambiguity paired with the euphoria of danger, autonomy, and control. On a boat, Hayden was in charge of his destiny, not so in Hollywood. It was a place of facade, a place where, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, the actor was indebted and subservient to the studio. He went from extreme freedom to the rigid and uncompromising control of the Hollywood studio system. This went, quickly, from merely uncomfortable, to dangerous. 

     During the 1950s, with anti-communist sentiment high, the House Un-American Activities Commitee, or HUAC, became one of the most powerful and feared organizations in Hollywood. Actors, screenwriters, directors, and many others were called before the Committee for alleged communist ties and were forced to either name other known Communists or face an unofficial but powerful blacklist. Hayden, who joined the Communist Party in his youth, was soon called to testify. What he did next was the thing that plagued him for the rest of his life. He named names. Although the names he mentioned were already known to the committee, he was filled with a regret, the depths of which he could never pull himself out of. He spoke frequently on this point in his later life, not in an attempt to absolve himself, but rather to speak frankly about the cost to himself and others of this action. He seemed to forever damn himself. He was hired for many films after his appearance before HUAC and, seeing these films as payment for his testimony, decided to leave Hollywood.

     “Pharos of Chaos”, a 1983 documentary, gives us a glimpse of Hayden’s later life, after his self-imposed exile from Hollywood. Living on a barge outside of a small Parisian town and plagued by alcoholism, Hayden is shown at his most frank. The film is composed of moments that together form one of the most unflinching surveys of a man’s life. To a young man asleep on a boat, Hayden recalls having said, “Strange that you can’t see. What a terrible affliction.” While a story of a different time, I believe this statement means much more because Hayden is a man who sees everything. He is a man tormented by his faults, whose clarity of vision has caused him to demand so much of himself. He is a man whose perception has made him solitary, who has failed to find comfort in the ideals of a modern homogenized society. He is a man of awareness and it is this that has made his life so poignant and so hard. Building your life the way you want it, surrounded by the things that you draw beauty and inspiration from, does not necessarily mean that you are able to escape the ways that you have let yourself down. This is what we see when we see an older Hayden, a contemplative and pained man, constantly at odds with himself. Here’s the thing though, to have the vulnerability to accept that you did wrong is to show what true strength is. And here, again, we see the outsider and the mentality that characterized Hayden. The honesty. He wanted to show people what the world had been and what it had momentarily turned him into. 

     There are many ways that the HUAC hearings killed people. Some were more obvious, like suicide or stressed induced heart attacks, and others were more subtle. Hayden’s is an example of the latter. The gnawing and overwhelming guilt, the sense of personal devastation at the loss of one’s morals, and the deeply held conviction that there is no returning from that loss. The refusal to learn how to live with yourself after you have let yourself down. It is a devastating thing to think about. The drinking to mask the despair, the loneliness, the knowledge that you are not the person you hoped you would be. But doesn’t the honesty about what he perceived as his failings actually show fortitude and awareness? Isn’t that what makes a person powerful? I think he would heartily disagree, but how are we supposed to change ourselves and the world if we can’t even accept our own failures. Maybe he never found peace with himself, in fact, I’m sure he didn’t, but at least he was honest, to himself and to his audience, and in that he showed strength. It was not the strength of the tough guy from the movie, but real human strength, the kind made up of fragility. It is the kind of strength that we should actually mean when we talk about strength and it made Sterling Hayden who he was.

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Blank, Manfred and Wolf-Eckart Bühler, dir. Pharos of Chaos. 1983: The Criterion Collection, 2016. DVD. 

Hayden, Sterling. Wanderer. Connecticut: The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2018.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Persona and The Public

     When my Mother was young, she crept into the dining room where her Mother was, deep in conversation with a neighbor. At the mention of Elizabeth Taylor, my Grandmother turned up her nose, shook her head, and, in a voice dripping with derision, called her “the sexy witch.” With this off-hand statement my Grandmother seemed to have encapsulated her worldview. In saying it, she set herself up in opposition to whatever she saw as the threat of Elizabeth Taylor, of glamour. It seemed to be an incantation for her own place in the world, no matter how small or filled with turmoil. Taylor was the image of sensuality and luxury, of unabashed desire, and my Grandmother was a woman in and of small town Oregon, a woman for whom these things did not only not apply but to whom these things would have been seen as truly forbidden. They were of two completely different worlds and that, with resentment and resignation, is what my Grandmother latched on to. 

     Elizabeth Taylor is a true movie star, a woman whose image is indelibly linked to the studio system and its old elegance. She was a woman whose many transformations, from child star to mid-century ingénue then, finally, to decadent, tempestuous artist, could never destroy her. She was resilient, never acquiescing to demands, but always countering with her own. She was a woman full of empathy and compassion, whose ability to care for those she saw as the victims of an uncaring society, was vast. She was accustomed to luxury and she reveled in it, in diamonds and in fury. She was a force of emotionalism, in her films and out of them, and all of these things conspired to make her, according to the negative view of my Grandmother, “the sexy witch.”

     But what made Elizabeth Taylor the “sexy witch” is what made her great. She was uncontrollable, frank, and unapologetic. These personality traits were cultivated, alongside scandal, throughout her career. Maybe the first time the public truly turned on Taylor was in 1959, when she began a very public affair with the very married Eddie Fisher. His wife, Debbie Reynolds, was fashioned by the press into the all-American sweetheart, the poor angelic woman, the pious and devoted wife, left unceremoniously by her husband. Taylor was vilified. The dichotomy was cemented: the naïve, blonde wife and the harlot, the seductress, the wanton homewrecker, who seemed to feed on immorality, sex, and a general disregard for others. She became the enemy of all wives, of Americana, of the suburban dream. Taylor, for her part, decided to lean into the role that had been written for her. In an interview, Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper questioned her about the affair and Taylor responded with, “What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?” (Longworth). She was unabashed and while under fire from conservative pundits and the culture at large, she dug in her heels and seemed to say what no one else had dared say: that, as a woman, she had desires and that they were foremost and, further, that she would not be shamed by them. She was bold, she was unapologetic, and she emerged triumphant, gaining her fourth husband and a Best Actress Oscar for BUtterfield 8 in 1960. This was the Taylor that people saw when they went to the movies. The public who read the newspaper and the movie magazines knew all of the details of the scandal and projected this image onto her. And Taylor, who refused to conform to the few acceptable notions of femininity available to her at the time, reflected this in her very public life and in her films.

     And then, a few years later, on the set of Cleopatra, she began an affair with her co-star, Richard Burton. When the affair became public knowledge, the studio sued both Taylor and Burton, citing morality. To the studio, Taylor and Burton’s behavior on set damaged the film’s value. But what the studio didn’t seem to acknowledge was that it added to Burton and Taylor’s allure. All of this was widely commented upon by newspapers, gossip columnists, and the general public. Together, they had become a cultural force. Here, again, Taylor seemed to court intrigue and salacious rumor and emerge from it all even stronger. Throughout her life, she was married and divorced eight times (twice to Burton, whose tumultuous nature was well-documented). Some of her later films even highlight her growing frankness and apparent abhorrence for convention. In The Sandpiper (1965), where she was once again paired with Burton, Taylor plays Laura, a single mother whose son is forced to go to a parochial school. She is a free-spirited painter who lives by the ocean and shirks convention. She is tied, metaphorically, to the place she inhabits, the wild untamed power of Big Sur. Burton, as the headmaster of the school, soon becomes enamoured with Taylor, learning that following convention for its own sake can itself be a kind of sin, wherein there is no room for the human spirit. Laura is undeniably free, and so is Taylor herself. Taylor’s public persona and knowledge of her personal life is brought along to add depth and nuance to her character. The scandals of her life are addressed and seemingly justified within this film. 

     Given all of this, I don’t think my Grandmother’s response was unusual. Many women probably reacted to Taylor this way. Partly because she seemed to threaten the very foundations of their lives and marriages (the monogamous husband and the devoted, yet unsexual wife), and because she is all of the things that they were not allowed to be. She reveled in her sexuality and when its particulars were made public, she decided to revel in that too. Rather than apologizing, she made light of the things that were designed to harm her. She became something difficult to contain, something wild and willful. Women can’t be that, society continued to say. (My Grandmother, for example, was ostracized in her small town religious community for getting a very necessary divorce.) But Elizabeth Taylor was that and to many women, whose firm belief in a system that had not only trapped them but forced them to celebrate their submission, grew to resent it. To be a part of so rarefied a world, so insular and protected, that all of your scandal, all of your supposed misdeeds only added to your allure, was unacceptable. My Grandmother seemed to resent that mobility, that world of apparent ease, a world with which she, on some instinctive level, knew that she would never have any common ground. These shows of emotion, these tempests, were something a small town American woman was not allowed. To express your needs, however minuscule or life-affirming, was akin to selfishness. Taylor was the opposite of that and she loved it. I only wish that women like my Grandmother could have seen that, could have found some solace in it rather than resenting and attempting to harm it. I wish that they could have been allied, their views on their femininity not something to fight over, their respective places in the world not something filled with resentment, but with support and understanding. Rather than lashing out at the things that were holding her in an impossible place, she chose to do so to Elizabeth Taylor and I get it, I really do, but it also makes me kind of sad. There are things that she could have learned from Taylor: how to be thorny, what it means to persevere, how volatility can be beauty and boldness can be life giving, how society will not protect you and decorum will destroy you. If she wasn’t forced to hate her, I think she could have loved her.

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Longworth, Karina. “You Must Remember This: How Elizabeth Taylor Won Her Oscar.” Slate. https://slate.com/culture/2015/12/elizabeth-taylor-and-eddie-fishers-affair-and-taylors-oscar.html