CELEBRITY SPIES, PART 2: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN IN THE MOVIES

True Spies, Episode 149, Celebrity Spies, Part 2: The Most Beautiful Man In The Movies

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Sophia Di Martino, and this is True Spies, from SPYSCAPE Studios.

LEE MANDEL: It was kind of cute because at every mission brief, when he'd brief his crew, he'd end it by going, “Protect the God damn boat and you'll protect your ass.” That was his signature sign-off. 

NARRATOR: Celebrity Spies, Part 2: The Most Beautiful Man In The Movies.

LEE MANDEL: This mission was described by one of his sailors years after the war. He said they were taking gold shipments to Yugoslavia to use as payment to Tito for rescuing American airmen. Almost sounds like a little bit of a bribe, whatever. And on the way back, they were attacked by German aircraft. And you have mainly German E- boats  .

NARRATOR: The year is 1943 and World War II is raging. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Americans entered the war. But the German onslaught on the free world remains ferocious. Allied support missions for local resistance across strategic European locations are in full force. 

LEE MANDEL: It's like a PT boat version of an American patrol torpedo boat - like about 70-footer, heavily armed, and very fast. And so Sterling had to maneuver out of the way. And on this particular mission, he had picked up four American airmen, two of which were seriously wounded.

NARRATOR: At the forefront of these attempts to disrupt the German advance are the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and the recently formed US Intelligence Service known as the OSS.

LEE MANDEL: And on the way back, they got attacked. They got attacked by the Germans and fought their way out. When they were pulling up, they sent two flares up to indicate, “Look, we need an ambulance because we got seriously wounded.” And as they're approaching the harbor, they notice that there's an ambulance way back there and there's a Red Cross van there and there's a big crowd. As they get closer, they see there's a beautiful woman dressed in a Red Cross outfit. And as they get closer they say, “Oh, my God, that's Madeleine Carroll.” 

NARRATOR: One of the critical missions performed by these intelligence services was working with local resistance movements in running supplies, rescuing wounded military personnel, and transporting refugees to safety, from what was then known as Yugoslavia, across the Adriatic to the Southern heel of Italy. These missions required highly skilled sailors capable of navigating under cover of night with the constant threat of attack by the Nazi naval forces. As a consequence, they also required unparalleled levels of courage, competence, and determination to pull them off. So why, then, was one of the most famous and celebrated Hollywood actresses in the world waiting on the pier for the return of one such mission? More importantly, who was she waiting for? The man she was there to greet was none other than her husband, and this week’s True Spy, the Hollywood heartthrob Sterling Hayden, a six-foot-four hunk dubbed by Paramount Studios’ publicity team as the ‘Most Beautiful Man in The Movies’. Yet he had thrown it all away to serve in the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, in the Allied effort to bring an end to Hitler’s murderous onslaught on European freedom. But as we shall find out, the German Navy wasn’t the only danger Hayden was to face. The simmering rivalry between US and British intelligence was about to blow up into a life-or-death showdown. With our True Spy at the center of it. Our guide through this star-studded tale is Hayden’s biographer, retired US Navy physician Lee Mandel.

LEE MANDEL: Hayden was livid. He gets off the boat and what was happening was they wanted to do a publicity thing because Madeleine had volunteered as a Red Cross volunteer and was only about 50 miles north of the base. So they brought her down there. Well, Hayden was in no mood after what they went through, started cursing her, and drove her away. And he checked his men onboard, made sure they were taken care of, and inspected the boat. Then he went up to the guy who was the public affairs officer for the 15th Air Force who had arranged this whole thing. So he went up to him and when the guy tried to speak to Sterling, Sterling grabbed his shirt and threw him into the harbor.

NARRATOR: Not, perhaps, the reaction anyone expected, least of all Hayden’s famous wife. But by 1943, Sterling Hayden had rejected fame and fortune to volunteer for the Marines. In a matter of months, he had been assigned to Operation Audrey, the OSS’s mission to disrupt the German War effort in the Adriatic. He had changed his name to John Hamilton and returned to what he loved most of all: sailing. And in doing so, he was becoming one of the most unusual, fascinating, and courageous figures to emerge from Hollywood. A man whose life more resembled a character from a Hemingway novel than a real person. To understand why this Hollywood actor was now commanding a boat, aiding the Communist rebels, we need to go back to the beginning. To a young boy who fell in love with the ocean and spent the rest of his life trying to find freedom on the open seas. A freedom that, for the most part, eluded him and drove him to the brink of his sanity. How this wanderlust also led him to become a star witness in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt to root out Communism in the entertainment industry. A decision he regretted for the rest of his life. Sterling Hayden’s childhood was tough from the start. Born in New Jersey in 1916, his formative years were shaped by an abusive father. When he died of a heart attack on the brink of another vicious beating, Sterling’s mother remarried a con man called Jim Hayden.

LEE MANDEL: He was a ne'er do well, a schemer, kind of a get-rich-quick guy. 

NARRATOR: Sterling despised Jim. But the con man’s itinerant lifestyle made its mark on the boy nonetheless. During a trip to New York, the young Sterling met his first and deepest love. 

LEE MANDEL: They get to the piers in New Jersey. And for the first time, Sterling sees the water. And he was enraptured. He said, “My God, this is the most beautiful stuff I've ever seen.” And from that point on, he was almost addicted to his vision of a life at sea.

NARRATOR: Despite the challenges of his early years, Hayden’s life possessed a certain charm. By chance, coincidence, and sheer luck, he encountered a handful of surrogate father figures and mentors throughout his youth.

LEE MANDEL: One was Warwick Tompkins. Warwick Tompkins was an intellectual who became a communist and became a strong influence in Sterling's life. And Sterling was getting many books and news articles and letters from Tompkins throughout the war and it affected his thinking. The other mentor had two others. One was a guy named Lincoln Colcord. Colcord was a former socialist when he was a young man, became a conservative, was hard-drinking, and an adventurer, and he wanted to open Sterling up to the adventures in life. And then the other one was Irving Johnson. Irving Johnson hired Sterling after he met him to be his first mate on his around-the-world cruise. And from Irving Johnson, he learned seamanship extraordinaire and responsibility. Johnson was a teetotaler, fiscally responsible. And it's interesting here he had these two mentors. Colcord on one hand was a bit of a wild man. And Irving Johnson, who was the kind of laid-back conservative type of guy. 

NARRATOR: It was this trio of father figures that helped shape the young Sterling into the man he would become: a sailor of exceptional skill and dedication to his crew, prone to introspection, self-destruction, and addiction. At 16, Hayden takes his first sailing trip from Connecticut to California. 

LEE MANDEL: And the very first time he spent a night on a sailing ship, which is a decrepit old ship in New England, he was thinking, “This is wonderful. This is what I've dreamed about.” I mean, he was somewhat obsessed. 

NARRATOR: Hayden was a quick learner and soon earned a reputation for seamanship, a reputation cemented when he crewed on his first round-the-world voyage. And then, just as he’d settled into a life at sea, young Hayden’s story took its next, unexpected turn. 

LEE MANDEL: By the time he was a late teenager, he was six-foot-five, about 220 pounds of muscle, and handsome as all get out. And in the International Fisherman competition off of Gloucester, these sailing boat races, the news media noticed him and they saw this Viking God who’s a sailor on the ship, and the young ladies really would flock up to the pier just to get a good look at him. 

NARRATOR: Sensing an opportunity, one of Hayden’s friends with connections in Hollywood convinced the young sailor to contact a talent agent to do a screen test. Hayden, at first resistant, but also completely broke, finally agreed. The Hollywood moguls took one look at Hayden and, in a matter of months, catapulted him to top billing. He became the hottest name in Hollywood, described by one magazine as ‘The greatest find since Clark Gable’. But right from the start, Hayden’s relationship with stardom, and the massive salary he was now earning, sat uneasily with this romantic dreamer. His dressing room at the studio was adorned with pictures of sailing boats and he would escape to the sea whenever he had the chance.

LEE MANDEL: Next thing he knows, he's starring in two major movies, including with a woman who was the number-one box office star of that era, Madeleine Carroll. Unbelievable, you can’t make this stuff up! 

‍NARRATOR: His first film role, in 1940’s Virginia, introduced him to his co-star and future wife, Madeleine Carroll - the same woman he was to turn his back on two years later, on that fateful day at the docks in Italy. Carroll, English by birth, was one of the biggest stars in the world at this time. Despite her being 10 years his senior and already divorced, she and Hayden quickly fell in love. But it wasn’t their stardom or good looks that brought them close together. It was their mutual disdain for the whole Hollywood circus that united them. Carroll had already donated a French Chateau she owned to be an orphanage for victims of the German occupation. Spurred on by the need to do something more to help the war effort, she was soon to abandon her extraordinary career and head to Europe to join the Red Cross. The youthful, insecure Hayden, driven by the desire to prove himself to Madeleine and earn her hand in marriage, met with his studio bosses and severed his lucrative contract. He was going to follow his love across the Atlantic and into action. However, there was an obstacle Hayden hadn’t quite considered before he made the move into military life: his new-found super-stardom.

LEE MANDEL: His first day in the Marine Corps, of course, everyone knew who he was because he was a famous movie star. And of course, they started ‘You're not getting any slack here, mister,’ - that kind of stuff. 

NARRATOR: So, with Madeleine’s help, Hayden changed his name to John Hamilton. 

LEE MANDEL: And throughout the war, all the documents that discuss him, he was John Hamilton. And yet everyone knew who he was when he was running the boats in Operation Audrey. I mean, his crew knew he was Sterling Hayden, but woe is to them if they refer to him as Hayden. They had to call him Hamilton.

NARRATOR: By this time Hayden and Carroll had tied the knot, although for the most part had managed to keep the news out of the gossip columns. It’s here we need to introduce another pivotal figure in Hayden’s life, one who would go on to further shape his destiny. 

LEE MANDEL: We're talking about General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, as he was referred to, who was appointed as the first head of the clandestine agency in the United States by President Roosevelt. And Sterling knew him because in 1937-38, when he was on his round-the-world trip, one of the people on the trip with Irving Johnson was David Donovan, son of ‘Wild Bill’. And Sterling became good friends with him. And this is back in 1941 when he walked out on Hollywood and asked if he could get him into commando training. The United States didn't have any such organization as this and they sent him to Scotland for three months where he trained as a commando, including parachute training. 

NARRATOR: Wild Bill Donovan’s methods were unorthodox and this appealed to Hayden, whose own suspicion of authority and convention was now ingrained - which, perhaps surprisingly, made him in turn an attractive recruit for Donovan’s OSS. 

LEE MANDEL: Sterling was a master sailor. He spoke French. He was physically adept. But I think both were looking for out-of-the-box thinkers, which Sterling was. 

NARRATOR: And it also brought Hayden, once again, into contact with Socialist ideology first introduced to him by his friend Warwick Tompkins. 

LEE MANDEL: In fact, after the war, when they studied the records, I think there were 25 people in the OSS who were communists - card-carrying communists. But Donovan had the same philosophy as Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill said, "I don't care what people's beliefs are. If they're willing to kill more Germans and Nazis, that's all I care about.”

NARRATOR: Hayden’s emerging political sensibilities, honed by his immersion amongst tough, hardworking, seafaring types, were to be further sharpened by two significant factors in the coming months of his service. The first was his exposure to the partisan rebels in Yugoslavia, where Donovan eventually posted him, in 1943. The other, as we will come to see, was the simmering rivalry between British and US intelligence forces in the region.

LEE MANDEL: When the Axis powers took over Yugoslavia, they put in Serbia, the Germans occupied that, and in the Croatian part, they put the Ustasha, which was a Nazi-like organization. And the man who the Allies thought would lead to the victory was this guy named Mihailovic, Draža" Mihailović, who led a group called the Chetniks freedom fighters. And originally the British and the Americans sided with him. But the more that they watched the progress of the war, the people out of the Croatian side, led by Tito - his nom de guerre, Josip Broz - were the ones who were doing the fighting and killing the Nazis and all that.

NARRATOR: The British SOE had overall jurisdiction in the Balkans. Any operations mounted by the Americans required British authorization and this is where mutual suspicion turned into something more destructive. Sensing an overall resistance to their efforts - and perhaps even an anti-American snobbery - the OSS decide to circumnavigate the SOE and take matters into their own hands.

LEE MANDEL: They set up an operation to run supplies and rescue partisans to the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. And this became known as Operation Audrey. And this led to a lot of conflicts in the way it was set up because the Americans set it up unauthorized. It was supposed to go through the British, a senior agency, they just did not. The British were surprised when they got to Bari, Italy, the port that they operated out of, the Americans were already doing this stuff unauthorized. 

LEE MANDEL: It didn't help that the guy who arranged it was Louis Huot, who really kind of ran wild. He would go there saying, “I have the authority of General Eisenhower to do this. I have the authority of Admiral Power to take these ships.” He didn't. But he was able to talk his way through there. He spilled a lot of bad blood between the Americans and the British. He finally got fired. And that's just about the time when Sterling entered into Operation Audrey. 

NARRATOR: Hayden was walking into a highly fractured relationship between the two intelligence services. In contrast to this turf war among the officer classes, Hayden could not resist the appeal of the down-to-earth ‘real’ people he encountered: the dock workers and the Yugoslavian resistance, with their unrelenting courage, their utilitarian masculinity, and their wild songs. In his autobiography, Wanderer, now published by Golden Springs Publishing, Hayden describes these people in vivid detail as he witnessed them attending to a mother and her child, fugitives from the destruction. He writes: 

“Men were clustered around this woman, men he had seen in action maybe three dozen times. Men who had carried comrades 15, 20, 30 miles, barely ever pausing, up endless stony trails, who thought nothing of infiltrating towns to carve SS throats with long knives. These men, burned black, lousy, whispered now, bending tenderly down and touching the shawl with horn-fingered hands, making cooing sounds, the sudden tears unheeded, then turned away, wiping their eyes with greasy sleeves, with a clank of battle gear as they got back into the column.” 

After the Germans bomb the port in Bari, Operation Audrey is moved down to the smaller port at Monopoli. Hayden is charged with establishing the new base and setting up the operations whose primary goal was to break the Axis blockade, using requisitioned coastal ships. These vessels would make armed reconnaissance missions to determine optimal supply routes to smuggle arms and guerilla forces into Yugoslavia, and in turn, bring back the wounded for treatment alongside thousands of refugees to relative safety. Over the course of his time as an OSS operative, Hayden would command an ‘armada’ of 14 schooners, six ketches, and two brigantines. He would be personally responsible for 400 Yugoslav men and women, making over 70 sailings. He had to draw upon every ounce of his skill as a sailor, navigating Allied minefields before he could venture into even more treacherous enemy waters swarming with German boats hungry for a fight. 

LEE MANDEL: The expatriate partisans worked 24 hours a day, loading ships, unloading casualties, and stuff like that. And Sterling was so impressed with the dedication of these people that he had nothing but admiration for the partisans. And, of course, he was involved in many of the runs across the Adriatic Sea, which is an 80-nautical mile run with the missions primarily to bring supplies to the partisans and to offload downed American airmen, casualties, and stuff like that. And this was not easy, never mind just the distance. But the Germans had PT boats that were guarding their patrols. 

NARRATOR: Hayden relished not just the opportunity to sail, whatever the challenges presented by running the blockades again and again. He also relished the immersion in a way of life that was far removed from the frivolous and empty existence that had plagued his time in Hollywood. However, the demons that would come to destroy him were already circling. Heavy drinking had set in, compounded perhaps by the knowledge that his new wife - whom he’d only spent a few weeks within the entirety of their short marriage - was cheating on him. This, then, is the context behind his behavior that fateful day on the docks when the military PR machine made its error in bringing Hayden’s now, virtually estranged, wife, to greet him following a particularly dangerous mission.

LEE MANDEL: They'd leave at night and they'd arrive on the Dalmatian coast and go into hiding and cover the boats up and all that, wait until the next night, unload the supplies, and load whatever they were bringing back, wait till the next night and then come back to them. All their operations were done pretty much at nighttime.

NARRATOR: Knowing how dangerous these missions were, it comes as no surprise that Hayden was so furious at the intrusion of the crass Hollywood PR machine into the serious and important business of war. But worse was yet to come. Rumors had started to circulate that the British SOE, threatened by the success of the OSS, had started to deliberately take credit for the American efforts or even worse still, sabotage some of the missions.

LEE MANDEL: And they were also allegedly claiming credit for supply drops to the partisans, and even to the Chetniks supposedly using American supplies. And they were saying, “Well, these came from the British.”

NARRATOR: The incident involving Madeleine Carroll had alerted people to Hayden’s volatility. But soon the Anglo-American rift would directly impact his safety and the safety of the people he was responsible for, as he embarked on one of his most daring sorties. While US Naval records are relatively sketchy about the following incident, we are lucky to have the account of someone who was there, a fellow OSS operative called D. Perry Moran. Moran was interviewed in the late 1980s and described his experiences of working under Hayden’s command. 

LEE MANDEL: He was one of the crew members who worked with Hayden on several missions and truly admired him. He said, “We worshiped him as a leader. We knew never to call him Hayden; we always called him Captain Hamilton.” But he was intense. He was focused. He had the ability to navigate like no one they'd ever seen, could pick out all these hiding places on the coast. They truly loved him.

NARRATOR: Moran goes on to paint a picture of a fearless, hard-drinking man with a mercurial temper. “He was built like a tree,” Moran recalled. He went on to observe the introspective side of his boss, saying Hayden would often go for long periods without talking, “always holding his binoculars up to his eyes”. Hayden is now deep into Operation Audrey, and once again running his boat through the German blockade attempting to return yet more wounded servicemen to safety. But this time, it seemed that Hayden’s luck had run out, as they were soon overwhelmed by a ferocious German attack.

LEE MANDEL: And they're coming back to, I think, Monopoli on this particular mission when they got attacked by several German patrol boats. And they're getting shot up and Sterling, over the open mic, he's calling for air support from the British. 

NARRATOR: It was a make-or-break moment, Hayden was severely outgunned by the Germans, sustaining considerable damage to his boat. He urgently needed the British to come to his aid. But it was not to be.

LEE MANDEL: And to his amazement, they said, “Sorry, can't do old chap.” And they rang off.

NARRATOR: Whatever beef existed between the two agencies, by any standards this was a monstrous act of betrayal. Hayden was incensed. 

LEE MANDEL: Well, he fought his way out and he was livid. So as they’re approaching the harbor, he sees a British PT boat and he orders his men to open fire. And they say, “What?” And he says open fire on it. And of course, they were afraid of him, so they fired over the PT boat, one hit the windscreen and broke it. 

NARRATOR: Needless to say, the British were quick to retaliate.

LEE MANDEL: And immediately a British destroyer, which was in the region came alongside and said, “We're placing you all under arrest.”

NARRATOR: The destroyer escorted Hayden’s boat into the base. But Hayden, still incandescent with rage at the British refusal to help, snuck some of his men off to get help from the Americans.

LEE MANDEL: And meanwhile, the British destroyer anchored behind them to keep ‘em in there. Well, the seaman who got off the boat went and they got the American military police. The next thing they know, there's a bunch of Americans with machine guns standing facing the British destroyer.

NARRATOR: The British still attempted to press charges on Hayden. He and the men who’d remained on the boat were interrogated. And it’s here that the loyalty Hayden’s leadership inspired kicked in.

LEE MANDEL: When they testified, they said “did Captain Hamilton give you the orders to shoot?” And they said, “No, he didn't.” They went to the next crew member, “...did Hamilton order you to shoot?” “No, he didn't.” And every one of them swore that he never gave that order. And as Moran said, “He took care of us, so we wanted to take care of him.”

NARRATOR: With no testimony to corroborate their story, the British military police dropped the case. While the enmity between the two sides cannot have helped the Allied cause, Operation Audrey was still a stunning success.

LEE MANDEL: According to the final report, they ran 155 missions during the lifetime of Operation Audrey. They rescued 20,000 partisan refugees. They also brought in over 200 wounded.

NARRATOR: And Sterling Hayden, aka Captain John Hamilton, did not go without recognition for his efforts. On July 31st, 1946, he was awarded the Silver Star for his contribution to the war. His citation includes the sentence: “His conduct reflected great credit upon himself and the United States Armed Forces.” So whatever controversies surrounded his displays of anger at the time, they were soon forgotten in the wake of the unequivocal heroism he displayed on active duty. Hayden’s OSS deployment continued after Operation Audrey was disbanded. 

LEE MANDEL: He was assigned to make supply runs and rescue runs to the Albanian coast. And he made 10 runs in about six-and-a-half weeks of activity. And then he went on leave. And when he came back, he was assigned the European theater to the first US Army as an intelligence officer. He was assigned to what was called the aircrew rescue unit. And these were OSS members who parachuted into Yugoslavia to rescue airmen and bring them back. 

NARRATOR: But it was here that disillusionment started to set in. The organized Communist units were nothing like the partisans for whom he had so much admiration.

LEE MANDEL: They were run by commissars, typical communist commissars. So they were like teenagers telling the military what to do. They had indoctrination. They purposely held up orders and all that, and they were obstructionists. They'd go into villages and they’d take it over. And when the enemy forces attack, they'd abandon the people and let them fend for themselves. He was disgusted.

NARRATOR: So disgusted that he ended up writing a damning report, displaying considerable foresight in predicting that Yugoslavia itself was unlikely to survive in the face of such corruption and internal conflict. You can listen to True Spies: Balkan Betrayals for a taste of how things turned out.

LEE MANDEL: Then he was assigned to the photographic unit, photograph bases, and then his service ended in December of 1945.

NARRATOR: While his sympathy for the Yugoslavian resistance was waning, so too was his marriage. In his autobiography, Wanderer, the split gets a brief mention: “We knew, without knowing why, without much discussion, that the marriage had dissolved.” What had not dissolved, though, was his fascination with, and increasing sympathy for, the communist cause. Despite seeing firsthand the horror of a committed communist regime in the form of the Yugoslavian commissars, Hayden was soon considering joining the party back home in Los Angeles. And a great deal of this had to do with his old friend and mentor, Warwick Tompkins.

LEE MANDEL: It's hard to put that together. All the time that he was in Italy, he was getting letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings from Warwick Tompkins with this basically leftist communist ideology. And I think he believed in the common man and he looked at himself as a common man, and what can you do to make the world better? 

NARRATOR: Added to this his suspicion for unearned wealth, easy money, and conmen in general - no doubt heavily influenced by his step-father’s dogged pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ - it seemed that the introspective Hayden was yearning for a cause he could truly believe in. A cause that had been inspired by hard-working men and women, the sailing crews, and Yugoslavs. The kinds of people he wanted to be amongst, to be part of.

LEE MANDEL: When he came back, he went back to Connecticut and he went to New York and Paramount Pictures signed him again. And it was during this time, 1946 when he joined the Communist Party.

NARRATOR: But the discreet, elite activities of the Hollywood intelligentsia were of little appeal to the war veteran. 

LEE MANDEL: And he finally quit. He says, "I can't get through this. He realized that somehow working for longer coffee breaks on a Hollywood set for the crew was not quite the same as working with the Partisans on the docks in Bari. It didn't quite strike him as ‘this is something noble that I should be doing’. So he quit and didn't look back though it came back to haunt him, certainly.

NARRATOR: While Hayden was extracting himself from the Party, the US was plunging into the grip of what became known as the Red Scare. Following the end of the war, fear was spreading of Soviet agents and Marxist ideology penetrating the very fabric of American Society. And one of the hotspots was the small but dedicated membership of the Communist Party who’d infiltrated the Hollywood studio system.

LEE MANDEL: Well, he buys a boat and in fact, he marries his second wife in 1947. And they live on a boat for well over a year in the harbor there. He goes sailing fairly regularly, nothing long distance, but meanwhile was starting to heat up with the House un-American Activities Committee.

NARRATOR: And with his albeit brief membership of the Party on his record, Hayden knew that it would only be a matter of time before the infamous HUAC came knocking. 

LEE MANDEL: He did go to the FBI initially testifying because he knew he may be recalled to the Marine Corps for the Korean conflict. And you'd have to answer the question, “Are you now or were you ever a member of the Communist Party?” He didn't want to perjure himself, so he went to the FBI. They took testimony, but it wasn't enough.

NARRATOR: By this time his second marriage was also beginning to break down. And he now had children to care for. What the FBI also, allegedly, warned Hayden was that, if he didn’t want to lose his children in a custody battle, he would have to name names to HUAC.

LEE MANDEL: He was very worried about the story of the Hollywood 10. Congress subpoenaed, I think it was 19 people, and 10 of them refused to testify. They became known as the Hollywood 10. All of them were screenwriters and directors. And to counter this Sterling Hayden, Danny Kaye, and John Huston, went to Washington to sit in on the hearings to show their support for the Hollywood 10. It backfired totally on them for a number of reasons, but they were shocked when they later found that Sterling Hayden, who was part of their committee, was a member of the Communist Party. 

NARRATOR: With no way out, Hayden knew he had to testify.

LEE MANDEL: The Hollywood 10 were convicted of obstruction of Congress, sentenced to up to a year in prison, and fined $1,000. But it had to work through the appeals. And finally, in 1951, the Supreme Court turned down the appeal. So the sentences were executed and they restarted the hearings. And Hayden was one of them who was subpoenaed to appear. 

NARRATOR: From the transcripts of these hearings, it’s obvious that they were as much for show as finding out any new information.

LEE MANDEL: They already knew the names. I thought that was very interesting. They knew exactly who were members of the Communist Party, and who wasn't. But what they wanted, and this is what Sterling provided them, they wanted it to come out of the mouth of a celebrity. They wanted it to come out of the mouth of an insider. 

NARRATOR: And top of Hayden’s list? His old friend, Warwick Tompkins.

LEE MANDEL: And when he was done, Sterling said in his book, “I was a real daddy of a long-legged worm crawling on the earth.” He never forgave himself for his testimony, yet his career flourished after that. 

NARRATOR: That his career indeed flourished, is beyond doubt. A string of appearances in what is now considered classic films followed, right into the 1970s. But all the while, the demons who had pursued him from an early age only multiplied in number.

LEE MANDEL: Tompkins worked for the L.A. School Board as a filmmaker, so he got fired after that. And Sterling would always send his family money for the rest of his life because he felt so bad about what he did. And interestingly, when he wrote his first book, Wanderer, he dedicated it to Warwick Tompkins.

NARRATOR: For the rest of his life, Hayden was plagued with financial difficulties and his love-hate relationship with his acting career. And always, the lure of the sea: open water and the freedom of body and spirit he was incapable of feeling on dry land. Then, one day, he came up with a plan to escape for good.

LEE MANDEL: After he and his wife Betty Anne got divorced, he got custody of the children, which was a tribute to how good a father he was. He worked at it. He had the plan to take his schooner Wanderer and take the kids with him and go to Scandinavia and do a Swiss family Robinson type of thing. And he got financing from a movie production company and then his wife got an injunction from a federal judge saying he could not take the children because the ship was unsafe, which it wasn't. 

NARRATOR: Hayden’s deep disdain for authority remained undiminished. 

LEE MANDEL: So he had a volunteer crew that he recruited from around the country. And they went out to take the kids to Santa Barbara. And unbeknownst to the crew, they anchored there and they said, “Guess what? Change of plans. We're going to Tahiti.” He became a fugitive from American justice by technically kidnapping his kids. They stayed in Tahiti for almost a year. 

NARRATOR: Eventually, with no money left in the bank, Hayden was forced to return to the US and face the consequences of his actions.

LEE MANDEL: But the judge was a big admirer of his and then basically let him off with a suspended sentence and a slap on the wrist. 

NARRATOR: Hayden’s legacy as an OSS operative remains as important and meaningful, but far less celebrated, as anything he committed to celluloid. Perhaps, as Wild Bill Donovan sensed, recruits for these dangerous missions needed to be drawn from unexpected, unconventional places to carry out these extraordinary deeds. They needed to be outsiders, outliers, capable of acts of courage far beyond those expected of ordinary people. But such heroism and obsessive dedication come at a price. Once an outsider, it seems, always an outsider.

LEE MANDEL: I think his service in the Balkans was incredible. And the respect he earned from his men in its dollars and cents, I think he committed to the war. He committed to the good of the common man. And I think that was part of his conflict. And he was an extraordinary man. But it's funny. I think he was an extraordinary man trying to be an ordinary man in a sense, and just didn't fit in. Just didn't fit. 

NARRATOR: Despite the drugs and the drink, Sterling Hayden lived a long life, dying of cancer in May of 1986, a rebel to the very end.

LEE MANDEL: He got arrested at I think it was Toronto Airport in 1981 because he had hashish in his possession and they let him off basically with a slap on the wrist. And when the judge was asked why, he said, “Look, this was an unusual judgment for an unusual man.” I thought that was kind of an interesting comment.

NARRATOR: Lee Mandel’s biography of this week’s True Spy, Sterling Hayden’s Wars, was written with unparalleled access to Hayden’s war records and the blessing of Kitty, his widow. It’s a fantastic read and is available to buy from all good bookstores. I’m Sofia Di Martino. Join us next week for part three of our Celebrity spies trilogy. We’re off to Paris and the extraordinary story of Josephine Baker, the most famous entertainer of her day and daring member of the French Resistance.