The Adventurer

The man on the witness stand looked like anything but the popular conception of a Communist, and his story made him an even unlikelier candidate for the role. Big, blond Sterling Hayden had quit school when he was 15, became a fisherman off Newfoundland, a sailor in the Caribbean, the master of a sailing schooner by the time he was 21. He had wound up in Hollywood as the untamed adventurer of half a dozen films, was briefly married to Actress Madeleine Carroll and dropped everything in 1941 to help out in the war. But before the House Un-American Activities Committee last week, Actor Hayden forthrightly admitted that he had indeed fallen for the party line.

It had begun, he said, when he was a Marine officer attached to OSS, smuggling arms to Tito's Communists in their guerrilla war against the Nazis. He was "tremendously impressed, deeply affected, by the work the Partisans were doing. I became all steamed up ... There was something churning around in me, and I couldn't handle it." After the war, he decided "to go into this political thing and try to do something to make conditions better in the world." In June 1946, he joined the Communist Party.

Disillusioned Neophyte. For the next six months Hayden was a dutiful Communist neophyte, attending meetings of his cell, paying regular dues ($1.75 to $2 a month). But disillusion soon began to set in. Said Hayden: "They think they have the key to everything by some occult power--and that they know what is best for everybody . . . When I learned this, I got out."

Witness Hayden was unable to name many of his cellmates. Most of them he knew only by their first names and most of them were obscure writers and back-lot workers. The whole affair, said Hayden, now seemed "the stupidest, most ignorant thing I've ever done. Believe me, it's a load off my chest."

Red Catalogue. With that, Actor Hayden went back to work on his latest picture, Skid Row, and the committeemen turned to some less cooperative witnesses. Actor Will Geer, one of the Jeeter Lesters of Tobacco Road, strode nonchalantly to the stand and amiably refused to answer any questions about Communist membership: "This is an emotional and hysterical question. I stand on the rights of the Fifth Amendment." Less pleasantly, three minor Hollywood writers also defied the committeemen.

But before the week was out, they heard one more witness who provided a whole catalogue of Hollywood Reds and ex-Reds. Like Actor Hayden, Writer Richard Collins had broken with the party and saw no reason to "go to jail for a year, for guys I don't even like any more." Among them: Novelist Budd Schulberg, who, he said, quit the party in a huff after the Reds tore into his What Makes Sammy Run?, Producer Robert (All the King's Men) Rossen, a score of other lesser Hollywood citizens.

Hollywood, concluded Witness Collins, provided the Communists with an ideal concentration of "frustrated or partially frustrated artists." With a long list of glamorous names still to be heard from, there was no longer much doubt of that.

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