"To Break Out"

I have sold out for years. Just recall the pathetic trash I have made month after month, year after year ... I am a decent enough man, not too bright perhaps, but impelled by some ideas as to conviction and principles. I was sustained by my inner determination to break out . .

Ever since his boyhood summers in Boothbay Harbor, Me., Sterling Hayden (born John Hamilton) had been running away to sea whenever the going got rough. At 15, he sailed as workaway on a schooner from Connecticut to California. He shipped as fireman on a steamer, fished off the Grand Banks, finally got his master's papers and wound up part owner of a schooner that was supposed to carry passengers from Hawaii to Tahiti. Only when his ship piled up in a gale did the handsome blond sailor finally agree to take a Hollywood offer and a crack at pictures.

Soon Sterling Hayden was busy playing the uncombed adventurer of half a dozen so-so movies and working out his marriage to Cinemactress Madeleine Carroll. During World War II, as a Marine lieutenant, Hayden wound up in Italy, and had the time of his life running guns to Tito's partisans. He was briefly infected by Communism, but he returned home to divorce, remarriage, P.T.A. meetings, more B pictures. He dreamed of making a movie based on Jack London's Sea-Wolf, using his own 98-ft.-schooner, The Wanderer.

Lately, it seemed as if Sterling Hayden had really learned how to act; he turned in a fine TV performance in Playhouse go's Old Man. In 1955, his second marriage had broken up, and this year, the court, after examining wife Betty Ann's record, awarded custody of his four children to Hayden. Fortnight ago Betty Ann got a court order enjoining Hayden from taking the children out of California. But Hayden had made his move. Quietly, with friends and with some like-minded fellows he had recruited through ads, he had gone about his preparations. Though his ex-wife got a warrant for his arrest two weeks ago, Hayden and his four children had already disappeared. Last week a friend got a letter: Hayden, his kids and his crew were aboard The Wanderer, en route to Tahiti. "It's time to go," wrote Hayden.

Betty Ann alerted the Coast Guard, charging that his craft was not seaworthy. Her lawyers went to court with another sheaf of charges, ranging from kidnaping to conspiracy to commit contempt of court. But for the time being, at least, The Wanderer was at sea. At 42, Sterling Hayden, in his own words "a decent enough man, not too bright perhaps," had finally made his breakout.

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