Wanderer
by Sterling Hayden
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sterling HaydenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-01-25
ISBN: 1574090488
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Sheridan House
Book Reviews of Wanderer
Book Review: Frank, Very Readable Autobiography, but Perhaps Not Very Flattering.
Summary: 4 Stars
Sterling Hayden began "Wanderer" during the infamous 1959 excursion in which he took his four children against court orders on a South Sea voyage to Tahiti aboard his schooner "Wanderer". He ran out on a movie, too, and used a crew of mostly inexperienced adventurers. Hayden had in mind to escape Hollywood, which he always professed to hate, and return briefly to the simple life of a seaman and island bum. He was, as usual, broke: "To be challenging, a voyage, like life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest." His friends urged him to write a book about it, and, by the time he returned to Los Angeles, he sure needed the money.
"Wanderer" is an account of that voyage, written in a conversational, literate style that moves between Hayden's earlier life and the voyage, until one catches up with the other. He recalls his childhood in Upper Montclaire, New Jersey, where he had a pleasant enough small town upbringing until his father died when he was 9 years old. His mother's remarriage to an inept schemer meant living hand to mouth in string of towns. It was Boothbay Harbor, Maine where he discovered the sea. He took a job on a ship bound for California when he was 16. He made his first round-the-world voyage when he was 20. He got his first command at 22. By this time, Hayden's 6'5" stature and blond good looks had attracted the attention of talent scouts.
Hayden signed with Paramount and moved to Hollywood. It was an opportunity to make some money. He was extremely fortunate to get a lead role shortly after he arrived, and his luck in Hollywood never dried up. He had no sooner made one movie than he wanted to quit the business, but he continued to be offered roles even as he swore off acting time and again, including after he joined the Marines and did work for the OSS in Europe during World War II. Hayden was blessed with beauty, vigor, and luck. He loved the sea, like to talk about rejecting the trappings of success and the "cancerous discipline of `security'", dismissed acting as unproductive, and yet always returned to those things.
That was Sterling Hayden's problem. He never could, or would, live up to his own ideals. He hated acting and love the sea, cared little about money, yet he always returned to acting for the money. Nothing stopped him from returning to a life at sea, where he had found success for a decade. But he liked the good life. He never stayed in Hollywood long enough to secure the luxury he enjoyed, or at sea long enough to reestablish himself there. So he complains. It was the same with his testimony before HUAC. He betrayed his own ideals, because he was worried about the career that he professed not to care for. He wouldn't live up his ideals, or change his ideals, but he kept preaching them.
That's the problem with his autobiography. I became impatient with his whining about the world not being as he would like it, himself not being as he would like, and making no great effort to be. I have to say he is honest. Hayden doesn't hold back in this book. He's a hypocrite suffering from no small amount of self-loathing. But all of his vacillation produced two interesting lives: one at sea and one in Hollywood. He talks more about his own feelings for those places than about the experiences themselves, so don't expect any tidbits about Hollywood personalities. Hayden remarried as he was writing "Wanderer" but makes no mention of his third wife. The book covers his life until about age 44. "Wanderer" is very readable, and it's a rare memoirist who does not try to make himself look good.
Summary of Wanderer
Since its publication in 1963 Sterling Hayden's autobiography, Wanderer, has been surrounded by controversy. The author was at the peak of his earning power as a movie star when he suddenly quit. He walked out on Hollywood, walked out of a shattered marriage, defied the courts, and, broke and an outlaw, set sail with his four children in the schooner Wanderer-bound for the South Seas.His attempt to escape launches this autobiography. It is the candid, sometimes painfully revealing confession of a man who scrutinized his every self-defeat and self-betrayal in the unblinking light of conscience. It is also the triumph of a complex and contradictory man, a rebel and a seeker, undefeated by his failure to find himself in love, adventure, drink, or escape to the South Seas.
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