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I'm standing here in my ship...

Let me go again.

I'm standing here in my ship

aboard the Quay Terignon

beneath the glorious Citadel of Besançon

powered by the wild huber Doubs

not maybe uh, not maybe uh

two thirds of the length of your local gridiron from the barrage...

We are moored on a very small

narrow

basin

And from these three windows

of this midget cabin

I look at the willow and reed of this little peninsula

maybe forty feet at width

narrowing to a tip at the barrage.

Beyond this peninsula

the Doubs

runs fast

for her rendezvous

with the sweet old

yeah...

Trampelson.

The idea was

like a second birth.

When I'm twelve years old

and I see sailing ships, yeah?

Now I'm uh, I'm uh, what the hell am I?

I'm fifty-two.

And I know through our friend Stevenson and through

I know, okay, here's another world.

So it was a rebirth.

And that's what I would love to

that's what I'm really trying to get in, in, in this book I'm working on.

Yeah.

It was like living twice. Huh?

Usually men, when they're fifty-two, they die.

Yeah.

I see them all the time, you know, in the

near my wife's house. You know what I mean?

Okay, I'm going now, I'm going on, I'm going on, you know

I'm sixty-five and I'm okay.

But for the last three or four years, I look at them

and they look much older than I do.

And they're forty-seven.

And they're dead! Hey?

You know when they died?

They died the day they came out of the university

and said to a company like Xerox or IBM

"I go to work for you."

"And I will haul my ass up the ladder

"until when I am sixty I will retire."

Alright, they died when they were twenty-two. You know what I mean?

Strange, isn't it. Huh?

God damn, you know.

I came over to Norway one time.

Coming in over the polar, polar route.

Everybody snore, snore

Not me, I don't sleep much.

Not when I'm traveling.

Not when I'm on the road. Oh no.

I don't sleep at all.

I look down

at the northern tip of Norway

and the whole damn place is snow

but there was some neon from a town

and some smoke

and it is so beautiful.

And I look around at my amigos

snore

And I think holy shit, they...

Strange, isn't it?

Christ's sake.

Strange that you can't see.

My god, what a terrible affliction.

This gentleman said a most beautiful thing to me down below

uh about, perhaps what, one hour ago.

When I was trying to find a piece of paper to show to you.

A thing from uh, from uh, from uh, the International Tribune,

I couldn't find it.

And I said, "Damn, you know uh

"it's so terrible not to be organized."

And this man said, "Well, you are organized, in another way."

And I said to him,

"Yeah, I know that. Sure."

Our first trip to Besançon was a long shot.

We knew Sterling Hayden from the movies.

We loved him as Johnny Guitar.

Yet he had never been merely a Hollywood figure to us.

His autobiographical novel 'Wanderer'

told of irreconcilable contradictions

of eternal restlessness,

of a life which tells no simple story.

Of the existence of a man who went to sea at fifteen,

a man who has been at home in the most

varying and contrasting worlds ever since,

but never in just one.

Of a man who has always been an outsider wherever he went

and who took on a life of fear, unrest and solitude to be one.

Adventures like these are too costly to be adventurous.

At various times, Hollywood could have drawn

enough material from Hayden's life to make several adventure films.

There is the young sailor and roamer of the south seas

who loses his ship in a hurricane.

He is offered two starring roles in Hollywood,

marries the leading lady of the two films,

then disappears on a new ship.

He fights the Nazis on the side of the Yugoslav Partisans,

and returns to America,

and Hollywood a war hero.

The second scenario is by Warwick Tompkins,

sailor, writer and close friend of Hayden's.

"A typically non-political American youth

"develops into a militant participant in the class struggle,"

the subtitle of his then planned book.

The third scenario

a quarter of a century later

a role written for Robert Redford.

The movie star and ex-sailor and war hero

who drops out.

The rebel and nonconformist who turns his back on Hollywood,

sails to the south seas with his children,

concentrates on writing,

and later devotes himself to the struggle for civil rights.

"None of this is right, although it is all true."

"We knew of a different struggle; one with no end."

Hayden's war with himself.

Our first trip to Besançon was a long shot.

We weren't even sure that Hayden would even be there.

We had been trying to pin him down for a year,

had reached him on the phone in London, New York and San Francisco.

However, every time we managed to locate him

he was always heading somewhere else.

We spent three days with Hayden

talking, smoking,

drinking and listening

an intimate warmth and

at the same time a painful remoteness.

We left only to return

to shoot a film that Hayden, himself, seemed to suggest to us.

A glimpse, a portrait,

a collection of tales.

A sixty-five-year-old loner

living a life of solitude and chaos on a barge.

Four days later we were back and shot for a week.

Of all the creatures

of commercial enterprise

a canal barge

is by far

the most delightful to contemplate

It makes its sails and then you see it sailing high above the treetops

and the windmill, sailing on the a, da-da-da-da-da...

the horse, and the horse, cause you know

when he was writing this it's 1886.

And the horse plods along at a footpace

as if there was no such thing as business

in the world.

And the man dreaming at the tiller

sees the same spire on the horizon

all day long.

All day long.

And so far as I can make out

time uh, time

Time, huh!

stands as nearly still with him

as is compatible, which means, you know uh...

practical.

With the return of bedtime

or the dinner hour, it is hard

it is not easy to see why a bargee should ever die.

My world was the uh...

was the sea.

And the sea is rough, huh?

Hm? Hm?

I mean, the rivers

ah the rivers and their canals can be rough,

but the sea is um...

you know, it's different. Huh?

And I read uh, I read uh, where

the book I threw on the floor.

Jesus, I shouldn't do that, should I.

You break the back of a book when you do that.

Well, I felt... key though...

And I thought, well uh...

I thought um...

maybe one day, you know, when I get old

I don't wanna go out there anymore, hm?

And I read Stevenson...

and as I think you might agree, it's very beautiful.

Something about it that is not like

you know, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea,

the goddamn, motherfucking sea,

you know, it's uh, it's uh...

it's a, it's a, it's a...

it's an empty world. Huh?

There're no lights in the cities.

You don't go by towns at night.

You don't go by like what we're seeing here.

You don't go by this.

What do you see? You see the goddamn...

oh goddamn, excuse me, the blue ocean.

Which, it could be extraordinarily beautiful.

But also very lonely. Huh?

So I thought maybe one day,

okay, so one day comes, you know, I start smoking the hashish.

God bless us, we should have another hit, shouldn't we.

So I start smoking, and uh...

And I think, yeah. Huh? Huh?

Huh? Huh? Huh?

Yeah. Why not, huh?

My wife is living in a, in a...

What the hell is the word in German for surburbia?

Surburbia, you know what surburbia is?

Surburbia, which is the outside of a big city, you know, and it's um...

The day of our return was also our first day of shooting.

Hayden suggested we begin at once.

Several French customs officials showed up a little later.

They seemed to pay Hayden regular visits.

Some of his papers or certificates were always missing.

Yeah.

Where the hell was I? Excuse me.

Um, I don't know.

It doesn't matter, does it.

Yeah.

Bonsoir monsieur.

He looks back at me, he looks back.

Goddamn, that's nice.

Jesus Christ, wine.

Beautiful sight, isn't it?

Two bottles of wine.

We should open one, shouldn't we?

Should we not open a bottle of wine, hm?

For the Doubs.

For the (muffled).

For the police.

It's water.

It's open.

It's not wine.

Ah, it's water. Well screw that.

It's not for you.

That's wine.

Jesus Christ. What an afternoon.

We had vainly hoped that Hayden would drink less during the filming.

We tried to talk to Dana about it,

but he didn't want to get involved.

He claimed his father knew what he was doing.

Dana is Hayden's second eldest son,

and hired on this year

to look after both the barge and his father.

In the meanwhile,

we had learned that Hayden had bought the old barge in 1968 in Holland,

and had fixed her up himself.

She was called the Vi Salt Vechy.

Hayden turned that into 'Who Knows'

and painted a question mark on the stern.

For a long time she had been moored along the Quai Conti in Paris

across from Notre Dame.

And for a long time

Hayden used her to cruise the rivers and canals

between Rotterdam and Marseilles.

The barge is one of the places he has picked to write.

He spends six months a year on her.

That is, if he is not searching for another place to write.

Wandering between Sausalito and San Francisco

where most of his children are.

And New York and Connecticut

where his wife Kitty lives.

Lincoln said,

"Don't talk to me about your beautiful studios."

"The best places for a writer to work

"is in a cheap hotel in an inside room,

"on the, what we call, air shaft,

"with a jackhammer, you know, du-du-du-du-du,

"going down below,

"and the landlord, the owner

"banging on the door for the money."

I like that.

So here, this is so beautiful

you know, it's almost too beautiful.

You understand?

No? No?

It's almost too beautiful.

The door.

Baby.

Christ.

This was my university.

This ship.

My, my secondary school, you know?

And uh, and the men who were working there, they would not let their sons fish. You know?

They said, "Work in the goddamn gas station."

"Work in the post office,

"but don't go on the ships."

And so, in a way, for me it was very easy

because I was strong, and I was happy,

and that wonderful word, committed,

enthusiastic.

And I have a...

I found very quickly that I had a...

a quality, um...

that I always tried to be decent to...

to other men, you know?

And if you are it makes it,

you know, it's usually better off, you know what I mean?

And so if you would, decent, polite...

They think, "Ah." And um...

So I got along very well, very well, very well, you know.

And um...

But I think mainly it was the beauty.

We might even say grandeur.

The grandeur of a

big sailing ship. Very powerful thing.

Sometimes when I was working in a ship that was not a sailing ship...

but she was a working ship...

working ships have a beauty to them

that yachts never have. No.

Maybe uh, you know, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago

when they had big yachts like the 'Wanderer' or a little bigger,

or like that schooner I had that belonged to the Kaiser, hmm?

They were beautiful.

That damn Aldabaran...

Meteor, Meteor III she was.

Meteor III.

The Kaiser had um...

four Meteors.

Four over the years.

Oh yeah.

Go like hell.

Go like goddamn hell, you know?

That's how I got to Hollywood, you know?

Cause I lost her, yeah? As you know.

"Hackett's breath shows white."

Some white laborers like daybreak

you know, in the east.

"Now for the waiting time."

Cause you have to wait for the fish to bite.

"Now for the waiting time. Nothing to do but wait."

"Wait for an hour or more hoping the fish will bite"

Waiting for the Thebaud's horn

Cause when the captain pull the horn, then you haul.

This is the coldest time of all.

Cause you're not working.

"Hackett's head droops on his chest."

"He locks his back

"and starts heaving in on the trawl."

The kid, me

I'm coiling down in a bucket.

And he says, "Hey, boy

"Lemme tell you, this is a poor fuckin' way to get rich."

Isn't that beautiful?

Hayden was a sailor at the age of fifteen.

A fisherman on the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic.

A first mate by the time he sailed around the world.

And a captain at the age of twenty.

His picture appears in the local papers.

The giant blonde viking is advised to become a movie star.

Four years later in 1940

the Aldabaran, the schooner he intended

to start a shipping line with in the south seas,

is shipwrecked.

Now, Hayden actually goes into pictures.

After only one year in Hollywood,

he has made enough money for a new schooner.

He runs guns to South America on his own initiative

before the U.S. enters the war.

He volunteers for paratrooper training in Scotland.

From 1942 to 44

he is in command of a small fleet of fishing boats

in the Adriatic that break the German blockade

and provide Tito's Partisans with supplies.

We read that Hayden owned eighteen sailing ships all together,

and that he lived on them

even when he was in Hollywood.

Ships and the sea make one superstitious.

He calls his first barge 'Who Knows'.

But to him, she has long been the 'Pharos of Chaos',

which is also the title of his new book.

He joins the American Communist party.

He buys a schooner he christens 'Quest' on the very same day.

Two decades later he calls his new schooner 'Wanderer'.

A new beginning, but the same quest.

He will sail the 'Wanderer' to Tahiti and leave Hollywood forever.

Late afternoon

Well, I'm uh, I would say uh...

two-thirds sloshed.

I'm looking in the camera now.

Sometimes one looks in the camera.

I'm two-thirds gone, baby. Huh?

Two-thirds gone.

Out in front of my little hotel window

while I'm quaffing, as they say in England,

the porto...

and sampling the pipe...

I see a drama

for me, like opera. Like opera.

Some people go to opera.

Some people go to ballet, hey?

I look out.

I see, I see a fantastic thing.

I see three big goddamn

Swiss barges coming up the river.

Below the hotel

there's a German péniche... may I say.

Hey?

Now...

they begin to make the break,

to make the turn,

and the wires part.

as we say part, part. How do you say part?

Part, break.

Break, now.

The two, the two lead barges come in

toward the German barge below my hotel window.

Now...

Why do you look away?

Now... the master

of the towboat...

he does what every shipmaster will do,

he goes...

Huh?

Now, down here...

I'm taking a toke off my pipe...

and I watch a wonderful thing, may I say.

A most beautiful thing.

One of the things that I will remember until the day I die.

I watch the, the master, the master

of the German péniche

he comes up and he's wearing his uh, skivvies

we say skivvies, huh?

Now...

he knows

immediately

the shit is in the fan.

As we say, the shit is in the fan.

Here are coming toward him

two goddamn barges.

Maybe five thousand ton.

He presses a button, like I pressed for you the other day,

"kaarunk", she goes, you know?

And he does a wonderful thing.

He puts her ahead,

he puts her astern, he gets up the momentum,

and then he goes wide open astern and he breaks the lines,

and he backs out,

and the barge'd come crashing into the quay.

With about I would say uh

ten meters of slack.

That's good, isn't it?

To do that so fast.

To come up in your skivvies, huh?

And suddenly think, "Baby, I ain't got no time to do nothing."

You beautiful girl, huh?

"I ain't got no time to, I, I...

"I ain't got no time to say hello to my friends on my own ship."

"I gotta do one thing. I gotta go."

"I gotta haul."

And he hauled.

I think that's very nice.

That to me is an example of what is called seamanship.

Seamanship. The same thing made the lines...

that we were talking about. No?

See? See?

Damn, damn, damn, damn.

It was a third kick, you know?

One, two... no, fourth kick. Fourth kick.

Which is it, the course again, uh

part of the fundamental of...

Hm?

Yeah, shoot the river.

Shoot the Doubs.

I was saying to you, Eckart, on the quay...

that you came here...

to uh, to make some film...

and you discovered that uh

suddenly I'm drinking extremely hard.

For which again, I apologize to you.

No, I do. And to all of you.

But in a way, no.

Cause in a way

It's me.

And I was thinking last night...

that what you have, as I said to you when you were on the quay

you have a record

of exactly...

what alcoholism is.

It's not a picture of...

Your film is not about alcoholism.

It is there, baby. It is there.

And I, I have the uh...

I think I have the strength

to say, "Okay, I know, I'm sorry, sure," in a way,

but also I think, "Okay, that's the way it goes right now." Huh?

Again, last night I was thinking

if anybody in your country and my country

made a picture about what it is like to be a drunk...

Oh boy.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Am I wrong?

No.

Huh? Felix?

No, no, no.

It's like I have not said much to you,

but I have many um...

what we call journals.

Journals, journals, journals.

Diaries, records, records, records,

which were kept on, on, on, on hashish.

Maybe I mentioned this, excuse me.

But they are magnificent

because they are not about, you know,

like when I stand here now, and I write about uh, let's say Besançon,

or the war, or Hollywood,

or going down the Rhone, okay that's one thing.

But the journals are the way it is at the time.

Just what goes through your head, you know?

We came aboard at the usual time, but Hayden was still asleep.

Dana had told us that his father had spent the night with a bunch of American tourists.

They had recognized him,

taken one another's pictures with him,

and had raised many glasses toasting him.

Returning to the barge, he lost his balance on the narrow plank,

and plunged into the river.

He could barely keep his head above water.

Dana woke up and rushed out just in time.

Well, like I said earlier, you see, now in a way...

I'm all fucked up.

Cause I'm alone.

Sure, my son's back there.

Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful.

Sure, you're here.

But maybe after an hour or two, or three,

you will go, you know?

And I'm down here.

And it's night time.

And I'm alone. I don't wanna be alone. You know what I mean?

I want very, very, very, very much

to be able to do what, what you're doing right now.

Simply put my hand out and touch

a girl. Huh?

Okay.

Okay, my ass.

It ain't okay.

But I must say, you know uh...

In terms of alcohol, it doesn't make any difference. You know?

If my wife was here, I'd still be drinking. You follow?

Hm? Yeah.

And I'm sure one reason my wife is not here

is...

Sure.

"Captain Denison Boardman

"awakened reluctantly,

"in Banning Blanchard's palace car."

The railroad car of the (muffled).

"In the middle of such a monumental hangover...

"that for, for a solid three minutes

"he was unable to open his eyes."

You, none of you know that yet.

"Indeed...

"it was all he could do to slither, which is fall,

"off the bed,"

"and crawl on all fours about, you know,

"on his legs, on his knees, and on his...

"in a desperate quest for the chamber pot."

That's a thing you piss in.

"A handsome example of the potter"

That's the people who make the pottery.

"A handsome example of the potter's art,

"embossed with porcelain posies."

Flowers.

"This receptacle...

"he proceeded at once to fill

"from a kneeling position

"with his eyes beginning to open

"and his head braced...

"between the bars of a...

bars like this, you know, of a narrow

of a brass bed.

"Damn, oh God, oh Jesus."

"he muttered gratefully, gratefully."

"recalling the Blanchard, da-da-da."

"Steward, he bawls,"

Steward is a, you know, a black man who takes care of you in those times.

Steward, you know a steward.

"Fetch my whiskey"

"and my big cup"

"and a pail full of ice"

"and be goddamn quick about it, boy,"

"or I'll warm your fat black ass."

"A female's voice"

That's what I was saying earlier.

"A female's voice exploded beyond the, the uh, the partition."

The uh, the wall.

"Don't swear you dirty old son of a bitch."

"The captain froze on his knees."

"The lady's voice was raucous."

"It boomed through the Arbiter," the name of the car,

"It boomed through the Arbiter,

"like the cry of a wounded moose."

That's a big deer,

with a, with a fucking horn.

"And reaching the extremities, excuses me, of the car,

"came volleying back with a rush of air

"as the big ex-shipmaster..."

"upsetting his potty," he turned over his piss pot,

"lunged headlong back into bed."

"Land o' Goshen," that's an American expression.

Land o' Goshen, I don't know, comes from the Bible I think.

Land o' Goshen, Goshen is somewhere near uh... Jerusalem.

"Land o' Goshen,

"he groaned...

"I brung the hussy with me."

You understand?

The hussy? The whore.

"Tumbling out of his head, he checked for his watch,

which we always do.

"counted the bills in his wallet,

"at the same time trying to recall

"where the car was."

"Beaver," the black man.

"came in with the booze."

You know I went to a hospital for alcohol.

And one of the people,

one of the ladies who was, you know the uh...

like an instructor, like a teacher,

she said, you know, she said uh...

She said to me, "I read your book 'Voyage'...

"and I realized that that man who wrote that book,"

"know much more than I know about alcohol."

So your question doesn't really make sense to me.

Hm?

Sure.

Christ, Christ, Christ,

of course, I could write about alcohol,

but my problem is I can't write.

You know, right now I write a little bit, but not all the time. You know what I mean?

I don't write regularly.

Yeah.

Ah, it's a funny kind of a tragedy, you know?

It's a funny kind of a tragedy because of...

Oh yeah.

Now...

what confuses me, if you'd excuse me...

is that I, I, oh that I'm happy. You know what I mean?

Part of me is very happy.

Part of me knows I'm strong.

I know I can write. I know I have this ship.

I know I have my, you know uh

not only one son, but many sons.

And one beautiful daughter.

Hey. Hey!

So why, why, why, why do I drink?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But nobody knows.

Hey?

Why do people kill themselves?

Some of the most beautiful people that you know.

Hey?

Kill themselves.

Pourquoi?

Virginia Woolf.

Lovely, crazy uh

bisexual uh English writer,

who one day, puts some, some, some, some uh

some rocks, huh? Some stones in her pocket

and walked to the river in front of her house

and drowned herself.

Hemingway...

who one day, when he was only what, fifty-two?

fifty, no... fifty-six?

Takes, like I said the other day, he takes a

double-barreled shotgun

and he blows his head off

Why do I fall in here, huh? Same thing.

This is a form of suicide.

Sure.

I think. No?

Sure. Sure.

If it had not been for my son...

I would not be here this morning. You know?

Cause I could not, like I said this morning,

I could not get my head out of the water. You know what I mean?

And my friend,

comes after me, he comes right...

right in.

And he grabs me...

Bonsoir.

And he gives me enough strength

to put one hand on this ship.

One...

And this is my connection with life.

Hey, here. Hey.

I know I got good hands.

I got good hands, you know?

And I hang on,

and he comes around, you know, with his boat very quickly,

and somehow he pulls me out.

I couldn't, I couldn't, I...

I couldn't do anything.

Excuse me.

So, in a way, for him...

Amen. Amen.

Hey.

Hey.

Bonsoir. Oui.

When I realized, you see, that Pharos of Islandia

was not really in the way it was,

or the way it is...

You see, it's funny, if you'll excuse me,

it's funny, I use the word 'pharos'...

which is 'lighthouse'.

I thought, you know, I thought certainly in, in, in uh...

in Paris,

at the Quai Conti...

this ship was sort of a lighthouse, you know what I mean?

Sort of a place, a beacon. You know what I mean?

You know, of happiness,

of music,

of hashish,

of dreams,

strong, good.

Pharos.

And so the word 'Islandia'

was I think okay.

And then I realized...

I'm working too hard with this.

And the chaos is uh...

is not knowing exactly what to do.

So what am I doing?

I ain't doing nothing.

I ain't doing bullshit.

I could work on a picture, sure.

It's not, in a way it's not hard to work on a picture. You know what I mean?

You follow?

Sure, I can go tomorrow to any place

and work on a film.

But the slow, basic,

strong, beautiful,

driving force that we have within us

to write

I ain't got.

I ain't got.

So that becomes chaos. You know what I mean?

When you go through weeks after weeks after weeks.

And months after months after months.

I think, "Okay, something is uh...

"wrong."

Something is...

what we call haywire.

Huh?

And I had what's called a breakdown.

You know what a breakdown is?

You know the word?

A breakdown?

I find myself crying.

Crying, crying, crying, you know what I mean?

Crying all the time.

This is rough shit, huh?

Huh?

Crying, huh?

You know what I mean?

Just like you're collapsed.

Like you're uh, like you're dead.

And you'd be better off if you were dead. You know what I mean?

But you're not dead. You're alive.

But you're crying.

Drinking.

Now I think,

holy shit, you know?

What's uh, what's going on?

What's happening, hm?

Me.

And I know myself pretty well, may I say.

And like I've said, if you would pardon me,

I know I've said before,

I know I'm a strong son of a bitch.

Very strong.

But I'm crying.

Like a baby. Hey?

Why?

And like I said, you know?

Thinking at times

where's the gun?

Just blow it away, baby.

Blow it.

Christ.

Yeah.

But we also know, do we not? I know,

as we're talking now,

as we were talking uh, several days...

There are people in the world who are in prison,

in jail,

in solitary.

People who are being tortured. Hm?

So this, in a way, is paradise.

Paradise. Hey?

It's beautiful.

But, in a way, it's like um...

a prison without bars.

You follow me?

It's a jail that we make ourselves.

Which maybe is worse than the, than the formal uh...

No, I don't think so. No, no.

I don't think so.

It's not. Of course it's not.

Cause I know damn goddamn well

that I can uh...

walk up here.

If I can get there.

If I need to, I can get there.

And I can go anywhere.

If you're in jail you can't move, can you?

Huh?

They got those big goddamn doors.

No, it ain't jail. It ain't jail.

It's just a, I dunno...

Again, maybe it's chaos.

Hayden didn't want to remain aboard that morning.

He suggested we accompany him

on a walk along the Doubs.

He received a telegram later that afternoon.

It was from his wife, Kitty,

and his first news from her in four months.

The period of time since his arrival on the barge.

He cried.

He wanted us to go into town with him to wire a reply.

But he changed his mind on the way.

See that little tree.

Eckart, huh?

That little tree, yeah?

Who put that tree there?

Who? Huh?

I'll tell you who put it there.

The same guy who said to James Dean one night,

"Take that goddamn Porsche

and go 120 miles an hour and kill yourself."

Same man.

Same guy who said to me last night, "Fall in the water."

Fall in the water, Christ's sake.

For Christ's fucking sake.

Oh Christ.

Oh yeah.

You know, it's funny.

You bust your ass.

It's like ballet, you see? Huh?

You know, I learned that with Altman.

With Robert Altman.

You understand? Hey?

That they can, it is possible

for the actor or the person

to work with the cinematographer,

and the director and the writer,

and we all work together,

and it is like, in a way, ballet.

But also, it's always for me

very difficult to call anybody. You know?

Say, "Hey, mademoiselle or garçon."

I can't do that. You know what I mean?

I think maybe they're doing their job.

Like we said about the police.

I do my job, but nobody calls me.

Nobody says, "Sterling."

Yeah. But directors call your name.

Yeah, you say to me.

Okay, but we're close.

No, I mean the Hollywood directors.

S'il vous plaît.

What would you like?

- De double Pernod. - De quoi?

De double Pernod.

- Pernod? - Si.

- Ah, d'accord. - Double, double.

- Double Pernod. - Deux?

Manfred, what do you wish to drink?

Coca-cola?

And one morning I'm walking down

the waterfront in San Francisco,

near the Oakland Bay Bridge,

and I look more or less like this, you know, I...

And I see a man coming toward me...

What we call a tramp. A tramp.

Hobo. Hobo, hm?

And uh...

I said to him, "Good morning."

"Good morning."

I said, "Where are you from?"

He said, "St. Louis."

I said, "Where are you in from right now?"

"And how did you get here?"

I said, "Did you come uh, hitching? Hitching?

"Or did you come on the trains?"

He said he came on the trains.

I said, "Where from?" He said, "Chicago."

And I said...

Cause I knew he didn't, you know he had, he had...

he had a beat-up old pair of tennis shoes, you know?

Sneakers?

And the black socks, they were not black socks. They were dirt

on his legs.

And I said, "How are you fixed for change?"

Cause I knew I was gonna give him some money.

And he says to me, "Brother,

"this morning I can't spare a dime."

He thought I was hitting him.

Can't spare a dime.

Do you know the uh...

fantastic uh...

writer Ibsen? Ibsen?

Yeah.

Ibsen said that, "Good men do nothing...

"is the chief danger of our time."

Okay?

Let's haul ass, huh?

Should we haul?

Shall I help you finish your drink?

You take half, I take half.

Hayden later writes in the 'Wanderer'

"This is a day he will never forget."

"April 10, 1951."

"I am sworn to tell the truth."

"I check my costume, which has been selected carefully."

"In the lapel rest a tiny fleck of combat ribbon."

"Counsel studies his script and sounds his pitch pipe

"and I begin to sing."

"I am well prepared."

"Few stoolies have played this hall who were better prepared than I."

"I was a real daddy longlegs of a worm when it came to crawling."

On the tenth of April, 1951

Hayden and his wife Betty

take the early morning flight from Los Angeles to Washington.

They fly back to Los Angeles that same evening.

A lot has happened in the mean time.

Hayden has been asked,

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Community Party?"

If he tells the truth

he will put himself in a position

that can only lead to denunciation and betrayal.

Should he refuse to testify

his career in Hollywood will be over.

And he may face a prison term.

The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings

are America's purge trials.

Show trials.

The Committee knows all the answers.

It merely wants to hear them in public.

This domestic offshoot of the Cold War spares no one.

Certainly not an ex-communist.

No one who can be suspected in the slightest

of un-American ideas of behavior.

What that is is decided by a handful of reactionary,

power-hungry politicians like McCarthy and Nixon,

and their accomplices, such as Ronald Reagan,

chairman of the Screen Actors Guild.

The Committee knows all the names

the law will force Hayden to name after admitting his past.

It merely wants to hear them in public.

The Committee wants public repentance and self-degradation.

It wants to set an example.

Hayden in 'Wanderer',

"Not often does a man find himself eulogized

"for having behaved in a manner that he himself despises."

Many of the people who were rats before the Committee,

never actually said the way I've said,

I'm saying now with you.

Or I said in 'Wanderer'.

I was a shit.

An absolute goddamn shit.

But I would say one thing if I might...

If...

you, you, you, you...

If we hurt anybody

we must live with that.

I can talk and talk and talk and talk, okay? Da-da-da...

But have I hurt a man named Warwick Tompkins?

And I did.

I must live with this, you know?

All my life.

And when his son says to me, well thank you or whatever,

after the Cuban blockade thing,

sure, that's a beautiful moment.

But the fact remains

that one day I sat there in Washington,

and I spilled his name,

and they fired him the next morning.

Hey. In Los Angeles they fired him.

And he was making a picture about ants.

And they fired him, huh?

My communist dream

after World War II.

My communist dream, which I tried to write about

you know in 'Voyage', was uh...

It is necessary, it is necessary

for a, for a, for a...

for a force to overcome capitalism.

Cause I know capitalism is uh...

Shit, huh,

in a way. Is it not?

Hey?

Okay. So,

I used to think, okay...

the Soviet Union. But now I realize that...

I'm crazy, you know. I'm crazy.

You see, I think the wonderful thing about Yugoslavia

was that Tito was sort of a mix.

He was half West, half East.

He was half capitalism, half communism. You know?

And of course, in...

in the war, oh boy...

The first time I began to think...

That's redundant, excuse me...

First time I began to think...

No wonder you can't write.

First time I thought...

We come in from uh, we come in off the goddamn Grand Banks,

and we sell fish for two cents a pound,

and the same afternoon my mother buys the fish for eleven.

Now, wait a minute...

Okay? Oh yeah.

I've been out there with my friend Jack Hackett,

in the snowstorm hauling our goddamn ass off.

And we come in and we bust our ass

and we get two cents, and they sell it for...

Something happens between...

the Boston fish pier

and where my mother lived.

And she goes to eleven cents.

No, no, no, no, no.

And then in the war

I remember thinking when I was in the Marines

thinking, okay, we're getting forty-two dollars a month. Hm?

And all these bastards are getting uh...

how many thousand dollars

for, for, for making what we fight with.

I'm thinking, man you've got it all turned around.

You should be getting the forty-two dollars a month.

And we should be getting rich

before we die.

Hey?

Before I jump into goddamn Yugoslavia?

In the middle of the night,

with about uh, forty pounds of uh, not cameras...

of uh, guns?

Getting forty-two dollars.

And you fuckers are getting uh...

how many thousand dollars a week?

Hayden in 'Wanderer'

I swung like a goon from role to role.

All those spoons were made in an effort

to cash in fast on my new status

as a sanitary culture hero.

Between 1951 and 58

Hayden makes as many as six movies a year.

Westerns, gangster movies,

war movies, melodramas,

a gigantic orgy of self-punishment.

At the same time, the long and carefully planned,

cautiously guarded preparations for another,

and this time, final escape.

Despite everything, it comes spontaneously.

For years, Hayden had tried to gain custody of his four children.

Then, fed up, he simply puts out to sea with them.

He returns from Tahiti a year later.

He is determined to continue working on his book,

moves to San Francisco and marries Kitty.

He doesn't make another movies for the next ten years.

With only one exemplary exception.

Which characterizes a course

that cannot be ended merely by his breaking with his past.

Not even by a book like 'Wanderer'.

Yeah, I went to a black church in Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo.

And during the civil rights time,

I went there um,

and I made a speech. And um...

I'm not a good speaker.

I can do three things.

I think I can do what we're doing together,

I know, I can do that.

I can sail a ship,

what was the third one?

Well, fuck it. Let's go on, um...

And write.

But in the church, um...

I got going, and um, and um...

You know, you can feel it.

That's a beautiful thing. You know, I've never been on a stage.

But I know, we all know

that this why, real actors love the stage.

Cause they can feel it coming right back.

But I can feel it here now.

Alright, I'm in a church, and uh...

And at the end,

I talked a whole, you know, fifteen minutes...

And it's a hard thing to do, when you think about it.

Me, Sterling Hayden.

To be talking to American negroes. Huh?

I mean, what the hell?

We're from, we're from over here. Huh?

I've had everything, I've had all the luck in the world.

All my life. And they ain't got no luck.

Alright. Somehow we made a connection.

And the end, I used a quotation,

you know, as you know by this time, I love quotations, right?

And it was Walt Whitman.

And he said...

He said...

I've got it, I've got it um...

I'm gearing up, um...

He said, "Thou hast great allies."

"Thy allies are agonies

"and exaltations,

"and man's unconquerable mind."

And they got on their goddamn feet. The place went wild.

It destroyed him. As you know.

That's why we're here.

Absolutely. Sure.

Surely, surely, surely, surely,

Took me right, goddamn limb from limb.

Like I said to that son of a bitch

from Wales up here the other night when I hit him.

I told you.

I said, "I'll take you limb from goddamn limb."

So that experience before the committee...

Then you go back, you go back,

and then they uh, you know,

somebody from Paramount calls me says, "Hey, uh, Sterling

"we make a picture called 'Denver and Rio Grande'."

'Rio' they say on the railroad.

'Rio' not 'ree-oh'.

Most people say 'ree-oh'.

It's not 'ree-oh', it's 'rio'.

On the railroad, 'Rio Grande'.

'Denver and Rio Grande' for christ's goddamn sake.

And I'm an absolute, I mean, jackass.

I don't even know what happened.

But I knew that I had sold out

to the producers.

And now they're paying me off.

Like I said in 'Wanderer', "Hey, putty boy."

Putty. Great worker, putty.

Okay, so I shoot uh,

Ronald Reagan sends me a telegram,

"Dear Sterling, I'm very proud of you."

Hey? Hey?

Yeah, that's Reagan. You see, that's Reagan.

That's what I said about his heart.

His heart, it ain't here. It ain't where it should be.

Okay, okay, man.

No.

No.

That's a hard picture to come out of.

But it's funny, you know,

cause like I said the other day, I know I've come out of it.

In a way.

It's like when the young Warwick Tompkins

took my hand and said,

"Congratulations."

Hey, okay.

But, of course, not in a way, not

you can not erase...

you know, if you, if you behave badly...

It's like rape.

This is not rape of a girl.

But this is rape of your friend.

You can not erase rape.

Except that we're human.

I dunno.

Except that I know I have a lot of credit.

I know that when many of the people that I knew

in the Communist party were working in Hollywood,

I wasn't in Hollywood, as you know.

You know where I was.

Right now there some place.

Over the hills and far away.

Yeah, rape in a way. Rape, yeah.

Ah, wait a minute.

It's different, it's rape of integrity.

That's what I did. Rape of integrity.

I think rape of a girl, rape of a girl,

yeah, that would be wonderful to be raped by a girl, wouldn't it.

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine being chased down the quay at Terignon

by a girl who wants to fuck?

Oh baby, huh?

So beautiful, huh?

Rape.

Ah, but it's different, isn't it? Cause a man's strong.

Physically strong.

Hey?

The man can overwhelm the girl.

The girl, I don't think,

as a rule, can overwhelm the man.

Though I've seen one or two.

Oh yeah, I've seen one or two.

Yeah.

But, you see, the wonderful thing was, I guess...

That John Huston takes me

'Shirley', hm?

And makes me Dix.

John and uh sixteen men.

Sixteen men and ten or fifteen girls.

All going together,

like we're going together now, in a way.

But for me, I'm still 'Shirley'.

Goddamn, you know, I did a picture...

I did a picture

and I was playing a gunfighter.

Again, 'Shirley' Hayden, slowest draw, west of the world.

I'm playing a gunfighter.

I have to come out of a saloon

with the swinging doors

and jump on a horse.

Right over the ass.

And I'm, oh I, I, I'm a uh...

I'm a general in the army. Hey?

Why do you laugh?

I'm a general. Huh? Huh?

Now, a general should be able to get aboard a horse, huh?

Now, I, this is true...

I rehearsed

in North Hollywood for two weeks, you know?

How to jump over the ass-end of a horse.

And I was very good in rehearsal.

But...

I overlooked

overlooked one thing.

When you jump on the horse, you got to put your feet in the stirrups.

What we call, you know what I mean?

Those hooks?

Now, I come out of the saloon.

Me, General what the hell my name was.

Oo hell, baby.

Here was cavalry,

all the way from here to Nevada.

And I take the big jump, the big hero.

And I hit the saddle very beautifully.

But...

I make one mistake.

I don't get the feet in the stirrups.

And the horse takes off,

and I go right back over his ass

in front of the saloon.

Very embarrassing.

Huh?

Here am I.

There's the camera.

Here is Peter Sellers.

Here is Stanley Kubrick.

And all I have to, is very simple...

a few pages.

But, the way it was, I could not.

Again, like fucking, you can't get the hard-on,

what do you do? Huh?

Unlike the girl, we can't pretend, can we?

I died.

And he begins to do uh, what you call pickups.

One sentence at a time.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe ten words, Mr. Hayden?

You dumbass.

General Jack Ripper.

Which is very strange, you know,

cause I knew I was playing the part of a man

who was starting the third World War. Huh?

And here I am, impotent,

creatively impotent.

And I was working with a goddamn cigar, you know.

A lot of cigars, you know?

I don't like cigars.

And they kept coming apart, you know, in my mouth.

Now I think I got enough trouble.

I got enough trouble, let alone with a goddamn cigar.

And uh...

we went forty-eight takes.

And that's a lot of takes.

And the crew,

I didn't say this the other day. The crew

at this time, the crew

has turned around, cause they're embarrassed for me.

They know I'm dying. Hey?

And so they look the other way.

And every time Kubrick said 'go',

I would try, and then I would go 'poomp'.

It's funny, you know, because I

I often find myself playing characters

who are so alien.

So totally simply alien

to me, as a man.

And I think, "Why? Why, why?"

Why?

We had always identified Sterling Hayden

with his role in 'Johnny Guitar'.

As the gunfighter who was tired of fighting.

Who sticks his guns in his saddlebags

and roams the west with a guitar.

A man looking for a place to settle down.

Near the woman whose love he hopes to win back.

Only to end up in the deadly insanity

and chaos of emotions brought about

by the rise of a new era.

And then there was 'Asphalt Jungle'.

He played the horse lover Dix Handley,

tough and gentle,

who, uprooted in the big city

longs to return to the bluegrass of Kentucky.

Who was hunted down by the authorities,

and arrives there dead.

The horses sniff at his lifeless body.

He had always considered the content of these two films

a part of his own biography.

However, it is hard to talk to him about his films.

Not that he doesn't have much to say.

He just prefers telling yarns and witty anecdotes about them.

He can't take the film industry or his role in it very seriously.

Of the sixty or more films he has been in over the years

Hayden feels only three were worth his while.

And 'Johnny Guitar' is not one of them.

He gave us the feeling that he had nothing but contempt

for all of the films he made in the fifties.

That is, most of the films he ever made.

That he despised himself for making them,

and that he made them with contempt.

That he regards them all, without distinction,

as a reward for his 'patriotic' act.

'Shirley Temple' Hayden,

America's little darling,

who didn't know his ass from his elbow.

He admitted that in 1940 in his first two movies

he had been nothing but a male starlet.

A boy who photographed well.

He first felt he had come close to being an actor

in 1949 in 'Asphalt Jungle'.

And it was then that he saw the beginning of an existence in Hollywood

that would be more than just parasitic.

But a different kind of performance was demanded of him.

He claims he wasn't anywhere near that good again

until ten years later in Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove'.

Ironically enough, in the role of an hysterical anti-communist,

General Jack D. Ripper, who triggers the nuclear war.

For more than ten years now, Hayden has been acting in films again.

In large supporting roles and small starring ones.

And at least since Robert Altman's 'The Long Goodbye',

with a new attitude toward acting.

It has become a job, work he doesn't want too often,

a profession he no longer wants to hate.

And something that gives him the financial independence

to concentrate on his real work.

My position is, the same, again I'm doing with you.

I don't know exactly what you're doing.

Maybe you don't.

But, I have down in here, I have an instinct.

A strong goddamn instinct that says to me sometimes,

"Go man, go."

So I'm going with you. As we know, we're going, aren't we.

So I went with Altman.

I went with Huston, I went with Kubrick.

You know what I mean? Um,

not knowing, not knowing. Huh?

Not knowing.

I didn't know on 'Asphalt Jungle' what the fuck I was doing.

For me to play a hoodlum, huh?

It's a long way from where I've been.

And yet

and yet

and yet,

may I say,

I've been down those streets.

I've been down Boston in the middle of winter. You follow me?

Without a goddamn fucking dime.

Not a dime.

Can't even take a shit.

What do you do?

Snowing.

You think, "My God, why?"

And all I'm asking is to get a job.

Get a job on a ship, okay.

So this guy, this guy, this man,

this character Dix Handley

in uh, in uh, in 'Asphalt Jungle'.

What's he doing, huh?

He's trying to make a heist.

Hey?

And they need him because he's rough.

And I know I'm rough.

Excuse me, if I have to be.

And they hire me because I'm rough.

I think, okay if I'm here, hey?

I'll go along with you. Sure, I'll go.

Yeah, Whitmore, Marilyn Monroe,

Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern,

I mean, should we talk about a cast?

For a moment should we talk about a cast?

Isn't that beautiful?

Calhern, Monroe,

Excuse me. Whitmore,

Jaffe,

Shirley.

The basic problem is um...

is do you have the capacity to fight?

You know, I read about Che.

Hey? Our friend.

Che, hm?

I read about Lech.

I think in a way, yeah I'd like to do that.

But I can not. I'm not that strong.

It's that simple.

I don't have the strength to be Fidel,

or Che, or Lech.

Or all the people around the world tonight who are fighting.

Whose names we don't know.

No.

What I wanna do is crash right here

in this beautiful place.

Peu de...

Peu de hashish, peu de musique...

Or go to the hotel,

Or meet my wife in the Plaza Hotel.

As I said, perhaps the most beautiful hotel in, certainly in the United States.

And have a good time.

So I do.

But, as you, with your beautiful question, as you said to me,

there's a part of me that thinks, no

I shouldn't be here.

I shouldn't be here, I should be up there in the goddamn mountains where Che was.

Or where Fidel was, or where Lech is,

or where, you know, people are all over the world.

But I ain't going there.

Ain't no hot baths.

No.

Jesus Christ, water.

Water.

Bonsoir.

Hayden stopped drinking from one day to the next.

He became more formal and laconic.

What I really see, of course, is uh...

the uh, the heart of myself. You know?

Some days, like you know,

the last few days when I'm drinking hard,

I look into that mirror up there,

I think, "Holy shit."

In one sense.

But in another sense, I think,

"Yeah, you old fart. That's you."

"Go ahead. Let her rip."

"Let her rip."

I mainly feel uh...

may I say um, diminished.

I just think like uh,

like if I look in the mirror now,

I think, "Hey baby,

"slow down, huh? Stop, stop, stop the booze."

On the other hand, as we've said to each other,

I think, well...

Again, it's like the third rail.

If you're going, baby go.

Go huh, go huh, go huh. Hey?

Let her rip.

Henry Miller's words. Let her rip.

I love that expression. Let her rip.

Great, isn't it? Let her rip.

No?

Yes.

Let her rip.

Hayden politely let us know it was time for him to be alone again.

Several weeks later we received a telegram from the States

informing us that he was acting in a new film.

In another telegram as long as a letter, half a year later,

he let us know he had been in a hospital for alcohol,

that he hasn't touched a drop in months,

that he is working on his book like crazy,

and feels wonderful.

And he asked if we wanted to continue shooting,

wherever.

The last part made us especially happy.

But that would be another film.

Returning,

Stevenson,

is buried in British Samoa

up in the hill.

And you go up to his grave, to his tomb,

And you read,

ah it's a long one...

"'Neath the wide and starry sky,

"dig the grave and let me lie."

"Glad did I live

"and gladly die."

"And I laid me down with a will."

"Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

"and the hunter home from the hill."

Damn, damn, damn, damn.

Yeah.

Bonjour. Hey.

Yeah.

Look at the light on the water, the way it's uh

the river is popping.

Yeah.

"Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill."

I raise a salute to you.

To you. To all of you.

A toast to you. An empty toast, huh?