A new spiritual hero of the moment

Dr. Strangelove has long been one of my favorite films and I always like Sterling Hayden as Gen. Jack T. Ripper, but there was a lot more to Hayden than I ever suspected.



Driftglass posted a few bit of an amazing conversation between Tom Snyder and Sterling Hayden and it piqued my interest in a guy I've always thought was a good actor. I looked into his biography and damn, what an interesting guy. He ran away to the sea at 15, sailed and eventually skippered square-riggers and eventually ended up in Hollywood before the war, joined the marines and ended up running guns into Yugoslavia with the OSS in the war, joined and quit the commmunist party, named names for McCarthy and considers it the most shameful thing he ever did, became both a writer and fan of marijuana late in life. Say what you like about him, the guy was definitely an original. Having listened to these interviews, I now have a fantasy of traveling across the United States in Hayden's train car with him, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Ruth Gordon, Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Thomas Pynchon, Hunter Thompson and a couple of cases of good scotch.

Check out the first series of interviews on the Tomorrow Show here, the second one here and the third one here.