By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
“Film Star Names Ex-Sausalitan in Commie Testimony This Week” read the headline in the April 12, 1951, Sausalito News. The paper reported:
“Warwick Tompkins, a former Sausalitan, was named as a communistic influence in film star Sterling Hayden's testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) Tuesday. Referring to his membership in the Communist Party as ‘certainly the stupidest, most ignorant thing I’ve ever done,’ Hayden said Tompkins was instrumental in his affiliation with the Communists. Tompkins is former captain of the Wanderbird, a schooner which took youths on summer cruise voyages as paying crew... According to press accounts of the testimony, Hayden told the committee he had first met Tompkins in Boston when he was 14 years old. He said he saw Tompkins again in 1940 in California when he first went to Hollywood. The film star identified Tompkins as an employee of AMTORG, a Russian Trading firm, who continually supplied him with Communist literature and sent him Communist publications while he was in the Marines. It was Tompkins, Hayden said, who suggested that he contact V. J. Jerome, identified as head of the Communist Party’s cultural commission. According to the testimony, Tompkins later wanted to write a hook about Hayden, ‘The development of a nonpolitical American youth into a militant participant in the class struggle.’ Hayden said Tompkins followed him to Hollywood, took notes and wrote some 75,000 words ‘before I came to sufficiently to stop him.’ Hayden readily admitted he joined a Communist cell in 1946 and in seven months found out how wrong he was, so dropped out in December of the same year. He said he left the party with the realization that one of its aims was to overthrow the Government of the United States.”
Warwick Tompkins is best known in these parts as the father of Warwick “Commodore” Tompkins, who launched his world class maritime career by sailing around the Horn with his father in 1936 when he was just 4 years old. In 2014, Commodore Tompkins joined other Bay Area sailing legends in a memorable Historical Society panel discussion dubbed “Salty Stories.” The saga of that epic voyage has been told in Tompkins Sr.’s book “Fifty South to Fifty South” and the 2016 documentary “Life on the Water,” with actual onboard footage of the passage.
Hayden’s testimony wasn’t the first time Tompkins Sr. had been fingered as a communist. In October 1947, according to the News, a Marin City resident named Sidney Hall testified that several communist meetings had been held aboard the schooner Wanderbird at Sausalito Yacht Harbor. Hall told the Tenney Un-American Activities Committee, a California spinoff of the HUAC, that approximately one per cent of the population in Marin City belonged to the Communist Party at that time.
Sterling Hayden's admiration for the Communist partisans he had fought alongside during World War II led him into his brief membership in the Party. Hayden served in the Marines and then with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Europe. He was awarded the Silver Star for displaying “great courage” in the Mediterranean Theater.
VIDEO CLIP FROM S.F. STATE UNIVERSITY
Sterling Hayden testifying before HUAC.