The Conquest of Smiling Jim

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"Yeah? This is Holden. Yeah, Marty. Hold it a sec." The muscular man with the hard eyes palms the phone. "I'll take those letters now, Miss Moller." The voice is hard, too, even sexy in a nasal way. Holden flips a Parliament into the corner of his mouth. "Marty? Shoot." Miss Moller brings the letters. Holden stands up suddenly and paces the floor, still listening. His brogues gleam richly on the broadloom, his tie is tensed into a merciless Yale knot. "Yeah, boy. Versteh. Versteh." He sits down, props the phone with his left shoulder, reads the letters with fierce concentration, signs them. Miss Moller leaves the room. "You do that, Marty. Yeah. Get back to me Monday. No, I'm tied up. Make it noon. No--" He squints at the ceiling. "Say 12:30. Oh, Lucey's. See ya, boy." He hangs up, bounds from his chair, grabs a sharp Tyrolean felt. "I'll be over in dubbing," he flings over his shoulder as he hurries out.

The man in a hurry is William Holden, and he has no doubt where he is going. He is going to make a million dollars. He is going to make his first independent picture, a movie called Toward the Unknown, about a jet flyer, and the reason he is racing his engine is that half the population of Hollywood is hell-bent in the same exciting direction. The movie colony is now off, like a merrily misguided missile, on another of its whilom whooshes toward the unknown. Spang in the middle of a firm prosperity, the production pattern of three decades is dissolving. The mighty major studios, which have dominated U.S. moviemaking since L. B. Mayer founded the M-G-Mpire, have been brought to humbling terms by a spectacular revolt of the stars. Hollywood, which thought it had seen everything, is seeing something new beneath the California sun: the cinemogul with a profile.

Loosed from their contractual shackles during the great television scare, and thirsty for the taste of tax relief, a host of famous actors have saddled up their "horseback corporations" and gone storming after creative control of U.S. film production. They have won an amazing measure of it. Jimmy Stewart made the breach, and Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper and a score of others have followed. Almost two-thirds of film production at Warner and Columbia is now in the hands of independents. Paramount and Fox are yielding to the trend. Even rich old M-G-M had to make concessions; as many as ten independent pictures may be made on the Metro lot in 1956, and in many cases the mouse has nibbled deep into the Lion's share of the profits.

The new lords of the celluloid jungle are a rugged breed. They have to be. When the actor is a businessman, what he says in conference can matter more than how he says his lines. He must learn how to pick a story as well as play it, fire an actress on the set as well as set her on fire.

And while he is at it, he should learn to direct the director. His days are spent in a nerve-shattering series of quick dissolves from the lawyer to the tax man to the agent to the press, and no matter what he looks like on the screen, his very best scenes had better be played at the bank. "The matinee idol of the Eisenhower era," cracked a Hollywood reporter, "is a man in a grey flannel suit."

Among the Greats. No figure in filmland is wearing the new uniform of success with more dynamic distinction than William Holden. At 21 he was the boy wonder of Hollywood. At 31 he was just another "second lead" on Paramount's waiting list. At 37 he is as hot a drawing card as any in Hollywood's hand. Last week, for the second year in a row, Actor Holden won what Hollywood regards as a most significant seal of approval: the Photoplay Award. It means, the moviemakers agree, that--at least for the time being--William Holden is the man of the average American woman's dreams.

For the second year in a row he stands among the Big Ten in the box-office ratings. His latest picture--Picnic, based on William Inge's Pulitzer Prize play--opened last week in Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. His 14-year contract with Paramount (one of the longest now in force at any studio) still has 9 1/2 years to run, at $80,000 a picture--with all sorts of side deals that easily double its value. Holden has crashed the inner circle of the greats--Cooper, Gable, Crosby, Wayne. He gets 1,500 fan letters a week, from both sexes and all age groups. The critics respect him and so do the best directors. Billy Wilder calls him "the ideal motion-picture actor"; a well-known teacher of acting in Hollywood says flatly that Holden is "the best movie actor of his generation."

This Is a Movie Star? To movie goers who remember Valentino's Latin flourishes, John Gilbert's burning eyes or the leering sensuality of the young Clark Gable, Bill Holden may appear a singularly commonplace mutation. He is, it is true, the athletic type, with a graceful flow of well-conditioned muscle. But his face has the curious neutrality of a composite photograph of everybody's favorite movie star. "A map of the United States," a friend calls it. "All those meaningless straight lines." It is, on the whole, an open and agreeable map, for Bill Holden is a forthright and likable man. But in recent years the brow has been seamed with ridges of tension and the cheeks with little gullies of exhaustion, and the gee-whiz expression of a student-council president has given way to something like the keen suburban glitter of a man who's going to get there, come no matter what.

"Is this what the women of America want?" asks a Hollywood producer. "You mean to tell me that the great lover of our time is a civic booster who recently served on the Los Angeles Park Commission? I don't get it. No blue suede shoes, no moldy sweatshirts. He doesn't walk down Sunset Boulevard with an ocelot. He doesn't even have a Filipino houseboy. This is a movie star? He goes to P.T.A. meetings. He has been married to the same woman for 15 years. His swimming pool is not in the shape of a grand piano or a thyroid gland. And have you heard? He wears the tops and bottoms of his pajamas, both."

An $18 Edge. It is all true, but it is only half the truth. The grey flannel suit has a scarlet lining, and though Bill generally keeps it hidden, he is secretly proud that it is there. He has a savage temper, and it is no respecter of persons. The studio grips can catch it if they talk too much on the set, and so can the director. When Bill gets too tense, which is frequently, he drinks to relax, and he drinks too much. "It costs him $18," says a friend, "to get an edge on." Before he does a scene he usually takes a few belts. On the set, "Warm up the ice cubes" is often enough his grinning way of saying good morning.

To his friends, Bill's drinking is less frightening than his need for danger. "I don't really know why," he admits, "but danger has always been an important thing in my life--to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up." He drives his Thunderbird like a brat out of hell, but he handles it skillfully. He likes nothing better than to boot it down to Palm Springs (114 miles) on a moonlight night in two hours flat. In his pictures he does all his own stunts--leaping aboard a freight train that is moving 30 m.p.h., dropping off a 15-ft. house front, vaulting a 6-ft. fence into the saddle and riding away. He is a masterly horseman, and the wilder the animal the better he likes it.

On a dare Bill Holden will do almost anything. One cold California night he dived into a swimming pool with an Aqua-Lung and proved to a friend that he could stay underwater for half an hour. He came out blue but happy. For some reason, Holden, a trained gymnast, likes to lower himself from outside a windowsill, hang there and look around. Once during a conference with Director Joshua Logan, who is terrified of heights, Bill calmly walked over to the window, opened it. stepped out and hung by one arm over ten stories of nothing. While Logan "turned to jelly," Holden blandly continued the conversation.

How does Holden reconcile the citizen on the Park Commission with the character who is hanging out the window? The tension of these opposites seems to be his pressing problem, yet the tension he can oftentimes relieve before the camera with a gesture of creation. Holden's talent as an actor is not large, as he readily admits, but he uses it with an almost ferocious sincerity, and with an intelligence much keener than some men with greater gifts enjoy.

Picnic. These qualities are shiningly in evidence in Picnic--in which he is miscast. The hero of the Inge play (rewritten for the screen by Dan Taradash and directed by Josh Logan) is a sex bomb, and the drama describes what happens after he explodes on a small Midwestern town one summer's day. Every woman in the vicinity--to wit, Betty Field, Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg and Rosalind Russell--falls flat, or wants to. But Holden isn't having any. He's a simple sort of joe who lost a piece of his soul in childhood and a part of his wits on the football field. All he wants is a job. "I gotta get someplace in this world," he tells an old college chum. "I just gotta."

The friend promises to get him work, and they all go off to the annual Labor Day picnic--a wonderfully splashy mess of cinematic mulligatawny. At the picnic both Kim and the schoolteacher make a pass at the boy. Kim thinks she loves him because he doesn't merely tell her that she's pretty; he treats her like a human being, too. Roz, however, is a middle-aging schoolteacher who knows what she's after, and when she doesn't get her man, she goes vindictively to pieces in public--and the scene breaks up in scandal.

In the part. Bill was asked not only to portray a man far younger than himself, but to animate a type completely opposite to his own--a feat especially difficult on the screen. For a good cinemactor, there is only one way to act: don't. The camera comes so close that the slightest insincerity can be seen. Bill's whole experience has taught him not to play a part, but to play himself in the part. Within his limits. Bill has made himself a master of the movie method; among cinemactors, his style is classic in its careless care, its seamless seeming. "He is beyond acting," says Billy Wilder. "He is there."

In the Picnic part, however, the old way would not work, and Bill was made most mightily to stretch his soul. It would not always stretch, but at moments Holden grasps perfectly the schoolboy shame of a man who has been "left down" in life. Or again, in the horseplay at the picnic, he hits off exactly the boob in his natural element, as mindless as a baboon in a tree. Best of all, he brings out in the love scenes some real sense of how the depths of a man are seized and shaken up when he truly feels the power of a woman. Even so, in the balance, the lapses in Bill's acting weigh the most, and the greatest of these failures is emotional. In playing the part of a man who is little more than an animal, Bill seems unable to free the animal forces in himself.

Apron Strings. The story of how the beast was put in a cage began in O'Fallon, Ill., about 20 miles east of St. Louis, where William Franklin Beedle was born on April 17, 1918. His father was a chemist, his mother a schoolteacher. When Bill was four the family moved to Pasadena, and there in the California sun the boy grew up with no more trouble than an orange. His father had a good job in the fertilizer business, and his mother trained young Bill firmly to the trellis of middle-class respectability. Bill was a good little boy--almost too good. He did all his homework, sat straight at table, sang in two choirs, and took responsibility or a spanking if he didn't. His father, a gymnast, gave the boy a physical training to match the social discipline; at the age of eight he could tumble like a circus brat.

"Everybody liked Bill," his mother remembers. "He was an angel." He was expected to be, but sometimes the natural devil took the hindmost. One dark night Bill threw a straw man onto the highway in front of a passing car. As the brakes screeched, he hid in the bushes with a friend, and they laughed themselves silly. All at once they stopped, as out of the car two burly policemen appeared. For the next six weeks the boys spent their spare time at the station house, memorizing traffic regulations.

Such adventures came but seldom. Bill was not the boy to notice that the apron strings of Pasadena propriety were holding him as fast as a straitjacket. All went well enough until Bill was in his teens, when suddenly he was overcome by an urge to experience danger. Soon he was making a good part of his spending money from boys who bet him he couldn't jump a 4 1/2-ft. fence of iron spikes from a standing position, and every once in a while, "just for the hell of it," he would walk along the outer rail of Pasadena's "suicide bridge" on his hands, apparently indifferent to the 190-ft. drop that awaited the least slip. He longed to be a member of Victor McLaglen's motorcycle corps of trick riders, and when he was 16 his father got him a secondhand cycle. For the next few years Bill rode blissfully about the streets of Pasadena, standing on the seat.

In a more constructive direction, Bill also had half a hanker to be a musician, and in his spare time picked up a fair proficiency on two instruments--clarinet and piano--and a real professional sheen on two others--drums and bones. At almost everything his timing and coordination were exceptional--though, curiously he could never learn to dance very well--and they showed to brilliant effect whenever he was on a stage. In the sixth grade he played Rip Van Winkle in the school play, and made a hit with all the mothers. He decided he might like to be an actor, if only fate would preserve him from the fertilizer business.

All There. Fate went to considerable trouble to do just that. When Bill was 20 and a second-year student at Pasadena Junior College, he got a chance at the part of Madame Curie's father in a play at the Pasadena Playbox. On opening night a Paramount talent scout, Milt Lewis, went to see the play. He couldn't see Bill for the whiskers, but he liked Bill's voice, and went backstage to see what the rest of him was like. Says Milt: "It was all there." He invited Bill to Paramount next day for an interview. "Sorry," the young man said, coolly. "I've got to take an exam." Milt was so flabbergasted that he stood still for an appointment later in the week.

Two weeks later Bill had a movie contract ($50 a week) but what about a name? "Beedle!" exclaimed a Paramount executive. "It sounds like an insect." Just then his secretary announced that William Holden, a West Coast newsman, was on the wire. That took care of the name, now all Bill needed was a part. Fate got busy again. Over at Columbia, Director Rouben Mamoulian saw Bill's screen test, grabbed him for the title role of Golden Boy, the Clifford Odets play about a young pug who could hit like Marciano and fiddle like Paganini.

First day on the set, Bill was pale with fright--and exhaustion. What with violin and boxing lessons, he was working 17 hours a day. To calm his fears he called his mother as many as five times a day, and to conceal them he began to give veteran Mamoulian a little friendly guidance on how the show should be done. He almost got fired. Suddenly he had a two-day nervous collapse. Barbara Stanwyck, the star, came to his rescue. Every night, no matter how hard the day's work, she gave him a private rehearsal of the next, day's scenes. Says Bill: "She pulled me through." To this day he sends her red roses every year on the anniversary of the day the picture started.

The Hollywood Life. The picture was a hit, and the Holden boy was the golden boy of Hollywood. From the easy life in Pasadena he was transported to the easy life in Hollywood. Hollywood, however, is not so easy as it looks, and besides, as Bill's mother warned him, there is an "abyss" between the moral standards of the two communities. Half of him, the half that walked the suicide bridge, longed to live it up in high Hollywood style; but the other half, the nice boy from Pasadena, gave him a murderous moral hangover the next day.

Meanwhile, Bill's career hit a few snags. He was soon typed as "the boy next door," a sort of "Smiling Jim" whose whole-wheat charm went quickly stale. His private life, however, took a turn for the better. He met a young actress named Brenda Marshall (real name: Ardis Ankerson). One Saturday night Bill and Ardis flew to Las Vegas and got married. Eight months later Bill enlisted in the Army Air Forces, and for the better part of four years, except for occasional leaves, he was away from home, mostly with entertainment and P.R. units in Connecticut and Texas.

Bill had left Paramount a boy; he came back a man who meant business. By 1946 he had three children (two boys, and a girl born of Ardis' first marriage) as well as a wife to support, and he intended to make a good job of it. At the studio gate he got his first shock: the gatekeeper said he had never heard of William Holden, and refused to let him in. In the executive offices he got another: moviegoers had forgotten all about William Holden, and the big bosses saw no particular reason to remind them of his existence. It was seven months before Bill got a part, and then it was just another chance to play Smiling Jim. He took it. He took almost anything he could get, and in the next three years appeared in a depressing total of 17 pictures.

He was adequate in all of them, and in a few (as the widower in Rachel and the Stranger, as the psychopath in The Dark Past) he was better than that. But whenever he took his fight for better parts to the front office, he got the same cold shoulder and the same cold talk: "Face it, kid. You got no sex appeal. What can you do with that face? It looks like a baby's behind." Bill took such talk and came back for more. For the first time in his life he was really fighting--not for Pasadena, not for Hollywood, but for something of his own; and something of his own began to show in his face.

Director Billy Wilder was shrewd enough to see it. He signed Holden for the role of the mixed-up gigolo in Sunset Boulevard. The critics cheered, and chose Holden the best actor of 1950; but the public was still not wildly enthusiastic. One day in a supermarket--after 14 years as a Hollywood headliner--Bill saw a woman staring at him. "Young man," she finally said, "you really ought to be in pictures. You look so much like Alan Ladd."

That Kisser. The fight for parts went on, and in fighting for himself, Bill found himself fighting for others. He was elected a vice president of the Screen Actors' Guild, and slugged it out with the big studios in many a negotiation, with quick wit and a sharp mind that grew more analytical the more it saw of Hollywood. At the same time, Bill came to understand the problems of the big executives, and to wish a little wistfully sometimes that they were his to solve. Force of Arms, Submarine Command, Boots Malone--his face, though it was slowly maturing, was still his misfortune. "Do me a favor, Bill," a director wisecracked. "Go on over to Sunset Boulevard and let a truck run over that kisser."

All at once, in 1953, Bill broke through. In the midst of a box-office slump, three Holden pictures--Stalag 17, The Moon Is Blue, Escape from Fort Bravo--hit hard. And for Stalag, in which he played a scrounging U.S. sergeant in a German prison camp, Holden won an Oscar as the year's best actor. He deserved it. The boy next door had become the type in the back room, with rat-grey skin and rat-quick eyes and a furtive softness in the way he moved; for the first time, Bill had almost managed to lose himself in a part. After seeing the picture, one fan who came in late remarked: "That man was wonderful--and you know, he looks an awful lot like William Holden."

Culture & Contracts. After the Oscar, Bill had his pick of parts at every studio, and he picked them shrewdly. With each successive hit--Executive Suite, Sabrina, The Country Girl, The Bridges of Toko-Ri--he grew bigger at the box office. From Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing his studio is now sure to gross at least $10 million.

With success assured. Bill has not relaxed. He has known the adrenal delights of executive existence, and he has no intention of giving them up. Acting does not give him the chance to express everything that is in him. If and when his popularity subsides, many a studio will be glad to get him as an executive, and one has already offered him a production unit of his own. Meanwhile, Bill is making the most, in a practical way, of his powerful position. Last year he traveled 135,000 miles for Paramount as an "ambassador of good will," selling Hollywood--and Bill Holden--in 16 countries. This year he will hit the road again: from Paris to Moscow, Cairo to Hong Kong. On the way he picks up culture as well as contacts--he has made a handsome collection of primitive art, and has added a shelf of Asian and African music to his huge record library--but mostly he picks up facts, figures and feelings about the world he lives in. For at the back of his mind, Bill Holden holds a tantalizing thought: politics. Says a friend: "He would be a success in politics--a success at almost anything."

So far, however, Bill Holden has been truly happy at nothing. The tensions of the troubled years are tearing at him still. On the one side is the rampant do-gooder he feels he ought to be, forever inveighing against public lust and private indolence, and especially against all the varieties of flimflam, backscratch and general phoniness in which Hollywood abounds. Yet, on the other hand, Holden is a man who in his time has admittedly fired off as many cannon-crackers as the next man.

He often suffers from psychosomatic symptoms that range from actor's stomach to false coronary alarms. For a while he was plagued by the recurring sensation that his heart had stopped. Whenever the feeling came--and sometimes it came in the midst of public gatherings--he would rush out of the building and run around the block "to start my heart again."

Such tensions and complexities are far from rare in Hollywood. What is rare is the driving sincerity of William Holden, his almost complete lack of pretentiousness, his energetic blend of talent and intelligence, his simple human decency to other people. One of his directors sums him up as "the typical American boy who wanted to become a slob, but couldn't make the grade."

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