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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 9½ 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."