(3 of 8)
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."