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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.