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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.