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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."