Word: holden
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...Yeah? This is Holden. Yeah, Marty. Hold it a sec." The muscular man with the hard eyes palms the phone. "I'll take those letters now, Miss Moller." The voice is hard, too, even sexy in a nasal way. Holden flips a Parliament into the corner of his mouth. "Marty? Shoot." Miss Moller brings the letters. Holden stands up suddenly and paces the floor, still listening. His brogues gleam richly on the broadloom, his tie is tensed into a merciless Yale knot. "Yeah, boy. Versteh. Versteh." He sits down, props the phone with his left shoulder, reads the letters...
...hurry is William Holden, and he has no doubt where he is going. He is going to make a million dollars. He is going to make his first independent picture, a movie called Toward the Unknown, about a jet flyer, and the reason he is racing his engine is that half the population of Hollywood is hell-bent in the same exciting direction. The movie colony is now off, like a merrily misguided missile, on another of its whilom whooshes toward the unknown. Spang in the middle of a firm prosperity, the production pattern of three decades is dissolving...
...weeks later Bill had a movie contract ($50 a week) but what about a name? "Beedle!" exclaimed a Paramount executive. "It sounds like an insect." Just then his secretary announced that William Holden, a West Coast newsman, was on the wire. That took care of the name, now all Bill needed was a part. Fate got busy again. Over at Columbia, Director Rouben Mamoulian saw Bill's screen test, grabbed him for the title role of Golden Boy, the Clifford Odets play about a young pug who could hit like Marciano and fiddle like Paganini...
...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...
...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...