The Many Deaths of William Holden Taught Me How to Be Anxious

On Nov. 12, 1981, William Holden, the Hollywood star, was standing on the subway platform at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, leaning over the edge to look for the uptown local, when an unidentified assailant shoved him onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming C train.

It’s been more than 25 years since my father told me the story of William Holden’s untimely death, and still, every time I stand by the edge of a subway platform, I think of how I could meet the same end. Instinctively, I get as close to the wall as possible.

But William Holden didn’t die in any rail-related accident. In fact, at the time of his death, William Holden wasn’t even in New York City. On Nov. 12, 1981, he was across the country at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., where he fell from a wheeled office chair he was standing on while trying to change a light bulb.

That’s not true either.

To my father, William Holden’s many accidental deaths offered endless valuable lessons. My dad, André Aciman, is a writer who had lived on three continents before he was 18, which meant I grew up with a tapestry of narrative traditions when it came to cautionary tales.

The star of many of those stories was William Holden, known for his roles in Hollywood classics such as “Sunset Boulevard,” “Sabrina” and Stalag 17. (A fictionalized version of Mr. Holden also makes a brief but memorable appearance, played by Sean Penn, in Paul Thomas Andersen’s coming film “Licorice Pizza.”)

And yet, it was not Mr. Holden’s canonical body of work that changed me. His death — as re-envisioned by my father, the storyteller, the caregiver — came to define the way I moved through the world in a body that could easily be gruesomely mangled if I wasn’t careful.

The world was a frightening place when my dad was a newly minted father. It has only become more dangerous since then. After all, I learned these stories before Sept. 11, long before a virus made our every move fraught. But I had already been trained to see danger.

On Nov. 12, 1981, William Holden died after stepping onto the marble edge of his bathtub with wet feet. He desperately tried gripping the shower curtain as he fell, but the fabric ripped loose, and he landed on the tile and broke his neck.

Mr. Holden always seemed to fall like Achilles — a hero cursed with a single tragic flaw: complete and total carelessness. While American parents might simply tell their children not to run into the street or to be careful around the stove, my immigrant dad turned to candid descriptions of violence and harrowing tales to keep me out of harm’s way.

My father grew up in Egypt, where he once saw an organ-grinder’s baboon go rogue and gouge out a child’s eye. To him, the world was full of perils that many Americans simply couldn’t see, in large part because America was insulated from many of the dangers that citizens in other countries took for granted. Since Americans didn’t experience air raids, how could they possibly understand something as elementary as falling onto the subway tracks or slipping in the bathroom? Americans understood the theory of a threat, but not the threat itself, and that was reflected, or so my father seemed to believe, in the way they cautioned their children.

On Nov. 12, 1981, William Holden died while running through Central Park with his hands in his pockets. An unruly tree stump — or was it a warped cobblestone? — caught his foot, and he fell on his face, went into a coma and never woke.

Most of Mr. Holden’s deaths were the result of physical accidents born of commonplace recklessness. True, there was the time Mr. Holden died after wandering away from his parents at the Museum of Natural History and walking into the arms of kidnappers. But he was far more likely to die because he took his sweater off at the top of a stairwell and accidentally tumbled to the bottom.

My father’s biggest fear for me was that I’d go through life unaware of the potential dangers lurking around every corner. The fear of dying like William Holden haunted me. But now I am beginning to realize that if I ever become a father, I might use similar fables to teach of danger. William Holden died 1,000 deaths so that I could lead one relatively safe life.

These stories fundamentally shaped how I assess every risk. I’m aware of dangers most rational humans are not, like the way taxis stop two feet over the crosswalk, increasing the risk of getting hit even at a green light, or how a spooked carriage horse in Central Park might rear up and accidentally strike my skull. I don’t like to walk after a heavy rainstorm because I worry a damaged tree might fall and kill me. It might seem ridiculous, but I once pulled a friend out of the path of falling ice. So you never know.

In 2020, when constant risk assessment became necessary, the logic behind my dad’s stories bloomed. Surely William Holden would have contracted Covid after going to the 21 Club for martinis or schmoozing with strangers, maskless, on a cross-country flight. My siblings and I double-masked before it was in vogue and biked to work to avoid the subway. This level of caution was exactly what our father had been training us for all our lives.

And yet my father seemed strangely oblivious. He did things like make several trips daily to the grocery store for items such as a single onion. Hadn’t he listened to his own stories? Didn’t he know how the great actor would have died in November 2020? Were these stories simply my dad’s way of overcompensating for his own faulty radar for danger, hoping I might grow up to know better?

William Holden died on Nov. 12, 1981, taken out by a taxi, when he didn’t look both ways before crossing the street. Every time I jaywalk, I can almost hear a voice in my head, a voice uncannily like William Holden’s, telling me I should be more careful.

What’s the real story of how William Holden met his end? I myself have trouble knowing the truth. On Nov. 12, 1981, William Holden drunkenly slipped on a rug and hit his head against a table. He bled to death from a forehead wound.

Really. That’s the true story.

Still, I feel in my heart that the truth of the great star’s death is so much stranger, so much darker, so much more shocking. When danger approaches and the hairs on my neck stick up, I realize that what my father meant to teach me was that life is fragile. Don’t believe me? Just remember what happened to the great Hollywood star on that terrible night in November 1981.

Alexander Aciman is a screenwriter and journalist in New York.

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