Why Humphrey Bogart Claimed William Holden Was Trying To Kill Him On Set

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When it comes to Hollywood legend, the feud between unlikely leading man Humphrey Bogart and box office great William Holden is no secret. Despite years of publicly obvious tension, the truth about their beef didn't come out until 1972, when Holden, by then an Oscar winner, appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show."

After telling Cavett some great stories about classic Hollywood productions, the subject of the interview turned to Holden's working relationship with Bogart. "There's a rumor [that's] been around the business that Humphrey Bogart and you got in a fight one time," Cavett says, asking if it's true. Surprisingly, Holden jumps straight into a Bogart story from over 30 years ago, about a stunt gone wrong on the set of the 1939 gangster film "Invisible Stripes."

"I think I almost killed him," Holden admits, deadpan enough to elicit audience laughter, "But it was accidentally!" In the Warner Brothers film, Bogart plays an ex-con and leader of a criminal enterprise, while Holden is the younger brother of a recently released prisoner tempted to return to a life of crime. Holden explained that he had to drive a motorcycle with a sidecar for the film, and it "had a shimmy in the front wheel." The actor said he had experience with motorcycles at the time, but that the one on set was simply "a bad machine." Here's how the story went, according to Holden:

"So Bogart got out. He said, 'I'm not riding with that crazy so-and-so.' He said, 'He's liable to kill me.' So a stunt man got in and sure enough, we turned the corner and went right through a brick wall. The whole gear in the front broke."

Bogart apparently took this as proof positive that Holden wanted him dead, to which Holden says he replied, "I had to go through the brick wall! You think I'm immune to bricks and you're gonna get away with it?" Holden was in good humor as he talked about the incident in 1972, reframing the anecdote as a funny story rather than a potentially frightening stunt gone wrong.

Despite his apparent insistence that Holden was trying to kill him, the accident wasn't enough to keep Bogart from working with the actor again fifteen years after "Invisible Stripes." The pair reportedly butted heads again while working on 1954's "Sabrina," in which they played brothers who both caught the attention of Audrey Hepburn's titular character.

In the book "Audrey and Bill," author Edward Z. Epstein explains that Bogart was irritated by Holden and Hepburn's relationship, at one point provoking a physical altercation with the former which ended with crew members pulling the two men apart. According to Epstein, the trouble came when Bogart accused Holden of drinking too much on his lunch break, saying, ”Methinks the lad hath partaken too much of the grape."

The "Sabrina" set sounds like a nightmare, with Bogart reportedly complaining about Holden's cigarette smoke, making fun of his dyed hair, and nicknaming him "Smiling Jim." In addition to his male co-star, Bogart was reportedly not especially keen on director Billy Wilder and on Hepburn, who was still new to Hollywood at the time but had already earned acclaim for "Roman Holiday." According to "Audrey and Bill," Bogart had several cast and crew members over to his dressing room for a nightcap after the first day's shoot — but pointedly excluded Hepburn, Wilder, and Holden. The trio had their own celebratory drinks, and Bogart was soon calling them "Paramount bastards."

Other points of conflict Epstein notes include a scene rewrite and a (possibly one-sided) war over close-ups. The way biographers tell it, Bogart seems to be the paranoid instigator in most of these run-ins, and at one point on the "Sabrina" set, he even yelled, "I want this sabotage to end!" In Barry Paris' 1996 biography "Audrey Hepburn," sources also claimed that Bogart was convinced Hepburn was "conspiring with Holden against him" because his two co-stars were dating at the time.

If the late, great actor seemed extra territorial with his time and spotlight during the "Sabrina" shoot, it may have been in part because he sensed it was running out. By the next year, Bogart's health began failing, and he passed away in 1957 after enduring a painful case of metastasized esophageal cancer, according to biographers Ann Sperber and Eric Lax (authors of "Bogart"). At his funeral, filmmaker John Huston commented on Bogart's love of sparring with Hollywood types, concluding that his barbs "were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit where real injuries are done."

You can watch "Sabrina" now on MGM+, Hoopla, and Fubo in the U.S. "Invisible Stripes," meanwhile, is available to rent or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango.