Through Oleg Cassini, for whom she had traveled to New York to work, Machado met Hollywood agent Charles Feldman. “Very big, attractive guy, big womanizer,” she says. One with a big, impressive client list. Just days after meeting Feldman, Machado was out at a nightclub and saw the agent sitting at a table with William Holden. “Charles comes over to the table, and says, ‘Listen, why don’t you come over to our table and have a drink? At least come for five minutes.’ So he introduces me to Bill Holden, and that was it.” The two dated for almost a year. “He was a wonderful man, but no one who I could have anything in common with,” she says. “I’m not an outdoor girl. I can barely swim. I don’t ride a horse.”
Nor is she a drinker. Holden, on the other hand, traveled with a metal suitcase fitted “with foam shapes for bottles, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of scotch and, um, Black Daniel’s?” (Jack Daniel’s, she’s corrected.) “And then we would go to the hotel—‘Room service, please bring up two bottles.’ I mean, he gets up in the morning! Barely brushes his teeth!” Yet, she adds, “I never saw him drunk. I saw him a little drunk, but not really.” She then contradicts herself with a recollection of being on the set of The Horse Soldiers, directed by John Ford and starring Holden and John Wayne. “They were all so drunk, they could hardly get on the set. They drank all the time! Every night after the shoot. I don’t know how they got to finish.”
Holden, separated from his wife at the time, was much older than Machado, and as the father of two sons, he didn’t want any more children. (She says he’d had a vasectomy.) In due course she went back to LaSalle, and stayed married to him until 1965.