Cinema: A Star Is Made

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The throne room at Columbia Pictures resounded with the whoosh of an outsized riding crop swung in anger. Scepter in hand, striding before two rows of Oscars at stiff attention behind his vast desk, Columbia’s stubby and balding Boss Harry Cohn fumed with the king-sized wrath of the last Hollywood despot who still runs the studio he built. The year was 1953, the object of his wrath Rita Hayworth, Columbia’s reigning love goddess; Rita had flounced out and left the studio with a costly stack of properties bought just for her. Before Cohn’s desk, underlings watched the riding crop and awaited the great man’s edict. If the studio only had another big female star, he grumbled, she could be used to bludgeon Hayworth into submission, or, if it came to that, to take over her roles in the scheduled pictures. Then Cohn announced his decree: “We will make a star.”

What began as an angry gleam in Harry Cohn’s eye now glows from the world’s screens. The star’s name: Kim Novak.

By ancient Hollywood practice, a star is made not just born. Kim Novak herself was virtually invented, the first topflight star ever made strictly to order, for delivery when needed. When Cohn’s underlings found her, she was a small-time model, somewhat overweight and so utterly lacking in acting experience that, as one director put it, “she had never even read the funnies out loud.” Today Kim Novak not only holds full sway where Hayworth once ruled supreme, but she has set a record for going far and fast. After only six pictures, she is the nation’s No. 1 box-office star, an honor bestowed with calculated deliberation by the exhibitors after a close count of the till.

Sex Without Leers. How did it happen? Growls Harry Cohn, a 66-year-old professional ogre dubbed “White Fang” by Hollywood wits: “If you wanna bring me your wife or your aunt, we’ll do the same for them.”

But not even Harry Cohn can conjure up—or do without—the special, ineffable magic of looks and personality that only a star strikes from celluloid. Young (24) and at the top of her form (37-23-37), Kim Novak is an ample (5 ft. 7 in., 125 Ibs.), creamy-skinned girl with classically solid Slavic good looks under a gloss of glamour. Her hazel eyes are long-lashed and deep-socketed; her full mouth pouts ever so slightly; an alabaster pallor sculpts her cheeks; her hair is shaped to the head in a fluffy corona of lavender-rinsed silver platinum. With no effort at all, she generates a kind of sex appeal that is strangely rare in a town where sex is a major product. Marilyn Monroe parodies sex, and Jayne Mansfield parodies Marilyn Monroe. Kim Novak simply communicates sex without leers. She moves in a kind of rapt trance that is oddly provocative because it also seems innocent.

Traffic Jams. Experts have tried to isolate something of the special Novak quality. Says Director Otto (The Man with the Golden Arm) Preminger: “Novak is the way every American girl would like to look, and every man would like to have a girl like that. She is not too sophisticated. She gives you a feeling of compassion.” Says Cameraman James Wong Howe, who shot Picnic: “What makes her interesting is the combination of her classical beauty with a sensual, lush quality.” Says Director George (The Eddy Duchin Story) Sidney: “She has the fa cade and the equipment of a bitch in the long shot. Yet when you look in Kim’s eyes in a closeup, she’s like a baby. There is a fire with the sweetness, a bitchery with the virtue, all in one package.”

However it works, her magnetism draws 3,500 fan letters a week and exerts its tug freely across international borders. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival (where she danced with Rita Hayworth’s ex-husband, Aly Khan), the international press corps virtually ignored other stars in a tumbling pursuit of the blonde American girl who had then appeared in Europe in only two movies (Pushover, Phffft!). Last week, vacationing in the frequent company of an attentive, wealthy Italian businessman, Mario Bandini, 33, Kim created traffic jams on the Roman stamping ground of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.

Heights of Adequacy. Next week Kim Novak will mark a new milestone: the U.S. release of Jeanne Eagels, the first movie designed as her personal vehicle and thoroughly dominated by the character she plays. Until now, she has been shrewdly cast in roles that seemed remarkably varied yet actually made only modest demands on her modest resources. She has played a dizzy platinum blonde (Phffft!), a red-tressed, small-town belle (Picnic), a slum-dwelling B-girl (The Man with the Golden Arm), a golden-haired Manhattan society beauty of the ‘205 (The Eddy Duchin Story). In each picture, the major acting burden fell on others, while Newcomer Novak managed to scale the heights of.adequacy. Jeanne Eagels casts her in the first part that is just beyond her grasp—that of an actress. And not just any actress, but the brilliant, tempestuous Broadway deity of the teens and ’20s, who ran for four years as Sadie Thompson in Rain, lived with tigerish passion, and died at 35 in a gutterdam-merung of hooch and heroin.

Kim attacks the role gamely. To prepare for it, she read everything she could find on Jeanne Eagels. “The first thing I read said she was irrational and sensitive and all the things I sort of am, and how she used to eat pickles in school like me.” Kim was instantly attracted. She plastered her dressing room with pictures of the star (whom she actually resembles), rehearsed while a phonograph played mood music of the ‘203. For sad scenes, an accordionist played Poor Butterfly. But in the picture, Kim proves more kitten than tigress; her tempests rattle not even a teacup. Happily for her admirers, this indifferently fictionalized cinememoir reveals more of Kim than ever before; shedding for a midnight dip with her lover (Jeff Chandler), or wiggling proficiently through a hootchy-kootchy dance in the carnival he runs, she shows that her extraordinary complexion is just as good all over. No matter how art may suffer, all should work out nicely at the box office.

Suffering Psyche. In thrusting stardom upon her, Hollywood has put Kim under a weight of emotional pressure that few young women are called upon to bear. Before every picture, she works herself up to a nervous, racehorse tension and bursts into anxious tears. During production she worries and glooms to the point of nausea. She throws tantrums on the set and off. Says a writer who knew Kim on the way up: “She’s been like a quiz contestant who has won all the money before she’s been asked any questions. Then, every time they ask a question, she’s desperately afraid of losing everything.” Kim puts it this way: “I was good in my first picture and got wonderful reviews. I was afraid I might not be able to live up to it. I felt it could never happen again. Today I’m worried because I didn’t enjoy it on the way up, and now maybe

I’m on the way down/’ Under the goad of this fear, Kim ran herself so ragged while making Jeanne Eagels, and simultaneously preparing for the recently completed Pal Joey, that she landed in the hospital with exhaustion. Says a friend: “Harry Cohn thinks he can make Kim an actress. But it’s a terrible strain on Kim. She knows she isn’t an actress, but she’s ambitious. She cracks up under the pressure.”

Nowadays movie stars come equipped not only with gowns by Adrian and makeup by Westmore but with insight by Freud. Nobody talks more about Kim’s suffering psyche than Kim herself. She has given hundreds of interviews with a couch-side slant, readily analyzes “my inferiority complex” and “my insecurity” and, digging back, rattles on about her childhood as if she were the only adult who ever had one.

Seated with the Jerks. Kim’s childhood, even as recounted by her family, was Spock-marked with classic difficulties. Her birth in Chicago on Feb. 13, 1933, came as a disappointment to her parents, Joseph and Blanche Novak, native Americans of Bohemian parentage, who had prepared only boys’ names for the arrival. The Novaks named her Marilyn Pauline. Joe Novak, a claim clerk for the Milwaukee Railroad, is a melancholy, tight-lipped man whom little Marilyn tried hard to please; she seldom succeeded. Marilyn proved to be lefthanded; her father badgered her without success to use her right hand. “It just makes me sick to see anybody write lefthanded, just makes me sick,” he explains. Even today Father Novak is not altogether pleased with his daughter’s success. Says he, “It’s all well and good that she’s at her best right now, but imagine, say five or ten years from now. What’ll she be then? I would just as soon have her living here and married to a truck driver.”

As Marilyn grew up, she felt herself-in the shadow of her favored sister Arlene, who is three years older. She turned moody and inward, took to her room to scribble poetry—a kind of release to which she has resorted ever since. Recalls Actress Novak: “I was real skinny, real anemic. In school I was always in the last row or next-to-last row, according to the marks. I was seated with the jerks.”

Yet life was not all tears and traumas. The Novaks saw that their two daughters had lessons in dancing, piano, singing and art, sent them to camp each summer. In 1951 the family moved from their Southwest-side flat to a $20,000 one-family house in the Northwest area. Marilyn’s own lot began brightening when she was about twelve. She found a big welcome in the Fairteen Club, a teen-age group sponsored by a Chicago department store, won modeling contests there, was soon modeling for Slenderella, department stores, dress shops. Marilyn and boys discovered each other. “I was getting quite a nice little shape on me,” she says. “I got whistles.”

She went to Chicago’s Wright Junior College, quit after a year and a half to take a full-time modeling job. Soon afterward, at 19, she met and became engaged to “a baron from Germany,” a tall, handsome charmer who was working in his father’s chemical business in Chicago. He gave her a family ring with the baronial crest. Then came another tempting offer: a role as “Miss Deepfreeze” in a countrywide promotional tour with three other girls for Thor appliances. “I jumped at it,” says Kim. When the tour ended in San Francisco, she headed for Hollywood. Several months later, the baron received a farewell note in verse (the only sample of her verse that Actress Novak will quote):

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t come home.

I must, I must, I must stay alone Until I -wind and find my way . . .

First Rites. Just about then, Cohn issued his edict. At a Hollywood party, Marilyn met a Columbia production assistant; he took her to see Maxwell Arnow, then Columbia’s talent chief. Arnow inspected her with a routine but practiced eye, advised her to lose some weight and return. When he met her again by chance in the office of Agent Louis Shurr, she had lost the weight—at least enough for Arnow to see possibilities. He ordered a screen test, soon was excitedly telephoning colleagues: “I’ve got the girl.” Against her parents’ advice (“I never could see that sort of business. I still can’t,” says Mrs. Novak), Marilyn signed a contract starting at $100 a week.

The studio roared into gear. Experts straightened, leveled and whitened her teeth, put her on a rigid diet, redid and dyed her hair, exercised her in a gym and in acting classes, posed her on a tiger rug with a still camera staring down her bodice. One of the first rites was to change her name. Cohn liked the name Kit Marlowe. She insisted on keeping Novak. But the name Marilyn had to go because it suggested another blonde. For two days the new actress was named Kit Novak until she tearfully went to Publicity Director George Lait to plead for a change to Kim.* Remembers Lait: “Honey, 1 said, I had one helluva time to even get Cohn to keep Novak. You go to see him.” Kim went, and charmed the great man into acquiescence.

Lines & Props. Kim’s visual impact was immediate. Fan-magazine editors, leafing through publicity pictures of other starlets, were stopped dead in their tracks by the photograph of Kim on the tiger-skin rug, demanded interviews long before she had appeared in a movie. Columbia’s pressagents, hunting through her biographical questionnaire for extra angles, reluctantly discarded the intellectual approach after examining her answers. To the questions “Do you like to read? What?”, Kim had scrawled, “Prose and poetry mostly.” Then she had added: “I love Shakespeare and good philisophical [sic] books.” But they found that she was a cycling enthusiast.

“This is not much clay for a sculptor —even a fellow with three hands,” says a Columbia pressagent. “But from the bike came a spark.” He concocted the legend that Agent Shurr had discovered her while she was cycling in Beverly Hills. The Novak publicity boomed (and Shurr was besieged at his office, according to the pressagent, “by dozens of dames on bikes”). Says Publicist Lait: “Kim was a great interview because she did exactly what she was told. And she has a cute habit of getting herself set for a still picture, and at the last minute she unbuttons one more button.”

Acting came harder. In tests for Pushover, her first picture, Kim was so flustered that she rushed her lines, and her voice was so low that Cohn complained: “I don’t understand a word she says.” Suggested Production Chief Wald: “Just look at her.” While Acting Coach Benno Schneider struggled to rid Kim of self-conscious mannerisms and to teach her to project her voice, the picture began shooting. “The big problem,” recalls Wald, “was to get her to speak a line and handle a prop at the same time. The director simplified the action, and after we finished shooting, we had to loop [rerecord] lots of her lines.” In one scene she had to slap Star Fred MacMurray. She said tearfully that she just could not bring herself to hit’ anyone. Says Director Richard Quine: “I pleaded and begged and cajoled. Fred begged her, ‘Hit me good.’ She finally did it and went into her dressing room and cried for an hour.”

Not So Soft. She began the first day’s shooting of her next film, Phffft!, with panicky hysterics. Lines had to be rewritten because she tripped over merely pronouncing them. Yet Kim’s impact in her early pictures won Cohn so completely that he ordered a reluctant Director

Joshua Logan to put her in her first big one, Picnic. Logan, used to working with Broadway’s top professionals, objected in vain. “Logan had to put her in Picnic or I’d have taken him off Picnic” says Cohn baldly.

“How did I ever live through it?” asks Kim of Picnic. She was fearful of Logan, awed by such professionals as William Holden. Rosalind Russell and Betty Field, fretful about the fact that her weight had risen again. (“She has the kind of hourglass figure that time runs out on,” quipped one cynic). On the Kansas location near Hutchinson, she went every night to a local Roman Catholic Church to pray that she would be good in the next day’s shooting. Every day she lugged a knitting bag to the set; it was full of toy clowns, teddy bears, holy medals, dolls—all talismans on which she still sets great store. She often exasperated Logan. Repeatedly, she held up shooting by stopping to examine her face in a hand mirror, as if seeking reassurance that she at least really looked like Kim Novak the movie star. “Her only self-confidence is her face,” says a friend. When she could not cry as demanded by the script, an impatient and disgusted Logan grabbed her by the arms and shook her until she burst into tears. The arms turned black and blue. “That’s when I first started getting a little thick-skinned, because I got bruised mentally.” says Actress Novak. “I wasn’t so soft from then on.”

“I Love Love.” She has indeed toughened considerably, thanks also to success, adulation and growing experience. In some ways she is oddly unchanged. She still does not drink or smoke. She says that she has not found it necessary to buy either a fur coat or an evening gown, prefers slacks and sweaters. After three years in $20.50-a-week room at the Studio Club, an establishment for aspiring actresses, she moved last spring to a one-bedroom, $240-a-month apartment done up in lavender (her favorite color). But her toughness shows in the fanatic discipline with which she attacks her work. A stickler for self-improvement, she took singing and dancing lessons for Pal Joey, along with acting lessons that she is still taking, partly at her own expense. She puts in 28 hours a week working through the studio school toward a University of California degree, maintains a B average. For all her chatter of dark psychological wounds (which Kim knows makes good publicity copy), her “sense of inferiority” is not a handicap but a realistic piece of self-appraisal, and she is doing things about it.

On her original studio questionnaire, Kim volunteered: “I love love more than anything!” But it is hard to fit into her schedule. A 37-year-old builder and theater owner named Mac Krim, her steady date almost since she arrived in Hollywood, used to see her seven nights a week. “Then,” he says, “when she made Pushover, we saw each other four nights a week. Now, while she’s on a picture, she won’t go out except on a Friday.” Kim has also dated others, e.g., Frank Sinatra, and she was making purring sounds last week about Italy’s Bandini. Krim wants to marry her, but of marriage Kim says: “I don’t believe in doing too many things at one time and lousing up everything.”

Full Cycle. The tougher Novak has an unpretty side. She has begun throwing her weight around; in her tantrums, there is less of the plaintive whimper and more of the prima donna’s war whoop. Says Co-Star Tyrone (The Eddy Duchin Story) Power tartly: “Confusion between temperament and bad manners is unfortunate.” Retorts Kim: “When things are going wrong, it is a waste of time to be calm.” She has taken to offending lesser studio employees, breaking appointments and stalking out of interviews. During shooting of the final scene in the big musical production number of Pal Joey, she kept a huge company waiting for two hours until she” showed up on the set. Among those cooling their heels: Rita Hayworth.

Last week nobody felt the brunt of the new Novak more than the man who “created” her, Harry Cohn. She has decided—rightly, by Hollywood standards —that, at $1,250 a week, she is grossly underpaid. When Columbia lent her to Producer Preminger for Man with the Golden Arm, the studio charged him (and pocketed) $100.000 while paying Kim a salary of $750 a week. On today’s loanout market, she is worth $250,000 to $300,000 a picture. Yet for Jeanne Edge’s, on which Columbia had to pay $200,000 for Co-Star Jeff Chandler, Kim got only $3,000.

As her new agents went into action, she said: “It will have to be a raise that means something, not a little bit. How many more years will I be able to work? Jeanne Eagels reminded me I’ve got to protect my future.” She added pointedly: “It hasn’t come to the walkout point yet.” Cohn squirmed on his black leather throne. “You know anybody who isn’t hard to control?” he demanded. “They all believe their publicity after a while. I have never met a grateful performer in the picture business.” Will she get more money? “I think she’ll get it,” he growled. “I’m only afraid she’ll ask me to make Kim Novak pictures instead of Columbia pictures.” The star-making process was approaching full cycle. The throne room at Columbia resounded with the whoosh of an outsized riding crop swung in anger.

* The name, now in show-business vogue, came into currency with the hero of Kipling’s Kim, an urchin of Lahore, later with a girl in Edna Ferber’s novel Showboat, so named because she was born on the Mississippi River within sight of Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri. Kim Novak has as good a title to it as Actress Kim Hunter (real name: Janet Cole), not quite so good as Actress Kim Stanley (real name: Patricia Kimberly ReidJ.