LIFESTYLE OF THE STARS. Cont'd.

Actress Kim Novak leads rustic life

She made a batch of chocolate fudge, packed it in a Christmas box and presented it to him in his office. "What's this?" he demanded. When she told him what she had done, "his face blushed and he nearly smiled. I almost saw another side of him. But then he said, 'Get outta here.' " She also saw two sides of Sinatra. She co-starred with him in her first important film, The Man with the Golden Arm, and found him kind and generous. When she was ill, he sent her flowers, along with books by Thomas Wolfe, "which I loved." Novak and Rita Hayworth co-starred with Sinatra in the musical Pal Joey, for which all three were scheduled to perform a song and dance number. "Frank wouldn't come to rehearsals," Novak said. "Rita and I worked hard for two weeks with the choreographer, Hermes Pan. Finally Frank showed up, but he wouldn't rehearse. So we went through the number with Hermes dancing Frank's part. When we finished, Frank said, 'I'll do this and this, I won't do that.' He continued until he had ruined the dance that we had worked so hard on. I thought that was a mean thing to do, especially to Rita." Novak remarked that she had good experiences with directors such as Otto Preminger (The Man With the Golden Arm) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo). But not Joshua Logan on Picnic. "He seemed to think Harry Cohn had forced me on him," she said.

 

 

"He preferred his New York actors." In Vertigo, which marked her strongest performance, she played a woman who was haunted by her dual persona. "The role for me couldn't have been more right," she remarked, "because I was able to use all my feelings of resentment for being made over by Harry Cohn and the studio into a movie star. I was able to use the duality that was going on inside of me." Novak's career dwindled in the 1970s, mostly by her own volition. She didn't like the scripts producers offered, many of whom wanted her only as a sex object.

 

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