CABARET VILLE MAGAZINE. P212. CONT'D FROM P210
Lifestyle of the stars: Visiting Kim Novak
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.
![[The lovely Kim Novak]](kimporcel.jpg)
"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.