In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (47 page)

Studio executives at Columbia Pictures, where Novak was under contract, sought to put tight reins on her social life, but she dated willfully—whom she wanted and when she wanted.

In her first three years in Hollywood, Novak starred opposite the likes of Jack Lemmon, Fred MacMurray, Tyrone Power, and both Holden and Sinatra. There had been a romantic affair with Sinatra; Cary Grant was bewitched and wooed her as well.

In the summer of 1956, NBC premiered
The Steve Allen Show
, a variety show timed to compete against
The Ed Sullivan Show
on rival CBS. Allen gathered an eclectic group of stars for his show’s debut: Vincent Price, Dane Clark, Wally Cox, Kim Novak—and Sammy Davis, Jr. Sammy fell hard for the young actress with the soulful brown eyes. He could not take his eyes off her. But an open courting of Novak was out of the question. He would have to play by a discreet set of rules. He was hardly intimidated; rather, he was quite determined. When odds were wildly stacked against him, he only sensed additional thrills. “The white-woman thing was his way of saying, ‘I’m just a little shorter than Sinatra,’ ” says Cindy Bitterman.

Kim Novak’s reviews for her performances onscreen were not always positive. There were those who believed she often glided along merely on the arch of her beauty. But she managed to outrun the reviews. And it certainly mattered little to the public, or to Hollywood, that she lacked formal training. She had Harry Cohn behind her, and Cohn, the powerful head of Columbia studios, was determined to make her a star.

She was born Marilyn Pauline Novak on February 13, 1933, in Chicago. Her family was close-knit and Catholic. After high school she worked a series of jobs, among them elevator operator and clothing salesgirl. By her teen years young Marilyn Novak had sprouted up. Her height made her feel gawky. She was besieged with feelings of insecurity. At home she posted a sign in her bedroom window: “
Bring your sick animals to me.” She spent a great deal of time alone, writing emotional poems, ruminating about the outside world, its mysteries
and secrets. Her mother, Blanche, worried about her, so much so that she took her daughter to see a psychiatrist. Apparently, the visits proved fruitful enough to boost young Marilyn’s self-esteem. She sought out modeling jobs. The modeling agents quickly saw potential; her gawkiness had turned to sexiness.

At first the modeling assignments, in and around Chicago, were small. But she had a presence, and striking features. She was selected “Miss Deepfreeze,” a plum honor for an aspiring model. She traveled the country, posing in front of gleaming new refrigerators. While she was in California, talent scouts from Columbia studios took notice, and did so at a propitious time.

Rita Hayworth had been a longtime star at Columbia. In the 1940s she compiled a string of memorable screen performances, among them
My Gal Sal
,
Gilda
,
The Lady from Shanghai
,
Cover Girl
, and
You’ll Never Get Rich
. In the latter, she held her own dancing—very nicely, having been a professional dancer since the age of twelve—opposite Fred Astaire. Hayworth, red-haired and beautiful, had a sweet sexiness. Her picture in
Life
magazine on August 11, 1941—sitting upright on her bed at home, dressed in nighttime silk, cleavage showing, plenty of light in her eyes—made thousands of doughboys swoon and became an instant pinup classic. “Love Goddess,” she was called. (World War II soldiers would affix the picture to one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. When told of it, she could think only of the death and dying, and broke down in tears.) Harry Cohn, feeling that he had made Hayworth’s career, rebelled when she started wishing for a public life less intrusive than what the studio imagined for her. Cohn, one of the original founders of the studio, and a man with a notorious temper—he had been given the nickname “White Fang”—did not approve of the men she dated and slept with, who were often her costars. Nor did he approve of the men she married. When Hayworth left her first husband, she became engaged to pretty-boy Victor Mature. But she fled the engagement to marry, in the fall of 1943, another lover, Orson Welles. She found much in common with Welles, whose own independent streak was legendary. But Welles’s appetites—in matters of the flesh as well as art—were huge. There were infidelities, tears in her lonely bedroom. In 1949 she married again, this time Aly Khan, a playboy and a prince. Khan merely pushed her toward despair again, and the marriage unraveled. In 1953, Hayworth married Dick Haymes, a singer. Cohn howled at his minions about Hayworth, who, amid the breakup of her marriages, kept demanding more money for the roles thrown her way. She was a tough lady, and yet, it is a wonder that Hayworth held to her sanity. The early years of her life had been torturous. Her father had forced himself upon her in her youth. She was all smiles and composure for the cameras, but the pain inside was unbearable. She felt no one seemed interested in getting to know
her
, her soul. Over time, she grew depressed. Cohn
began to feel that Hayworth was a flighty actress, a star ungrateful for his having guided her through the tricky lights toward stardom. Time and time again she willfully exasperated him. And Harry Cohn was not a man to exasperate. He often threatened legal action against her. Finally, he told studio executives he would replace her.

Harry Cohn giveth, and Harry Cohn taketh away.

Kim Novak would be his new love goddess, his new Rita Hayworth. Cohn told Novak to hurry along those voice lessons, dance lessons, and singing lessons. She was a star; the public had anointed her; now she must make an attempt to become an actress.

It did not take long, however, for Harry Cohn and others to realize that Kim Novak had not quite left her insecure Chicago childhood behind. On movie sets she cried and threw temper tantrums. She seemed befuddled by her own fame. In a 1956 exhibitors poll, she was the number one box office attraction. She had looks, certainly, and mystery, but it was a mystery created by the studio. Becoming a star before learning how to act was hardly a sin, but it could take a toll. The train was hurtling along, leaving her no time to catch up to it. In the tunnel of Hollywood magic—soundstages and whistles—she was already aboard. Mindful of the ease in getting the ticket, she was forever wary.

Still, the more one looked at the Novak phenomenon, the more perplexing it could appear. She seemed to breeze between intensity and nonchalance about her career. Ezra Goodman, a
Time
magazine writer, was assigned to write a profile of the actress during her meteoric rise. When he had gathered what he deemed enough material, he still felt confused about her, so he took his notes to a Beverly Hills psychoanalyst. A curious detour for sure, but he had a story to write. The psychoanalyst studied Goodman’s material, then finally confided to him that Novak was much like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, products of the 1950s, buxom beauties best left beyond the yardstick of intellectual probing. In essence, they were all dreams, the fancies of men, images upon the screen. “
And in the Fifties,” came the report from the psychoanalyst, “with their pronounced loss of identity, the most popular movie stars are pudding-faced, undistinguished girls, not particularly talented—like Monroe, Mansfield and Novak. Their undistinguished background appeals to most people. These girls have no father or mother, figuratively speaking, and sometimes literally. They seem to come from nowhere.” The assessment seems too brittle, overlooking, as it were, one fact: they were gorgeous women, and gorgeousness played like honesty on the big screen. Such beauty couldn’t be a lie!

Kim Novak had a father, all right. He lived in Chicago, and he put movie posters of his daughter on the basement walls. Harry Cohn wanted to be her father—figuratively speaking—her Svengali. She would not have it, even if she was a creation of the public and Cohn, the twin forces that had turned her into
such a seductive presence in the rococo theaters of America. Onscreen, Novak seemed tough yet vulnerable. Her eyes told stories. Richard Quine, a onetime actor turned director—he cast Novak as a gangster’s moll in his 1954 film
Pushover
—believed Novak possessed “
the proverbial quality of the lady in the parlor and the whore in the bedroom.”

She sent money she made from the movies back home to her family and asked her parents to keep her life as private as they could. Fame had been pushed upon her as with a velvet pitchfork. She rented a house in Malibu. Evenings she could listen to the ocean. And she also pondered the low pay scale female stars suffered under compared to male stars. She considered it unconscionable to keep quiet about the disparity. So she complained to Harry Cohn.

Against the mirror of self-deceiving Hollywood, her strength was believed to be but naïveté—the young lass taking on the great and feared Cohn.

For public consumption, she was known to be dating a quiet man who had construction interests and eshewed the limelight. But at night she was gliding by the palm trees on her way to yet another secret rendezvous with Sammy Davis, Jr.

With Sammy, there was plenty to talk about. He also had a Cohn-like figure in his life, Will Mastin, and he couldn’t shake him. So they talked about breaking free of the forces that hemmed them in. The world was often cruel, small-minded; together, they commiserated. They fortified each other. She loved that he was part of a trio, that blood ties were always with him. She snuck into his home often disguised and wearing gaudy wigs, which were easily obtained from studio makeup departments. “There were columns upstairs at Sammy’s house,” says Annie Stevens, wife of Morty Stevens, who arranged music for Sammy. “All of a sudden, you’d see Kim doing a sexy pose around a column.” She remembers another visit: “Sammy and Kim had been in the kitchen, on the floor, making out. Kim’s wig fell off.”

Novak sat and ate collard greens and pork chops prepared by Sammy’s grandmother Rosa, who was now happily moved to the West Coast and living with her Sammy. For Novak, the word “family” carried precious weight, and even if Sammy didn’t quite understand his, he tried to honor the majesty of it by pulling his grandmother close to him. Since she came from inner-city Chicago, the world of Negroes was not foreign to Novak. Around Sammy and his family she beamed. Rosa adored her, thought she was down-to-earth, without airs. Sammy spun records for Novak, pulling them from his vast album collection, bopping about his home like a nightclub host. The actress folded her legs beneath herself and listened as he riffed, on and on, about life, movies, music, her Chicago, which he knew, the way he knew so many cities across the great vast American landscape. She told him he must meet her family.

It was, nevertheless, a dangerous liaison.

Arthur Silber, Jr., sometimes drove them around on their furtive missions and getaways. They ducked in the backseat of the car, giggling, kissing. The home of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis was always a safe haven because Leigh and Curtis were friends, and always discreet. “They were very much ‘together,’ ” Leigh would remember. “And very compatible.”

All his life he swam toward dangerous waters. Kim Novak was exactly someone Sammy was not supposed to have. The things he saw with one eye would have blinded the nocturnal ambitions of others. So there they were, on the beach in Malibu, at nighttime. Here is proof that the movie camera adored Kim Novak
.
(
© THE WASHINGTON POST. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.
)

And so they carried on their underground affair. Her movies; his famous nightclub act. They had much to smile about. Novak told certain friends secrets. If they betrayed those secrets, she never spoke to them again. There was a Garboesque quality about her. (Sammy addressed the affair in
Yes I Can
. But it was a mere four pages, and much of that a mixture of his sometimes Sinatra-like machismo and his anger against Negro newspaper columnists who had tried to expose the affair.)

“He was so enamored of her,” remembers Jerry Lewis. “I said, ‘They’ll cut your knees off and you’ll never dance again. Do you understand what you’re doing?’ He said, ‘Yes, she’s the best thing in my life.’ I said, ‘You can have any blonde out there. Why her?’ He said, ‘Because I didn’t ask for it.’ ”

And, of course, that was true: everything he had, he had to claw for, chase down. But there she was, Kim Novak, pursuing him, wanting to be with him, lying next to him. He did not have to woo. He did not have to send the jewelry. She wanted him. Not Poitier, not Sinatra, not Belafonte.
Him
. The little weasel. The little nigger. Ha ha ha.

In 1957, Novak won the coveted role of Jeanne Eagels in the movie of that name. Her name would appear above the title. Eagels, born in 1894, had been onstage since the age of seven. She was a stunning Hollywood beauty and an admired actress. She was also a heroin addict. In 1929, she died from an overdose. There was haunting drama in the life of Eagels, and for Novak to be offered the opportunity to portray her spoke well of her rising stature in Hollywood. “George Sidney wanted Kim to do
Jeanne Eagels
, a very demanding role,” says Luddy Waters, who would become Novak’s dialogue coach. “We had new dialogue every single day. I used to meet her at five-thirty every morning. She was living in Malibu.”