The Hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak - 10th anniversary restoration

This episode delves into the complexities and challenges faced by Kim Novak during her Hollywood career, highlighted by a deep dive into her experiences during the making of the film "Vertigo."

1. Kim Novak's career was heavily influenced by studio control and public expectations.
2. Her relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. highlighted racial and social tensions in Hollywood.
3. Novak's roles often mirrored her personal struggles with identity and self-worth.
4. The public and media scrutiny of her appearance in later years reflects ongoing issues with ageism and beauty standards in Hollywood.
5. Her withdrawal from the public eye was a move to reclaim her personal life and identity.

1. Introduction

Karina Longworth reintroduces a restored version of a lost episode, discussing the blend of original and new content.

2. Kim Novak's Early Career

Exploration of Novak's rise in Hollywood, her struggles with her image, and the studio's control over her personal and professional life.

3. Personal Struggles and Public Image

Discussion on Novak's controversial relationship with Sammy Davis Jr., reflecting societal prejudices of the time.

4. Later Years and Legacy

Consideration of Novak's life after Hollywood, including her struggles with health and the harsh public reaction to her appearance in later years.

1. Embrace Authenticity: Like Novak, challenge societal expectations and be true to your identity.
2. Respect Aging: Advocate for a healthier perception of aging, recognizing beauty in all stages of life.
3. Support Mental Health: Encourage open discussions about mental health to destigmatize treatment.
4. Challenge Prejudices: Stand against racial and social prejudices, promoting equality in all interactions.
5. Protect Personal Boundaries: Learn from Novak's experiences to set and enforce personal boundaries in professional settings.

The first episode of You Must Remember This tells the story of actress Kim Novak -- a top box office draw of the late 1950s and the iconic star of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo -- and her painful struggles to assert herself from the mid-20th century through well into the 21st, in a Hollywood that repeatedly sent her the message that she was only valuable for the way she looked, while also insisting that she didn’t quite look good enough. Originally released in April 2014, this episode has been “lost” for almost as long due to copyright issues with its soundtrack. Today, in honor of the podcast’s ten year anniversary, we’re rereleasing this episode with new music, largely re-recorded voiceover, and just enough of the original episode intact so you can hear how far the show has come over the course of a decade.

People

Kim Novak, Sammy Davis Jr., Alfred Hitchcock

Companies

Columbia Pictures

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

Discussions of mental health issues, racial prejudice

Karina Longworth

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Karina Longworth

Hello. You must remember this listeners. What you are about to hear is a new version of our long lost first episode titled the hard Hollywood Life of Kim Novak. For those who dont know, when I started this podcast ten years ago, it was fully diy and in addition to the old timey radio that I think most people see as the podcasts main reference, I was inspired by two trends from the nineties when I was a teenager, mixtapes which were always imperfect and basically existed to illegally distribute music outside of the capitalist structure and culture jamming, which was an underground art movement that involved appropriating music and iconography from the mainstream in order to comment on it. In the spring of 2014, when I was dreaming up this podcast and trying to figure out how to make it, I never thought I would make money off of it.

The most I hoped for was that a few people would listen and maybe one of them would hire me to write a book or do something else with my ability to research and analyze old movies. So while I knew it was illegal to essentially sample pre recorded music to create a score for a podcast, I didnt really think that it mattered much because I thought this show would basically be like a basement tape and no one would sue me because it would be clear to everyone that there was no way for me to make money off of it. That changed really quickly when, after just ten episodes, I was invited to join a podcast network that planned to sell ads. In signing a contract with that network, I had to get my ducks in a row, legally speaking. And so in the late summer of 2014, I sat down to re edit the ten episodes I had already released to remove the copyright music that I didnt have the right to use.

However, the original Garageband project file for this episode had become corrupted and I couldnt easily re edit it. So that is why for the past nine and a half years, there has been no episode. One of you must remember this on podcast apps. So for the podcasts 10th anniversary, which is April 2024, I decided to take the time to restore the episode to preserve as much of the original as I could while re recording parts of it so that I could replace copyright music with royalty free or pod safe music. What you are about to hear combines elements from the original 2014 episode with new elements inserted in 2024.

I resisted the urge to rewrite the original episode extensively, but I did add or alter a word here or there just to try to make sure that I am communicating what I want to communicate, which I was still clearly learning how to do in 2014. Also, I was still learning how to speak into a microphone. As youll hear, my voice sounds quite different now than it did then. I wanted to leave in as much of the original episode as possible so that you could hear how far ive come over the past decade as the show turns ten I dont currently know what its future is going to be, but right now I just want to take a moment to celebrate how far its come since those weeks in 2014 when I was banging my head against a wall, sometimes literally trying to make this thing that would tell the world who I was and what I cared about. I hope you enjoy, and thanks so much for your support.

And now the hard Hollywood life of Kim Novak.

Alfred Hitchcock

You must remember, of course.

Karina Longworth

Welcome to you must remember this, a new podcast dedicated to exploring the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm your host, Karina Longworth. You watch the woman resisting being changed back.

Alfred Hitchcock

Now you have a woman who realizes this is a man who's practically unmasking her.

But that's the plot side of it. The sex, psychological side was when she came back from having her hair made blonde and it wasn't up.

This means she has stripped but won't take her knickers off.

Karina Longworth

That's Alfred Hitchcock talking to Francois Truffaut about the film, which today is widely considered to be both Hitchcock's masterpiece and maybe the greatest Hollywood film of all time. Vertigo.

Alfred Hitchcock

Vertigo. A feeling of dizziness, a swimming in the head, figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror, as created by Alfred Hitchcock in the story that gives new meaning to the word suspense.

Karina Longworth

Vertigo starred Jimmy Stewart as a retired detective who becomes obsessed, first with. With a beautiful, classy, mysterious blonde named Madeline, and then, after Madeline's death, with a shop girl named Judy. He tries to make Judy over into Madeline without realizing that they were the same person all along. The double role of Madeline, the ultimate hitchcockian icy blonde, fetish object. And Judy, a regular working girl undone by insecurities which are desperate but not unfounded, was played by Kim Novak.

It was a personality and identity split with which Novak was pretty familiar. This is how she explained it in an interview with the British Film Institute a few years ago. I think the role appealed to me because it was the resistance of Judy who was, in a sense, me trying to become the Hollywood person, trying to be Madeline, needing to be loved and willing to be made over. Is this it? Is it?

Alfred Hitchcock

You know, if I become her, will you love me? Do you know? You know, and I remember when I played it, it was. I mean, I felt absolutely stripped naked, you know, I felt so vulnerable. When Vertigo was going into production in 1957, Kim Novak was the biggest star in Hollywood.

Karina Longworth

She was 24 years old. She had only been in Hollywood for four years. And her movies were already selling more tickets than John Wayne's Doris days and Marilyn Monroe's combined. But nobody cared much about vertigo when it was first released in 1958, and Novak's star started fading soon thereafter. She gave up living in Hollywood in the mid sixties, married a veterinarian and moved to his ranch in Oregon in the mid seventies, and she played her last film role in 1991.

She's made appearances at film festivals and tributes and whatnot in the interim, but she had been out of the wider public eye for decades until March 2, when the 81 year old Novak presented two awards alongside Matthew McConaughey. At the Oscars. You affected a whole generation of men, got them quite animated with your work in Vertigo. Yeah.

Alfred Hitchcock

Now, here's something that I really love about animation. It's whatever they dream of and they just draw it. There's no limits, there's no boundaries. Total freedom. Absolutely.

Anything goes. Yeah. Well, they work with unshackled minds. They've got so much freedom and it's beautiful to see. Pure creativity, incredible writing.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I gotta take a minute just to say that I'm really glad to be here. It's been a long time. As you can hear in the room at the Dolby Theater, Novak's presence was at least accorded the respect of polite applause.

Karina Longworth

Outside of the room, on the Internet, Novak's appearance instigated an explosion of outrage. But Kim Novak left the Oscars audience in shock as she took to the stage with Matthew McConaughey to present best animated short film and best animated feature film. The 81 year old, who's best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock 1958 film Vertigo, got most of the attention due to the drastic plastic surgery she's had in recent years. Her plumped up cheeks, stretched lips and high brows caused a stir on social media. The impulse to attack Novak's apparently visibly altered face was awful and instant.

But it was followed by a leave Kim Novak alone backlash that was arguably more powerful.

Of all of the defenses of Novak's plight as an oxygenarian former sex symbol, maybe the most notable and sympathetic came from Faran Neme, who blogs as the self styled siren. Neme tried to hypothesize what it might feel like to be 81 year old Novak approaching this situation, she wrote, as. The evening approaches, the anxiety sets in. Harsh lights, you think high definition cameras and a public that remembers you chiefly as the ice goddess whose beauty once drove James Stewart to the brink of madness. So a few weeks before the ceremony, you go to a doctor and he says, relax, honey.

Faran Neme

I have just the thing to make you feel fresh and dewy for the cameras. And you go to the Oscars and the next day you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face. Some aspects of what happened here were unique to our moment, right? The frenzied speed at which Novaks face was eviscerated, the lightning quick pace at which said evisceration was then spun into clickbait. And then the second wave of content in defense of Novak, either shaming her shamers, for argument's sake, or, like Faran's piece, actually offering humanizing context.

Karina Longworth

These are all products of the technology we have right this second and of how we use them now. But the essence of what happened here was as old school as it gets, and it's the type of thing that's been happening to Novak on screen and off for 60 years. Join us, wont you, as we take a look back at the hard Hollywood life of Kim Novak. The future Kim Novak was born Marilyn Novak in 1933 in Chicago. A teenage model, Novak entered a few beauty contests, but she was hardly eyes on the prize about it.

She worked all manner of after school odd jobs, dental assistant, dime store clerk, elevator operator. When she was 20, she earned the role of Miss Deep Freeze and embarked on a national tour posing with refrigerators. The last stop was San Francisco, and the night before Novak was supposed to hop a train back east. A fellow model convinced Novak to come with her to Los Angeles for some r and r when they had blown the $500, they had each saved seductively opening iceboxes. Then they could go back to frozen Chicago.

They had one goal, to swim in the Beverly Hills hotel pool.

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But Marilyn Novak stayed behind. She signed up with a local modeling agency, and they regularly found work for her as a movie extra. Despite the fact that she was, as they frequently reminded her, carrying an extra 25 pounds, Marilyn Novaks big break came on the set of a Jane Russell film, the French Line. Jane Russell was a big star, literally. She was physically larger than the norm at the time and the makers of the french line worried that she looked particularly giant working it in front of a line of typically petite chorus girls.

So director Lloyd Bacon issued a call for plumper potential background girls, and Marilyn Novak got the job. On set, she was spotted by Whit Melnick, a big shot agent who told her that if she could only lose those 25 pounds she could start making some real money in the movies, like even $30 a week. She did lose some weight, but she didn't pursue Melnick's offer. She wasn't that interested in being a star. She really thought she was just biding her time until some guy came along and married her and took her back to the midwest and made a mom out of her.

Melnick and a Columbia exec named Max Arnau had to almost force her to do a screen test. The test was directed by Richard Kline, who would later direct Novak in Bell, book and Candle. The two were engaged for a while but never married. Quine made Novak do the test while wearing an old strapless dress that had been worn in the movie Gilda by Rita Hayworth. The Columbia star whose refusal to work had created the vacancy for which Novak was being considered.

Novak signed with Columbia in 1953. Virtually the last of the contract stars. Harry Cohn was the head of the studio and it wasnt an exaggeration to compare him to a dictator. In fact, legend has it he kept a framed photo on his desk of Mussolini. Harry Cohn made Marilyn change her name because in the branding universe of Hollywood, there couldn't be two marilyns.

So right from the start, she had to become someone different in order to stand out on her own. Cohn wanted to transform Marilyn Novak into someone called Kit Marlowe. The actress's first act of defiance was to resist this, to insist on keeping her family name and to refuse to take on a first name meant to evoke a kitten. Here is a clip from the Legend of Lilac, a 1968 film in which Kim starred as an actress who a tyrannical director, played by Peter Finch tries to mold in the image of the doomed star she's been cast to play. Thank you, but I'm happy with the name I have.

Alfred Hitchcock

Well, I'm not, and neither will the public be, anyway. Whats in her name? Why are you so sensitive? But she wasnt able to stop the studio from changing her look. Her weight was a constant battle that fat Pollock, Cohn called her, even though he knew fully well that Novak was of czechoslovakian descent.

Karina Longworth

Her teeth were capped and her hair was bleached and rinsed lavender. A publicist had come up with the idea while flipping through Vogue, declaring that Novaks life would be shaped into a mauve symphony. All this embellishment and transformation made Novak understandably paranoid about her looks. Shed often hide in her trailer, paralyzed by the fear that her hair and makeup werent quite right or ready. It didnt help matters that Harry Cohn controlled his property, that is, his stars, through threats, frequently reminding his on camera chattel that he made them and he could break them.

Stars were taught to fear what would happen if they stepped out of line as they were being put on pedestals in public. Behind the scenes, they were cut down to size, their confidence eroded, until they believed that they needed the support of the studio just to hold onto whatever security they had in the world that they could barely live, let alone thrive, on their own. We see this dynamic mirrored in this clip from the legend of Lilac. What am I supposed to feel? Feel, you stupid coward.

Alfred Hitchcock

All you've got to do is do as I say and then your feeling will be up on the screen. All I need is your face. I don't want your goodwill or your understanding. It's harder to control someone through intimidation and by hitting them in their inferiority complexes once theyve become a hot commodity. Within three years of arriving in Hollywood, Kim Novak had become the hottest commodity.

Karina Longworth

It was a one two three punch that did the job. She helped Frank Sinatra kick heroine in the man with the golden arm. She danced in lust zonked post war conformity, smashing bliss with William Holden in picnic and in the musical pal Joey. She played the good girl side of a virgin horror triangle with gold digger Sinatra and stripper turned society matron Rita Hayworth. Hayworth was 39.

Her face was already showing the impact of alcoholism, and she was trying to mount a post third divorce comeback. She was also, of course, the star Novak had been recruited to replace. Think of pal Joey as the moment when the torch is passed from one generation of stars hayworths to the next novaks. Unfortunately, Novak wouldnt be able to hold onto the torch for very long, but it was good while it lasted. Across this run, Novaks movies earned exponentially more than what they had cost to make.

And she became so valuable to Harry Cohn and Columbia that they were forced to overlook it when she would say something a little too candid in the press or perhaps go out at night with what they perceived as the wrong kind of guy. Whats to account for Novaks sudden, massive popularity? What was she broadcasting in the mid to late fifties that audiences so fervently responded to? Here again is Farron Smith Neme. It's strange because she didn't have like a sort of like sharply defined personality like Shirley MacLaine being, you know, kind of kooky or Marilyn's like sort of, you know, vulnerability coupled with the dumb blonde image that she was kind of shackled to.

Faran Neme

Or Grace Kelly being the epitome of high class. Novak was almost kind of defined by what she wasn't. She wasn't really like any of those. Novak brought something unique to the screen. She was the master of the almost blank, enigmatic stare.

Karina Longworth

Maybe it's crazy hyperbolic to call NoVak the female James Dean. But theres something to the comparison. Theres a real angst to her screen presence, a kind of petulant pain that you dont get from many actresses of her day. Just as Deans three screen performances, when taken together encapsulate something tangible about being a young man in the 1950s so too do NOvAkS handful of really interesting performances give face and body to the repressed agony of being a young woman in the fifties. There's something very fifties about Novak because the surface is incredible.

Faran Neme

But you get a sense that there's a facade and that feels very kind of Eisenhower, doesn't it? You've got this perfect surface and then in back, there's just this mess of things that need to be worked on. She may have been molded after Marilyn and groomed to replace Rita but unlike the pinups that preceded her Kim Novak rarely seemed to be having fun with her sexuality. If anything, she made being stuck in a beautiful body seem like an unconscionable burden. Of course, a lot of that had to do with what she was asked to do.

Karina Longworth

In each of her three big hits between 1955 and 1957 Novak played a gold hearted bombshell whose outsized sexual appeal causes some kind of panic. But these girl women are hardly in control of their powers. In fact, theyre all wounded birds enthralled to charismatic bad news boyfriends Sinatras golden arm junkie and pal Joey Hustler William Holdens chiseled vagabond whose presence at a small town picnic inspires hysteria. Novaks characters clung to these damaged bachelors as though they had absolutely no other options. And maybe they didnt.

Over and over again, Novaks characters are told their beauty and their bodies are their only sources of value. And then theyre humiliated for trying to assert any kind of ownership over these assets. One example is this scene from picnic, in which Novak, playing 19 year old small town beauty Madge, is pressured by her mom into using her feminine wiles to land a rich husband, whether she likes him or not. When a girl's as pretty as you are, she doesn't have mom. What good is it just to be pretty?

Alfred Hitchcock

What a question. Maybe I get tired of only being looked at. You puzzle me when you talk that way. Majesty's Ella never make love?

Sometimes we park the car by the river.

Do you let him kiss you? Well, after all, you've been going together all summer. Of course I let him.

Does he ever want to go beyond kissing? Oh, mom. Well, I'm your mother, for heaven's sakes. These things have to be talked about.

Do you like it when he kisses you? Yes. You don't sound very enthusiastic. Well, what do you expect me to do? Pass out every time Alan puts his arms around me?

No, you don't have to pass out. But there won't be many more opportunities like the picnic tonight. And it seems to me you could at least. What? Oh, nothing, nothing.

Karina Longworth

The clear implication from the mom is that the daughter should put out so as to assure this rich guy that shes the kind of girl who will be compliant to whatever he wants. In her own personal life. Novak was also expected to at least pretend to be a certain type of girl and only be seen with the right types of men. But by 1957, she was so fed up with all the rules imposed on her that she either stopped caring about conformity or actively chose to rebel against it. At Alma, we know the connection between you and your therapist matters.

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That's hello, alma.com Therapy 60 at a. Party at Tony Curtis and Janet Lee's house that year, Kim Novak met Sammy Davis Junior. At that time, three years after the car accident in which he lost his left eye, Sami had already triumphed on Broadway in Mister Wonderful. But the rat pack wasn't really a thing yet. And in unquestionably racist Hollywood, real movie stardom was proving elusive.

Karina Longworth

Both Kim and Sami struggled to conform to what was expected of them based on how they looked, and both felt like outsiders on the inside. The two were instantly attracted to one another and spent the whole night deep in one on one conversation. The next day, after their meeting had made the tabloid news, Sammy called Kim to apologize. He knew the very idea that Novak had allowed herself to be chatted up by a black man in public would send Harry Cohn into fits. The studio doesnt own me, Kim responded and invited Sammy over to her place for dinner.

So began a series of clandestine dates. The two eventually rented a house in Malibu for their rendezvous. But they couldn't be too careful. Sammy would lie on the floor of his chauffeured car, covered up by a blanket, so that no one could see him in transit and connect him to Novak. And this wasn't pure paranoia.

From the moment Kim signed her contract with Columbia, they had had private detectives on her tail. Kim Novak was playing out this duplicitous chapter in her private life during the back half of 1950, the same time that she was making vertigo. Novak has always said that she had a special connection to the material. Maybe she was uniquely inspired by the Vertigo script to start taking back her own identity. Maybe she was emboldened by the secret she was keeping in her personal life.

Regardless, Kim Novak chose this moment to start fighting back against the controls of the studio. In September of 57, Novak famously held up the start of production on Vertigo, refusing to show up to work until Harry Cohn at Columbia negotiated her contract. It was a huge gamble, and it paid off. The studio caved, and despite a brief skirmish over her wardrobe, Novak initially resisted, wearing the black spike heels and form fitting gray suit that Hitchcock had transposed into the script directly from his own fantasies. The making of Vertigo was, by Hitchcock standards, relatively painless.

The trouble was soon to come. Novak's work on the movie was done by December 1957, and she went home to Chicago to spend Christmas with her parents. By that point, the relationship with Sammy had apparently hit levels of delirium, at least for him. Booked to do a series of shows at the Sands in Las Vegas. One night Sammy told the casino they'd have to find a replacement.

And then he hopped on a red eye to Chicago determined to meet Kims parents and ask for their daughters hand in marriage. He was barely on the ground in Chicago before he had to turn around and fly right back so as to be in Vegas for that nights show. It was totally nuts. The kind of love struck madness that only happens in movies and apparently two people who make movies. And it backfired.

Reporters in Vegas noted Samis absence and put two and two together. Soon word reached Harry Cohn in New York of the impending scandal. About to break in magazines like confidential. Cohn called his assistant Max Arnau in LA to inform him they had a disaster on their hands. The damage control process began but Cohn and Columbia werent able to move fast enough.

2 hours later, the first blind item about an affair between a certain KN and SD hit the New York papers. Harry Cohn had his first heart attack the next morning. Over the next weeks, gossips dispensed with the discretion. Kim Novak is about to become engaged to Sami Davis Junior and Hollywood is aghast. Announced the London Daily Mirror.

Confidential called it the tragic love story of the century and claimed Frank Sinatra had told his friend and Vegas co star Sammy, you're making a serious mistake. At this point, enough was enough. Legend has it that Harry Cohn hired gangsters to drive Sammy Davis Junior out into the desert. Not to seriously hurt the guy, just to put the fear into him. So he got the message that the Novak affair had to be called off.

But Sammy had mob ties of his own who could keep him safe as long as he stayed in Vegas. Eventually, Cohns mobsters and Daviss mobstersworked out a deal. Since the only surefire way to kill the story was to change the subject Sammy would have to marry someone else. Hed have to give up the beautiful blonde top box office draw in Hollywood and hook up with someone more appropriate. Someone like Loray White, a single mom and chorus girl whom Davis had dated a couple of times.

No one was under any illusions that this was romantic matrimony. White signed a contract stipulating a $25,000 rate for one year of marriage. The scandal was thus put to bed. But on some significant level the principals never recovered. Sammy Davis went to his deathbed vowing that Kim Novak had been the love of his life.

Harry Cohn's wife believed the scandal killed him. Two months after the heart attack he suffered amidst the first gossip reports he was dead. Novak quickly bounced back in her romantic life. In fact, the promotion of Vertigo was marred by a scandal involving the gifts she allegedly received from her alleged new boyfriend, the son of the prime minister of the Dominican Republic. But without Cohn around to guide her selection of roles, she struggled.

Vertigo's lackluster box office performance broke Novak's lucky streak, aside from Richard Kein's strangers when we meet and Billy Wilder's fascinatingly vulgar kiss me stupid, in which Kim starred opposite one of Sammy's rat pack cronies, Dean Martin. The next few years brought on a string of duds. Then, in 1966, Kim Novak's La home was endangered by mudslides. She managed to fill a station wagon with some valuables, furniture and paintings. And she was taking a final armful of things to the car when she looked up and saw that journalists were starting to gather in her driveway.

A handful of newspaper men, a truck from NBC. Shocked by their presence, she dropped a sculpture which smashed to the ground. Her eyes swelled with tears. And according to one of her biographers, right then and there, she vowed, I'm getting out of Hollywood and I won't come back. Ever.

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Karina Longworth

She did leave Los Angeles, moving first to Big Sur and then, after marrying veterinarian Bob Malloy in 1976, up to his ranch in Oregon. It took her another 25 years to officially stop working, although theres not much on her filmography of note after 1968, when she starred in Robert Aldrichs totally Loony, the legend of Lila Clare, a kind of end of the haze code sploitation thriller come remake of Vertigo Lila Claire cast Novak as a mousy girl whos essentially forced to star in a megalomaniac directors movie as the dead Marlene Dietrich esque bisexual star whom he loved and whom she resembles. The legend of Lilaclair has been virtually forgotten, and maybe for good reason, although once again it gave Novak a chance to rehearse her own real life struggles to assert herself in an industry that routinely dehumanized her. Heres another clip from the Legend of Lilac Claire, in which dialogue between Novaks actress and Finchs director doubles as an encapsulation of what Kim herself had experienced in the studio system. Who are you?

I'm somebody that you wanted to make love to. Some people might think that had a certain amount of responsibility. Oh, a day. You don't own me. You don't control me.

Alfred Hitchcock

On the contrary, you be on the set at 09:00 in the morning and do exactly as I say, because you're an illusion. Without me, you don't exist. You're nothing. Do you understand? Nothing.

Karina Longworth

If the question sparked by the 2000 414 oscars was what happened to Kim Novak, well, here's what we know. She worked the tribute circuit in the late nineties when Vertigo was restored and re released, and then largely slipped out of the public eye for the next 15 years, popping up for the occasional interview or film festival. In 2006, she had a serious horse riding accident, suffering broken ribs, a punctured lung and nerve damage. Then four years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2012, she appeared on stage a few doors down from the Dolby Theater in a conversation with Robert Osborn that was later aired on TCM.

In that conversation, she admitted to having been diagnosed as bipolar and cried, talking about the production of her final film, Liebstrom, directed by Mike Figgis. Its possible some of her changed appearance could owe to these very real health problems. Its also possible that after an entire life of being told that she had to be made over in order to be accepted in Hollywood, she internalized the mandate to transform herself. We all know defying nature is a slippery slope. We learned it from the movies.

Faran Neme

Any reminder of your imperfections just gets magnified in your brain. And I had always found that really sympathetic about Kim Novak. And so especially the day after the oscars, I was just, I was so indignant that people were going after her about that. I was like, no, don't you know that she's always been insecure? After she wrote her blog post on Novak, Farron was tipped off by a reader, the writer Dan Callahan, to an interview Novak had given a few months earlier in which she acknowledged that she had gone to see a plastic surgeon and regretted it.

She wanted a fresh look, but, quote, I didn't want to do anything major, end quote. A doctor suggested fat injections to add fullness to her face. She said that was absolutely crazy. When I think about it now, you spend all your time trying to get rid of fat. I love the hollow kind of cheekbone look, Novak says.

So why did I do it? I trusted somebody doing what I thought they knew how to do best. I should have known better. But what do you do? We do some stupid things in our lives.

I mean, you pay to look worse. You pay money for that. We know Hollywood is a tough place for aging actresses. We know most of them end up doing something artificial in order to stall the aging process or to foster the illusion of eternal youth and beauty. So why did Novaks altered appearance cause such an uproar?

Karina Longworth

Maybe its because her whole career seems to have been defined by that push and pull between wanting to be appreciated for who she was, for herself, and the pressure to conform to an imaginary ideal or just straight up transform into someone else. Or maybe its because it seems to go against the one thing that, at her peak in the 1950s, really made Novak stand out. On the one hand, she's got this very dramatic beauty, but she doesn't feel, I watch Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, who are also big stars in that period, or even Sophia Loren, and they're just, they're so beyond, like mortal women. But you look at Kim Novak and there's something relatable about her. It's a rare quality in a screen beauty where you look at her and you think there's a reality to this woman and to the way she's dealing with her beauty.

One final note. While Novak has frequently acknowledged that Harry Cohn forbid her from being seen with Sammy Davis Junior, she's never publicly acknowledged that her close friendship with Sammy, as she's called it, was sexual. Maybe the sheer fact that we expect famous women to disclose details of their sex lives is part of the problem.

Thanks for listening to, you must remember this. This week's guest stars included Faren Neme, who blogs at self styledcyron dot blogspot.com. Join us next time for another story from the secret and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm Karina Longworth. Good night.