Boston Globe (23/Feb/1985) - Kim Novak is having fun at 51
Details
- article: Kim Novak is having fun at 51
- newspaper: Boston Globe (23/Feb/1985)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Chicago, Illinois, Kim Novak, Vertigo (1958)
Article
Kim Novak is having fun at 51
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — The tourist in the tan business suit squeezed past a camera crew in the lavish Caesar's Palace suite to get a better look at the striking blonde in the plush fur coat.
"Oh man, I've been in love with her since I was 16," said the fan, now edging past his mid-40s.
It's an emotion Kim Novak evokes wherever she goes — hotel elevators, restaurants, city streets or on a movie location at Caesar's Palace, where she was shooting "The Man From the South."
Now 51, and with more than 20 films to her credit, she is still best remembered by the postwar generation as the sultry, sexy, sulking blonde of Joshua Logan's hit movie "Picnic" in 1956.
Today, with a face and figure some younger women might covet, she still elicits fond memories from men who adored her three decades ago.
"You'd be surprised how many men come up to her, in elevators or on the street, and say 'I've been in love with you since I was a teen-ager'," said agent Sue Cameron. "She's very flattered; she loves it."
Though Novak enjoys the adulation today, she abhorred it 30 years ago during her "Picnic" years.
"My career came so fast and hard. It was difficult because I felt pushed; I was working all the time and I just wanted to get away," she said of the '50s and '60s when she was one of the industry's leading sex symbols.
She starred in a dozen films in her first eight years in movies including "The Man With the Golden Arm," "Picnic," "Pal Joey" and the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, "Vertigo."
In 1962, she bought a ranch in Carmel, Calif., to help her combat a growing case of Hollywood burnout, and she began cutting back on her movie work.
"I was so insecure then; I just didn't have any control over my life," she recalled in an interview, resting between takes in her hotel suite as the camera crew shuffled around the hallway outside. "The studio told me how to wear my hair and makeup, what clothes to wear, even who I should date to get the most publicity. I constantly resented being made over. Today the industry is so much freer."
The Chicago native was a 20-year-old art student and a traveling Miss Deepfreeze model for a refrigerator ad campaign when she was discovered in Los Angeles.
"The role I portrayed in 'Picnic' was very much the real me. I was frightened and frustrated," she said.
"All of a sudden there I was a superstar and I hadn't lived up to it yet. The image was there, yet I was still a little girl from Chicago. Here were all these great pros exchanging stories (Logan, William Holden, Rosalind Russell), and I really felt out of it. But now I feel like I finally have my own identity."
Novak shifted from talk of the insecure "Picnic" years to plans for an upcoming ski trip with husband Robert Malloy at their Oregon ranch. They met when Malloy, a veterinarian, came to the Novak ranch to treat one of the ranch's animals — llamas, horses, dogs, a donkey and a goat.
They were married in 1976 under an oak tree on the ranch, and Novak said the union has changed her life.
"I think working in films today is much different, much more fun than it was when I was younger," she said. "Possibly a lot of that is my attitude. I've got a good home life, a caring husband and now I can do film work for the fun of it, the enjoyment. It seems much more relaxed, more open."
Life in Carmel includes raising llamas for sale, helping Malloy in his practice and teaching exercise classes at a Boy Scout hall three days a week.
"The older I get the more I like to share my life," she said. "Maybe that's because I was a very private person when I was young."
The Hollywood lifestyle has a certain glamour and appeal that was lacking two decades ago, Novak said, because it was thrust on her then. "The work appeals to me now because I feel I have so much more to offer as a person."
And she has never quit looking at scripts, though she admits it's hard to find something she really wants to do.
She said she took the part in "The Man From the South," one of four updates of old Alfred Hitchcock dramas, out of respect "and a twinge of nostalgia" for the suspense master who directed her in "Vertigo."
The tv movie was shot in Las Vegas in late January for airing later this year.
