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Toronto Star (03/Jun/1990) - She's coming back to say 'thanks'

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She's coming back to say 'thanks'

Kim Novak is taking time off from her job as veterinarian's assistant to make a movie.

The woman who dropped out of Hollywood just when her star reached its zenith says she wants to resume her movie career. But only if the parts are right.

And the part was right for The Children, in which she co-stars with Ben (Gandhi) Kingsley. It comes out later this year.

"I'm back because of unfinished business," she told writer Dotson Rader. "I would like to complete the dance, one nice beautfiul dance. And then I'd like to say 'thank you,' and I'd like to have someone say 'thank you' to me."

No one, she says, ever said "thank you" when she was a contract player in the 1950s and '60s. Sure, they made her a star overnight, but then they (the studio moguls, like director Alfred Hitchcock and producer Harry Cohn) decided she was just a property, a sex symbol they could mold to their wishes.

She grew to hate it. "Hollywood was like a little hothouse," she says. "They were growing special exotic plants — beautiful orchids — which they had certain lights hitting and kept at a certain temperature and showed only in a certain way.

Mountainside ranch

"An orchid is a gorgeous, marvellous flower, but its beauty is unnatural. It's just an ornamental thing. I didn't want to be in a greenhouse anymore . . . "

So, abruptly, in 1966 she ran away. She didn't want to be Kim Novak, movie star, any more; she wanted to be Marilyn Novak, the railroad worker's daughter from Chicago.

So she pitched her tent — figuratively speaking — on the California coast, near Carmel, and began to commune with nature. Before long she began to gather animals around her on a mountainside ranch.

Llamas, goats, donkeys, horses, dogs — all creatures great and small became her life. And, after one disastrous marriage, to actor Richard Johnson (it lasted just months), she vowed that only animals would ever get close to her again.

Then one day one of her horses took sick and she called in a local veterinarian, Robert Malloy, and before you knew it she'd thrown her lifetime bachelorhood vow out the window.

"What impressed me," she recalls, "was that he didn't know who I was, because he had been in vet school working so hard that he never went to the movies or anything.

"I felt I could tell he liked me because there was no other reason. We both loved animals and physically hard work, the outdoors, the woods."

And so, in March, 1978, she became Mrs. Robert Malloy. He was 39, she was 45.

The day of their wedding — in a chapel in the woods, naturally — was the first time he saw her in a dress: that's how far she had retreated from her former life.

After a while she plucked up the courage to return before the cameras, but only for short periods. You'll recall her in The Mirror Crack'd (1980), the four-hour telefilm Malibu (1983), and the night-time soap opera Falcon Crest ('86-87 season).

'Miss Deep-Freeze'

But still, she says, she's first and foremost a vet's assistant. "I go with Bob on a lot of his calls. We care for our animals together."

Novak, 57, last February, is still a platinum blonde — studio boss Cohn didn't like her natural brunette locks — and, says Starweek's west coast correspondent Eirik Knutzen, "the gorgeous face exhibits nary a wrinkle, the long legs are firm and the waist is waspish."

Marilyn Novak operated an elevator and worked as a salesgirl in a five-and-dime before becoming a model in her late teens. She toured the United States as "Miss Deep-Freeze," promoting a line of refrigerators, and when the tour ended in San Francisco she headed for Hollywood to see if she could break into movies.

She had a bit part in The French Line (1954), and before she could catch her breath she was being molded into the new sex symbol. She made a lot of good movies — Pal Joey, Picnic, Vertigo, Bell, Book And Candle, Jeanne Eagels, The Man With The Golden Arm — and some not so good — Of Human Bondage, The Notorious Landlady, The Amorous Adventures Of Moll Flanders — and some awful ones that we'll not name.

But then, of course, she had no control over what she did in those days. So in 1966 she'd had enough of the studio system and said "Farewell, Hollywood".

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