Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

r Fame Cloaks the Lonely Heart ( Continued from page 43) herself — and privacy is a luxury she cannot afford. She is beautiful — and must slave to make the world forget or at least ignore it. She has glamorous clothes, yet she has neither the time nor even the desire to wear them. She has no time for anything that is frivolous or dilatory, that is not work or the preparing for work. Today she is caught up in a feverish drive to earn the fame that is already hers — and in that she has no time to live or to love. Kim Novak’s star has risen far beyond the heights envisioned by the little dreamer of Sayre Street. And Kim Novak is consumed with an unrelenting need for Kim, the actress, to catch up with Kim, the star. Phenomenally, with only six pictures behind her, Kim is starring in the “Jeanne Eagels” story, a difficult dramatic role coveted by every top actress in town. Immediately thereafter Miss Novak, who has never sung or danced professionally, is joining professionals Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth in “Pal Joey.” As a result, she is working too many hours a day, both on and off camera. “It’s now or never,” Kim says. “Things vvon’t wait. I’m not bucking for anything. I’m just trying to do the best job I can.” Perhaps the reason for this is that Kim still feels left out. In her own mind she does not belong to the group in which she now lives — the group of talented, able people, the real craftsmen of the movie industry. Desperately she is trying to be one of them. Others may be as well known as she, but they have more ability. “Someone else could just step into ‘Jeanne’ and do it right,” Kim says. “But I have to work. I have to catch up with my fame.” Unfortunately, Kim is at a disadvantage. She didn’t start as one of the dedicated; movies fell into her lap without half trying. “I never starved to act,” she says. “I never painted scenery. This wasn’t a burning thing from childhood for me, as it has been for so many others. I didn’t fight for it. But today it’s in my blood, and I want it to stay.” To Kim’s friends it seems as though the contest is an inner one — Kim against herself; Kim against her feelings of inferiority; Kim against her fears of never being good enough. They are afraid her standards are too high, that she expects too much. They have seen her become ill with fright and anxious with worry over a new role. Her friends are concerned, and rightly so. Kim is driving herself at an inhuman pace. Mac Krim was one of the first to speak out. “Look, Kim,” he said, “your health comes first. The human body will only take so much.” But Kim doesn’t listen. “I can’t help it,” she says. “I have to do this now. After ‘Jeanne Eagels’ I’ll take it easier.” This is what she said after “Picnic.” This is what she said after “The Eddy Duchin Story.” Mac thinks that this is what she will say after “Pal Joey.” What Kim seems to fear as much as not making the grade, despite all her hard work, is not being wanted by the public after a while. She is obsessed by a feeling of impermanence. It is actually a basic disbelief in her own popularity. People don’t really like her, she reasons; they just think they do — now. The fear wells up in her stronger when she imagines that at the height of her artistic achievement she will be box-office zero. All the work will have gone for nothing. It does no good to point out her fabulous success to date — how she was polled number-one box-office star by Box Office Magazine itself. Her first reaction was simply, “Ridiculous! It couldn’t be true!” Then, when she finally believed that it was true: “Do you realize, now all I can do is go down?” Not, however, in the experienced opinion of producer-director George Sidney who’s directing Kim Novak in both “Jeanne Eagels” and “Pal Joey,” and foresees a long and sparkling future for her. “Like Jeanne Eagels, Kim Novak is a natural,” he says. “She has that golden thing you can’t give anybody if it isn’t there. Kim was born with the magic called talent. “We wouldn’t have made the ‘Jeanne Eagels’ story without Kim,” Sidney says. No other actress was considered for the title role in the picture he describes . as “the story of the rise and fall of a meteor who came out of nowhere and blazed across the sky too fast and broke into a thousand pieces. That was Jeanne Eagels. “Kim is in essence very much like her. Kim has depth and with it the same kind of spirit, the freedom and abandon, the same latent ability that made Jeanne Eagels the great actress of the American theatre.” But although “Eagels” is in the vernacular an “Oscar part,” Kim says she isn’t driving for an Academy Award. “I don’t believe in making goals. Then you’re just disappointed. But whatever I do, I give everything. That’s the way I am. I can’t understand anybody doing any job and not doing the best she can.” Which is all too true, Kim’s friends say, of “Kim, the perfectionist.” An Evening with ELVIS PRESLEY e DINAH SHORE: Mother of the Year • Pop tells on GEORGE GOBEL JIM LOWE: Newest Singing Sensation all in the April TV RADIO MIRROR at all newsstands W a “I Mac K’im learned early in their acquaintance how determined Kim can be c( about any project. Mac plays polo and tl Kim, who’s mad about horses, would ride w along and cool off the horses with him. h; One day she insisted on hitting a ball ; ti off a horse. j[ “Oh no you don’t,” he said. f “If you do it, I can,” Kim insisted, fi Whereupon she grabbed a helmet and a S mallet and took off — right over the horse’s n head. “Kim took a nasty spill. She was bruised i y and shaken up, but she insisted on re y mounting immediately. Not many girls v would do that. This I liked very much,” i Mac recalls. Ironically enough, it was the same de I termination — with another goal — that was to take Novak out of Mac Krim’s life so much of the time later on. “Kim is so conscientious about her work — I can’t tell you. At dinner Kim’s studying her script. Riding along in the car, she’s reading her script. Before she started ‘Jeanne Eagels’ Kim was studying dancing for ‘Pal Joey’ four hours a day. When 1 1 picked her up at night, the kid would come limping out of the studio.” “Take your shoes off,” Mac would say when Kim crawled wearily into the car. And as he recalls now, “She would have Band-Aids on her feet, and blisters. They would be bleeding.” “Nobody works as hard as Kim,” agrees Norma Kasell, Kim’s secretary and her long-time Chicago friend, who first encouraged a shy, insecure teenager to take up the modeling that eventually brought her to Hollywood. “Kim would dance so long and so hard, she’d dance herself right out of her shoes and not even notice. Kim would stay with a step until she got it if it took all night. Kim loses herself completely in whatever she’s doing, and it has to be right — exactly right.” Kim is a brutal critic of her own performances. In a projection room she will agonize over even a wrist movement that appears awkward to her. When a reviewer of one of her earlier pictures remarked that Kim essayed such-and-such role “and looked beautiful throughout,” Kim was in tears. “Who cares about looking beautiful throughout,” she said. For Kim, her beauty is just one more obstacle in proving she’s an actress. When she isn’t working before the cameras, Kim takes drama lessons from Benno Schneider at the Columbia studio from ten a.m. until noon, dancing lessons all afternoon, singing lessons from seven to eight p.m. (or before ten a.m.) . Two evenings weekly she spends four hours working with Batomi Schneider’s drama class. The other three evenings she usually rehearses for the class. Dinner? Often a hot cup of soup and a hamburger she picks up at Googie’s en route home to change clothes. “If I fix something at the apartment, I relax and let down. This way I don’t lose my momentum,” explains Kim. “When I let down, I let down all the way. Then I can’t do anything more. I have to keep right on going now. It’s the drive that keeps you going.” However, for all Kim’s “drive,” the physical hardships, long hours and loss of sleep almost caught up with her. The studio had been working against time from the beginning, to finish by the first of March in order to keep commitments with Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth for “Pal Joey.” Costumed scantily as a hootchy-kootchy dancer in the carnival scenes, Kim worked during rain sequences and freezing nights. 68