The Guardian Weekly

Kim Novak on the vertigo of fame

Vertigo made her a star, but she was too fragile for fame. The actor opens up about art, mental health, Hitchcock and dating Sinatra

- Kim Novak: Her Art and Life is available now SIMON HATTENSTON­E IS A GUARDIAN FEATURES WRITER

Kim Novak apologises for the mess. And, to be fair, the studio at her Oregon home is fabulously messy. Behind her as we Zoom are a couple of canvases she has been working on; to the left and right, all sorts of all sorts. At the back of the room, her rescue dog, Patches, lies on a sofa, half snoozing, half listening. Occasional­ly, Sadie Ann, her husband’s pudelpoint­er, wanders by.

Novak, who turned 88 earlier this month, is so much more than a Hollywood legend. The star of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a wonderful artist, a mental health activist (she is proudly bipolar), an anti-bullying campaigner, a vet’s assistant and one of the greatest life forces I’ve spoken to.

It is less than three months since Bob Malloy, her second husband, died. And here she is getting on with stuff, painting her way out of the blues, as she has done so often before. Now she is publishing a beautiful book of her art, dedicated to Malloy, accompanie­d by a few words that nod to rather than scrutinise the big events in her life. There are tender portraits of her parents and the many animals she has helped and harboured (Malloy was an equine vet), swirling surrealist landscapes in which creatures merge with the skies, and anthropomo­rphised trees dancing branch to branch.

“Painting’s always been there to rescue me. Since Bob passed, I’ve done his portrait so I could communicat­e with him,” she says. Novak sounds as husky as ever. They used to say it was a voice fashioned by whisky and fags. She says that is nonsense. “I never smoked cigarettes. Awful stuff – they don’t make you feel good. And I was never a drinker. I smoked grass; I still do. It’s relaxing. I like stuff that gives me images in my head.”

Novak was 21 when she played her first credited Hollywood role in the 1954 film noir Pushover, opposite Fred MacMurray, who was a quarter of a century older than her. A year later, she starred in the Oscar-winning Picnic as Madge, who falls in love with William Holden’s older unemployed drifter. Then, at 25, came the twin roles in Vertigo that defined her Hollywood career – icy femme fatale Madeleine and shop assistant Judy. James Stewart’s retired detective, Scottie, falls in love with Madeleine, then tries to turn Judy into her. Ultimately, it transpires that Scottie is in love with an illusion, a woman who doesn’t exist.

It is a theme that resonates with her – men who want the impossible and try to reshape women into that dream. Even Malloy was a little like that, she says. “It happens in every marriage. My husband, whom I adored, wanted me to be more like how he wanted me to be. But I have too much of an independen­t personalit­y. I’d be off painting and he wanted me to be more of a housewife.”

Novak was born Marilyn Pauline Novak in Chicago to serious-minded Czech parents. Her father had been a history teacher, but became a dispatcher for the railroad in the depression, while her mother worked at a bra and girdle factory. Young Novak was so shy that she hid behind curtains when the family had visitors. They lived in a rough area of the city – a rape and murder hotspot. Her mother kept her in pigtails throughout her childhood and wouldn’t let her wear makeup, to ensure she didn’t attract the wrong sort – or any sort. Her father wanted nothing more than for her to be a good student, while she, picked on by the neighbourh­ood kids, wanted nothing more than to look out of the window and dream.

Novak has said she was raped as a child, but has never gone into details. Does she think her mental health problems are related to that? “I inherited my mental illness from my father, but the rape must have added to it,” she says. I ask how old she was and whether the rapist was known to her. “It was in my early teens by multiple boys in the back seat of a stranger’s car.” She never told her parents about being bullied by other children, let alone the rape.

Novak won two scholarshi­ps to study fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mother signed her up to a youth group to help her get over her shyness, and the head of the club urged her to model. She won a beauty contest and became Miss Snow Queen. On a visit to RKO Studios, she was invited to be an extra in two movies and was signed up by Columbia films, run by Harry Cohn.

Hitchcock had a reputation for mentally torturing his female stars, but

Novak says he was fine with her. It was Cohn who was the monster. He asked her to change her name to Kit Marlow to make her more marketable. She refused, but compromise­d with Kim. Is it true he called her a dumb, fat Polack? “That’s right,” she says. “I wouldn’t have minded if I was, but I wasn’t a Polack. I was from Czechoslov­akia. I’d be waiting for a meeting with him and he’d say: ‘Send the dumb Polack in, send in the fat Polack.” But you weren’t fat? “He just wanted to get a rise out of me.”

When rumours circulated that Novak was seeing Sammy Davis Jr, Cohn decided it would be bad for business if she had a relationsh­ip with a black man. “They refused to let me go near Sammy’s house. And I loved his family – they were so wonderful. Sammy had already lost one eye in an accident and Harry Cohn threatened to take out the other one. I’m sure he would have got his gangster friends to do it. Cohn was definitely in with the mob.”

And did she have a love affair with Davis? It is complicate­d, she says – she loved him, but wasn’t in love with him. Novak was also close to Sinatra, with whom she starred in two fine films – Pal Joey and The Man With the Golden Arm. “Frank Sinatra and I had a nice, friendly relationsh­ip at times.” Is that a euphemism? “It was a bit more than that. I had a relationsh­ip with Frank, yeah. He was a very sexy guy.”

In The Man With the Golden Arm, he plays a vulnerable heroin addict, while in Pal Joey he is a shyster love rat. Which side was truer to him? “The real Sinatra was a very sensitive person. But he was affected by people putting him on a pedestal, so he let that simple, beautiful side of him go. You can get lured into loving yourself too much. That’s why I left Hollywood. I didn’t want to get into all of that. I didn’t want to lose myself.”

One reason she never got carried away, she says, is because of her parents. She did everything for their approval and never got it. Her father saw her first two films, then refused to see any more. He hated the idea that she was a sex symbol. “He was afraid of seeing me in a light that he didn’t want to see me in.” Did that upset her? “Very much. Very much.”

Her Hollywood career was pretty much done and dusted within a decade. By 1966, after a marriage that lasted less than a year – to the English actor Richard Johnson, whom she had met on the set of The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders – she had had enough of the movies. She had struggled with depression since her teens and she feared for herself. “When you’re happy, you’re on a cloud higher than anybody can see. All of a sudden, the cloud turns grey and it starts putting pressure on you and before you know it you’re down at the bottom of the hole again.”

There were other signs that she should get out. She was living on the coast at Big Sur and she lost most of her valuables in a fire. She stayed put, but next came the mudslide that took away her home: “So I rented this van and took what was important to me. I took photograph­s, I took art stuff, and I thought: ‘That’s what’s important.’ The mudslide was telling me: ‘Your time is up; take off while you can. Get ahead of the game. Don’t wait till you’re too old and wrinkled. Then nobody will want you any more.’”

She ended up on the coast of Oregon, met Malloy, married him in 1976 and made a new life for herself. The focus now was assisting him with his work, art, poetry, riding horses, enjoying nature. In the early 00s, Novak was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Since then, she has spent time trying to normalise it, telling people it is just another illness that can be treated (in her case with antipsycho­tics) and not one to be stigmatise­d. She says she didn’t like lithium, another medication, because it made her put on weight. “I don’t want anything that makes me put on a lot of weight. I don’t feel good. My horse doesn’t appreciate it!”

She looks in great nick today – blond bob, purple hoodie, huge yellow-green eyes. But in 2014 her appearance was ridiculed by Donald Trump, who tweeted: “Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!” after she made a rare public appearance to present an award at the Oscars. To be fair, Novak is the first to admit she looked awful that night. “You know when you get insecure and you think somebody can help you? I didn’t want a facelift or anything like that, so I went to a doctor and he put some fat injections in my face. That was the stupidest thing I could have done. First of all, I didn’t need it, because I think my face is too round anyway. But it filled out my cheeks so I looked different.”

A couple of weeks later, she returned to Hollywood to do an interview in front of a live audience. “I didn’t want them to think they had got the best of me and that what they had said was going to take me down, so I went and talked about bullies in the interview.” Since then, she has campaigned against bullying. “There are kids who have taken their lives over what has been said about them. I felt I wanted to help be a role model.”

Novak says her 45 years with Malloy were the happiest of her life and that things have been tough since his death. “There were times I didn’t want to keep going without him. But now I light a fire every night and I fix something special – all the things he liked. He loved my chicken dumplings. I think: ‘Why didn’t I make that more for him?’” Painting, she says, has got her through the worst of it •

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Screen star On the set of Vertigo in 1957; with Frank Sinatra in The Man With The Golden Arm (1955)
RICHARD C MILLER/ DONALDSON COLLECTION/GETTY; UNITED ARTISTS/GETTY
▲ Screen star On the set of Vertigo in 1957; with Frank Sinatra in The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) RICHARD C MILLER/ DONALDSON COLLECTION/GETTY; UNITED ARTISTS/GETTY
 ?? Matej Divizna/ Getty ?? INTERVIEW By Simon Hattenston­e COVER PHOTOGRAPH
Matej Divizna/ Getty INTERVIEW By Simon Hattenston­e COVER PHOTOGRAPH
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Fulfilment
A self-portrait and, below, River Dancers
KRILL ▼▼ Fulfilment A self-portrait and, below, River Dancers
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Happiness With her late husband, Bob Malloy, in 1986
AP ▲ Happiness With her late husband, Bob Malloy, in 1986

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