Hollywood star Kim Novak ‘woke naked’ after drink ‘spiked by Tony Curtis’
One of Hollywood’s brightest stars of the 1950s has accused actor Tony Curtis of spiking her drink at a party in his Beverly Hills home at the height of her fame, leaving her dazed and naked.
Actress Kim Novak, who played the female lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, made what could be one of the oldest #Metoo allegations as she recalled a 1958 soiree where she passed out.
‘‘Tony Curtis had brought me a drink,’’ Novak, now 89, told The Hollywood Reporter. ‘‘I don’t know, I only had, I think, one drink there. But that’s the last thing I knew. I do not know anything afterward, cross my heart, hope to die. Don’t know what happened after that or how my car got back in front of my apartment.’’ Curtis was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1950s, appearing alongside Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot and later Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant. He was married to actress Janet Leigh at the time, while Novak was linked to singer Sammy Davis Jr, whom she met on the set of Vertigo.
Curtis and Novak would go on to star together in television drama The Third Girl from the Left in 1973.
‘‘I think Tony Curtis did it. I don’t want to think Sammy did that,’’ Novak goes on to say later in the interview.
Talking about the morning after, she said: ‘‘I’ll just tell you the honest truth: I didn’t have my clothes on. People didn’t talk about things like that, but I could never figure it out . . . I’ve never blacked out in my entire life.’’
Novak said she was encouraged by the recent #Metoo movement to speak out about the incident, despite the amount of time that has passed. Curtis, the father of Jamie Lee Curtis, died in 2010 of a cardiac arrest.
Following widespread sexual abuse allegations against director Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017, the movement began to spread as a hashtag on social media.
Widespread media coverage and discussion of sexual harassment, particularly in Hollywood, led to high-profile firings, as well as criticism and backlash.
Novak, a multi-golden Globe winner, stepped away from the limelight after filming The Third Girl from the Left.
– Telegraph Group