Kim Novak on Hitchcock, Hollywood

Kim Novak returned Wednesday to her hometown of Chicago to preside over a screening of the film many people believe is the best that either she or Alfred Hitchcock ever made. A restored version of "Vertigo" (1958) was shown in a rare 70 mm print at the Chicago Film Festival, and afterward Novak came onstage for a question-and-answer session that spanned her career.

In an interview earlier Wednesday, she recalled the advice of Columbia Studios czar Harry Cohn, before he loaned her to Universal to make the film for Hitchcock. " 'It's not a good screenplay,' he said. 'But he's a good director, and he may make something of it.' "

He did. He told the story of a phobic retired police detective (James Stewart) who falls in love with a woman he sees only at a distance. And then, apparently, he sees the woman die.

Little does he suspect that both the woman and her death are fictitious - part of an elaborate murder plot. But when he encounters someone who looks exactly like his fantasy-woman, he persuades her to play the role of the woman in his dreams. What he doesn't suspect, of course, is that the woman he meets, named Judy, is the same woman who portrayed "Madeleine," the woman he dreams about.

Novak plays both roles. And there is a moment in the movie where, as Judy, she allows the Stewart character to make her over into "Madeleine." She walks toward him, as he's caught up in a frenzy of passion and gratified desire - and she feels a great sadness because she has come to love Stewart, and realizes he can't even see her; he only sees the woman in his imagination.

"Of course, in a way, that was how Hollywood treated its women in those days," Novak said. "I could really identify with Judy, being pushed and pulled this way and that, being told what dresses to wear, how to walk, how to behave. I think there was a little edge in my performance that I was trying to suggest that I would not allow myself to be pushed beyond a certain point - that I was there, I was me, I insisted on myself."

Novak had a reunion in Chicago with James C. Katz, the famed film restorer, who with Robert Harris took the aging materials of the Hitchcock classic and turned them into a fresh new print. He told her something she didn't know. She was paid only $750 a week to appear in "Vertigo" - but records uncovered by Katz indicated that Universal was paying Columbia $2,500 a week for her services.

"You mean Harry Cohn was pocketing the difference?" she said. "He screwed me every way he could . . . of course except for the one way that counts." I asked if the old Hollywood legend was true, that Frank Sinatra went to Cohn's funeral "just to be sure the SOB was dead," and she laughed and said it wouldn't surprise her.

Novak was romantically linked in the 1950s with Sinatra and other Hollywood stars, but she talked of only one relationship, with Sammy Davis Jr., that ended when Cohn's spies threatened Davis with bodily harm if he continued to see her.

"It wasn't a romance so much as a friendship with a beautiful man," she said. "He was so sweet and good, and something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him. I didn't think it was anybody's business. If he had been a bad man, a dangerous man, then the studio might have had reason - but simply because he was black?"

Working with Hitchcock was strange, she said, "because I don't know if he ever liked me. I never sat down with him for dinner or tea or anything, except one cast dinner, and I was late to that. It wasn't my fault, but I think he thought I had delayed to make a star entrance, and he held that against me. During the shooting, he never really told me what he was thinking."

It has been said that "Vertigo" comes closest to revealing Hitchcock's innermost obsessions, which had to do with controlling his actors, particularly women, and dictating every nuance of their behavior. By trying to do that with "Judy," the James Stewart character finds he simply cannot find the dream he seeks.

"I don't know how autobiographical the film was - or even if it was," she said. "I know that Hitchcock gave me a lot of freedom in creating the character, but he was very exact in telling me exactly what to do. How to move, where to stand. I think you can see a little of me resisting that in some of the shots, kind of insisting on my own identity."

Novak was born in Chicago in 1933, attended Farragut High School, was a beauty queen as a teenager and a Hollywood starlet before she was 20. Among her best-known roles were "Picnic" (1955), opposite William Holden; "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1956), opposite Sinatra; "Pal Joey" (1957), again with Sinatra, and "Bell, Book and Candle" (1957). The restored version of "Vertigo" starts a commercial run here today at the McClurg Court; a restored "Picnic" starts Monday at the Music Box.

While she's back in Chicago, she said, there is one haunting fear she wants to exorcise.
"I have a recurring dream," she said. "It's late afternoon - rush hour. I'm in the Loop and I need to get home. I lived on the Far West Side. There are no cabs. There's no way to get there. I start to walk home. It's dark and dangerous. That's a bad dream I've had for years. So while I'm here, I'm going to retrace that journey. Maybe put that nightmare to rest."

Kim Novak Looks Unrecognizable at 2014 Oscars, Sparks "Frozen" Twitter Jokes

Twitter was abuzz with people talking about 81-year-old screen legend Kim Novak's appearance at the 2014 Oscars on March 2 Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty; Steve Granitz/WireImage.com

Ellen's epic selfie wasn't the only buzzworthy social media moment of the 2014 Oscars. Screen legend Kim Novak also set Twitter abuzz on Sunday, March 2, when she took the stage to present a trophy with Best Actor winner Matthew McConaughey.

The 81-year-old star, known for classics including the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo, was tasked with announcing the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature alongside McConaughey. Unfortunately for her, the winner was Disney's Frozen -- which provided Twitter users with plenty of ammo for jokes about her stiff speech and appearance.

"Kim Novak's face just won for 'Frozen,'" user Chris Chua tweeted.
"Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum," comedian Nick Youssef quipped.

"When Kim Novak said the winner was Frozen, I thought she was talking about her face," writer Fortune Feimster joked.

"MUST. NOT. TWEET. ABOUT. KIM. NOVAK'S. FACE. #BeNice #Oscar," actor David Krumholtz wrote.
Others on the site rallied to Novak's defense. Rose McGowan, for example, shared a photo of the actress in her heyday, captioning it, "Kim Novak! No standing ovation?! Self-obsessed and disrespectful, that sums up the Oscar audience."

Added user @jjtierney, "People making fun of Kim Novak on Twitter is why we can't have nice things."

Novak has not made a movie since 1991's Liebestraum. Two years ago, she revealed she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; she has also successfully battled breast cancer.

Kim Novak and Hollywood cruelty

Image caption Does Hollywood require a female star to maintain her "youthful looks until her deathbed"?

Actress Kim Novak starred in what arguably is the best film ever made, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. But when she stood with Matthew McConaughey on the Academy Awards stage on Sunday night, it wasn't her professional career people were talking about.

As the headline in USA Today put it: "Kim Novak takes a beating on Twitter".

The Huffington Post's Howard Fineman tweeted: "#AcademyAward for worst plastic surgery: tie between Kim Novak and Goldie Hawn."

Comedian Nick Youssef: "Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum."

It's no secret that society both encourages and stigmatizes cosmetic surgery for women

Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic

Donald Trump (Donald Trump!): "Kim should sue her plastic surgeon!"
Robert Rorke of the New York Post listed Ms Novak's appearance as one of the "eight weirdest Oscar moments".

"Looking like Cesar Romero on Batman and sounding like Jimmy Durante, the hoarse Novak got through the presentation, but left us wondering whether extreme plastic surgery shouldn't be illegal in Hollywood," he writes.

The spate of snarky responses to the 81-year-old actress's appearance have prompted a discussion of celebrity culture and the high price it exacts on aging female stars. (It's also worth noting that Ms Novak recently was treated for breast cancer and suffered a serious horse-riding accident.)

"It's no secret that society both encourages and stigmatizes cosmetic surgery for women," writes Spencer Kornhaber in the Atlantic. "People have a lot of different opinions on this - maybe we should stop encouraging; maybe we should stop stigmatizing. Either way, perhaps we can agree that laughing at Novak in this case is particularly awful.

Film blogger Farran Nehme delves into Ms Novak's background and points out that movie producer Harry Cohn "discovered" the actress but was cruel to her in a way that should seem familiar even today. "I made you, I can break you," she says Cohn would tell actresses like Ms Novak.

"Cohn put Novak on a stringent diet, all the while calling her 'that fat Polack' (Novak's background is Czech) behind her back," Nehme writes. "She followed an exercise regime. She was assigned a make-up artist. Her teeth were capped. Her hair was dyed blonde, then rinsed to make it gleam lavender in the light."

Then Nehme imagines what Ms Novak must have been thinking on Monday night.
"And you go to the Oscars, so nervous you clutch your fellow presenter's hand. And the next day, you wake up to a bunch of cheap goddamn shots about your face. "
"Nice system we got here, isn't it," she says.

Hollywood may value youth above all else, but as we learned last night, there's nothing sorrier than an older woman who tries to look young

Amanda Hess, Slate

Older actresses are caught in a conundrum, writes Justine Musk on her blog:

It's expected that an actress like Catherine Zeta Jones would use fillers and plastic surgery to stay youthful ("more Botox") even as she's criticized for using fillers and plastic surgery at all (since they are neither natural nor effortless). If a woman hasn't made that obvious investment in looking youthful and thin, she's accused of letting herself go.

"Hollywood may value youth above all else, but as we learned last night, there's nothing sorrier than an older woman who tries to look young," writes Amanda Hess of Slate. "Hollywood made Novak a star, then abandoned her - decades ago."

She writes that unlike Ms Novak, 64-year-old Meryl Streep and 67-year-old Sally Field were held up as examples of how to age "gracefully".

"But we don't know what Streep and Field do to maintain their looks - all we know is that they have successfully navigated Hollywood's dual requirement to look amazing post-60 while never signalling that they've worked at it," she writes. "That means avoiding obvious plastic surgery, but it can also mean spending your life investing in the habits, trainers, diets, creams, and treatments that add up to a 'natural' look in old age."

She concludes: "Jennifer Lawrence is Hollywood's current girl crush, and she's got a bright career ahead of her - as long as she maintains her youthful looks until her deathbed, or else picks the appropriate moment to crawl into a hole to wait to die."

Or, as Musk puts it: "Don't destroy the players. Change the game."

Kim Novak American actress

Kim Novak, original name Marilyn Pauline Novak   (born February 13, 1933, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American actor best known for her dual performance as Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Vertigo (1958). Novak played both women as part of a plot to trick an acrophobic former detective (Jimmy Stewart), with whom Barton falls in love. Although not a commercial success at the time of its release, Vertigo and Novak’s performance are now celebrated as significant contributions to cinema history and to what is arguably Hitchcock’s finest film. In 2012 that film displaced—for the first time in 50 years—Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film of all time, as ranked by the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound critics poll.

As a teenager, Novak left Chicago, where she was working as a model, and moved to Hollywood to audition to be an extra in The French Line (1954), a film starring Jane Russell. She succeeded in that mission and also came to the attention of the president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who offered her a contract and groomed her for a career as a Hollywood sex symbol. Cohn transformed her image, instructing her to lose weight and, as another young actress named Marilyn—Marilyn Monroe—was then a rising star, suggested that she change her name. She refused to change her surname but adopted the given name Kim. She also took acting lessons and, early on, was cast in films opposite well-established actors such as Fred MacMurray (Pushover, 1954) and Jack Lemmon (Phffft, 1954).
In 1955 she was given leading roles in a number of films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra, and Picnic, with William Holden; the latter is often considered her breakthrough film. In 1955 she won a Golden Globe for most-promising newcomer. In both Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm, Novak’s characters try to deflect the infatuation of her suitors, to be more than just a sultry sex object, a challenge, it is thought, that the actress herself faced throughout her career. In Picnic, Novak’s character—a small-town young woman—laments always being “the pretty one” instead of “the smart one.” Novak earned a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for that role. In The Man with the Golden Arm, Sinatra played a master card dealer and ex-con trying to make it as a jazz drummer, a path impeded by his heroin addiction and his deceptive wife. Novak played the strip-club dancer Molly, his sympathetic former flame, who stands by him as he goes “cold turkey” in an attempt to get his life back on track.

Another standout performance by Novak was in the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), opposite Stewart and Lemmon. Novak played an art-gallery owner who is also a witch. She is forced to conceal her true identity and choose between love (with Stewart) or her supernatural powers. In Billy Wilder’s farcical comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), Novak starred as Polly the Pistol, a waitress and prostitute. Although it is considered to show her in one of her better roles, the film opened to poor reviews and was criticized for its coarseness.

Novak was the top box-office star for three consecutive years in the 1950s. The trajectory of her career began to stall, however, when she appeared in such unsuccessful features such as Kiss Me, Stupid and The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965). That career change coincided with Cohn’s death, which Novak believed had much to do with the professional struggles she faced thereafter. None of her intermittent later movies approached the success of her early films. Her most-notable later role was that of the conniving Kit Marlowe in the 1986–87 season of the television series Falcon Crest (1981–90). She retired from acting after a disagreement with the writer-director Mike Figgis during the filming of Liebestraum (1991).

Should We Give Kim Novak a Break on the Oscar Plastic Surgery Hate-Tweeting?

Yes, Kim Novak’s face shocked us at the Oscars. But did she really deserve all the nip-and-tuck hate-tweeting?

 

The Oscars are invariably remembered as much (if not more) for the speeches, snafus, and outlandish red carpet outfits as for the awards. Last year, Jennifer Lawrence’s charming tumble over her couture when accepting her Best Actress award generated maximum buzz (Anne Hathaway’s nipples came in close second). This year’s highlights included John Travolta butchering Idina Menzel’s name, Ellen Degeneres’ celebrity group selfie and 81-year-old actress Kim Novak’s face—nipped, tucked, and stiff with silicone.

The Internet gasped in horror—or was it amusement? —when the Vertigo star took the stage with Matthew McConaughey to present the award for Best Animated Feature to Disney’s Frozen (an unfortunate coincidence, generating countless rudimentary puns on social media). A sampling of tweets, including several from well-known figures in the entertainment and media industries: Comedian Nick Youssef joked that “Kim Novak was just safely transported back to the Hollywood Wax Museum”; Chelsea Lately writer Fortune Feimster quipped, “I’m assuming Kim Novak was representing the movie ‘Mask’”; Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman broadened the mockery: “#AcademyAward for worst plastic surgery: tie between Kim Novak and Goldie Hawn.”

And blowback against the comments was equally fierce. Newly minted MSNBC host Ronan Farrow shot back, “Half the people being cruel about Kim Novak are ten years away from being Kim Novak.” Actress Rose McGowan tweeted a picture of the actress in her heyday as a sex symbol, adding, “Self-obsessed and disrespectful, that sums up the Oscar audience.”

In a way, by tweeting a picture of Novak sprawled out on a bed in a scene from the 1958 film, Bell, Book and Candle, McGowan was unwittingly acknowledging that we should judge actresses by their looks—because beauty is indeed one of the most important attributes for a Hollywood actress, young or old. Had Novak not won the genetic lottery, she could have easily lost her breakout role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo to a prettier face (Novak was a good actress, but not a great one). So why are we surprised when, years after being out of the limelight, viewers continue obsessing over the face that once made her famous? And we should be no less surprised that Novak is obsessed with her face.
Film critic Farran Nehme noted that Novak’s natural beauty wasn’t good enough for the silver screen when, at 20, she was scouted by Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn as the next Rita Hayworth. Fame came only after Cohn pressured her to diet, dye her hair, cap her teeth, and change her name.

Indeed, Hollywood is no more obsessed with youth than it was 50 years ago. But with the advent of plastic surgery, our most relentless scrutiny is reserved for actresses who are no longer in their kittenish prime yet who are unwilling to go gently into the good night of post-menopausal sexlessness. (Newspapers like The Daily Mail do big business on the “did you see what [formerly attractive actress] looks like now” stories.) And if an actress attempts to turn back the clock by going under the knife, they can expect every wrinkle and fold to be observed under the media microscope.

Still, Botox injections and facelifts are a double-edged sword. Done incorrectly, they can land an actress on the receiving end of hate-tweeting. But done right, they can extend her shelf-life in a hyper-competitive industry that revolves around youthfulness. Most members of the sniping press and snarking Twittersphere aren’t exercising moral or (even general aesthetic) objections to plastic surgery: they’re not saying that actresses shouldn’t go under the knife, but that they should know when to quit. Hence Donald Trump’s acid observation that Novak “should sue her plastic surgeon.” And most women in Hollywood seem to recognize that, for better or worse, some sort of plastic surgery (or vampire facials) is imperative to staying in the game, even if it is seen as cheating.

We can interpret criticism of Novak’s paralyzed face as indicative of our own shallowness, or we can see it as a general consensus that the imperative to go to extreme lengths to preserve youth is absurd—that women should be allowed to age normally and retain their dignity in doing so. Or we can cut out the politics and merely acknowledge that as time marches on, nothing can save us from the inevitable drooping, sagging, and shriveling. As British singer Linda Thompson told her Facebook fans, “Apropos of Oscars brouhaha. You have two choices in old age. Look creepy or crepey. Who cares which you choose? You'll still look old.”