Interesting Interview with Kim Novak, Who is Still Alive

By Reg Caesar

“Are any singers from the 1950s still around, other than Brenda Lee, Gayla Peevey (aka Jamie Horton), and Barry Gordon, who were kids at the time? Brian Hyland, too, though his second song and first hit didn’t come out till 1960. We lost Jimmy Boyd in 2009, and Frankie Lyman way back in 1968.

“Kim Novak is 91. She has stories to tell:

“‘I often got knocked down, buried in snow and pied with mouldy deli pies.’ That’s awful, I say. No, she says, it wasn’t – just think what those kids had just been through. ‘These were young innocent Jewish kids trying to seek revenge for the murders of their kin. And it didn’t help to have a grandpa whose first name was Adolf.

“‘They refused to let me go near Sammy[ Davis]’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.”

Kim Novak: ‘I inherited mental illness from my father, but the rape must have added to it’

Thanks so much, Reg. Oddly, the interviewer opens by engaging in indirect quotations for the longest, before he increasingly quotes her directly.

I’m a big fan of Novak the actress, and I even like her as a person, but whenever she mentions Harry Cohn, I take what she says with a grain of salt. Here, she calls him “a monster,” but she earlier called him her guardian angel (paraphrasing).

In my favorite Novak performances (Vertigo (1958) and In the Middle of the Night, 1959), she played a girl who needed a man to overwhelm her. I got the impression that she wasn’t just acting.

The end of the interview left me queasy. Has she contemplated taking her horse and leaping off the side of a mountain?