They compromised on “Kim” Novak-the name of the son of her Chicago friend and business manager, Norma Herbert, then Norma Kasell. She balked at being renamed “Kit Marlowe,” and, incredibly, she won that battle. Since there was already a Marilyn, the first thing that had to go was her name. The next girl to walk through Cohn’s door was Marilyn Novak, a shy, plump, large-boned 20-year-old from Chicago with no acting experience but a breathtaking face. It’s a terrible comparison, but it’s like betting on the Kentucky Derby. After that, we switched over to Grace Kelly. “We started with Mae West, Jean Harlow, Marilyn, then Kim. “We always had a blonde,” George Sidney remembers. Cohn decided he was going to take the next girl who walked into his office and manufacture a new star for Columbia Pictures, one who would do exactly what he wanted, who wouldn’t walk away until he and the public were finished with her. He was still smarting from having let Marilyn Monroe slip away: unimpressed by her beauty, he had neglected in 1948 to renew her initial six-month contract. Instead, Cohn decided to get back at Hayworth. (Haymes, an Argentinean native, was always facing deportation.) “I’ll have that son of a bitch back in Argentina,” Cohn exploded. By the mid-1930s, Cohn had nurtured Columbia from a low-rent, B-movie studio on Hollywood’s “Poverty Row,” a block off Sunset, into a major Hollywood film studio. He ran Columbia Pictures as if it were a family business, and in a way it was, because he had wrangled control from his brother Jack, who was back on the East Coast in New York. It was said that Harry Cohn put more people in the cemetery than all the other moguls combined. At the heart of their star-crossed affair was one of Hollywood’s sacred monsters: the notorious Harry Cohn. That night would be the first and virtually the last time that Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. He was singing to Kim Novak, sitting at a stageside table she had just finished work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the most challenging film of her career. He was in the dark and suddenly the spotlight picked him up-he was electric, he was hot, it was almost a sexual thing. You had to see him: the gorgeous shirt, the cuff links, the way everything billowed. The man known as “the greatest entertainer in the world” was onstage, the smoke from his cigarette trellising the air. It started in 1957 at Chicago’s most famous nightclub, Chez Paree. What began as a boldface item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip column in the New York Journal-American threatened to become a national scandal on the eve of America’s long struggle for civil rights. Kim Novak was Harry Cohn’s revenge on Rita Hayworth.
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