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The throne room at Columbia Pictures resounded with the whoosh of an outsized riding crop swung in anger. Scepter in hand, striding before two rows of Oscars at stiff attention behind his vast desk, Columbia's stubby and balding Boss Harry Cohn fumed with the king-sized wrath of the last Hollywood despot who still runs the studio he built. The year was 1953, the object of his wrath Rita Hayworth, Columbia's reigning love goddess; Rita had flounced out and left the studio with a costly stack of properties bought just for her. Before Cohn's desk, underlings watched the riding crop and awaited the great man's edict. If the studio only had another big female star, he grumbled, she could be used to bludgeon Hayworth into submission, or, if it came to that, to take over her roles in the scheduled pictures. Then Cohn announced his decree: "We will make a star."
What began as an angry gleam in Harry Cohn's eye now glows from the world's screens. The star's name: Kim Novak.
By ancient Hollywood practice, a star is made not just born. Kim Novak herself was virtually invented, the first topflight star ever made strictly to order, for delivery when needed. When Cohn's underlings found her, she was a small-time model, somewhat overweight and so utterly lacking in acting experience that, as one director put it, "she had never even read the funnies out loud." Today Kim Novak not only holds full sway where Hayworth once ruled supreme, but she has set a record for going far and fast. After only six pictures, she is the nation's No. 1 box-office star, an honor bestowed with calculated deliberation by the exhibitors after a close count of the till.
Sex Without Leers. How did it happen? Growls Harry Cohn, a 66-year-old professional ogre dubbed "White Fang" by Hollywood wits: "If you wanna bring me your wife or your aunt, we'll do the same for them."
But not even Harry Cohn can conjure up—or do without—the special, ineffable magic of looks and personality that only a star strikes from celluloid. Young (24) and at the top of her form (37-23-37), Kim Novak is an ample (5 ft. 7 in., 125 Ibs.), creamy-skinned girl with classically solid Slavic good looks under a gloss of glamour. Her hazel eyes are long-lashed and deep-socketed; her full mouth pouts ever so slightly; an alabaster pallor sculpts her cheeks; her hair is shaped to the head in a fluffy corona of lavender-rinsed silver platinum. With no effort at all, she generates a kind of sex appeal that is strangely rare in a town where sex is a major product. Marilyn Monroe parodies sex, and Jayne Mansfield parodies Marilyn Monroe. Kim Novak simply communicates sex without leers. She moves in a kind of rapt trance that is oddly provocative because it also seems innocent.