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Suffering Psyche. In thrusting stardom upon her, Hollywood has put Kim under a weight of emotional pressure that few young women are called upon to bear. Before every picture, she works herself up to a nervous, racehorse tension and bursts into anxious tears. During production she worries and glooms to the point of nausea. She throws tantrums on the set and off. Says a writer who knew Kim on the way up: "She's been like a quiz contestant who has won all the money before she's been asked any questions. Then, every time they ask a question, she's desperately afraid of losing everything." Kim puts it this way: "I was good in my first picture and got wonderful reviews. I was afraid I might not be able to live up to it. I felt it could never happen again. Today I'm worried because I didn't enjoy it on the way up, and now maybe
I'm on the way down/' Under the goad of this fear, Kim ran herself so ragged while making Jeanne Eagels, and simultaneously preparing for the recently completed Pal Joey, that she landed in the hospital with exhaustion. Says a friend: "Harry Cohn thinks he can make Kim an actress. But it's a terrible strain on Kim. She knows she isn't an actress, but she's ambitious. She cracks up under the pressure."
Nowadays movie stars come equipped not only with gowns by Adrian and makeup by Westmore but with insight by Freud. Nobody talks more about Kim's suffering psyche than Kim herself. She has given hundreds of interviews with a couch-side slant, readily analyzes "my inferiority complex" and "my insecurity" and, digging back, rattles on about her childhood as if she were the only adult who ever had one.
Seated with the Jerks. Kim's childhood, even as recounted by her family, was Spock-marked with classic difficulties. Her birth in Chicago on Feb. 13, 1933, came as a disappointment to her parents, Joseph and Blanche Novak, native Americans of Bohemian parentage, who had prepared only boys' names for the arrival. The Novaks named her Marilyn Pauline. Joe Novak, a claim clerk for the Milwaukee Railroad, is a melancholy, tight-lipped man whom little Marilyn tried hard to please; she seldom succeeded. Marilyn proved to be lefthanded; her father badgered her without success to use her right hand. "It just makes me sick to see anybody write lefthanded, just makes me sick," he explains. Even today Father Novak is not altogether pleased with his daughter's success. Says he, "It's all well and good that she's at her best right now, but imagine, say five or ten years from now. What'll she be then? I would just as soon have her living here and married to a truck driver."
As Marilyn grew up, she felt herself-in the shadow of her favored sister Arlene, who is three years older. She turned moody and inward, took to her room to scribble poetry—a kind of release to which she has resorted ever since. Recalls Actress Novak: "I was real skinny, real anemic. In school I was always in the last row or next-to-last row, according to the marks. I was seated with the jerks."