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Yet life was not all tears and traumas. The Novaks saw that their two daughters had lessons in dancing, piano, singing and art, sent them to camp each summer. In 1951 the family moved from their Southwest-side flat to a $20,000 one-family house in the Northwest area. Marilyn's own lot began brightening when she was about twelve. She found a big welcome in the Fairteen Club, a teen-age group sponsored by a Chicago department store, won modeling contests there, was soon modeling for Slenderella, department stores, dress shops. Marilyn and boys discovered each other. "I was getting quite a nice little shape on me," she says. "I got whistles."
She went to Chicago's Wright Junior College, quit after a year and a half to take a full-time modeling job. Soon afterward, at 19, she met and became engaged to "a baron from Germany," a tall, handsome charmer who was working in his father's chemical business in Chicago. He gave her a family ring with the baronial crest. Then came another tempting offer: a role as "Miss Deepfreeze" in a countrywide promotional tour with three other girls for Thor appliances. "I jumped at it," says Kim. When the tour ended in San Francisco, she headed for Hollywood. Several months later, the baron received a farewell note in verse (the only sample of her verse that Actress Novak will quote):
I can't, I can't, I can't come home.
I must, I must, I must stay alone Until I -wind and find my way . . .
First Rites. Just about then, Cohn issued his edict. At a Hollywood party, Marilyn met a Columbia production assistant; he took her to see Maxwell Arnow, then Columbia's talent chief. Arnow inspected her with a routine but practiced eye, advised her to lose some weight and return. When he met her again by chance in the office of Agent Louis Shurr, she had lost the weight—at least enough for Arnow to see possibilities. He ordered a screen test, soon was excitedly telephoning colleagues: "I've got the girl." Against her parents' advice ("I never could see that sort of business. I still can't," says Mrs. Novak), Marilyn signed a contract starting at $100 a week.
The studio roared into gear. Experts straightened, leveled and whitened her teeth, put her on a rigid diet, redid and dyed her hair, exercised her in a gym and in acting classes, posed her on a tiger rug with a still camera staring down her bodice. One of the first rites was to change her name. Cohn liked the name Kit Marlowe. She insisted on keeping Novak. But the name Marilyn had to go because it suggested another blonde. For two days the new actress was named Kit Novak until she tearfully went to Publicity Director George Lait to plead for a change to Kim.* Remembers Lait: "Honey, 1 said, I had one helluva time to even get Cohn to keep Novak. You go to see him." Kim went, and charmed the great man into acquiescence.