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Lines & Props. Kim's visual impact was immediate. Fan-magazine editors, leafing through publicity pictures of other starlets, were stopped dead in their tracks by the photograph of Kim on the tiger-skin rug, demanded interviews long before she had appeared in a movie. Columbia's pressagents, hunting through her biographical questionnaire for extra angles, reluctantly discarded the intellectual approach after examining her answers. To the questions "Do you like to read? What?", Kim had scrawled, "Prose and poetry mostly." Then she had added: "I love Shakespeare and good philisophical [sic] books." But they found that she was a cycling enthusiast.
"This is not much clay for a sculptor —even a fellow with three hands," says a Columbia pressagent. "But from the bike came a spark." He concocted the legend that Agent Shurr had discovered her while she was cycling in Beverly Hills. The Novak publicity boomed (and Shurr was besieged at his office, according to the pressagent, "by dozens of dames on bikes"). Says Publicist Lait: "Kim was a great interview because she did exactly what she was told. And she has a cute habit of getting herself set for a still picture, and at the last minute she unbuttons one more button."
Acting came harder. In tests for Pushover, her first picture, Kim was so flustered that she rushed her lines, and her voice was so low that Cohn complained: "I don't understand a word she says." Suggested Production Chief Wald: "Just look at her." While Acting Coach Benno Schneider struggled to rid Kim of self-conscious mannerisms and to teach her to project her voice, the picture began shooting. "The big problem," recalls Wald, "was to get her to speak a line and handle a prop at the same time. The director simplified the action, and after we finished shooting, we had to loop [rerecord] lots of her lines." In one scene she had to slap Star Fred MacMurray. She said tearfully that she just could not bring herself to hit' anyone. Says Director Richard Quine: "I pleaded and begged and cajoled. Fred begged her, 'Hit me good.' She finally did it and went into her dressing room and cried for an hour."
Not So Soft. She began the first day's shooting of her next film, Phffft!, with panicky hysterics. Lines had to be rewritten because she tripped over merely pronouncing them. Yet Kim's impact in her early pictures won Cohn so completely that he ordered a reluctant Director
Joshua Logan to put her in her first big one, Picnic. Logan, used to working with Broadway's top professionals, objected in vain. "Logan had to put her in Picnic or I'd have taken him off Picnic" says Cohn baldly.