(6 of 7)
"How did I ever live through it?" asks Kim of Picnic. She was fearful of Logan, awed by such professionals as William Holden. Rosalind Russell and Betty Field, fretful about the fact that her weight had risen again. ("She has the kind of hourglass figure that time runs out on," quipped one cynic). On the Kansas location near Hutchinson, she went every night to a local Roman Catholic Church to pray that she would be good in the next day's shooting. Every day she lugged a knitting bag to the set; it was full of toy clowns, teddy bears, holy medals, dolls—all talismans on which she still sets great store. She often exasperated Logan. Repeatedly, she held up shooting by stopping to examine her face in a hand mirror, as if seeking reassurance that she at least really looked like Kim Novak the movie star. "Her only self-confidence is her face," says a friend. When she could not cry as demanded by the script, an impatient and disgusted Logan grabbed her by the arms and shook her until she burst into tears. The arms turned black and blue. "That's when I first started getting a little thick-skinned, because I got bruised mentally." says Actress Novak. "I wasn't so soft from then on."
"I Love Love." She has indeed toughened considerably, thanks also to success, adulation and growing experience. In some ways she is oddly unchanged. She still does not drink or smoke. She says that she has not found it necessary to buy either a fur coat or an evening gown, prefers slacks and sweaters. After three years in $20.50-a-week room at the Studio Club, an establishment for aspiring actresses, she moved last spring to a one-bedroom, $240-a-month apartment done up in lavender (her favorite color). But her toughness shows in the fanatic discipline with which she attacks her work. A stickler for self-improvement, she took singing and dancing lessons for Pal Joey, along with acting lessons that she is still taking, partly at her own expense. She puts in 28 hours a week working through the studio school toward a University of California degree, maintains a B average. For all her chatter of dark psychological wounds (which Kim knows makes good publicity copy), her "sense of inferiority" is not a handicap but a realistic piece of self-appraisal, and she is doing things about it.
On her original studio questionnaire, Kim volunteered: "I love love more than anything!" But it is hard to fit into her schedule. A 37-year-old builder and theater owner named Mac Krim, her steady date almost since she arrived in Hollywood, used to see her seven nights a week. "Then," he says, "when she made Pushover, we saw each other four nights a week. Now, while she's on a picture, she won't go out except on a Friday." Kim has also dated others, e.g., Frank Sinatra, and she was making purring sounds last week about Italy's Bandini. Krim wants to marry her, but of marriage Kim says: "I don't believe in doing too many things at one time and lousing up everything."