The couple started their relationship in 1956 when they both were guest on The Steve Allen Show. The next year, while Novak was filming Hitchcock’s suspense thriller Vertigo, Davis arranged to come to the set to take some pictures.
Similar Topic: Paramount Pictures sets to make a Sammy Davis Jr. bio film
Here is a statement from the book about the couple:
“The entertainer was no photographer, but to spend time with Novak he pretended to be an avid shutterbug. As he shot his close-ups of her, she asked slyly, ‘Did you ever think of taking off the lens cover?’”
They met up again at a charity ball in California the night before Thanksgiving in 1957. Davis “had come solely to see Novak,” He asked her to spend the holiday at his house — an invitation which she accepted. She, in turn, brought him to meet her family in Chicago at Christmastime.
But as word spread that they were spending time together, some in Hollywood became uneasy, including the head of Columbia Pictures( Novak was under contract with the company).
Leamer, pointing to the brutal murder of Emmett Till just two years prior in 1955, says “there was a very real possibility that the segregated film theaters of the South would refuse to show movies starring an actress who was dating an African American in real life.”
According to Smithsonian magazine, a Gallup poll from 1958 showed only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial unions, which were still outlawed in some states. (Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down those laws, would not come for another decade.)
Kim Novak was undeterred. “Something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him,” Leamer quotes Novak as saying. “I didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”
However, A Chicago gossip columnist changed everything on Jan. 1, 1958 when he printed an account of Novak and Davis’s relationship. He reported the two would potentially get married. Novak denied it vehemently, but nothing could stop the spread of the story.
Leamer writes in the book that Cohn was angry and sent a message to Davis — who had lost one eye in a car accident years prior — via his “Mob friends”: End the relationship or else “he would lose his one good eye.” Nine days later, Davis married a Black chorus girl named Loray White.
Novak herself wed actor Richard Johnson in 1965. They divorced, and she married veterinarian Robert Malloy in 1976 and remained together until his death in 2021. Novak previously told PEOPLE that her relationship with Davis was “often misunderstood.”
Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession is available wherever book are sold.
Source: People