LIFESTYLE OF THE STARS

Actress Kim Novak leads rustic life

"What would I be doing if I still lived here?" Kim Novak mused. She supplied her own answer: "I'd be spending my afternoons shopping on Rodeo Drive." Instead, she has chosen to live in a wooded paradise near Ashland, Ore. Called Windsong, it's a place she and her husband, Bob Malloy, share with golden eagles, geese, deer, elk and a host of other wild fauna, not to mention a barnyard full of farm animals. "We have two or three hundred acres (80 to 120 hectares), including two large islands," she reported. "The main channel of the (Rogue) river runs past the islands. A smaller tributary passes in front of our house. It has very little traffic, so we can enjoy it without the noise of the motor boats." It's a far cry from the Kim Novak of the 1950s and '60s, who kept the gossip columns agog with her romances. Groomed by Columbia boss Harry Cohn, Novak progressed from a striking beauty in films such as Pushover and PHFFT to accomplished actress in Picnic and Vertigo. So does she ever get bored with the rustic life? "Never," she insists. "We go on long rides with our horses. We kayak on the river. I cross-country ski in the winter. I have my photography. I paint and sculpt and write poetry. And there are always the animals to watch."  Things haven't always been so idyllic at the ranch. In 2000, a fire destroyed the manuscript of Novak's nearly completed autobiography. She also lost all of her memorabilia, including letters from Frank Sinatra and James Stewart, jewelry, and posters of her films and photos. At first she despaired of resuming her memoir, but now she is back at work and has completed several chapters. Novak made one of her infrequent visits to Hollywood recently to present an award to Norman Brokaw, her William Morris agent for 47 years. She came to an interview in the formal dining room of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel and, like a proud mother showing off baby photos, she produced snapshots of her Oregon spread. The main house is indeed impressive, rising white and stately amid the foliage, surrounded by wide lawns. At 71 - "I can't hide it; it's in the record books" - she wears her movie-star looks well. Her straight white-blond hair provides a parenthesis to her unlined face. Her slender figure looks as if she just came from a dance rehearsal. The voice, so seductive in love scenes, remains husky and compelling. Born in Chicago, Novak worked as an elevator operator and dime-store clerk before touring the country selling refrigerators as Miss Deepfreeze. She eventually landed in Hollywood, where Cohn decided to make her Columbia's new glamour girl. His Svengali treatment worked, and soon Novak was a box-office star. But she earned little respect from her much-feared boss. One Christmas, she decided to turn the tables on Cohn.

She made a batch of chocolate fudge, packed it in a Christmas box and presented it to him in his office. "What's this?" he demanded. When she told him what she had done, "his face blushed and he nearly smiled. I almost saw another side of him. But then he said, 'Get outta here.' " She also saw two sides of Sinatra. She co-starred with him in her first important film, The Man with the Golden Arm, and found him kind and generous. When she was ill, he sent her flowers, along with books by Thomas Wolfe, "which I loved." Novak and Rita Hayworth co-starred with Sinatra in the musical Pal Joey, for which all three were scheduled to perform a song and dance number. "Frank wouldn't come to rehearsals," Novak said. "Rita and I worked hard for two weeks with the choreographer, Hermes Pan. Finally Frank showed up, but he wouldn't rehearse. So we went through the number with Hermes dancing Frank's part. When we finished, Frank said, 'I'll do this and this, I won't do that.' He continued until he had ruined the dance that we had worked so hard on. I thought that was a mean thing to do, especially to Rita." Novak remarked that she had good experiences with directors such as Otto Preminger (The Man With the Golden Arm) and Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo). But not Joshua Logan on Picnic. "He seemed to think Harry Cohn had forced me on him," she said. "He preferred his New York actors." In Vertigo, which marked her strongest performance, she played a woman who was haunted by her dual persona. "The role for me couldn't have been more right," she remarked, "because I was able to use all my feelings of resentment for being made over by Harry Cohn and the studio into a movie star. I was able to use the duality that was going on inside of me." Novak's career dwindled in the 1970s, mostly by her own volition. She didn't like the scripts producers offered, many of whom wanted her only as a sex object.