BY SAM KASHNER
Kim Novak was Harry Cohn’s revenge on Rita Hayworth. Sammy Davis Jr. was Kim Novak’s revenge on Harry Cohn. What began as a boldface item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip column in the New York Journal-American threatened to become a national scandal on the eve of America’s long struggle for civil rights.
| Kim Novak |
It started in 1957 at Chicago’s most famous nightclub, Chez Paree. The man known as “the greatest entertainer in the world” was onstage, the smoke from his cigarette trellising the air. You had to see him: the gorgeous shirt, the cuff links, the way everything billowed. He was in the dark and suddenly the spotlight picked him up—he was electric, he was hot, it was almost a sexual thing. He was singing to Kim Novak, sitting at a stageside table; she had just finished work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the most challenging film of her career. That night would be the first and virtually the last time that Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. would be seen in public together. At the heart of their star-crossed affair was one of Hollywood’s sacred monsters: the notorious Harry Cohn.