She was quickly cast in “Pushover” as a femme fatale. Kim was gorgeous, but without much personality. She appeared in the comedy “Phffft!” opposite Jack Lemmon, even more attractive, and lively, too. But her comic possibilities would never be properly exploited during her Columbia years. She would deliver her funniest performance much, much later. Next came “Five Against the House,” a heist film that gave her, as a nightclub performer, the chance to lean against a wall and whisper some indistinct moth-to-flame-I’m-not-to-blame song. In noir-ish black and white, she looked fantastic and, if not yet distinctive, she was increasingly assured.  

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Stardom arrived with her next movie, Joshua Logan’s “Picnic” based on the William Inge Broadway hit, paired with one of Hollywood’s biggest names, Bill Holden. It was with this film that the duality of Novak’s screen persona emerged. She played Madge, the reluctant small-town beauty queen, who wants nothing more than to be appreciated for herself, rather than her looks – though she hardly knows herself at all, having existed only through the superficial attention paid to her beauty via her friends, her mother, her beau. “I get so tired of just being the pretty one!” she exclaims to her tomboyish sister, played by Susan Strasberg. Novak’s Madge seems uncomfortable in her skin, unwilling to play the life role allotted to her. She enjoys her sensuality only when she is certain Holden wants her for more than the obvious – the famous picnic dance to “Moonglow.” In the years to follow, Novak’s best performances would come out of characters, unsure of themselves, women whose feelings and lives were conflicted; women on the edge, enveloped in tense vulnerability.

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Now Kim Novak was a great big star, and the Columbia PR machine moved to highest alert – she was called “The Lavender Love Goddess” because her blonde locks were tinted with a faint purple hue. Her preference for solitude, her independent ways, her love of animals were all grist for the mill. Every casual date was a great romance, dissected by Hedda and Louella. However, much to Harry Cohn’s distress, Kim was no more the malleable piece of clay than  Rita Hayworth had been. Kim went on strike for more money, enjoyed a clandestine, yet-still-gossiped-over affair with Sammy Davis Jr. and actually had opinions about her roles and career. “Remember this, never forget – you’re just a piece of meat!” said Cohn to Kim. Kim never forgot. And she never became a piece of meat, either. (“They want to starve you, in the heart,” she would later say of  Hollywood’s attempts to control and criticize its own creations.)  

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Approaching her peak, she would appear opposite Frank Sinatra in “The Man With the Golden Arm” and with Tyrone Power in “The Eddy Duchin Story.” Neither role offered her much more than the opportunity to be beautiful and sympathetic, but her restrained manner was intriguing, at least to fans. 

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Restraint was thrown out the window for her next film, “Jeanne Eagels,” a lurid look at the life of the infamous 1920s stage star. It is a cornucopia of camp posturing. Novak, playing an assertive, ambitious actress with drug problems, gets to say things like, “I don’t need any of you. I’m a star” in a voice pitched even lower than usual. It was so bad, it was great, and Novak, back to black and white, is photographed magnificently. (With her white-blonde hair, wide face and classic nose, she looks a lot like Jean Harlow.) The movie’s silliness is redeemed during Novak’s extended death scene; she succumbs in dreamy ecstasy to a heroin overdose, as the camera inches closer and closer. (One would have to go back to Marlene Dietrich in her von Sternberg era to find a performance so stiff and yet so cinematically mesmerizing.)