“Pal Joey” paired her again with Frank Sinatra, and, cruelly, with Rita Hayworth, who was working out her final film for Cohn. Novak was the awkward, innocent showgirl seduced by hustler Joey (Sinatra). Hayworth played the jaded “older woman” seduced by Joey. Kim was nervous and humiliated to be put in a competitive position with Rita, the legendary “Gilda.” Hayworth couldn’t have cared less. She wanted out and away from Cohn and Columbia. Director George Sidney gave it all to Kim, anyway, especially in her hushed rendition of “My Funny Valentine.” And once again, Kim – so beautiful, so ripe –was playing a girl who was not comfortable with her allure, tense and embarrassed. (The reality was even more confusing, however. “Pal Joey” revealed that Miss Novak was much averse to wearing a bra!) The film was another big hit.

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Kim reached the top in July of 1957. She was on the cover of Time magazine; the “biggest boff in release,” as they say in Variety. And the best – the most iconic – was yet to come. The following year, Kim, much to the initial distress of director Alfred Hitchcock, would embody the choice role of  Madeleine/Judy in his masterpiece, “Vertigo.” Hitch’s first choice, Vera Miles, became pregnant, and if for no other reason than a basic similarity in looks, Novak stepped in. Vera Miles might have been a better actress by traditional standards, but Novak had every spooky, sensuous, tentative quality the role(s) required. Luring detective Jimmy Stewart with her ethereal half-mad Madeleine – who is, in reality, the rather hapless, commonplace murder-accomplice Judy – Novak hits both performances out of the ballpark. She is especially moving in the second half of the film, resisting Stewart’s attempts to remake Judy into his fantasy woman – not aware they are one and the same. “I won’t wear it,” she insists furiously over the sedate clothes he chooses for her – copies of Madeleine’s style. (Novak herself resisted the film’s famous gray suit. After much back and forth, Hitchcock told designer Edith Head, “She can wear whatever she likes, as long as it’s a gray suit.”) The palpable terror she exudes in that scene also mirrors her own fear of losing herself to her image.

It was Novak’s haunting discretion that gives “Vertigo” its resonance. The film was not a success at the time, but became a great cult object later, reevaluated and more appreciated. It is certainly the movie for which she is most remembered.

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Novak would close the decade with three of her greatest performances, though the heat of her box-office fire had begun to cool. 

She would join Jimmy Stewart again for “Bell, Book and Candle” as the lovely Manhattan witch who whimsically casts her spell over Stewart, only to find herself falling in love with him for real. Another conflicted Novak woman, playing roles, not showing herself and suffering for it. Highlighting all of Kim’s mystery, seductive murmurs, smirks and nervous neck-twitching (mannerisms she shares with another American exotic, Jennifer Jones), the movie’s heroine is also an independent young woman. When Stewart, still under the witchy influence, proposes to her, she stalls: “I’ve never thought about marriage … I’ve been on my own for a long time, I’m set in my ways.” Stewart gasps: “Isn’t that the man’s line?!” She is never more appealing than as a bachelor girl, in her sensible slacks and bulky sweater, fending off a too-serious suitor.

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