Hitchcock's Blondes by Laurence Leamer

Author:Laurence Leamer [Leamer, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

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Those accolades came far too late to advance Novak’s career. It did not help when the most prominent director of the age dismissed her. Add to that the stories about how difficult she was and rumors about interracial dating. Novak had roundly condemned Cohn, but now that he was gone, no one was getting her good parts, and she moved from one forgettable role to another. She starred in several films that did little more than exploit her sexuality in sadly obvious ways. As her status in the industry slowly declined, she married a British actor, Richard Johnson. The marriage was over scarcely before it began, and Novak was once again single.

Novak purchased a house in Big Sur overlooking the Pacific, but other than that, the actress’s life appeared to be cursed. In November 1965, while filming a movie in France, she was so seriously injured when she fell off a horse that she had to be replaced. The following August, she hurt her hand when her car fell down a 120-foot embankment in Santa Maria. That December, near her Bel Air home, she collided with another car on Sunset Boulevard.

Two days later a great mudslide descended on her house in Bel Air, taking down trees in her yard and inundating some of her living room furniture in wet muck. It was all too much, all too terribly much. Grabbing up what she could, Novak jumped into her white Jaguar and headed down the hill as a tree fell, nearly taking her out.

“I got back on the highway and started to drive too fast, up to Big Sur,” she said. “I ran down to the beach and threw off all of my clothes and just scrubbed in the water. And it felt so good. It was the most cleansing, healing thing. And I started laughing and dancing in the waves, and by the time I got into the house, I slept like I never slept before.”

Novak understood it was time, past time, for her to leave Hollywood. “I wanted to express my feelings,” she said. Novak felt boxed up playing roles off-screen as much as on-screen. In seeking her feelings, she was seeking herself. As idyllic as Big Sur first appeared, it was not far enough away from the clamor of modern life or close enough to the feelings she sought. So a decade later, she moved to a country house on the Rogue River in southern Oregon.

Equine veterinarian Robert Malloy came to treat one of Novak’s horses. He was a good man doing good work, and she fell in love and married him. She adored his sense of humor, not jokes picked up somewhere, but a warm, amusing take on life. And when he laughed, the ends of his lips turned up as if he was smiling twice.

Novak and Malloy lived in a redwood house in a forest at the center of a forty-three-acre ranch. They had horses, llamas, dogs, and a pet snake or two. Novak

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