Kim Novak has criticised the title of Scandalous!, a forthcoming biopic about her 1957 love affair with Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr.
The 92-year-old actor, one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the face of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, had a clandestine affair with the Black singer and actor at the height of their careers while Jim Crow segregation laws existed in America.
The events surrounding the relationship are immortalised in Sing Sing actor Colman Domingo’s directorial debut, starring Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney as Novak and Rye Lane’s David Jonsson as Davis.
However, Novak has taken issue with the film’s title, telling The Guardian that their relationship wasn’t as scandalous as the moniker implies.
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” she said. “He’s somebody I really cared about. We had so much in common, including that need to be accepted for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.”
She added that she was concerned the film was being made for “sexual reasons”.
The pair’s relationship ended after Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, who had Novak signed under a contract, threatened Davis with mob violence, insisting it would be “bad for business” if Novak were involved with a Black man.
The affair made headlines when a Chicago gossip columnist wrote a detailed account of their relationship in early 1958, including their plans to wed, despite them both denying the claims.
After the news swept the nation, Davis married a Black woman named Loray White nine days later. Novak married a white actor, Richard Johnson, in 1965.
Domingo has described the project as a “beautiful, sweet film that’s really about the possibility of love, but under many eyes”.
He said the film, co-produced by Sweeney, will explore “trying to have privacy, trying to have love, trying to have a life”.
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He added: “And I think it’s something that Sydney and I both know very well. We’re trying to advocate for your humanity again in your life.”
Novak is being honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Venice film festival, where a documentary about her life and career, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, is premiering.
Announcing her award, Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera called her “a rebel at the heart of Hollywood”.
In Kim Novak’s Vertigo, the actor reflects on a long journey of self-discovery. Asked by The Guardian about how she would like to be remembered, she said: “I would like them to think that I was true to myself. That I kept my standards high and lived by them.”
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