Ahead of Kim Novak returning to the spotlight Monday night to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival, the 92-year-old “Vertigo” legend voiced concerns about “ScandaloFus,” an upcoming movie starring Sydney Sweeney about her clandestine love affair in the late 1950s with entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.
Actually, the affair between Novak and Davis wasn’t so secret, because her powerful studio boss Harry Cohn got wind of it and became angry. The Columbia Pictures chief thought that a romance between Hollywood’s top female star and a Black man would be very bad for business. According to Vanity Fair, Cohn also took credit for discovering Novak and was so intent on protecting his investment that he put out a contract on Davis — not to kill him but to send him a message by breaking “both his legs” and putting out his remaining good eye.
The gossip columns soon began to publish blind items on Novak and Davis, according to Vanity Fair, which some would say made it a brewing “scandal.” However, 70 years later, Novak takes issue with that word being applied to what she and Davis felt about each other, or with the word, “Scandalous” being used as the title for the upcoming movie.
American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr (1925 – 1990) and British impresario Al Burnett (behind Davis, 1906 – 1973) pictured with a convertible car outside the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly, London, on June 14th, 1960. Burnett is the owner of the Pigalle Club. (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” Novak said in an interview with The Guardian, as she also was promoting “Kim Novak’s Vertigo,” a documentary about her life and career.
“He’s somebody I really cared about,” Novak continued. “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. But I’m concerned they’re going to make it all sexual reasons.”
When announcing the “Scandalous” project a year ago, its director, Oscar-nominated actor Colman Domingo, told Deadline: “Hopefully we’ll make a beautiful, sweet film that’s really about the possibility of love, but under many eyes, trying to have privacy, trying to have love, trying to have a life.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 03: Sydney Sweeney attends the Los Angeles Special Screening of “Americana” at Desert 5 Spot on August 03, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Domingo also said that he and Sweeney were “trying to advocate for your humanity again in your life.” He credited Sweeney, his co-star on the HBO series, “Euphoria,” with bringing the project to his attention.
“I read the script, and I had some notes — I did a page-one rewrite of it,” Domingo said. “She loved it. So, we were really engaging one-on-one in that way of what possibly we can make together, sort of this fractured love story between Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak.”
According to Hollywood lore, this “fractured love story” began in 1957, after Novak finished work on “Vertigo,” Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco-set cinematic masterpiece about romantic obsession.
“Vertigo” would prove to be the most challenging of Novak’s career, as well as the film with which she is most identified. She hauntingly plays the dual roles of Madeleine, an enigmatic San Francisco society wife, and Judy, a shopgirl from Kansas who is hired to impersonate Madeleine in order to lure James Stewart’s retired police detective into a murder plot. The Guardian said that “the fragile presence” Novak brought to her performance is central to the film’s greatness and was possible because the story felt so personal.
“I identified so much with Judy and Madeleine because they were both being told to change who they really were,” Novak told the Guardian. “They had to become something that didn’t represent them.”
It sounds as though Novak felt she could be who she really was with Davis. Both Novak and Davis had told mutual friends they were interested in meeting each other. At the time, Davis was known as an electrifying and sexually magnetic singer, dancer and actor who performed to sold-out crowds in Las Vegas and Los Angeles nightclubs, according to Vanity Fair. He also was closely associated with Frank Sinatra’s “Rat Pack.”
Actress Kim Novak beside a train window, May 25th 1956. (Photo by Bob Haswell/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Tony Curtis finally arranged for Novak and Davis to enjoy some time together at a party he hosted at his home, Vanity Fair reported. Curtis said he told Davis, “I’m going to have a party at my house. Come on by, and I’ll invite Kim. They both came over and they spent the evening together — deep in thought, deep in talk. I could see right from the beginning that they were getting along in an intense way, and that was the beginning of the relationship.”
Their intense conversation at the party made it into a Hollywood gossip column, prompting Davis to call Novak and apologize, Vanity Fair reported. He explained he had nothing to do with the report and told her, “I realize the position you’re in with the studio.”
But Novak insisted that the studio didn’t own her, and she invited Davis over to her house in Beverly Hills for a spaghetti dinner. “For Novak, Davis was perhaps more than just an exciting, sympathetic man,” Vanity Fair reported. He might be her “co-conspirator” in saying no to Cohn and to other people in Hollywood who were trying to control her image and career.
From there, Novak and Davis found a way to meet up, usually for quiet, intimate dinners that wouldn’t be discovered by the press or by Cohn’s spies, Vanity Fair reported. Eventually, through a third party, Davis rented a beach house in Malibu for private rendezvous.
“At stake was not only Novak’s career as a screen star — by this time she was the No. 1 box-office draw in the country — but also Davis’s potential career as a dramatic actor, one of his cherished but still unfulfilled ambitions,” Vanity Fair reported, noting that America was still deeply segregated.
VENICE, ITALY – SEPTEMBER 01: Kim Novak receives the Golden Lion For Lifetime Achievement Award during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on September 01, 2025 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
But Cohn finally learned about the relationship, which, his widow later said, was a factor in him suffering a heart attack and dying two months later, Vanity Fair reported. After a Chicago gossip columnist reported on the affair, Cohn put out “the contract” on Davis. The singer’s father, Sammy Davis Sr., got word that his son was in danger from West Coast gangster Mickey Cohen, who told him that his son should immediately find a Black woman to marry.
So, Davis found a wife, a 23-year-old singer named Loray White, promising her a certain sum of money and “all the rights that Mrs. Sammy Davis Jr. would have” until they dissolved the marriage at the end of a year.
Unfortunately for Novak and Davis, their love story couldn’t survive Cohn’s interference, the mob threats or Davis’s “sham wedding,” Vanity Fair reported. Novak “simply retreated,” later saying: “It was a very dangerous relationship then—a white woman and a Black man, no matter his status—it simply didn’t mix publicly. I was suddenly in the eye of a hurricane. . . . My agent told me my career would be over if I continued to see Sammy. Some of my friends wouldn’t even return my telephone calls.”
But even after she backed out of the affair, Novak’s career still went into decline, perhaps because of Cohn’s death, according to Vanity Fair. While Cohn exercised tight control over Novak’s professional and personal life, she also acknowledged he had an instinct for finding the right projects for her. Once he was gone, “nobody knew what to do” with her at the studio. “Her later films veered from forgettable to lousy, with a few exceptions,” Vanity Fair reported.
Novak moved to Big Sur for a time, where she spent her time horseback riding, taking walks, painting, and eventually raising llamas with her second husband, a veterinarian. In 1976, she and her husband, Robert Malloy, relocated to Oregon, to a town on the Rogue River, north of Ashland. Meanwhile, she and Davis met up a couple more times: At the 1979 Academy Awards and then on his death bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1990.
Novak visited Davis in his hospital room, and he “dressed to the nines for the meeting,” the wife of one of Davis’s close friends told Vanity Fair. “He had sent to his house for his beautiful silk robe, his silk pajamas.”
