Kim Novak & Lavender — The Kim Novak Blogathon

A lot of Hollywood is built upon gimmicks—sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t—and when Kim Novak lighted upon Hollywood, her gimmick became her hair and its lavender tint.

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Before we get any further, this post is a part of The Classic Movie Muse's Kim Novak Blogathon: A 90^th Birthday Celebration. Make sure you click through to read all of the posts over the weekend!

So, when Marilyn Novak—as she was known then—arrived at Columbia Pictures as the next Rita Hayworth, she was assigned a studio press agent, Muriel Roberts. Roberts came up with the gimmick as they were dying Marilyn’s hair blonde: it would have a lavender wash to it.

And lavender would become her ‘favourite’ colour. Lavender clothing, lavender-scented accessories, lavender-coloured accoutrements. Lavender stationary to write fan mail on. Lavender everything.

Marilyn Novak became Kim Novak became the Lavender Blonde, and in mid-century Hollywood, this sultry blonde became a sensation with hits like Picnic, Vertigo, Bell Book and Candle and The Man with the Golden Arm (and my personal favourites, though I don’t think they were critical hits: Boys’ Night Out and Kiss Me, Stupid).

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A November 1956 Photoplay article entitled ‘The Girl with the Lavender Life’ introduced audiences to the new blonde on the block on her home turf: her entirely lavender apartment. And here’s how Kim’s affinity for lavender is noted:

“In Miss Novak’s life lavender has become an all-important morale-builder, lavender being her word to describe rather inclusively all shades ranging from rich purple to pale lilac. For the most part, her small objects like vases, Italian glassware, ashtrays, candlesticks, and even the candles are a deep purple, as richly hued as Malaga wine. The larger objects like curtains, sheets, table cloths, napkins, slip covers, porcelain fixtures and the walls themselves are of lighter hues, the somberness of the blue in purple yielding to the cheerful uplift of lilac and pink tones.

“The same applies to her personal attire. Deep purple for her costume jewelry, of which she uses very little, often doing without even earrings. A purple sweater and gloves, a lighter purple scarf, and possibly a pale lavender parasol. On formal occasions, when she might sheath her regal figure in severe black, she will still give her spirits an added fillip by tinting her blond tresses with lavender or by sprinkling her hair with a few grains of crushed purple rhinestones.

“Just when and how Miss Novak first discovered her pronounced preference for purple she does not know…”

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Here’s a delicious note about how lavender wasn’t really Kim’s thing until she hit Hollywood: “When she first arrived in Hollywood as a vacationing model, known variously as Miss Deep Freeze and Miss Ice Cubes of 1953, her authority over the color barely covered a small lavender monogram on a white handkerchief.”

The story continued into Photoplay’s December issue, and there’s this detail about her removing her make-up: “when Kim Novak stands before her mirror in her lavender apartment and slowly wipes away the purple mascara and takes off the purple eyelashes, only she will know whether the decision she has made was the right one.”

The lavender wasn’t just at her apartment or her home base of Columbia Pictures, either. It followed her from studio to studio. Here’s a letter to Hedda Hopper from a Paramount publicist around the time Vertigo was coming out, in 1958, as unearthed by Vanity Fair:

“Miss Novak, James Stewart, Albert [sic] Hitchcock and all of the visiting press will stay at the Clift where Miss Novak’s fetish for lavender will be fulfilled in her posh suite when she arrives May ninth. Her suite will be lavender-scented; bed sheets and pillow slips in lavender; and while she’s tubbing in lavender-scented water she may take her calls on a lavender-colored bathroom telephone.”

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Let’s pause here to unpack what lavender means. Some people think it’s bunk, some believe wholeheartedly in what the colour theory tells them, but according to several websites, lavender is a sensuous colour. It’s entwined with the ideas of beauty and grace; youth and vitality; masculine and feminine influence.

According to the Color Psychology website, lavender “is in the unique position of invoking masculine, feminine, dynamic, and restful states of mind depending on the current psychological perspective and temper of the viewer.”

And, of course, there’s the connection to royalty—since it was expensive to dye fabrics purple, it was often reserved for royalty and still carries this connotation to this day.

And here’s the thing about Kim Novak, the lavender blonde: she absolutely loathed the colour back in the studio heyday. She hated the lavender tint in her hair, hated all the lavender accents that followed her everywhere, hated being forced to wear lavender clothing in photo shoots, hated, hated, hated the colour.

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She hated what it represented and what it meant to be tethered to the ideal of the lavender blonde. 

In a 2015 interview with The Globe and Mail (a Canadian newspaper), she had this to say: “Suddenly they were selling pieces of sheets that were supposedly from my lavender room. It’s like they wanted me to hate it; it was made into such a phony thing!”

Kim all but retired after the ‘60s, instead periodically returning to the screen for smaller roles and features—never recapturing her earlier successes—but she found a medium she did enjoy: painting. And lavender made its way into her art.

She told The Globe and Mail: “I paint a lot with purple and lavender. But on the other hand, you get to resent something when it’s imposed.”

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Her introspection on what lavender meant in her life began much earlier. In a 1987 interview with McCall magazine, she spoken in-depth about the subject after revealing that she’d recently bought a purple sweater:

“I had a hard time with that for a lot of years. I couldn’t possibly think of wearing lavender, or sitting next to anything that was, because I felt so locked into that image. But I’ve arrived at a point of where, just last week in fact, I bought a purple sweater. And I did not have any guilt.

“I recognized the healing, even as I chose the sweater. I thought ‘Wow, that’s really great. I am no longer choosing it to be an image, and I’m no longer not choosing it not to be one.’

“Now I can even recognize that lavender always was my favorite color. It truly was. But they picked up on it and made too much of it, so I had to pull away from it. Now, I’ve come far enough around where I can recognize that there is something very special for me in that color.”

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For an icon like Kim Novak, who celebrated her 90^th birthday on February 13^th, to cycle through an affinity, then a distaste, then a respect for the colour lavender and what it’s meant for her legendary life is part of what has made her such a fascinating person.

For as much as the studios and the audiences wanted to pigeon-hole her as the lavender blonde and keep her in the neat box this represented, Kim has always defined herself on her own terms—lavender or not.