Tom returned from a play workshop to find that Carol had been checking out Robert Osborne’s interview with Kim Novak on YouTube.

TB: I didn’t know you were that much of a fan.

CB: Are you kidding—“Picnic”?

TB: Well of course “Picnic.”

CB: That movie spoke to me—my alienated, misunderstood teenage self.

TB: That amazing scene where she sashays toward William Holden while “Moonglow” is playing—supposedly some theaters flashed EAT POPCORN over that scene and increased popcorn sales by 50%.

CB: Didn’t that turn out to be a hoax?

TB: I think so, yeah.

CB: She was sort of playing herself—vulnerable, wounded…only appreciated for her beauty, until William Holden got who she really was—the sensitive girl-woman with the conventional family that was stifling her.

TB: Your family wasn’t conventional. They licked envelopes for the Rosenbergs.

CB: I’m saying she was a blank slate waiting to be imprinted. For years she was a #1 box office star, I never realized that. She’s had way too much plastic surgery but if you squinted you could see the old Kim Novak sneaking through the mask. And she’s lost that whisper in her voice. I guess that was part of her sexual signature. But why wasn’t she Marilyn? There was no such thing as “Kim.”

TB: What’s that thing about Marilyn, she was the “promise of sex”? With Kim Novak, the promise was already kept—the sleepy-voiced thing.

CB: Kim was more the innocent. But she said she was bipolar, like her father. I thought there might be some early dementia there. She kept repeating herself. Then she broke down in tears talking about the disappointments in her career…not fighting to get better parts. Envying Lee Remick for being taken seriously.

TB: Hitchcock said something awful about her. I think maybe it’s in the Truffaut book. Something like, “At least this time she doesn’t spoil the picture.”

CB: She was good in that picture with Kirk Douglas—the one set in the suburbs?

TB: “Strangers When We Meet.” Richard Quine.

CB: Who she was married to, I didn’t realize that. In the interview, she kept turning to the audience, and talking to Robert Osborne like a therapist…her bipolar father who walked out of “Vertigo” and never said he loved her…and then leaving the business because she and Mike Figgis didn’t get along? What movie was that?

TB: I’m looking it up….”Liebestraum.” Last movie, 1991. It made…133 thousand dollars. Wait, you know what we forgot? “The Legend of Lylah Clare.”

CB: Robert Aldrich. That was amazing.

TB: She was great in that. That scene on the staircase where she bursts out in that contralto, with a German accent.

CB: “Pal Joey.” “Middle of the Night.”

TB: She was in a lot of movies before she wasn’t.

CB: It was so painful…her painful memories. The way she started crying when she talked about not working again after Mike Figgis. The regret in her voice. And then how she’s painting now, and she’s proud of what she’s accomplished and she started crying again. Sometimes I wonder how people survive their childhoods—that they can still walk and talk much less act.

TB: And then not act.

CB: I hope she feels better now.