How Racism Doomed Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr.’s Relationship in 1950s: ‘I Was Told Not to See Him’

The new book 'Hitchcock's Blondes' reveals details about the two Hollywood stars' brief romance

A new book is shedding light on the short-lived relationship between screen legend Kim Novak and Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr.

In Hitchcock’s Blondes, a deep dive into the lives of eight actresses who worked with director Alfred Hitchcock, author Laurence Leamer reveals how the rampant racism in 1950s America ruined whatever chances the Vertigo actress, now 90, had with the singer-actor, who died in 1990.

The two connected in 1956 when they both appeared as guests on The Steve Allen Show. According to Leamer, Davis “was wildly attracted” to bombshell Novak.

The next year, while Novak was filming Hitchcock’s suspense thriller Vertigo, Davis arranged to come to the set to take some pictures.

Related: Kim Novak on Turning 90 and How She'll Be Remembered: 'My Life Has Grown Richer the Longer I've Been Around'

“The entertainer was no photographer, but to spend time with Novak he pretended to be an avid shutterbug. As he shot his close-ups of her, she asked slyly, ‘Did you ever think of taking off the lens cover?’” Leamer writes.

They continued to bond. “Sammy had an innocent boyish quality and a crush on me,” Leamer quotes Novak as saying. “We had fun together.”

But according to the author, Davis originally had an ulterior motive for wooing the actress: He wanted to thumb his nose at racists.

Related: Kim Novak's Life in Photos

“I reached a point with the indignities, the injustices, the nastiness, the racial abuses . . . where I wanted to get the whitest, the most famous chick in the world and just show ’em,” Leamer quotes Davis as telling his friend and biographer, Burt Boyar.

Davis, however, actually started to fall for Novak.

They met up again at a charity ball in California the night before Thanksgiving in 1957. Davis “had come solely to see Novak,” according to Leamer. He asked her to spend the holiday at his house — an invitation which she accepted.

She, in turn, brought him to meet her family in Chicago at Christmastime.

But as word spread that they were spending time together, some in Hollywood became uneasy, including Harry Cohn the head of Columbia Pictures, where Novak was under contract.

Leamer, pointing to the brutal murder of Emmett Till just two years prior in 1955, says “there was a very real possibility that the segregated film theaters of the South would refuse to show movies starring an actress who was dating an African American in real life.”

According to Smithsonian magazine, a Gallup poll from 1958 showed only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial unions, which were still outlawed in some states. (Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down those laws, would not come for another decade.)

The actress, however, was undeterred. “Something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him,” Leamer quotes Novak as saying. “I didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”

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Davis agreed. “We became conspirators, drawn together by the single thing we had in common: defiance,” Davis’s friend and biographer, Boyar, quoted the entertainer as saying in the 2000 book Sammy.

But a Chicago gossip columnist changed everything on Jan. 1, 1958 when he printed an account of Novak and Davis’s relationship, saying the two would potentially get married, according to Leamer:  “Novak denied it vehemently, but nothing could stop the frenzy of the story.”

Leamer writes that Cohn grew irate and sent a message to Davis — who had lost one eye in a car accident years prior — via his “Mob friends”: End the relationship or else “he would lose his one good eye.”

Nine days later, Davis married a Black chorus girl named Loray White.

Novak herself wed actor Richard Johnson in 1965. They divorced, and she married veterinarian Robert Malloy in 1976 and remained together until his death in 2021.

Novak previously told PEOPLE that her relationship with Davis was “often misunderstood.”

Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession is available now.

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