The Legend of Lylah Clare (The Associates and Aldrich Company, MGM, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, January 5) I watched a highly unusual film on Turner Classic Movies: The Legend of Lylah Clare, made in 1968 by director Robert Aldrich from a script by Hugo Butler (a veteran of Old Hollywood whose first screenplay credit, Big City, was from 1937) and his wife, Jean Rouverol, based on a TV-movie of the same title from 1963 that starred Tuesday Weld in the role(s) played in 1968 by Kim Novak. I decided to stay in and watch this because I’ve long been under the impression that this was the last in the long series of movies in which Novak played essentially what she was in real life: an independent woman under the control of a powerful man who remolded her into his fantasy image of what a woman should be, which she reluctantly went along with even though she didn’t really want to. Her first film as star, Pushover (1954), fit this template – she’s the girlfriend of a bank robber and her dominator is Fred MacMurray as a corrupt cop who wants her to lead him to her boyfriend’s cash stash. So does her most famous role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where she essentially plays two people: a doomed wife whose husband wants to murder her and the mistress he wants to murder the wife so he can be with her permanently. In that one the dominator is a retired police officer turned private detective, played by James Stewart, who becomes a pigeon in the murder plot because his duty-induced fear of heights will keep him from saving either the wife or the mistress, with whom he duly falls in love himself. The Legend of Lylah Clare deals with an old-time film director, Lewis Zarken (Peter Finch), who rather shame-facedly admits the name he was given at birth was “Louie Flack” and he ripped his alias off a dead Hungarian immigrant. He hasn’t worked in 20 years since the early death of his star, muse and ultimately wife Lylah Clare (Kim Novak in flashback scenes). But he’s written a script for a biopic of Lylah and all he’s waiting for is the right star.

The right star appears in the person of aspiring – but not too aspiring – young actress Elsa Brinkmann (Kim Novak). With his long-time friend, agent Bart Langner (Milton Selzer – in a role for which Aldrich originally wanted old-time actor Francis Lederer, but he was too sick), who’s just been diagnosed with cancer, been given only a year to live and wants to make his debut as a producer just before he croaks, Zarken sells the project to studio head Barney Sheean (Ernest Borgnine, still relatively young and husky instead of obese). All the cameras and lights at the studio are marked “B.S.,” after the studio head’s initials but also a sly comment on the lies on which the movie industry has been built. Sheean has a ridiculously ineffectual and pretentious son, Mark Peter Sheean (Michael Murphy), who irritates his dad by calling his studio’s products “films” instead of “movies.” Elsa is pressed into service as star of Zarken’s long-contemplated Lylah Clare biopic, and throughout the film’s production she becomes more and more like the late Lylah, taking on lovers of both genders and becoming more temperamental and more careless about what time she arrives on set. The character was pretty obviously based on Marilyn Monroe, who’d been dead for only a year when the original TV version aired and who was also notorious for arriving late to film shoots, though Aldrich consciously moved her away from the Marilyn stereotype as he developed the project and worked with Butler and Rouverol on the script. This was ironic, in a sense, because Kim Novak had been developed as a Monroe clone; Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn had had Monroe under contract for six months in 1948 but had given her only one film, a “B” musical called Ladies of the Chorus (though its director, Phil Karlson, got a better performance from her than some of her later, more prestigious directors did). When Monroe became a huge star at 20th Century-Fox, Cohn decided to sign another blonde actress with big breasts and make her his replacement. The woman he signed was born with the name Marilyn Novack, the daughter of two schoolteachers in Chicago, and Cohn wanted to rename her “Kit Marlowe.” Novak protested, realizing that she couldn’t use the name “Marilyn” because the former Norma Jeane Baker already owned it as a screen personality, but she insisted on keeping her last name (albeit with the “c” dropped) and calling herself “Kim,” partly from a female relative and partly because it was close to “Kit” without going totally there.

Novak had caused trouble in school for defying her teachers, and she had a predictable tug-of-war with Cohn, who like the protagonists of Pushover and Vertigo tried to control her behavior both on screen and off, telling her (among other things) whom she could date and what clothes she could wear. At the same time Cohn cast her quite creatively, and though she’s acknowledged their conflicts Novak herself has attributed the decline in her career to Cohn’s death and the inability or unwillingness of his successors at Columbia to develop projects for her. (Adding to the irony is that Novak ended up playing a character called “Kit Marlowe” for 19 episodes of the TV soap opera Falcon Crest in the 1980’s.) The Legend of Lylah Clare emerges today as a mashup of one of Aldrich’s best-known films, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and one of Novak’s, Vertigo. She allows herself to be seduced into a Lesbian affair by her “dramatic coach,” Rossella (Rossella Falk) – an in-joke reference to Marilyn Monroe’s alleged Lesbian relationship with her dramatic coach, Natasha Lytess – and also has an affair with Zarken’s gardener, Paolo (Gabriele Tinti). The moment we see Paolo’s shirtless chest we realize he’s being set up to be Chekhov’s pistol: we’re meeting him in act one (photographed to maximize his hunky good looks) so Elsa can have an affair with him in act three and precipitate the denouement. The movie also makes some attempts to comment on the discrepancies between what the Hollywood publicity machine tells us about the great stars and what they’re really like (though Aldrich made similar points more effectively in Baby Jane and an even earlier film, The Big Knife). At the start of the movie Zarken and Langner are bantering back and forth about how the original Lylah Clare was discovered; the official story was that Zarken spotted her working as a clerk in a store in Europe but Langner reminds him (not for the first time, we’re sure) that it was really he who discovered Lylah, and it wasn’t in a store but in a whorehouse that catered to the “special fantasies” of its customers.

And the “official” version of how Lylah died was she was attacked by a stalker who crashed his way into the home she shared with Zarken (and where he still lives 20 years after her death). When she refused him, he drew a knife on her, she grabbed it away from him and stabbed him repeatedly, and killed him but then plunged to her own death from the stairs to the floor below (since this was one of those preposterous staircases that had a rail on only one side). The real story – or at least the one we see from a Zarken-narrated flashback an hour into the film – was that her assailant was actually a consensual affair partner, and what’s more, it was a woman. As the film progresses and it comes time to shoot the ending, Elsa protests that she can’t shoot the scene as written because it would be false, so Zarken invents an even more preposterous ending: Lylah falls to her death while doing her own stunts for a circus picture she is shooting. Elsa is late for her call to the set because she’s having a dalliance with Paolo in her dressing room, and when she finally shows up to shoot the scene she waves away the stunt double, insists on doing it herself, takes a fall off the trapeze, bounces off the net onto the studio floor and dies for real from the concussion. Needless to say, the film is presented as a memorial to its short-lived star – whose name was changed to “Elsa Campbell” in an ironic reflection of what Kim Novak went through with Harry Cohn – and its premiere is a huge success, though it ends with a weird sequence spoofing commercial TV. The live telecast of the premiere is being sponsored by a dog-food company whose product is depicted as being so irresistible that all the dogs in the neighborhood descend on the bowl containing it, which at least according to some accounts of the film is supposed to symbolize the “dog-eat-dog” nature of Hollywood.

The Legend of Lylah Clare was a major flop both with audiences and critics, and it comes across now as a spectacularly uneven film with some great scenes – notably one in which Elsa pleads with Zarken to be told what her motivation is for a given scene, and Zarken snarls at her just to do what he tells her and don’t bother with the motivation. (One wonders if the real Novak went through this with the real Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Vertigo, since Hitchcock was notoriously impatient with actors who asked him why they were doing what they were doing. We do know that when she showed up for work on Vertigo, Novak told Hitchcock that she never wore grey, she never wore tailored suits, and she never wore black shoes – and since the whole plot of the film depended on Novak’s character wearing just those items, he said, “My dear Miss Novak, you can wear anything you like – provided it is what the script calls for.”) At the same time the later stages of The Legend of Lylah Clare Elsa is called on to speak with a German accent because she has supposedly become so possessed with the spirit of Lylah Clare she literally has morphed into her. Aldrich hired the Austrian-born actress Hildegard Knef to dub these lines and didn’t tell Novak he was doing this until the film premiered and Novak saw the movie with this strange, thickly accented voice apparently coming out of her mouth. I wouldn’t call The Legend of Lylah Clare a bad movie that could have been good – it’s more like a mediocre movie that could have been great – and Aldrich himself variously blamed Kim Novak and himself for its failure. In a 1972 interview he’s quoted as saying, “I was about to bum-rap Kim Novak, when we were talking about this the other day, and then I realized that would be pretty unfair. Because people forget that Novak can act. I really didn't do her justice. … I’m the producer and I’m the director. I’m responsible for not communicating that to the audience. I just didn't do it.”