Kim Novak was Harry Cohn’s revenge on Rita Hayworth. Sammy Davis Jr. was Kim Novak’s revenge on Harry Cohn. What began as a boldface item in Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip column in the New York Journal-American threatened to become a national scandal on the eve of America’s long struggle for civil rights.

It started in 1957 at Chicago’s most famous nightclub, Chez Paree. The man known as “the greatest entertainer in the world” was onstage, the smoke from his cigarette trellising the air. You had to see him: the gorgeous shirt, the cuff links, the way everything billowed. He was in the dark and suddenly the spotlight picked him up—he was electric, he was hot, it was almost a sexual thing. He was singing to Kim Novak, sitting at a stageside table; she had just finished work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the most challenging film of her career. That night would be the first and virtually the last time that Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. would be seen in public together. At the heart of their star-crossed affair was one of Hollywood’s sacred monsters: the notorious Harry Cohn.

It was said that Harry Cohn put more people in the cemetery than all the other moguls combined. He ran Columbia Pictures as if it were a family business, and in a way it was, because he had wrangled control from his brother Jack, who was back on the East Coast in New York. By the mid-1930s, Cohn had nurtured Columbia from a low-rent, B-movie studio on Hollywood’s “Poverty Row,” a block off Sunset, into a major Hollywood film studio.

Cohn wanted to be known as the toughest, meanest mogul in Hollywood. He brandished a riding crop and slashed it across his desk to terrify employees. He kept a framed photograph of his hero, Benito Mussolini, on his massive desk and had his office decorated to look like Il Duce’s. The reporter James Bacon, fresh out of Chicago, was assigned to cover Hollywood for the Associated Press back in 1948. “I went from covering Al Capone to covering Harry Cohn,” Bacon recalls. “Cohn was by far the meanest. He’d keep tabs on all the writers. He used to fire people all the time—usually on Christmas Eve.”

Henri Soulé, the owner of Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque in New York, detested Cohn and considered him a déclassé Hollywood hood. At the time, Le Pavillon was one of the most famous restaurants in the world: Through its doors, at 5 East 55th Street, came the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Cabots, and the Windsors. When Cohn came in, however, the imperious Soulé seated him at the back, near the kitchen. Unfortunately for Soulé, Columbia owned the building, and Cohn retaliated by raising Le Pavilion’s rent.

The director George Sidney, who made The Eddy Duchin Story, Jeanne Eagels, and Pal Joey, all with Novak at Columbia Pictures, became one of Cohn’s most trusted intimates. “People used to say, ‘I’m going to beat Harry,’” Sidney recalls. “But no one could beat Harry—he was too smart, he was too sharp. You really have to understand that Mr. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner—these men with their blood and their money and their reputations, they smelled out who had star material.”

Cohn took all the credit for creating Rita Hayworth—he was also obsessed with her. She was Columbia’s resident sex goddess in the 1940s, but she had a bad habit of getting married. Her first husband was a 40-year-old car salesman named Edward C. Judson; she then married director Orson Welles, Aly Khan, heir apparent to the Ismaili Muslim throne, and singer Dick Haymes. Every time she got married, her box-office standing eroded. Her marriage to Khan, a notorious playboy and womanizer, kept her out of pictures for more than two years, infuriating Cohn and further alienating her fans.