Hedren in 1963 publicity still for “The Birds”, photo from Universal/MCA archives
January 19, 1930 – Nathalie Kay Hedren:
“Birds I am fine with… spiders are an entirely different matter.”
Of course, Tippi Hedren is best known for her roles in a pair of Alfred Hitchcock films, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), or maybe as the mother of Melanie Griffith and grandmother of Dakota Johnson. As an animal lover, I always think about Shambala Preserve, her 80-acre wildlife habitat that she founded in 1983, when I consider Hedren.
In Marnie, possibly the most sexually fucked of all 20th century films, Hedren portrays a frigid kleptomaniac afraid of the color red and storms. Her character Marnie asks Mark, played by Sean Connery about a photograph in his office of a wild cat. It is a jaguarundi, native to southern North America. Mark says he has trained the wild cat to trust him.
Marnie asks: “Is that all?” and Mark answers: “Well that’s a great deal… for a jaguarundi”.
I wonder if Hedren knew while filming that someday lions, tigers and other large cats would become the focus of her life.
Hedren made two back-to-back films in Africa, Satan’s Harvest (1970) and Mr. Kingstreet’s War (1971) They are inconsequential films except that they led to Hedren financing and producing Roar in 1981. It is written and directed by Hedren’s then-husband Noel Marshall, and features young Griffith, plus Marshall’s two real-life sons. The film follows a family who are attacked by jungle animals at the secluded home of their keeper. 70 members of its cast and crew were injured by animals used in the film. Footage capturing the injuries are included in the final cut of the film, resulting in real blood on screen. It is considered the most dangerous film shoot in history.
Roar took five years to make. The plot was simple: Snakes On A Plane, but with cats in a casa. It is a rather dumb movie. Told by professional animal trainers that it was impossible to work with so many wild animals at once, Hedren and Marshall decided to make it without them, and they brought in more than 100 lions, tigers, and elephants, settling them at a California ranch, now Shambala Preserve. Griffith needed plastic surgery after being mauled, and cinematographer Jan de Bont required 200 stitches when his scalp was nearly severed by a lion.
Awful, but it brought Hedren a fierce passion for helping wild cats in captivity. Initially naïve about the dangers, she has become a safety expert. After three decades of providing refuge for large wild cats that people bought then quickly become overwhelmed, injured or killed, Hedren worked to pass the Federal Ban on Breeding Exotic Cats for Personal Possession Act, a tougher law than the 2003 Captive Wildlife Safety Act. Hedren co-authored the bill and Congress passed it unanimously. Can you believe that?
Hedren isn’t just devoted to helping animals. She has also traveled around the globe establishing relief programs following earthquakes, hurricanes, famine and war, with a special emphasis on helping the people Vietnam beginning in 1966.
She has never stopped working, and she says it has been out of necessity. She doesn’t make any money from Shambala, and her 60 + rescued lions, tigers, leopards, and bobcats, including two tigers Michael Jackson formerly had at his Neverland Ranch. Keeping Shambala open costs about $75,000 per month.
She kept acting, and played an abortion rights activist in Alexander Payne’s brilliant satire Citizen Ruth (1996) with Laura Dern. In 1998, she guest-starred in an episode of the television series Chicago Hope titled Psychodrama that pays tribute to the Hitchcock films. Hedren’s character, Alfreda Perkins, references Anthony Perkins, who starred in the director’s Psycho (1960). I loved her bit in David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees (2004), as a dirty-talking attractive older woman who slaps Jude Law in an elevator. In 2006, Hedren was cast in the series Fashion House with Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild and in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2008). Hedren and her famous daughter guest-starred on an episode of the underrated Raising Hope in 2012. In 2013, she made played herself in the fourth-season finale of, get this… Cougar Town.
Tippi: A Memoir was published in 2016. Hedren:
“It was about time I stop letting everyone else tell my story and finally tell it myself.”
Hedren, more than the other icy Hitchcock blondes, has been embraced by LGBTQ film fans.
Some critics have written that her acting is wooden, and that Hitchcock planned The Birds to star Grace Kelly. But, I think she is brilliant in The Birds. And, you know, queers have an affection for the easily dismissed.
Hedren has written that she knew she had become a Gay Icon when her character in The Birds, with her torn green suit, bloodied face and disheveled hair, became popular with drag artists, especially on Halloween.
Hedren was a successful model, appearing on the cover of LIFE and Glamour magazines, when Hitchcock spotted her on a commercial in 1961, the year after he made Psycho. At the height of his popularity, the director had his agents track her down and within weeks had signed her to a seven-year exclusive contract. Things went badly between the two as he became more and more controlling.
She claims that Hitchcock threw himself on top of her in the back of his limousine and tried to kiss her, and that she didn’t tell anyone because “sexual harassment was a term that didn’t exist in the early 1960s”. Hedren:
“Besides, he was Alfred Hitchcock, one of Universal’s superstars, and I was just a lucky little blonde model he’d rescued from relative obscurity. Which one of us was more valuable to the studio, him or me?”
In her memoir, Hedren describes a later encounter in Hitchcock’s office where the director suddenly grabbed her and put his hands on her:
“It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became. Then he started adding threats, as if he could do anything to me that was worse than what he was trying to do at that moment.”
“Marnie”, Hedren with Diane Baker, Hitchcock and Connery. photo via YouTube
Fighting off his sexual advances, he worked just as hard to keep her down. After Marnie, he sabotaged her career by keeping her under contract but refusing to give her any work or loan her out. Hedren:
“Hitch said he would ruin my career and I told him to do what he had to do. I’ve made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life.”
She finally was allowed to do a supporting role in Charlie Chaplin’s final film, A Countess From Hong Kong (1967) with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.
Still, she has become a regular at Hitchcock film festivals, especially when The Birds is shown. She even paid tribute to him at the American Film Institute event in his honor in 1979, the year before he died. Despite his treatment of her, Hedren says she felt “a wave of sadness” when he died .
Hedren:
“It surprised everyone that I went to Hitchcock’s funeral. As far as I was concerned, there was no unfinished business between us, nothing more that needed to be said. I’d already healed and moved on by the time Hitchcock died, far past anything I’d ever imagined for myself. So in the end, I was there to say, ‘Goodbye, Hitch.'”
Despite the iconography of the Hitchcock Blondes, Hedren never met Grace Kelly, who was already Princess Grace by the time Hedren started working in films. Before Janet Leigh (Marion in Psycho) passed in 2004, she and Hedren were photographed together at Hitchcock events. Hedren says that Kim Novak (Madeline in Vertigo) always declines the Hitchcock tributes.
In her memoir, she writes about a story meeting for The Birds where the famously ambiguous ending was discussed. Her favorite pitch was the idea to do shots of famous monuments around the world, all covered in birds. Universal Pictures said that would be too expensive. She also has only good things to say about her co-stars Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright.
Before filming of The Birds began, Hitchcock warned Taylor, not to socialize with or touch Hedren. She writes that on set, every time Hitchcock saw her laughing or talking with a man, he would turn petulant and ”fix her with an expressionless, unwavering stare… even if he was talking to a group of people on the other side of the soundstage.”
The Birds is sometimes seen as metaphor for Hitchcock’s complicated feelings about women. It wasn’t just the avian menace, but the women of Bodega Bay who turn on the perfectly coiffed, immaculately dressed, trespassing blond stranger in their town and bring her down.
2017, via YouTube
Choosing my favorite Hitchcock blonde is tough; they all have their special qualities. Yet, Hedren’s Hitchcock blonde seems to possess even darker secrets than the rest.
