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Features
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Hedren on Hitchcock
Tippi Hedren, the last of Alfred Hitchcock's cool blondes, reminisces about having her career made – and then broken – by the Master of Suspense.
Friday, July 29, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Universal Pictures
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Plucked from obscurity
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In San Francisco for a personal appearance at the Castro Theatre, Tippi Hedren greets FilmStew at the Hilton Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from Union Square, the spot where moviegoers first met her in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic The Birds. One of the Master of Suspense's cool blondes, a sorority that included Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Maria Saint, and Janet Leigh, Hedren, smart in a black-and-white pantsuit, is still a picture of sophisticated elegance.
Hedren's appearance tonight at the Castro, where she will participate in a Q&A with The Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson at a benefit double screening of The Birds and Marnie in support of her Roar Foundation and Shambala wildlife preserve, kicks off a four-day Hitchcock festival. On July 30th, Strangers on a Train screens with Rope. The director's daughter Patricia, her Strangers on a Train co-star Laura Elliott, and special guest Robert Walker Jr., son of the film's star, will be on hand for an onstage interview. Psycho and Rebecca follow on the July 31st, with Vertigo bringing the Hitchcock fete to a close on August 1st while simultaneously kicking off an 11-day 70mm film series.
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Universal Pictures
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On set with Hitchcock
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What catches the eye immediately about Hedren in the pin on her lapel, of gold and seed pearls, depicting three birds in flight. Hitchcock presented the bauble to her one evening when she was at dinner with him, his wife Alma Reville, and Universal Studios head Lew Wasserman. At the time, she was under contract to Hitch for $500 a week, signed after he spotted her in a commercial.
Hitchcock enlisted celebrated costume designer Edith Head to design the clothes for both her screen test and personal wardrobe. It turned out to be the most expensive screen test in Hollywood history up to that time, with the filmmaker flying in Martin Balsam to appear opposite Hedren in scenes from To Catch a Thief, Rebecca and Notorious.
With her lack of experience, Hedren was under the impression she would be starting out on his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The pin was his way of telling her she was starting at the top, as The Birds' playgirl heroine Melanie Daniels.
"I was totally dumbfounded," she admits. "I looked at Alma and she had big tears in her eyes. Of course, I was trying to just control myself and I looked over at Lew Wasserman – one tear. A very conservative man – one tear. And I looked at Hitch and he was sitting looking very pompous, pleased with himself, and from then on, my life totally changed, totally."
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Universal Pictures
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The beginning of the end
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Hitchcock became not just her director, but drama coach. She was acutely aware, she says, that those in charge at Universal were less than thrilled to have to take a chance at the box office with a complete unknown, but the filmmaker nonetheless gave her the confidence that she could do it. They discussed the movie over long lunches, during which they also got acquainted.
But for the most part, it was just Hitchcock holding court, telling stories and jokes. "He loved dirty limericks," Hedren laughs. “They were funny, actually, albeit embarrassing, but there were other limericks that weren't so embarrassing that were also charming and cute."
Hitchcock also did something that Hedren has never heard of another director doing and that was to take his young star to different department meetings with him so that she would have a better understanding of the process. "I was so grateful, because that gave me an education in filmmaking that was unbelievable," she says.
On set, the director - who was famed for his thorough preparation and detailed storyboards - kept to a strict 9-to-5 schedule, and so trusted his crew to do what he asked that he would never even approach the camera to look through the eyepiece. He approached his actors in much the same way, discussing the characters with them in depth so that by the time Hedren got to the set, she knew what was expected of her, although she admits that, "Sometimes he would direct me almost to the movement of an eye," she marvels.
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Nicholas Snow
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A rare return to Hollywood
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It was co-star Jessica Tandy who gave her a real insight into acting when she suggested to Hitchcock that he change the tone of a particular scene. In the scene, Melanie brings the older woman, who has horrifyingly seen a neighbor with his eyes pecked out by attacking birds, a cup of tea. Hitchcock originally directed Hedren to be somewhat mean towards Tandy. When Tandy saw the dailies, she told the director, "Hitch, nobody's going to like that girl."
Even though the set had already been struck, Hitchcock had it brought in again and re-did the scene, with a more sympathetic Melanie. "It made all the difference in the world," Hedren observes. "Being a novice at acting, I thought, 'Wow! What a difference.' Same set, same scene, same actors, and completely different. Same dialogue, same everything. It was just awesome to me. That was a thrill."
One thing Hitchcock didn't prepare Hedren for was the climactic scene where she is attacked by a horde of diving birds in the house. All along, she was told the scene would be filmed using mechanical birds until the Monday she came in to shoot the scene and the assistant director informed her that the mechanical birds wouldn't work. Instead, they were going to have to bring in live ones.
"I walked out to the set and they had no intention of using mechanical birds," she asserts. "They had a cage built already around the door that I walk in. It was ready. There were cartons of live birds within the cage and three prop men with their gloves ready to hurl them at me. I mean, you don't just do that all of the sudden."
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Daughter Melanie Griffith
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It took five days to shoot the scene. Cary Grant visited the set on the third day and couldn't get over it, telling Hedren, "You're the bravest lady I've ever met." By Friday, they had birds attached to her body, tethered to her dress by elastic bands. Late in the afternoon, one of them jumped from her shoulder and pierced the skin under her eye.
"I just said, 'You know what? That's enough," she says. "I just sat in the middle of the floor, on stage, and just burst into tears from sheer exhaustion."
When she got to work the next week, she fell into such a deep sleep, no one could wake her. He doctor ordered complete rest for a week, over Hitchcock's objections. ‘She has to [work]. We have nothing else to shoot,’ he told the doctor, who replied, ‘What are you trying to do kill her?’
But as difficult as that scene was, it was nothing compared to what she was in for with her next and final project with Hitchcock, Marnie. The story of a sexually repressed liar and thief who is blackmailed into marriage, the part was originally meant as a comeback vehicle for the Princess of Monaco, the former Grace Kelly, an idea that always struck Hedren as absurd. "All that time I was thinking, 'Isn't that odd that they would allow her to play a compulsive thief? And a liar and a cheat and frigid to the point where she screams if a man comes near her?'"
Sure enough, the comeback never happened and Hedren got the part, opposite Sean Connery, casting that at the beginning struck Hedren as her biggest challenge. She remembers an exchange with Hitchcock, "I said, 'Here I am playing this frigid woman who screams every time a man comes near her and you have chosen an actor who could melt the iciest of blondes. How am I supposed to do that?' And he said, 'It's called acting, my dear,' and that was the end of that."
But as the shoot wore on, the cordial relationship she originally shared with the director faded. He became more and more controlling and Hedren finally rebelled. "I felt it was much too confining and you don't take an adult woman with a child and try to make her over the way you would an 18-year-old,” she explains. “Even then, I don't know of many 18-year-olds today who would put up with that kind of thing. So I just said, 'I have to get out of it.'"
In his anger, Hitchcock promised to ruin her career. For two years, he kept her to her contract, paying her $600 a week, but refusing to let her work for anyone else. "I would find out year after year, directors and producers who wanted me for specific films and they were told I wasn't available. [Ruining my career] was very easily done."
| Eventually, she resumed her career, appearing opposite Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren in Charlie Chaplin's last film, The Countess from Hong Kong, and she continues to act, most recently in David O. Russell's philosophical comedy I Heart Huckabees and in the upcoming indie drama Strike the Tent.
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But it was 1981's Roar, a movie she produced and starred in with then-husband Noel Marshall and their children, that inadvertently started her other career, sheltering big cats on the Shambala Preserve and lobbying Congress on animals' behalf (she would particularly like to see a ban on breeding the animals for pets in the U.S.). “After the film was released in 1981, we probably had 100 animals,” she says. “This was their home and they needed to stay there.”
“I think if anyone had told me that this would become my responsibility, I probably would have run screaming into the night. However, I love them more than my next breath."
| Over the years, a number of myths have grown up over her relationship with Hitchcock, perhaps the most famous being that once, as a sick prank, he gave her then kindergarten-age daughter, Melanie Griffith, a doll of her mother packaged in a coffin. Not true, says Hedren. It was a sincere gift that looked just like Hedren, based as it was on a life mask. Unfortunately, it came packaged in a pine box.
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"The intent was nothing more than to give her a lovely present and it just went all wrong, and she never forgot it," explains Hedren of a doll that is now long gone. “I don't know what my husband did with it, which is one of the reasons he's my ex-husband. Can you imagine what a valuable piece that would have been?"
In spite of the cost to her career, Hedren has no regrets about taking a stand with Hitchcock, save one. "He was a major force in my life,” she admits. “It is sad to me that it couldn't have gone on, because I would have loved to have made more films with him. He was just awesome to work with.”
"Why he had these obsessions and this desire to control, I don't know. It killed it and that's sad."
[For more information on this weekend's Castro Theatre Hitchcock film series, please visit castrotheatresf.com or call (415) 621-6120.]
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