In Tippi: A Memoir, published this week, Tippi Hedren details the years she spent working with director Alfred Hitchcock—probably the most professionally acclaimed and personally miserable period of her career. Sexual harassment was hardly on Hollywood’s radar in the early 60s, and Hedren had to find her own solution for survival when the director began insisting on her company—first at lunch, then in private meetings, and eventually in his dreams. Her advice to young actresses today? “Don’t let a situation get to the point where you can’t control it. Ever.”
Hedren’s situation started at lunch in 1961, before she had been cast in The Birds. Hitchcock’s secretary invited her, the director’s new star, to meet him in his office. At first, it seemed like an innocent business meeting. “Then it just became a little more often, and then it was off in another room,” she explains. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh boy, I didn’t just fall off the rutabaga truck, you know?’”
Hedren was 31, a divorcée with a Ford Modeling Agency contract behind her, and a four-year-old daughter, Melanie Griffith. Hitchcock had seen her do a non-speaking role in a TV diet-drink commercial, and insisted that Universal Studios executives “find the girl.” Hedren arrived, never having acted in a movie before, and not even knowing who had sent for her. She was offered a substantial $500-per-week contract, and only met “Hitch” after accepting. He arranged a $25,000 screen test for her—unheard of at that time. When he offered her the lead in The Birds, a follow-up to his record-breaking thriller Psycho, he gave her a gold-and-seed-pearl pin showing swallows in flight.
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Early in the shooting of The Birds, a basket of bread arrived on Hedren’s doorstep. Hitchcock imagined she was losing weight (she wasn’t), and attached the message, “Eat me.” Not long after, riding in a limo, Hitchcock attempted to embrace Hedren, just before the door opened in front of a crowded hotel. Hedren approached Alma, Hitchcock’s wife, asking for help. “Her exact words were, ‘Tippi, I’m so sorry you have to go through this,’” Hedren remembers. “I looked at her and said, ‘But, Alma, you could stop it!’ And her eyes sort of glazed over and she walked away.”
By the time Hedren began Marnie, her second Hitchcock film, the director’s obsession had intensified. “Do not touch the Girl!” he ordered her co-star, Sean Connery. Hitchcock told Hedren, she writes, about a recurring dream he had: she was in his living room, bathed in light, promising to love him forever. “You’re everything I ever dreamed of, Tippi, you must know that. If it weren’t for Alma . . .”
“Don’t,” Hedren tried to stop him from going on.
“I love you,” he breathed.
The final straw broke, after a day’s shooting for Marnie. “He suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me,” Hedren recounts in her memoir. “It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked or repulsed.” She pushed Hitchcock away, in spite of his threats to thwart her career. “I am not going to live this kind of a life and I want to get out of my contract,” she insisted, and never talked to him after that.
“My soul needed to get away,” Hedren explains now. She founded her own production company, focused on filming lions, tigers, and other big cats for a movie called Roar, co-starring her daughter, Melanie. Lions and tigers are apex predators like Hitchcock, she acknowledges, though he was not nearly as alluring. “Or as handsome as a lion or a tiger, for sure!” Hedren quips. Five decades later, Hedren is still running Shambala—which Hedren says means “a meeting place of peace and harmony for all beings, animal and human” in Sanskrit—as a nature preserve.
Hollywood, meanwhile, has changed—and also hasn’t. Studio-system contracts are long gone, but actresses still routinely receive lower pay than actors. And even in a social-media and Internet age, a lot can still get swept under the rug. Hedren remains frank about the challenges actresses face today, but hopeful. “Women are able to speak up,” she says of actresses today. “I think they’ve become stronger; they certainly have the right to be stronger. If they don’t use that right, I have nothing to say to them.”
