Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 19, 1994 TAG: 9403190154
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: SHAMBALA PRESERVE, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
Lions roar at the drifting rain clouds through a canopy of leaves. Leopards and tigers join in the general din of snarling and hissing while elephants trumpet in the distance.
Even inside her house, the wild animal theme prevails. A young African serval - a pointy-eared spotted jungle cat - lounges on Hedren's day bed, while a large Gila monster suns himself nearby.
Such is life at Shambala, the 80-acre animal refuge near Acton where tree squirrels and gophers live dangerously among Hedren's 72 big cats and two African elephants, the "family" of rejects and runaways she has collected from circuses, zoos, animal acts and all kinds of oddball sources since the early 1970s, when her movie career began to fall apart in a big way.
Hedren is well aware she's living in a Disney movie - or at least the pilot for a weekly TV series on The Family Channel: Glamorous movie star retires from the Hollywood rat race to run a rest home for wild animals. It's "Green Acres Goes to Africa." She even has a camera-ready porker to play Arnold the Pig.
Her passion for her animals, her dazzling smile and her spontaneously musical laughter fly in the face of the screen image crafted by her mentor, the late Alfred Hitchcock. This is no "cool blond" in the mold of Grace Kelly or Joan Fontaine, but a woman with a spirit as free as the animals she has unchained and uncaged for the first time in their lives.
At 58, Hedren is a handsome woman, still slim in her stylish sweater and leopard-patterned pants. There's no reason she couldn't play the part herself - or any number of other parts. But she has worked so little on screen in recent years that her cameo in Saturday's Showtime movie, "The Birds II: Land's End" constitutes a show business "event" of sorts. "I can't seem to find any agent to really get things going again," she says. "I know I'm good and that I still look good. I just don't know why I'm not working."
Yet she has a suspicion it may be the "Hitchcock curse."
Her acting career was made by Hitchcock in back-to-back films of the early 1960s, "The Birds" and "Marnie." Then the director turned on her and did everything he could to unmake her career. Today she still seems to carry Hitchcock's brand, in demand only to discuss him and his influence on her - or to appear in latter-day Hitchcockiana, such as the 1985 NBC-TV movie "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," in which she co-starred with her famous daughter, Melanie Griffith, or Showtime's "Birds" sequel.
In the new movie, Hedren plays Helen, who runs a little store in the East Coast community of Gull Island and lives contentedly with "just the wind, the surf and the birds." There's no mention of her original "Birds" character, San Francisco socialite Melanie Daniels, a spoiled heiress who came to Bodega Bay to play a practical joke and ended up fleeing from a mysterious, apocalyptic attack by thousands of birds. Instead, "Birds II" makes only a brief historical reference to the Bodega Bay attack 30 years earlier and concentrates on the plight of the Hockens (Brad Johnson, Chelsea Field), who have come to the island with their two small daughters during a new wave of bird attacks.
Hedren has no illusions that "Birds II" will jump start her acting career overnight, but it isn't impossible. After all, her whole career began that way.
Tippi Hedren arrived in Hollywood in the early 1960s with baby Melanie in tow. Already a top model for TV commercials in New York, she had hoped for more in Hollywood, but was beginning to lose faith when "out of the blue, Alfred Hitchcock came along."
It seems the famous director of suspense pictures was watching a diet drink commercial during "The Tonight Show" and couldn't take his eyes off the model in the ad: Tippi Hedren.
Hitchcock then was trying to find a new protege in the "cool blond" image of Grace Kelly. He had signed two unknowns, Joanna Moore and Claire Griswold, to exclusive personal contracts, without success. Hedren would be his last attempt to create - and "own" - a star.
Hitchcock brought Hedren into the total filmmaking process, explaining every detail of the script and the complex technical processes necessary to bring "The Birds" to the screen. He personally supervised her transformation into the precisely coiffed, elegantly dressed, detached, distant type he favored.
Though Hitchcock never made a pass at Hedren, she now believes he had a juvenile infatuation with her, which impelled him to seek control over every aspect of her life.
"An obsession is what it was," she says. "It's a very miserable situation to be the object of someone's obsession. It's very confining, very frightening, and I didn't like it."
Though "The Birds" became a huge hit, Hedren began to reassess the situation. Under her personal contract, Hitchcock paid her only $500 a week, with a bump up to $600 for "Marnie," a film about a pathological lady thief that Hitch originally intended as the comeback film for Grace Kelly, then Princess Grace of Monaco.
During the making of "Marnie," Hitchcock's interference in Hedren's life reached the point of no return. When he refused to let her fly to New York to accept an award, she blew up at him. (Hedren denies rumors that she said something nasty about the director's weight, which others have reported.) She vowed not to work for him again, contract or no contract.
"He said he would ruin my career - and he did," she recalls. "He kept me under contract for a couple of years, then turned me over to Universal."
The rift between the two never healed. It cost Hedren an offer to star in a film by Francois Truffaut, which Hitchcock refused to permit. It also cost her the leading role in "Mary Rose," a haunting James M. Barrie story that Hitchcock had planned for her third film. The film was never made. When she refused to work in a TV series Universal offered her, the studio tore up her contract.
For all the pain associated with it, Hedren knows the Hitchcock experience made her a movie star and, ultimately, made her beloved Shambala possible. She treasures what Hitchcock taught her about film making and, indirectly, about taking charge of her own life.
by CNB