A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Tippi herself at the age of 89. I recommend that format, though the print edition has 16 pages of photos which I'm sure are amazing. Tippi is a great narrator of her own life, and her life is WILD. No matter how detailed this review seems, trust me that there is tons of jaw-dropping material I didn't even touch on.

Tippi Hedren is an American actress of Scandinavian descent - "Tippi" is a Swedish nickname that stuck. She starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (her first film role!) and Marnie, but never had another starring role in a good movie. Her memoir explains why, and it's absolutely infuriating.

She then got involved in big cat rescue! Her home in Sherman Oaks, which for those of you who don't know was and is a placid suburb in Los Angeles, was filled with LITERAL LIONS. And she made a movie called Roar, shot in Sherman Oaks and starring THIRTY RESCUE LIONS.



I have seen Roar. It's clearly intended to be a charming family comedy about a family that visits Africa and ends up in a house full of lions, a la Doctor Dolitte. But you can tell that the shoot was wildly unsafe, the lions are real and not tame, and the actors (Tippi and her actual family, including her teenage daughter Melanie Griffith) are frequently about to be actually eaten.

I was curious about how all this came about. Tippi's memoir explains. Sort of. It turns out that some things, like devoting multiple years of your life to making a movie starring your unpredictable and deadly THIRTY RESCUE LIONS and FIFTEEN RESCUE TIGERS, are beyond explanation.

Tippi started out as a model, and loved it. I've never thought much about modeling as a career, but she shows why someone might like it. She got along well with the other models, she was interested in fashion, she liked the professionalism and technical aspects of it, and she was level-headed and didn't get sucked into drama. She moved on to commercials, which she enjoyed for the same reasons. (Commercials on television were a relatively new thing at that time, and that part is pretty interesting.) We might never have heard of her, except that Alfred Hitchcock saw her on a commercial, picked up the phone, and said, "Get me that girl."

Tippi was a fan of Hitchcock and was thrilled to be considered for a role in one of his movies. At first it was all a dream. He and his wife taught her to act - they were brilliant teachers, she says - got her beautiful costumes, and were going to make her career. And then things got creepy.

Cut for sexual harassment and assault. ( Read more... )

And then came the lions! Tippi had married Noel Marshall, who she says was very impulsive and sucked her into his craziness. She does say she was also responsible for her own part in the big cat madness, and that she was also crazy. But, she says, she's much saner and more practical when she's left to her own devices. This seems a little self-serving but also probably true: all the really crazy stuff occurred when she was married to Noel Marshall, and her continued involvement with big cats after they divorced was considerably saner. Tippi herself recounts the events with genuine puzzlement as to how otherwise more-or-less normal people could have done and believed such crazy and dangerous things.

Having been born into a cult and also worked on movies and television, I can vouch for a kind of collective insanity that can overtake groups of people who are, or mostly are, sane when alone. This goes double when working on a movie or TV show, because sleep deprivation, high financial stakes, overwork, and group culture are very conducive to temporary group insanity; it's as if you create your own mini-cult. It's easy to get sucked into and hard to explain afterward.

This sort of thing was clearly at work in the production of Roar, and also in the events leading up to it.

Roar came about because Tippi visited Africa as part of a humanitarian mission. I'm not going to get much into that side of her life, but she did a huge amount of it, mostly focusing on hunger and refugees, and was instrumental in helping Vietnamese refugees set up nail salons, a niche which they hold to this day. Also, she was once taught to fly a plane on the fly, so to speak, when one of the two pilots bailed after an emergency landing, and flew a plane full of aid workers solo something like three hours after her first lesson. Tippi's entire life is one long "it could only happen to Tippi."

Anyway, while in Africa she and her husband, Noel Marshall, saw an abandoned house that had been taken over by a pride of lions, and thought, "That would make a great movie!" They talked to several big cat experts, all of whom told them that was an insane idea. Then they met a big cat rescuer in LA, who told them that if they wanted to work with lions, they needed to get to know lions... and he just happened to have a lion cub in need of a home.

That set them on a slippery slope leading to a ranch full of lions. And tigers. And panthers. And an elephant. This was an even worse idea than one might imagine. Not only are big cats wild animals that cannot ever be truly tamed, fight amongst themselves, and can kill you without even trying, but the different species don't get along with each other. They repeatedly had to chase down loose tigers in suburbia while pretending to the police and neighbors that there were no tigers, and ended up in the local hospital so frequently that the doctors got used to the family appearing on the regular with lion bites, broken bones, and GANGRENE.

Have you ever tried to train a cat to do literally anything on command? Now imagine trying to train a vicious, feral cat. Now imagine trying to train forty vicious, feral cats who weigh 500 lbs.

Due to the impossibility of getting the lions and tigers and panthers and pumas to do anything on command, the movie was mostly shot by shooing them into the house, then putting the cast (Tippi, Noel, teenage Melanie Griffith, and Noel's two sons (the third son sensibly refused to get near the big cats and did production design) into the house with them.

Cut for human harm. ( Read more... )

Cut for animal harm. ( Read more... )

Tippi says they didn't realize that they were basically making the world's most expensive and dangerous home movie. It was finally released... and flopped. She says no one wanted to see a family film in an era when sex and violence ruled, but uhhh I don't think that was the problem.

She divorced Noel Marshall, more or less came to her senses, and realized that big cats should not be kept as pets NO SHIT. She has lobbied for bans on keeping and importing big cats as pets. She also founded the Shambala Preserve, which takes in big cats that could not be released into the wild, including Michael Jackson's tigers and a lion that used to belong to Anton La Vey. The big cats are all neutered, and have no contact with humans beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Tippi Hedren is now 94. She lives in a house on the Shambala site, with multiple rescue cats. (The lap-sized kind.) They are not allowed outdoors.

I bought this book at a library sale for fifty cents and by accident - I thought it was a memoir by Sandy Denny the 1960s singer, not Sandy Dennis the 1960s actress. I almost donated it unread when I realized, then decided to read the first chapter just to see, as I often enjoy showbiz memoirs.

It is not a showbiz memoir. She never even mentions her film career or how she got started in acting, and mentions her career in theatre only in brief, glancing anecdotes that are about things other than acting, like how she fell in love with the set of an unnamed play she performed in on Broadway for a year. So this is another bait-and-switch book - a double bait-and-switch, at that - but a marvelous one, the kind in which what you get is different but unexpectedly much better than what you were promised.

Dennis wrote this book, which is very short, mostly while she was dying of cancer. It's partly about dying, not much at all about cancer, and mostly about her beloved cats (she had forty rescue cats), and how cats come to her; about her garden and her sadness at a nearby forest getting cut down; about strange shimmering moments, observed with great delicacy and precision but left unexplained.

Her book reminded me a bit of Ray Bradbury and a bit of Banana Yoshimoto and a bit of Tove Janssen, sometimes earthy and sometimes ineffable. What it did not remind me of was any other memoir by an actor. She says that she's always been a very secret person; few people knew she was writing a memoir, and the manuscript was only discovered after her death. The blurbs on the back, all by famous showbiz people she knew, are stunned and touched and bewildered to have read an unexpected masterpiece by someone they loved but never felt they quite knew, and whose inner life they discovered for the first time in these pages.

Content notes: Skip the first page of the chapter titled "The I Will Remember" if you don't want to read a description of a dead cat, hit by a car, that she finds and buries in her backyard.

Brief notes on books I read a while back but never got around to writing up.

A Taste of China: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking (Pavilion Classic Cookery), by Ken Hom. An evocative, hunger-inducing travelogue/memoir/cookbook/food history by a Chinese-American author. A bit of a period piece now, but much of it is historical anyway, and it's well worth reading if you have an interest in the topic.

The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker. The classic nonfiction book on the value of intuition: specifically, that fear - especially women's fear of men - is often based on having subconsciously picked up subtle signals of very real danger. I've re-read this book a couple times before, and it continues to be valuable: honest, easy to read, thoughtful, and very usable. One thing I'd forgotten was that de Becker himself was a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma, and is writing not only from his experience as a security expert but from his experience as a scared little kid.

This would make an excellent paired reading with Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which is also about how intuition works, but approached from completely different angles. Both books discuss false intuition based on prejudice or pre-conceived ideas versus true intuition based on the situation at hand, and how to tell the difference. Gladwell's book is more sociological, and de Becker's is more of a how-to.

Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship. It's an old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and we shared that, too.

Probably the best memoir I've read all year. I read it when it first came out, and then re-read it several months later. Though Knapp's death frames the memoir, it's not primarily about that, but about the intimate, twin-like friendship between two women. Writers Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp bonded over their careers, their alcoholism and sobriety, and most of all, their beloved dogs. The structure is complex but seamless. Caldwell traces her own life story and how it paralleled and diverged from Knapp's, weaves it back into the story of their friendship, and then continues her story without Knapp, but always with her memory. It's extremely well-written, intense, and engaging, and reminded me quite a bit of another favorite memoir of mine... Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story.

It also reminded me of Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, another intense and well-written memoir about female friendship, in this case with troubled author and cancer survivor Lucy Grealy. Though Let's Take the Long Way Home, despite Knapp's early death, is a lot less tragic, since Caroline Knapp sounds like she had a lot more happiness and satisfaction in her life than poor Lucy Grealy ever did. It's also got way more dogs. In fact, it has enough dog content that I would especially recommend it to anyone who loves dogs. it contains dog death by old age, but is much more about what it's like to live with and love and train dogs.

You can click on the author tags to get reviews of the books I mentioned in comparison.