Tippi: FFC Interviews Actress Tippi Hedren

ThedreninterviewtitleA conversation with the last of the Hitchcock Blondes

According to Donald Spoto's 1983 biography
The Dark Side of Genius, Alfred Hitchcock's tendency to become overly enamoured with
his blonde stars reached an ugly head with Tippi Hedren during the filming of Marnie.
Revisiting the book now, several years after first reading it and resisting some of the allegations therein, I see an author whose love for Hitchcock the auteur is at war with the unpleasant details of his subject's emotional life. As Ms. Hedren so delicately put it when
I had the pleasure of chatting with her the other night: "As a man, [Hitchcock] was
found wanting." Spoto's declaration that Marnie is a
result of sloth but also unusually personal and effective as art and even
memoir illustrates, I think, the schism at which most scholars of Hitchcock at some point
arrive. When I read The Dark Side of Genius as a college freshman, it
was a gateway to understanding better exactly what was going on in Notorious,
and exactly what Hitchcock's men are always playing out.


Hitchcock's movies are confessions, it's true, but they're also very public workings-out of
personal slights, imagined and real, proximate and ultimate. Calling Hitchcock
a misogynist is shallow (something Laura Mulvey herself has begun to teach in the
last few years): Hitchcock is Hitchcock because he was able to–helpless but
to–express the essential, Freudian conflict of men who view women as binary objects.
I see Hitchcock's films as efforts at self-medication–auto-therapy. They're
tragedies in that way; there's a certain poignancy to them for their failures
as personal epiphany. The Birds and Marnie, for instance, are Hitchcock's thoughts on marriage, probably his own.

I've
long held the idea that The Birds and Marnie are different
strategies for illustrating how it is that powerful women sell out their power once they enter, willingly, into the marriage contract. Knowing Hitchcock's obsession
with Hedren and knowing, too, his personal/professional co-dependence on wife
Alma, the theme plays out as astonishingly complex. The more one unravels the
Gordian knots in Hitchcock's pictures, the more one begins to understand that works like I Confess and The Wrong Man (not to mention, of
course, Vertigo) point to the filmmaker's "true north." By the
end, he recognizes the role he's playing in the subjugation and destruction of
that which he most admires/desires, and he
hates himself for it–but he hates his objects more for their willingness to
participate. What's fascinating about Ms. Hedren is that she didn't participate
(neither did Vera Miles, or Claire Griswold), placing her in the position of
eternal beloved/never won–and, more than that, following Hitchcock's death in
1980, neither did she keep quiet about it.

Moreover, she started a refuge for big cats, Shambala in southern California–the only result
of which most have fixated upon the self-funded, not-well-received Roar, during the production of which actress Melanie Griffith (Hedren's daughter) was mauled by a lion. What
struck me is that Ms. Hedren, a victim of abuse, sought refuge in an enterprise that likewise championed the helpless. Consider that she's currently working with American servicewomen
who were raped by their comrades in arms and subsequently instructed by the military
establishment to keep quiet.

I met Ms. Hedren in the lounge of Elway's on the first floor of Denver's Ritz-Carlton. I imagined her to be a giant–my mental image of her is of that quintessential, towering, totemic Hitchcock Blonde. I thought she'd be six feet tall. In reality, she's about 5'5", and tiny–wispy. I was afraid to shake her hand, but her grip is iron, that voice is authoritive, and as she looked me directly in the eye, suddenly–poof: towering, totemic. We talked about her
new pursuits and her "second career" in the movies, though we started as
most any conversation with Tippi Hedren must: with her time with Hitchcock.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL:
Melanie and Marnie end The Birds and Marnie catatonic and
decorating the arm of a man. How did you end
The Birds and Marnie?
TIPPI HEDREN:
Oh, I was fine. They
were just movies for me, you know, just jobs. As far as the characters and what
they went through, I didn't make the connection between what they went through
and what I went through until much later. I think a lot of my confusion was
this blurring between what was just a job for me and what was much more than
that for Mr. Hitchcock.

What was the
connection you made later?

Well, I began to see that this was a pattern for
Mr. Hitchcock–that he had run people out of the business, that there was even
an actress who had to keep changing her name to keep working because Mr.
Hitchcock had made it clear that he wouldn't allow her to work without his
permission. I began to see that the movies we did together had to reflect that
controlling nature in some way. And they do.

I watched the
rehearsal reel he made with you and Martin Balsam for
Marnie–they feel
like pornography.

Yes. Working with Mr. Hitchcock was very much
like that–he controlled every moment, every aspect of production. It was
hard–it is hard–to separate his genius [from] his less honourable
intentions. I was certainly in no position to question. When I first sat down
with Donald [Spoto], here was this man who was obviously enthralled with the
legend of Hitchcock, as we all were…

How did you trust
him? Why did you begin to have this conversion?

Well, I didn't for twenty years. I was
embarrassed, I was humiliated.

You were the victim
of sexual assault.

By the most powerful man in Hollywood–one of
the most powerful in the history of Hollywood. I was confused. I deflected this
for twenty years after it happened. I didn't talk about it, I didn't want to. Even though I knew that he'd done it to other women, I was silent. People would
ask and I would just give the accepted line about how great an honour it was…
And it was a great honour. I'm incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity
to work with Mr. Hitchcock and to have been in these movies that everyone is
still talking about, still studying. I'm incredibly grateful to have the voice
that these films allow me to have even after all this time.


ThedrenbirdscapHow did you begin to
talk with Spoto about what happened to you?

It took time but I trusted Donald. He and I are
still close. He gave me a safe environment–he was clear about his intentions
and he was a willing and sympathetic listener. What I feared the most was that
people wouldn't believe me, but he made it clear that he did, and that was
empowering. I think it changed the course of his book.

(laughs) It wasn't called The Dark
Side of Genius
when he approached you?

(laughs) No, it was not.

It's hard not to believe you, given the evidence
that the films themselves represent.

Yes.

Have you been shaken, disappointed by the
reaction from some to your comments–the ones saying that you should feel thankful
and lucky, no matter the abuse you suffered?

I wish I was more surprised. The attitude has
always been that–it's always been this way, hasn't it? With powerful men and
pretty young women. I suspect that there will always be a little of that. Look,
I do feel lucky, I do feel grateful. Hitchcock the artist was an incomparable
genius. Hitchcock the man left a little wanting.

Talk to me about that "voice" that you
mention.

I'm working now with an American servicewoman who
was raped by one of her peers and has been told–in no uncertain terms, ordered–to be quiet about it or else. It sounded all too familiar. The studio
system that I was caught in was similar: They tried to intimidate me into doing
whatever Mr. Hitchcock was asking of me by suggesting that I knew that all that
was part of the bargain. They suggested that I was property to be ordered
around and forced to do things. If I didn't, I was told, my career was over, so
I said, "Okay, my career is over."

Where does the courage to do that come from? Was
it naivety or was it something else?

Do you mean did I believe they meant it or could do
it? I knew they meant it and I knew they could do it. Mr. Hitchcock was
powerful and I knew that he'd done it before, but I also knew I couldn't do
what he was asking me to do. The courage came from my Lutheran parents. They
were strict, but they never punished me or my sister without first telling us
the reasons why. It's the only armour you give your children when they go out
into the world. If you don't tell them the "why," don't instil in
them a sense of what is right and what is wrong, they enter into the world
unarmed. When I was there, at that moment when an ultimatum was presented to
me, they were on my shoulders.

Did they ask afterwards what had happened?
No, we didn't talk about it, but I was sure that
they knew that I was grateful that they were essentially in that room with me.



Thedrencap2Your work with big cats, your work now with
American servicewomen–did you think you'd be here, now, fifty years later?

(laughs) Never. Everything that's happened
to me in my life, I see now, has just happened. I feel like it's only recently
that I've been the director of it. When I became a model, it was just that
someone spotted me getting off a bus and gave me a card and asked if I wouldn't
ask my parents if it would be all right for me to be a model, and then, there I
was, a model. Then Mr. Hitchcock saw me on the television and there I was, an
actress. Now, I guess, I'm something like an activist..and an actress… I don't
know, but none of it was planned.

Was there resentment about that among your
cast mates?

None. They were all lovely to me: supportive,
kind. There must have been some jealousy, I mean this was Hitchcock, everyone
wanted to be the star of a Hitchcock picture and then, there I was, never done
a thing, not even an actress.

Did Hitchcock set you
against your brunette co-star/antagonists, Suzanne Pleshette and Diane Baker?

Not at all. We were all doing a picture. It was
work. When things started going a little sideways on The Birds, though,
Suzanne pulled me aside and said to me, "It's not always like this." I'll never forget that kindness. I didn't know, you know, I thought it was all
normal. Unpleasant, maybe, but normal. But I felt very taken care of, then. She
was the loveliest person. Diane Baker, too. We were there to do a job and we
did it. I never for a moment felt any kind of tension with my co-stars, not
even the ones I was set against in the pictures.

Did you ever think about how you being set
against brunettes was analogous to you being set against Alma?

(long pause) Alma and Mr. Hitchcock were
enigmas to us all. They would throw these parties, they were in so many ways
connected at the hip. There was one day when Alma came to me on the set and
apologized–she told me she was sorry that I had to go through what I was going
through…at the hands of her husband!–and I said that she could stop it with
just one word. But it was like she didn't hear me… Or understand me. She just
turned and walked away.

How do you interpret that?
I don't know. It's what she knew.

We get trapped in the familiar.
We do.

Like Marnie in Mark Rutland's empty glass cage?
(laughs) And Melanie in her gilded one.

Yes, he actually put Melanie in a literal glass
cage: a phone booth.

(laughs) Yes!

How far have we come on the question of
misogyny?

Not far, I think. But there are two films coming
out this year about Mr. Hitchcock and both, to some degree, deal with his
shortcomings as a man and his treatment of the women he cast in his films. That's
some progress, at least.

Tell me more about your work now with this
American servicewoman.

I'm telling her to say "no." I'm
telling her that there is nothing that is worth what she's been asked to give
up–that she has value. I'm telling her to quit, to run, to get out of the Army,
and to speak. She can't be quiet about it. I wouldn't be where I am now, in
this position to help, if I had remained quiet, and it took me a long time to
learn that. I'm working now as an actress, I'm speaking for the voiceless, I
lost nothing by speaking and I gained everything. If I can be an example to one
young woman, then I'm grateful most of all to be that. No matter what I went
through, that's the past and I would not change one thing about the past if it
meant me not being exactly where I am at this moment. It's a privileged place.
I'm telling her that this won't be the end of her, that she can't let it break
her, because we come through these things stronger and it's our duty to not
remain silent.

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