Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  DEDICATION

  To my very special parents,

  Dorothea Henriette Eckhardt and

  Bernard Carl Hedren;

  to my sister, best friend, and confidant,

  Patty Davis;

  to Melanie Griffith,

  my “daughter of great fortune”;

  and to every single one

  of my beloved animals,

  past, present, and future.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  PHOTO SECTION

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  My name is Tippi Hedren.

  It’s 2016, and I’m eighty-six years old, happy, busy, single, content, and healthy (for the most part, but more about that later).

  A few weeks ago I came across an old steamer trunk I hadn’t opened in decades and decided to take a look inside. There were some spider webs, and an empty half-gallon plastic milk container in one of the drawers. (Your guess is as good as mine.) Then I began opening the rest of the drawers, and it was like Christmas.

  They were filled with treasures, a testament to the fact that I never throw anything away.

  There were two yellowed, disintegrating family Bibles.

  There were grainy old black-and-white photos of:

  • my daddy, Bernard Carl Hedren, with his Masonic Lodge brothers. Tall, slender, and handsome, purebred Scandinavian, a quiet, stoic “good man.”

  • my mother, Dorothea Henrietta Eckhardt Hedren, German/Norwegian, with an angelic face that always looked its most natural when she was smiling.

  • my older sister Patty and me, with our matching blond hair and Peter Pan–collared blouses.

  • my paternal grandparents. They lived with us for a while when I was a little girl, but I hardly knew them. I remember that they weren’t well, wore black a lot, and rarely spoke. When they did speak, it was never in English, always in Swedish, and they seemed to stay in their room all the time.

  • me among the other members of our Lutheran church choir.

  • several group shots of our large family. These photos are similar to some you may have as well, in which you have no idea who half those people are.

  • me in my first wedding, happy and hopeful at the age of twenty-two.

  • me and my beautiful daughter, Melanie, when she was a little girl.

  Other memorabilia included:

  • Two carefully bound locks of blond hair in an envelope with the words “Tippi—Age 8.”

  • A single strand of hair in a small black plastic pouch labeled MELANIE’S FIRST GRAY HAIR, AGE 14.

  • My diploma from Huntington Park High School in California.

  • My Girl Scout membership card. My Girl Scout uniform hangs in my office, and I immediately slipped the membership card into the pocket with my Girl Scout knife.

  • Several hand-printed notes on lined school paper, addressed to Mom and signed “Love, Tips.”

  The treasures went on and on, and I kept every one of them except the milk container and that web-accessorized steamer trunk. I’ve got some scrapbook shopping to do.

  At around the same time, the Hollywood Museum happily borrowed (obviously with my permission) my Golden Globe, engraved “Most Promising Newcomer, 1964,” and the dress form with my exact measurements that the legendary Edith Head created to design my wardrobe for my first two films. I was a little surprised they wanted the dress form—it has some rips and tooth marks from the day one of the lion cubs found it in my bedroom and promptly stalked and tried to kill it. The Hollywood Museum didn’t seem to mind a bit.

  All of which added up to a whole lot of memories and a whole lot of food for thought.

  I’ve been interviewed and quoted and written about more times than I can count since the early 1960s when I starred in The Birds and Marnie for Alfred Hitchcock, a man I look back on with admiration, gratitude, and utter disgust. Despite his efforts to thwart my career, I went on to act in more than eighty film and television shows. I’ve been a wife, three times. I’m a mother and a grandmother. I’ve been a model and an animal rights activist and a humanitarian. I have a lot to say.

  So maybe, I decided, inspired by all of the above, it’s about time I stop letting everyone else tell my story and finally tell it myself.

  As I write this, I’m sitting in the living room of my home just north of Los Angeles in Acton, California. It’s best described by an amazing fortune cookie message I chose one night after dinner at a Chinese restaurant shortly after I moved here: “Hidden in a valley beside an open stream, this will be the type of place where you will find your dream.” I framed that little message and hung it on the wall of my bedroom, where it’s one of the first things I see when I wake up every morning.

  I’m looking out of a room of wall-to-wall windows at the spacious, secure enclosures of the big-cat preserve I named Shambala, a beautiful Sanskrit word that means a meeting place of peace and harmony for all beings, animal and human.

  One of our tigers, Mona, is lying in the shade on her side of the chain-link fence just a few feet away. She’s statuesque and beautiful. She’s also a cat, so when I call her name, she might come to me, or she might stay right where she is and simply give me a look that says, “Hello? I’m relaxing right now. Maybe later. Maybe not.” I get exactly the same attitude from my domestic shorthair indoor cat Johnny Depp. Someone once said, “Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.” I’m staff, and proud of it.

  Shambala takes my breath away every single day. And every single day I’m in awe of all the roads and detours it took for me to get here, almost as if, without knowing it, I planned it this way.

  One

  The population of Lafayette, Minnesota, my hometown, was approximately two hundred on the day I was born, January 19, 1930, at the beginning of the darkest depression the United States has ever experienced. Lafayette was too small to have its own hospital, so I had to travel ten miles away to the hospital in New Ulm to come into this world.

  My parents named me Nathalie Kay, but from the very beginning my daddy called me Tippi, a nickname for the Swedish word tupsa, which means little girl or little sweetheart. It made me feel very special when he called me Tippi, and I chose it over Nathalie as my first name as soon as I was old enough to talk.

  Mother was a schoolteacher back then, and Daddy owned the Lafayette general store. “General” was the operative word—he sold everything from candy to tractors out of that modest wooden building. I adored my parents and have never wished for one moment of my life that I’d belonged to anyone else.

  My sister Patricia Louise, four years older than I, was a good sport about giving up her only-child status when I arrived. Our age difference kept us from being very close while we were growing up, but we’ve more than made up for this since we became adults. In fact, I’m honored to be the godmother of my niece Heidi, one of Patty’s five children, three boys and two girls—David, Heidi, Steve, Beni (named after our daddy Bernard), and Tipper (named after me).

  The demeaning Depression that was prevalent throughout the United States hit us as hard as it hit everyone else. Daddy lost his store, and when I was four or five we moved to Morningside, a streetcar suburb of Minneapolis, whe
re Mother got a job in a department store and Daddy’s health began to decline. He had a tremendous number of medical issues that eventually led to seven operations in ten years, but he still managed to live until he was eighty-seven. Mother lived to the ripe old age of ninety-five. We Scandinavians tend to stick around until we’ve accomplished everything we set out to do. I apparently told her one day when I was a child, “You know, Mom, when you smile, you feel happy.” She loved that observation, and she lived it. Her life wasn’t easy, but she never complained, and thanks to her example, I grew up with no patience for long-suffering martyrdom, in myself or anyone else.

  I was a painfully shy little girl, a pair of green eyes peeking out from behind my mother’s skirt when there was a stranger around. So it makes perfect sense that on the first day of school, when she dropped me off in a room full of children I’d never seen before in my life, I was out of there in the blink of an eye, sobbing and running to catch up with her before she was a block away.

  How they coerced me into going back, I have no idea, but I came to accept school as one of those things you have to do until you’re told you don’t have to do it anymore. I wish I could say I grew to love it, but that never really happened.

  I did the best I could to participate, though. I even played the violin in the school orchestra at Edina Junior High. It’s a mystery to me where that violin came from—my parents certainly had no money to buy one, and I’m very sure we didn’t just happen to have a violin lying around the house. I’m also very sure there are few situations more excruciating than a beginner practicing the violin. I can still picture Daddy sitting in his chair, completely hidden behind his newspaper, and that newspaper starting to tremble the instant I began raking my bow across those strings.

  As far as I was concerned, what we were being taught in school paled in comparison to the education Patty and I got at home. Our mom was a wonderful homemaker, and she taught us everything from cooking and sewing to the proper way to clean a house and keep it clean. I enjoyed those skills then, and I enjoy them now. I’m a natural-born nester. I designed and decorated every square inch of my home at Shambala, and I am as excited about finding a unique piece of furniture or a table runner at a thrift store as some women get about finding designer shoes and clothes, which were once such a major part of my life and career.

  We learned a lot about love at home, too, and integrity, responsibility, and morals, and keeping our word. Our parents weren’t overly affectionate, but we never ever doubted that they loved us to the core of their souls.

  We didn’t have a car or even indoor plumbing. I was too small to navigate the dimensions of our outhouse seat, so Mom kept a little white porcelain potty for me—one that had belonged to my grandmother, trimmed with gold flowers—behind the kitchen door. Our parents worked very hard for what we did have, and we learned to earn our way through life with no sense of entitlement. We were aware that they couldn’t afford to give us everything the other kids had, but we never felt deprived or inferior or frightened because of it, since they never discussed money in front of us or made their burdens ours.

  Patty and I were expected to be well-spoken, to always be clean and presentable, to be well-mannered and respectful, to follow the relatively strict house rules, and to be good girls who attended the Lake Harriet Lutheran Church and Sunday school every single week. We happily complied—Patty, the brave one, because she wanted to, and me because I was so timid that I wasn’t about to cause trouble.

  In fact, I was so obedient that Patty still occasionally teases me about it. Mom told us when we were very, very young that if we got home from school before she came home from work, we were to write her a note telling her exactly where we were and what we were doing.

  Mom apparently arrived home from work one day to find a note taped to the front door:

  Dear Mom,

  I just finished unlocking the door, and I’m inside the house.

  Love,

  Tips

  I don’t remember it, but all things considered, it wouldn’t surprise me. Anything to follow orders and make Mom and Daddy happy, and the thought of rebelling never occurred to me. I was perfectly content to just do whatever it took not to disappoint my parents and then immerse myself in the privacy of my room to read and listen to music on my secondhand record player.

  When I was four or five years old my favorite song was “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” sung by Kate Smith, a singer with a beautiful rich contralto voice. I listened to it over and over again, quietly singing along until I’d learned every word and every note.

  One night my parents had a few friends over for dinner, and I made a spontaneous decision to entertain them. They were sitting at the table when I made a sudden dramatic entrance into the dining room and burst out with “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” complete with hand gestures and arms spread wide open, appropriate for my solo concert debut.

  I’m sure I was intending that some combination of that song and my performance would send my small audience into rapt, spellbound awe. Instead, it sent them into instant gales of laughter. This was apparently the most hysterical thing they’d ever seen. And I of course ran to my room in tears, devastated and utterly mortified.

  The scar it left was small but deep—it’s about eighty-two years later, and to this day I could no more sing alone in front of other people than I could levitate and fly out the window. Logically, I get it. I’m not sure I could keep a straight face either if a four-year-old child suddenly made an entrance at a dinner party and began belting out a romantic ballad at the top of her little lungs. Emotionally, I’m still working on it. I’ve even taken private voice lessons and been assured that I have a perfectly wonderful singing voice, but just the thought of opening my mouth to sing by myself in front of other people, no matter how casually, sends me right back to that moment in that dining room a lifetime ago and stops me in my tracks.

  It did inspire me to make a promise to myself, though, to never ever make a child feel foolish. And it’s not as if it shattered my career plans.

  I think I just assumed that when I grew up I’d be a wife and mother, since that’s what girls did. But while my schoolmates also talked about wanting to be nurses or teachers or hairdressers, the only thing I was sure I wanted to be more than anything else was a figure skater. It was such a pretty, graceful, magical thing to watch, and I had to know what it felt like to actually do it.

  Somehow my daddy managed to find a pair of figure skates for me, but affording lessons was out of the question. Fortunately, two of my friends, Harriet and Mary, were kind enough to invite me along to their lessons, and I’d sit on the sidelines, intently watching and listening and soaking it all in. Then every day when I got home from school, and every single weekend when my chores and homework were done, I’d take my skates to a frozen lake near our house and practice for hours on end, enthralled by the peaceful freedom of it and the sensation of flying and being so completely alive as I glided across the ice.

  I had talent. I had passion. I had determination, and I had discipline. Unfortunately, I had also developed plantar fasciitis in my left foot that had to be treated, and an emergency appendectomy a year later, both of which cost me months and months of practice thanks to my doctor’s “absolutely no skating until you’ve recovered” order. As far as a potential career was concerned, it was too much time away at too young an age for me to ever make up for, and I sadly gave up that dream, while Harriet and Mary both went on to perform in the Ice Follies. I was happy for them. I admit it, I was also a little envious.

  But those skates traveled everywhere with me for many, many years, and no matter where in the world I found myself skating, I would always close my eyes for a minute or two and be gliding on that quiet, frozen Minnesota lake, a child again, when life was so simple.

  One day I was blessed with an epiphany, or whatever a life-altering realization is called when you’re ten years old.

  I was walking up a hill on my way home
from school, carrying my books, not consciously thinking about anything at all.

  Years earlier I’d developed the bad habit of biting my nails. I’m sure it was a physical manifestation of my shyness, my anxiety, my fear of pretty much everything. I didn’t know how to analyze it, I just knew I hated it.

  And all of a sudden, on that hill, I made a silent declaration to myself: “I’m not going to do that anymore.”

  I knew I meant it, and I was right. I never bit my nails again. I’ve had long, beautifully manicured nails ever since, an asset that became important in my life a great many years later.

  In itself, the simple act of giving up nail-biting wasn’t exactly an epiphany, but the essence of it went far beyond that. Somehow this triggered a much bigger realization in me, at ten years old, that things about myself I didn’t like, that I felt were getting in my way and not serving me well, weren’t facts about me, they were choices. With self-discipline I could choose not to put up with them and make whatever changes I wanted. If “I’m not going to do that anymore” could stop me from biting my nails, maybe it could stop me from being shy and fearful, too. Confident, fearless people seemed to be having a better time than I was, so why not give it a try?

  I tried it, and sure enough, I liked it. It felt great to “just say no” to my habit of living my life on the sidelines. By the time I started my freshman year at neighboring Edina West High School (Morningside had a grade school but no high school), I had lots of friends. Three in particular—Mercedes Skaaren, Roseanne Bellows, and Caroline Covell—remain close to me to this day. We were BFFs before that term was even coined, and what’s lovelier than friendships that literally last a lifetime?

  I even had the sweet, thrilling surprise of my first love.

  Richard McFarland was an “older man,” a sophomore when I was a freshman. It was an adorable, age-appropriate romance, and I felt like a princess. We went to parties and school dances together, and school dances in the 1940s meant dancing to the most wonderful music ever. I’ve heard it said that we measure every kiss from every lover in our lifetime by our first kiss from our first love. That may be true. I have a crystal clear memory of the exact moment and the dreamy magic of that first kiss. I talked to Richard not long ago, and it gave me those same butterflies to hear that he remembers it, too, all these decades later.