Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  Richard and I also had the added intrigue of being in a star-crossed relationship—his parents didn’t approve of me. They were wealthy pillars of the community, and they had their hearts set on their son falling in love with a debutante. I had a lot going for me, but I wasn’t even an aspiring debutante. We didn’t let their disapproval stop us, and we had a chaste, wonderful two years together before circumstances beyond our control pulled us apart.

  I imagine there are moments in all of our lives that we look back on and say, “That’s when it all started.”

  That moment for me was a seemingly ordinary trip home from a seemingly ordinary day at school, early in my sophomore year.

  I stepped off the streetcar at my usual corner in Morningside, in front of the drugstore that had the best milk shakes and hot fudge sundaes in town, and a woman I’d never seen before walked up to me.

  “My name is Ella Jane Knott,” she said as she handed me her business card. “Would you please ask your mother to bring you down to Donaldson’s department store at her earliest convenience? I would like to have you model in our Saturday fashion shows.”

  Me? A model? Seriously? I was stunned, ecstatic, flattered, giddy—you name it—and I don’t think my feet touched the ground as I ran home to share the news with my parents. Mom couldn’t have been happier to take me to Donaldson’s to meet Mrs. Knott and the rest of the people involved with their fashion shows. If I remember correctly, I started modeling at the department store the very next Saturday.

  Of course I knew absolutely nothing about modeling, so I simply learned the same way I learned to figure skate—I watched and listened. I loved everything about it, and I was determined to be good at it. Before long, photographers were asking me to do print work, which was every bit as exciting.

  Most unbelievable of all, though, was that I was having so much fun, getting to wear pretty clothes and be fussed over, and getting paid to do it. For the first time in my life I got to experience an amazing phenomenon called “spending money.” And because it was a brand-new sensation for me and I was young and foolish, I couldn’t spend it fast enough, especially on cashmere sweaters. There was no such thing as too many cashmere sweaters as far as I was concerned, while my frugal parents were still having to watch every penny of their hard-earned limited income to make sure we always had food and electricity and a roof over our heads. I was awful. I hope it matters that looking back, I feel terrible about it, and that one day I had the joy of buying them a car and many other things they would never have bought for themselves.

  Shortly after my sister Patty graduated from high school she married a young man named Bob Hanzlik, a professional football player for the Philadelphia Eagles. I was the maid of honor in their wedding, and it was as if I had a premonition about how that was going to work out—I sobbed all the way up the aisle, which must have been very confidence inspiring for the bride and groom. Then the day after the wedding, we had the biggest snowstorm of the year in Minnesota, which, looking back, turned out to be an ill omen for that marriage. But that’s another story for another day.

  Still, I may have been the world’s happiest fifteen-year-old girl in 1945. I was a model, my boyfriend and I were in love, I had wonderful friends and ice to skate on and parents who never once discouraged me from spreading my wings. And then one day it was all pulled out from under me.

  Daddy’s health was becoming more and more fragile, and the brutal Minnesota winters were becoming too hard on him, so we were going to move to the warmer, more temperate weather of Southern California.

  Just like that.

  I was devastated. Southern California? Were they kidding? They might as well have said we were moving to Pluto.

  The girl in me who adored her daddy wanted whatever was best for him.

  The teenager in me who was thriving right where she was, thank you very much, just wanted to wake up from this nightmare and go right on with my life in Morningside. Even while we were packing; even when they assured me that yes, of course my beloved cat Peter was coming with us; even when Daddy left for Los Angeles ahead of us to find a job and a place for us to live, I kept waiting for that moment when they’d announce that they’d changed their minds and we weren’t leaving after all. But that moment never happened.

  I was worried sick about my cat’s taking such a long trip, but a very dear friend and neighbor of ours down the street, Mr. Weber, built a strong travel carrier that even had a little space outside so that Peter would be safe and not have to be confined the whole way across the country. It was so kind of Mr. Weber, and I’ve never forgotten it.

  The move didn’t seem real to me until Mother and I arrived at the station to board the train to L.A. Two hundred people, including my beloved Richard McFarland and every friend, every teacher, every schoolmate, every neighbor, every fellow model and Lutheran and Girl Scout, everyone I knew in this world showed up to see us off, and my heart broke with every good-bye.

  I cried all the way from Minneapolis to Omaha.

  I was sure my life was over.

  Two

  I’ve always enjoyed my own company and been perfectly content being alone. In fact, the only times I’ve ever been lonely were those times when I was with the wrong person. It’s a blessing I especially appreciated at the age of fifteen, brand-new to Los Angeles, where nothing was familiar except my parents and my cat, and Peter was an outdoor cat, no needier for companionship than I was.

  By the time our train arrived in L.A., Daddy had found an accounting job and a sweet little house for us in a residential suburb called Walnut Park. I was homesick, but there was no point in indulging in it—it wouldn’t change anything or make everything okay again. I just busied myself helping Mother set up housekeeping and bracing myself for my first day at a strange new school.

  I was starting my junior year at Huntington Park High, and I wanted to make a good first impression. The night before, after a lot of trial and error, I laid out my wardrobe—my favorite cashmere sweater, the perfect matching plaid pleated skirt, sparkling white bobby socks, and my most fashionable penny loafers. I was a nervous wreck as I walked up to the double-door school entrance, but I took a few long, deep breaths, put a smile on my face, and marched into that building as if I owned the place.

  It became immediately apparent that I might as well have put on a pair of bib overalls and ridden in on a mule. Everywhere I looked, there were girls in tight dresses with lots of cleavage, stiletto heels, makeup, and professionally coiffed hair piled high on their heads. I couldn’t have felt more out of place, and my impulse was to turn and run right back out those doors as I did on my first day at Morningside Elementary School. But “I’m not going to do that anymore.” I wasn’t there to fit in and make friends, I was there to get this whole school thing over with, so I squared my shoulders and dived on in.

  Luckily, I had a higher priority to tend to. A few of the people I’d worked with back home had referred me to some modeling agents in Los Angeles, and one of those agents, a woman named Rita La Roy, signed me and began sending me out for print ads. I was finally back in the familiar territory of photographers’ studios again, and L.A. started seeming not so bad after all.

  It started seeming even better when a boy named Jimmy Lewis came along.

  I’d promised Richard McFarland that I would never forget him, and I’ve kept that promise to this day. But there’s a certain “out of sight, out of mind” approach to life that comes with being a teenager, and Jimmy Lewis was too irresistible to pass up. Like Richard, he was an attractive “older man,” a year ahead of me in school. Like Richard, he was smart and fun and funny. Like Richard, he had wealthy parents—his father was a very successful attorney and his mother was a society matron. And unlike Richard, he and his parents lived only two blocks away.

  It was one of those sweet young romances that started out as a friendship. Jimmy taught me to drive. He loved taking me to Newport Beach on weekends to show off his Star racing boat and teach me how to sail i
t. We spent a lot of time at each other’s houses, and his parents didn’t mind one bit that there was a very large economic difference between our two families. His mother, who seemed to sit and knit all the time, was happy to teach me to knit as well, and I turned out to be really good at it. I actually knitted myself a forest-green knee-length dress, fitted through the waist and flared at the hem, with long dolman sleeves. I was so proud of it, and it annoys me that I lost track of it somewhere along the way.

  (Apparently this passion for knitting runs in the family. At about the same time I was learning it from Jimmy’s mom, my sister Patty was becoming an avid knitter, too. She ended up supplying me, her children, and her friends with awesomely beautiful sweaters for many, many years.)

  I graduated from Huntington Park High School in 1947, thrilled to have it over with. I wasn’t especially interested in going on to college, but Jimmy had his heart set on going to Pasadena City College to major in business, and he wanted me to come with him. I was still enjoying every minute of modeling and had every intention of pursuing it. It was hardly a full-time job, though, and college might be kind of fun if Jimmy and I were doing it together. So sure, whatever, I was off to Pasadena City College, too, to major in . . . maybe art or something.

  And what do you know, it was fun. The campus was stunning, the classes I went to were kind of interesting (from what little I remember of them), and Jimmy and I were getting closer and closer and falling more and more in love.

  I was even approached one day, out of nowhere, to apply as a possible candidate for the Rose Parade Royal Court. What fun! The Royal Court rode on an elegant float in that magnificent, legendary parade—who wouldn’t want to try out for that? I filled out the application in the blink of an eye.

  Now, here comes the embarrassing part. Apparently the Royal Court committee carefully checks up on its applicants, and they discovered that I wasn’t qualified to be a candidate because I wasn’t really a resident of Pasadena. But wait, there’s more. They investigated a little further and found out that because Jimmy wasn’t really a resident of Pasadena either, and we’d used his aunt’s Pasadena address on our school applications, we also weren’t qualified to be attending college there in the first place.

  In other words, we were busted. No Royal Court for me, and no more Pasadena City College for either one of us.

  Needless to say, I took the end of my formal education incredibly well. Jimmy made other college arrangements, and I kept right on going with my modeling career, even getting a tiny, uncredited role in a movie called The Petty Girl, a romantic comedy starring Robert Cummings as artist George Petty, who in real life was known for his paintings of calendar pinup girls. Toward the end of the film, twelve of us fashion models, each representing a month of the year, were featured in a musical number with the movie’s female star Joan Caulfield. I was January, aka Miss Ice Box.

  It was fun. I thought no more about it than that. Not once did it enter my mind that more films might follow, or that I even wanted them to.

  Modeling was what I loved doing, and like most American models, I felt I needed to be in New York. I wanted to be in New York. I felt myself being pulled there, and I wasn’t about to put up any resistance. I was sure that if I stayed in California, I would continue doing modeling work here and there and end up marrying Jimmy. Worse things could have happened—he was wonderful, and I loved him. But every time I pictured a future with him, I pictured myself as a society matron, doing a lot of knitting, going to charity galas, and in the back of my mind always wondering “what if?” It was too early in my life to start piling up a collection of unanswered what-ifs, no matter how much in love I was.

  So one morning, in the true spirit of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I picked up the phone and called the best of the best in the modeling world, New York’s legendary Ford Modeling Agency. They explained where and to whom to send my portfolio, which was pretty extensive by then, and I shipped it off that same afternoon without telling a soul about it, in case nothing happened.

  Two weeks later, the call came. Eileen Ford herself wanted to meet with me, as soon as I could make it to the East Coast.

  “Ecstatic” doesn’t begin to describe how I felt when I hung up from that call. I immediately flashed back to the thirteen-year-old girl who’d stepped off a streetcar in Morningside, Minnesota, and had her whole life changed by a total stranger with a business card. Just like then, I wondered how I could be so lucky, and just like then, I couldn’t wait to tell my parents.

  They were wonderful, so supportive and there to cheer me on, never standing in the way of anything that would make me happy, even if it took me three thousand miles away. They simply wished me well, reminded me how much they believed in me, and promised to take good care of Peter.

  Jimmy wasn’t nearly as pleased as they were, but he knew me too well to try to talk me out of it. His only request, and it was understandable, was that I not fly to New York—his father had recently been killed in a tragic plane crash, and he couldn’t bear the thought of the same thing happening to me.

  And so it was that bright and early one Thursday morning in 1950 I boarded a train from Los Angeles to New York, feeling excited, hopeful, flattered, humbled—pretty much everything you can imagine other than afraid.

  I couldn’t afford a sleeper car, so I sat up for every minute of the three-day cross-country trip. Ah, youth. The Ford Agency had arranged for a room for me at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and I headed straight there from the train station when I arrived on Sunday, slept all day and all night and was right on time for my Monday-morning appointment with Eileen Ford.

  She was all business, a bit brusque and imperious, clearly not a woman who wanted to sit and chat for a while and then head on to lunch together. But after what seemed like only a few minutes, she called a photographer and said, “I have a new model,” and just like that, I started working, less than an hour after I walked through the agency door.

  In my first week I earned $350, which translates to about $3,500 today, and the jobs and the money and the excitement kept right on coming. I loved every second of it, from the endless, busy variety of the work to the skilled artistry of the people I worked with to the other models, many of whom became my closest friends—so much so that more than sixty years later, we still get together for lunches every chance we get. And more than sixty years later, we rarely have a conversation without devoting at least a few minutes to reminiscing about Eileen Ford, who died in 2014 at the age of ninety-two.

  There’s a reason this woman was a legend as a modeling agent. She had a very specific, instantaneous eye when it came to prospective clients. If she wanted you, as I discovered, she was on the phone in a heartbeat, booking your first job. If she didn’t, the rejection was usually blunt and brutal, anything from “You need a nose job” to “Your teeth are yellow” to “You’re fifteen pounds overweight.” Once she signed you, she was almost pathologically protective, carefully screening everyone she sent her models to meet, enforcing strict curfews, dictating everything from social lives to diets to dermatologists to hairdressers to street wear to how much skin should or shouldn’t be showing in any and all photo shoots. In many ways she was more controlling than your worst nightmare of a mother, but she wasn’t about to let anything bad happen to her models, not on her watch! If you weren’t willing to adhere to her clear, nonnegotiable rules, you’d be escorted straight to the door, no arguments and no second chances.

  As far as I was concerned, she took great care of us, and her rules weren’t all that unreasonable in exchange for the amazing careers we were being given in return. I did my first Life magazine cover, titled “Too Much Jewelry?,” in 1952, and not for one moment do I believe that would have happened without the power of Eileen Ford propelling me through the door.

  That Life magazine cover was shot by photographer extraordinaire Milton Greene, who was perhaps best known as Marilyn Monroe’s photographer, business partner, and friend. I worked with Milton m
any times, and he and his darling, tiny wife Amy and I became good friends as well.

  They invited me to their home in Connecticut for several weekend gatherings, and on one particular weekend Marilyn Monroe happened to be staying with them. I’m still trying to figure out whether or not I can say I met her.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and hours passed before Marilyn emerged from her suite on the second floor. I looked up to see her descending the stairs, presumably to come down and join the group.

  Instead, she stopped on the landing, where she sat down in the corner and stayed there.

  End of story.

  Seriously, she never said a word, she just sat there on that landing with a rather blank, unwelcoming look on her face. I never saw anyone approach her, and I kind of lost track of her. Later I noticed she’d just disappeared, perhaps back to her room or who knows where.

  I have no idea what was going on with her. I wrote it off to terrible shyness or insecurity and left it at that. Milton and Amy didn’t seem to think a thing about it, and I wasn’t about to ask them. It was none of my business, and frankly, I wasn’t that interested.

  So that was the perfectly lovely Sunday afternoon in Connecticut when I either did or didn’t meet Marilyn Monroe. Your call.

  And then, of course, there were the added bonuses of living in New York, a city I love, sharing a huge, wonderful apartment with a few of my friends and fellow models and being paid very generously to do work that exhilarated me and made me feel blessed every single day. My Minnesota friend Caroline Covell even came to New York and joined the Ford Agency as a model, and we privately marveled over and over again at where we two small-town Midwestern girls had ended up.