Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  There’s something about several women, even women who like each other as much as we did, living together under one roof that can get—shall we say?—a little edgy and competitive. Thankfully, we all ended up going our separate ways before any friendships were ruined, and I eventually found my way to a beautiful apartment of my own in Forest Hills, grateful for the peace, quiet, and privacy.

  Just when it seemed as though life couldn’t get much better, along came an amazing invention called television. Every family in America was buying one, which meant they needed shows to watch, which meant a whole new opportunity for advertisers, which meant a whole new world of possibilities for print models, runway models, and actresses.

  Suddenly we were booking television commercials, delightedly opening refrigerator doors on camera, taking ecstatic sips of coffee, and gracefully waving our hands over shiny new Studebakers. The residual checks were fabulous, and I loved learning the skills of performing live on soundstages.

  It’s hard to picture now, but back then there were cigarette commercials everywhere, and three of us were booked to do them on the wildly popular Perry Como Show, which aired live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night. The commercial went like this: One model would put a cigarette to her lips, the next model would light a cigarette, and the third model would exhale smoke in a state of absolute rapture.

  I had to learn how to smoke for those commercials, and since it’s impossible to fake smoking, I was addicted in no time. I kept right on smoking and enjoying it until the news came out in about 1965 that it causes cancer, emphysema, a prematurely aging face (that may have been the one that pushed me over the edge), and God knows what else. Once again, “I’m not going to do that anymore” came to the rescue—I quit cold turkey and put that killer out of my life without a single relapse.

  There was another popular series on the air at the time, the TV adaptation of a radio series called The Aldrich Family. I was there to shoot a small role as somebody or other’s girlfriend. The fact that it was my first acting job was far overshadowed by the fact that somehow, on my first day, I managed to lose my balance and fall backward off the stage. Fortunately, a young man happened to be standing at the right place at the right time to catch me in his arms and save me from hitting the floor. My leg was bleeding badly. In fact, I still have the scar. While he bandaged me, he asked if I was okay, and I focused on my hero for the first time.

  He was tall, dark, and handsome, with a confident, infectious smile and piercing eyes.

  I assured him I was fine, just a little shaken up. Then I thanked him for catching me and introduced myself.

  “Tippi Hedren,” I said.

  “Peter Griffith,” he replied.

  And just as I had with the first Peter in my life, my dear cat, I fell in love.

  I was twenty-one when I met Peter Griffith. He was eighteen, a former child actor who’d appeared on Broadway, and we became inseparable from the moment we met. He was fun, he was very, very smart, and he was wonderfully supportive of my career. When we weren’t going to dinners and parties and the theater in New York, we were visiting his charming parents on Long Island and his equally lovely relatives in Maryland. They had a gray horse I’ve never forgotten. I loved that horse and rode her every chance I got. But occasionally, for some reason, without warning, she’d decide she’d had quite enough of being ridden and throw me, and I’d go limping back to the stables brushing dirt off my jodhpurs, clinging to what little dignity I had left. I became the center of a lot of hilarious family stories for that—that mare would already be in the barn, settled into her stall, before I’d finally come dragging into view, and yet I never could bring myself to stop riding her.

  A few months into my relationship with Peter I took a trip to Arizona for a Sears catalogue shoot. My old boyfriend Jimmy Lewis was going to school there, and we had a brief, sweet reunion. I loved seeing him again, but it erased any doubts I might have had that my mind and heart had moved on.

  Peter and I had been together for about a year when we decided to get married. I was still living in my Forest Hills apartment, and we chose a nearby Lutheran church for our wedding. Everything about that day was perfect except that my sister Patty was too pregnant with the first of her five children to travel and take her place as my matron of honor, but Peter’s sister Sally and my closest modeling friends made a gorgeous team of bridesmaids. I designed my virginal white knee-length wedding dress, I flew my parents in from California, and it meant the world to me to have Daddy walk me down the aisle and give me away.

  It was 1952. I was twenty-two. Peter was nineteen. Somehow the fact that we were too young for this never entered our minds.

  My career was thriving, between TV commercials and magazine covers for everyone from Glamour to The Saturday Evening Post and Seventeen magazine, and there were things I loved about being a wife. We moved from my Forest Hills apartment to a great building at 81st and Park when the commute became too much of a grind, and I enjoyed making a home for us there. Peter loved horses, and of course so did I, so I decorated with that in mind, with horse-related artwork and forest-green decor. It was exciting to show off my minimal cooking skills at dinner parties for our friends and experience the novelty of socializing as Mr. and Mrs. Peter Griffith. I threw myself wholeheartedly into my new role of married woman, and I kept myself busy enough for a while to drown out the quiet feeling in me that something had changed, that for some reason being married didn’t seem as special as dating.

  Then the United States of America intervened. Peter joined the army, became an MP, and was sent off to the Korean War.

  My self-sufficiency kicked right in, and instead of indulging in missing my husband, I appreciated my time alone, going where I wanted when I wanted, keeping my own hours, enjoying work and relaxing with my friends. I even bought a fabulous Morgan convertible, in red, my favorite color.

  That car was a cop magnet. I lost track of the number of speeding tickets I had to pay off, and always did, by the way. Okay, maybe it had a little to do with the fact that Morgans weren’t built to be slaves to speed limits, but still, how about some sympathy for the young blond woman who was just trying to break in her new car?

  I’d been looking at apartments again and moved to a perfect one at 430 East 56th Street on the East River. There was a tennis club there, the Town Tennis Club. I didn’t play tennis. I still don’t. But I joined the club anyway, thinking it might be a nice, safe place where I could go by myself, meet new people, and make new friends.

  I was right. Also members of the tennis club were an irresistible couple named Lillian (Lily) and Hubert (Hubie) Boskowitz. She called him Potsy. He called her Pussy-Mouse. (I didn’t ask.) They were positively elegant. They owned a fantastic brownstone just off of Park Avenue, but they were so funny and down-to-earth that they put the names Potsy and Pussy-Mouse above their door. From the first day we met, Lily and Hubie took me under their very busy, very social wings. I met fascinating people through them, and on any given night they’d whisk me off to the opera or the theater or dinner or a party or an art gallery opening, always laughing, always having fun, always making me feel like family rather than a third wheel. We remained close friends until they died many, many years later, and I was so moved that when Lillian passed away, she left me two diamond bracelets she cherished.

  Peter went on leave to Tokyo, and I met him there for a lovely couple of weeks together, during which he told me the oddest, most amazing story. He and some of his fellow MPs in Korea had ambushed an enemy tent, and once inside, they found several of my magazine covers pinned to the canvas walls. Peter said it was all he could do not to kill the tent’s occupant and tear down those photos of me. What on earth are the odds?

  And then, because I’d already gone halfway around the world traveling from New York to Japan, and I had the luxury of being able to afford it, I decided I might as well go the rest of the way and kept heading west.

  I didn’t think a thing about traveling from one c
ountry to another by myself, and had a glorious two months of exploring India, which was a fascinating assault on the senses, and Egypt, a place I’d always yearned to see. What a magnificent experience, to be in the presence of the Pyramids and the Sphinx and to almost literally feel antiquity in the earth itself, making you aware that you’re a part of something timeless and far greater than yourself, a deep sense of being humbled and empowered at the same time.

  Then it was on to a glorious time with Dr. Thomas Rees, his wife Nan, who was a fellow model, and some other friends in the South of France. Someone briefly introduced me to Senator John Kennedy on my first afternoon there, the operative word being “briefly.” They exchanged a little small talk, including the fact that his wife Jackie was in Italy recovering from a broken ankle, and then we all went right on with our day.

  I was in my hotel room early that same evening preparing to meet everyone for dinner when the phone rang. It was the concierge.

  “Miss Hedren, Senator Kennedy asked me to tell you that he has a car waiting for you downstairs.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and gaped at it for a second before replying, “Please tell Senator Kennedy I already have plans for the evening, but thank you anyway.”

  I hung up and fumed. I was thoroughly disgusted with him. He was a representative of the United States government, for heaven’s sake—a representative of our government who should have been in Italy taking care of his wife and her broken ankle, if you asked me. And I was offended that he thought, even for a moment, I might say yes to such an arrogant, presumptuous invitation. Logically, I knew it wasn’t personal. It was strictly about genitalia, and the concierge was probably already on the phone with the next lucky candidate, who might easily say, “I’ll be right down.” But emotionally? How dare he?

  I went right on with my evening, and I don’t doubt for a moment that Senator Kennedy went right on with his.

  The only glitch in an otherwise perfect trip was when I became very sick in Paris, with chest pains and shortness of breath and a persistent cough. A friend came to my hotel room to check on me and immediately rushed me to the hospital, where I was diagnosed with pleurisy.

  It was a shock to have my life interrupted by a very real health problem. I’ve always taken great care of myself, and I was pretty sure that was supposed to count for something. I also wasn’t born with the patience gene, so lying in a hospital room surrounded by concerned friends instead of having dinner with them at a café on the Seine was infuriating. The minute they let me out of there, I headed straight back to New York and back to work, partly because I’d missed it so much and partly because I was eager to prove to myself that whatever the hell pleurisy was, I’d beaten it, and I was still every bit as healthy as I’d earned the right to be.

  Keeping a young marriage alive and well was hard enough without the added complication of a long separation of thousands of miles. When Peter came home from Korea, things felt different between us, but we did the best we knew how to do, and we were elated to learn at the end of 1956 that we were going to have a baby.

  On August 9, 1957, I gave birth to the most extraordinary, most exquisite love of my life, our daughter, Melanie Griffith. I’d heard and read a thousand times that there’s no love deeper and more unconditional than the love between a mother and her child, but I can honestly say I had no idea what those words even meant until they laid that baby girl across my chest when she was only a few moments old.

  Shortly after I arrived in New York in 1950, I’d gone to lunch at the very exclusive Russian Tea Room. A woman was moving among the tables reading the patrons’ tea leaves, and when she got to me, she studied the pattern of leaves in my teacup, looked into my eyes and said, “Ahhh! A daughter of great fortune!”

  I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, and I’d given it little if any thought, but it came rushing back to me when I looked into our perfect newborn’s eyes, and I still remember holding her close to me on the day she was born and whispering, “A daughter of great fortune.” Then I held her in my arms and walked her over to the window of our room at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan to show her the East River and introduce her to her awesome hometown of New York City.

  Melanie Griffith was and is my great fortune, my best friend, my love, my luckiest blessing in a life that’s been filled with them.

  I adored everything about being a mother.

  Sadly, being a wife was becoming more and more difficult.

  Peter and I had been social drinkers from the day we met, enjoying fine wine and champagne as much as the next person.

  After Peter got out of the army, though, it was impossible not to notice that his drinking was gradually increasing, to the point where he was getting drunk several times a week. The charm I’d always found so irresistible about him eroded into an obnoxious, glassy-eyed carelessness when he’d had too much to drink, and the man I’d fallen in love with and married seemed to be slipping away.

  Another problem, one that had actually existed unaddressed from the beginning of our marriage, was the fact that I was making significantly more money than Peter was. His acting career had withered and died in his midteens. He worked for an insurance company for a while and then got a job in commercial production, but he spent a lot of time unemployed.

  I honestly didn’t think a thing about being the primary breadwinner of the family. We had a secure, comfortable life I could afford, including a wonderful nanny named Josephine for our baby girl, and I’d never believed in relying on any man to take care of me when I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself.

  But while we never had an actual conversation about it, it was obvious that Peter resented it. It weighed heavily on him that he couldn’t compete with me salary-wise. He felt angry and emasculated to the point where he’d occasionally be snide and demeaning to me, and before long he found an easy, obvious, destructive way to overcompensate—he turned to other women.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something was going on when he’d come home at all hours of the night or not come home at all, no matter how sincere his excuses sounded or how indignant he’d get that the thought of his being unfaithful could even enter my mind.

  When I still cared, it devastated me. I felt betrayed, diminished, and insulted to my core that a man I’d loved as best I could would look elsewhere, as if my best wasn’t enough, and then look me in the eye and lie to me over and over again. And as far as I was concerned, he wasn’t just cheating on me, he was cheating on our baby daughter as well, choosing to be away from home more and more, when he could have been there with her. She deserved much more, and so did I.

  Then when I stopped caring, when I hit my “I’m not going to do this anymore” wall, I kicked him out.

  Peter moved in with his girlfriend.

  I flew to Mexico and got a divorce.

  He’d been absent so much toward the end that it was weeks before Melanie even asked, “Where’s Daddy?”

  Still, the timing could have been better. It was becoming more and more apparent that my ten-year modeling career was waning. The phone wasn’t ringing as often, aspiring models in their late teens and early twenties were continuing to flood into New York City every day and creating excitement because they were pretty and new, and after two years of starting to feel like old news, I decided it was time for a change.

  I packed up Melanie, our nanny Josephine, and our animals—our poodle puppy, kitten, and bunny—and moved back to Los Angeles, where Melanie could get to know her grandparents and I could regroup.

  Three

  I spent a very long time kicking myself for my years with Peter, thinking, “What a stupid marriage.”

  We were too young to have a clue what we were getting into, that’s for sure. I looked back on the wedding ceremony, and that moment when we vowed to love, honor, and cherish each other “till death do us part,” and wondered if we would have said “I do” so quickly if those words had been changed to “for the rest
of your lives.” That sounds so much longer and has so much more gravity than “till death do us part,” don’t you think? Peter was nineteen when we got married. I was twenty-two. Death? At that age? On such a pretty, happy day? Never heard of it.

  There was that wonderful, inexplicable spark between us at the beginning, and the thrill of romance. I love romance. It’s a perfect foundation for a healthy, exciting dating relationship. For a lifelong commitment? Not so much.

  We had what we thought was a lot in common. We both loved socializing, going to the theater and dinner parties and great restaurants, and we both “cleaned up” well—we looked really good together. But when it came to the essence of who we were, our beliefs and priorities and work ethics and personalities, we had virtually nothing in common at all, and yet I’d walked up that aisle on my daddy’s arm in 1952, thinking, “Yeah, this will work.” What?

  The day I stopped kicking myself and wondering how a smart woman like me could have made such a stupid mistake was the day a simple, undeniable fact hit me, with the help of a fascinating book called The Other Side and Back by Sylvia Browne: If I hadn’t married Peter Griffith, there would be no Melanie. No one else on this planet but Peter could have cocreated this treasured daughter with me, who’s completed my life since the day she was born. If my marriage to Peter was about nothing more than bringing Melanie into this world, then not only was that marriage not a stupid mistake, but it was a blessing.

  Peter went on to form his own production company and to marry four more times. He died of emphysema in 2001, and it probably speaks volumes about his taste in women that all five of us wives went to his funeral in Texas and thoroughly enjoyed one another. We almost felt like sisters, and it was extraordinary, and very adult of us, come to think of it, that there was such a great camaraderie between us.