Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  Mark decides it’s time to take Marnie to see her mother in Baltimore. His private investigator unearthed the fact that Bernice was a prostitute when Marnie was a little girl, and he wants to confront her to see if the truth might help exorcise Marnie’s demons. Bernice, in an angry effort to shut Mark up, attacks him, triggering the memory Marnie’s been repressing since childhood: A drunken “client” of Bernice’s, a sailor, tried to comfort Marnie when a thunderstorm frightened her. Bernice thought he was trying to molest her little girl and attacked him. To protect her mother, Marnie grabbed a fireplace poker and struck him. He died a very bloody death while the child Marnie stood over him and quietly murmured, “There. There now.”

  The restored memory of that horrible night elicits a confession from Bernice about Marnie’s conception: She’d admired a boy’s sweater, and he told her she could have it if she let him have sex with her. She let him, but he disappeared when she told him she was pregnant. “But I still got that old basketball sweater, and I got you, Marnie, and I wouldn’t let them take you away from me. I promised God that if He’d let me keep you, I’d raise you different from myself—decent.”

  Marnie asks Bernice at the beginning of the film, “Why don’t you love me, Mama? I’ve always wondered why you don’t.”

  After Bernice’s confession at the end, Marnie says, “You must have loved me, Mama. You must have loved me.”

  Bernice answers her, in tears, “Why, sugar pop, you’re the only thing I ever did love.”

  Set free from the repressed memory that explains her pathological fears and behavior, Marnie asks Mark what she should do. He reassures her, promising he’ll take care of her and defend her and stand by her. There’s hope for all three of them as the film ends.

  I just remembered something I haven’t thought of in decades. Back in the days when everyone was asking each other, “Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated?” my answer was that Florio and I were on our way to a training session, getting ready for our scenes in Marnie.

  The assassination hit everyone on that film like a horrible shock wave. It was all we talked about for days, and I never mentioned my very unattractive encounter with John Kennedy in the south of France a few years earlier. It was so trivial compared to the death of a president.

  I think we were all grateful for the compelling, full-time, emotionally complicated distraction of making the next Alfred Hitchcock film.

  The wonderful Louise Latham was cast as Bernice, Melody Thomas (now Melody Thomas Scott of The Young and the Restless) was hired to play Marnie as a little girl, Diane Baker was cast in the role of Lil, and to complete the embarrassment of riches, none other than Sean Connery signed on as my leading man Mark Rutland. As he had on The Birds, Hitchcock surrounded me with the most exquisite people, on-screen and off, and as he had with Rod Taylor on The Birds, he gave a nonnegotiable edict to Sean—“Do not touch The Girl.”

  In 2006 I had the profound honor of being a presenter the night that the American Film Institute celebrated Sean Connery’s lifetime body of work. I was thrilled that they asked me, and I must say, I wore the most beautiful dress I’d ever seen in my life. At the after party I found Sean sitting alone for a moment and went over to sit beside him. He gave me the sweetest kiss on the cheek and said, “I wasn’t able to do that when we were working together.” (His gorgeous, tiny wife Micheline joined us moments later and wanted to steal that dress right off my body. I dared her to try it, and we laughed and hugged.)

  I’ve been asked thousands of times if Sean and I were romantically involved during the time we shot Marnie. The answer is a simple no. Like Rod Taylor, he was gorgeous and wonderful and a dream come true as a leading man. We became great friends. But if anything had been going on between us off camera, when he wasn’t busy practicing his golf swing, it would have shown in my eyes on camera, and a pathologically frigid Marnie Edgar looking at Mark Rutland with even a hint of a passionate connection would never have worked. Even our “love scene,” for lack of a more accurate term, was as unromantic as could be, with cameras and lights and boom microphones and crew and Hitchcock just a few feet away, so I can honestly say I have no idea what it’s really like to kiss Sean Connery.

  I still remember Hitchcock telling me that he’d signed Sean Connery to be my leading man. I wondered out loud how I was supposed to play a frigid woman opposite Sean, of all people.

  To which Hitchcock replied after a long pause, “It’s called ‘acting,’ my dear.”

  The widespread belief at the studio was that Hitchcock had fired Evan Hunter from Marnie and hired Jay Presson Allen to write the script instead because Evan was very opposed to the scene in which Mark rapes Marnie on their wedding night. He thought it made Mark irretrievably unsympathetic. An equally widespread belief was that the rape was the scene that had driven Hitchcock to make Marnie in the first place, that a man taking his frigid, unattainable bride by force was Hitchcock’s fantasy about me. I refused to let my mind wander into that possibility. I had a job to do and a performance to give. A whole lot of people were counting on me, and I was counting on myself. I couldn’t afford to indulge in speculation.

  I couldn’t ignore the fact, though, that Hitchcock’s behavior toward me was as obsessive and bizarre as ever, and it seemed to be escalating.

  He had a life mask made of my face. My makeup man Bob Dawn put straws up my nose so I could breathe and covered my face with plaster for about fifteen minutes until it was dried enough to remove in one piece. Believe it or not, I didn’t think much about it at the time. There were life masks of contract actors and actresses all over the walls of the makeup room. I had no idea until Bob told me much later that Hitchcock had my life mask made for no other reason than to keep it for himself and jealously guard it.

  He had handwritten notes delivered to my house, accompanied by his favorite fine wines.

  He had personalized stationery designed for me that, except for the name, obviously, was identical to his.

  And then there was that beautiful, awful dressing room.

  It was a huge, luxurious suite, with every convenience from a giant light-rimmed mirror in the makeup area where Bob Dawn could work on me in private, to a shampoo bowl and salon chair for my daily sessions with my hairdresser Virginia Darcy. Hitchcock designed it himself and had it painted French blue to coordinate with a decorator’s dream collection of gorgeous French furniture. It “happened” to be located right next to Hitchcock’s bungalow at Universal, and its most unnerving feature was a back door that led into an alley just a few yards from the door to his private office. He could come and go as he pleased without anyone seeing him, even if it was ostensibly for no other reason than to enjoy a glass of the wine or champagne that he kept in my refrigerator. I avoided that dressing room as much as possible while Marnie was in preproduction, but once we started filming, I’d have friends, Mom and Daddy, Melanie and Josephine, crew members, anyone and everyone I could think of meet me there—anything to keep my time alone with Hitchcock at a minimum. And not once did I ever open that back door.

  Inevitably, though, sometimes it was just him and me, and it was usually the same excruciating dance. He would find some way to express his obsession with me, which he never referred to as an obsession, as if I owed it to him to reciprocate somehow. I would find some way to make it clear that his obsession wasn’t reciprocated and never would be. He’d become cruel and petulant and then, within a few hours or a few days, start all over again.

  One day he told me about a “recurring dream” of his, although it was obviously more of a fantasy. In this “dream” I was in his living room, surrounded by some kind of glow, and I told him I loved him and always would.

  Then he added, “You’re everything I’ve ever dreamed of, Tippi, you must know that. If it weren’t for Alma . . .”

  I could tell what was coming, and I’m sure I even warned him, “Don’t.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  It litera
lly turned my stomach. I managed to mutter something like “It was just a dream, Hitch,” before I walked out of my dressing room in search of anything but time alone with him.

  I was angry. I was in pain. I was anxious, and I was still utterly determined not to let Hitchcock ruin Marnie for me, the rest of the cast, and the crew, all of whom were working so hard despite tension on the set you could cut with a knife. It became my goal to get through it without a rift between Hitchcock and me that could never be healed. Looking back, though, that rift was inevitable. It wasn’t a question of if, it was simply a matter of when.

  I was even naive, or desperate, enough to hope that Hitchcock’s intensity toward me might dissipate when the script called for Marnie to dye her hair to disguise herself when she is on the run after her first theft. One of Hitchcock’s most memorable quotes was “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.” I thought that maybe, just maybe, those few days when my hair was darker for filming would break his obsession, or at least give me a temporary reprieve from it.

  In the end, all it did was make me even less recognizable to myself than I was already becoming. I knew I was slipping further and further inside myself, trying to hide from what was going on around me that I couldn’t escape, and when even my reflection in the mirror seemed unfamiliar, I felt more lost than ever.

  I’ll never forget an incident that happened one afternoon at Universal. I was waiting for an elevator when Hitchcock’s wife Alma approached me. She was a little awkward and reluctant, and all she said was “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

  So she knew. It surprised me, although I suspected that on some level or other, she’d had to tolerate it before, which I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or be angry with her.

  “Alma, you could stop it,” I replied. “You’re the only one who could.”

  She just turned and walked away.

  I had a similar hollow feeling when Marnie writer Jay Presson Allen and I were headed somewhere in the back of a limo, and out of nowhere she quietly asked, “Can’t you love him just a little?”

  I couldn’t even come up with a reply to that. I just stared at her.

  Making it even more awkward was the fact that during the filming of Marnie, Hitchcock had begun working with Jay on what he hoped would be their next film, the screen adaptation of a J. M. Barrie play called Mary Rose, in which I’d play the title character. It was an eerie ghost story in which Mary Rose’s father takes her to an island when she’s a little girl. She disappears, then reappears three weeks later unaware of having been gone. Years later, when Mary Rose is a young wife and mother, her husband takes her to that same island, where she disappears. Decades later she reappears, again unaware that she’d been gone and exactly the same age she was when she vanished. The second draft of the Mary Rose script had been completed, and I’d been hearing about it endlessly from Hitchcock. Our bizarre relationship finally detonated so completely that there was no coming back.

  It started when I was being honored with Photoplay’s “most promising actress of the year” award. They wanted to present it to me on a Friday night on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which was filmed in New York in 1964. I was flattered and excited, especially when I checked my Marnie shooting schedule and discovered it shouldn’t be a problem—I had that Friday off, so I could head to the airport when we finished on Thursday, be in New York for The Tonight Show to accept the award, fly home over the weekend and be back in plenty of time to work again on Monday.

  There was no reason other than meanness and control for Hitchcock to refuse to let me take that trip, but that’s exactly what he did. Not only did he refuse, but he picked up the phone, supposedly on my behalf, to decline the award and cancel my Tonight Show appearance.

  I was furious, and I imagine Photoplay and The Tonight Show were, too, not with him but with me.

  But the worst was still to come, just a couple of weeks later.

  It was late afternoon. We’d finished filming for the day. I was alone in my dressing room when Hitchcock summoned me to his office. Things had been very tense between us after the New York fiasco, and while it was unavoidable to interact with him on the set, I could barely bring myself to look at him or speak to him.

  I’ve never gone into detail about this, and I never will. I’ll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked and more repulsed. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became. Then he started adding threats, as if he could do anything to me that was worse than what he was trying to do at that moment.

  He would scrap the whole Mary Rose project, he said.

  I didn’t care, I told him. In fact, “let me out of my contract.”

  He had no intention of it. “Besides,” he added, “you have a young daughter and elderly parents to support.”

  “No one who loves me would want me to be this unhappy for any amount of money,” I snapped.

  Too bad. I still had two years to go on that contract, and he was going to make me honor it.

  Then he looked directly into my eyes, his face red with rage, and promised, “I’ll ruin your career.”

  I finally managed to push him off me once and for all and looked directly back at him. “Do what you have to do,” I said, and I stormed out and slammed the door behind me.

  I was shattered, but I wasn’t remorseful, not for a single minute. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Refusing Hitchcock that horrible afternoon wasn’t one of them. The next day poor Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock’s secretary, had to come and tell me it would be best if I didn’t come to the wrap party being planned for when filming was completed.

  It was cruel and devastating, but I guess I wasn’t surprised. The cast and crew were insulted on my behalf, and I also wasn’t surprised to hear weeks later, once shooting was completed, that the party was a huge flop.

  Hitchcock never spoke directly to me again. We were still filming Marnie, and he would give me directions and answer my questions only through intermediaries on the crew. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he never spoke my name again. From that day forward, I was only “The Girl,” nothing more. It made the atmosphere on the set unbearable, but no one blamed me for it, and I never blamed myself.

  He also completely stopped caring about Marnie, to the point where he seemed to be sabotaging it. His legendary meticulous attention to every detail of every camera angle, every special effect, every technical aspect of his films eroded into apathetic sloppiness. And the campaign he’d been on since we started filming to convince anyone who’d listen that I was headed straight for an Oscar for my performance shifted into reverse. Now he was spreading cold, cruel insults about my performance to everyone from the Universal executives to his colleagues in the industry.

  Despite Hitchcock’s lobbying against me, Universal had every intention to submit me for an Oscar nomination when we finally wrapped Marnie and the executives saw the finished product. He blocked it. I was never submitted and never considered.

  I immediately started getting offers for other films—the lead in Bedtime Story opposite David Niven and Marlon Brando; Mirage opposite Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau; and Fahrenheit 451 opposite Oskar Werner, written by Hitchcock’s friend François Truffaut, among others.

  But Hitchcock still had me under contract for another two years, and to every producer and director and agent and screenwriter who called wanting to hire me, he had the same answer: “She’s not available.” The one that hurt me the most was Fahrenheit 451. I would love to have worked with François Truffaut. Hitchcock personally saw to it that it never happened, and I’m almost glad I didn’t find out about that offer until later. It was tough enough to heal emotionally without the added anger and disappointment.

  I knew Hitchcock was doing everything in his power to keep his promise to ruin my career. In many ways, he succee
ded. I went on to make fifty films after Marnie, and I did episodes of several television series. But I was never offered another role as deep and challenging as the two I did for him, the two he chose me for out of nowhere and exhaustively prepared me for, before punishing me when, in his eyes, I paid him the ultimate insult of rejecting him.

  I’ve made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life.

  We never spoke again or had any further contact whatsoever. As far as I was concerned, there was no unfinished business between us, nothing more that needed to be said. I even felt a wave of sadness when he died on April 29, 1980.

  It surprised everyone that I went to Hitchcock’s funeral in Beverly Hills. I even had a floral arrangement designed in the shape of the iconic Hitchcock profile. I still have the frame.

  I didn’t speak at the funeral.

  I was just there to honor his genius as a filmmaker and his contributions to the industry.

  I was there to honor him personally as an unparalleled teacher and “star maker” who once believed in a former model who’d never acted a day in her life.

  I’d already healed and moved on by the time Hitchcock died, far past anything I’d ever imagined for myself. So in the end, I was there to say, “Good-bye, and thank you, Hitch.”

  Six

  Shortly after Marnie ended, in 1964, I married my second husband, Noel Marshall.

  I know. What? Who?

  Noel was my agent and manager. He’d also been helping me find a house to buy when I decided it was time to stop renting, so we were spending an enormous amount of time together. He had three young sons from a previous marriage, two of them a few years older than Melanie and the youngest exactly the same age, right down to having been born on the same day she was. Noel was incredibly impulsive, and he was ambitious, always full of plans and ideas, always busy, always on the move, always a great salesman.