Tippi: A Memoir
Page 8
He’d grown up on the tough South Side of Chicago, the oldest of twelve children, and he had a mind-boggling résumé. He’d spent one summer as a boy working at the St. Louis Zoo. He’d worked as a page at Chicago’s NBC affiliate and directed episodes of the puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie as well as coverage of a national political convention. When he moved to Hollywood, he worked for Hughes Aircraft and Sears before setting up a commercial agency with his then-wife Jaye. Jaye got the agency as part of their divorce settlement, although they continued to work together off and on, and Noel went into the construction business—with no prior experience, mind you.
At that time in my life, he was also a much-needed distraction from Hitchcock. It was as hard to be preoccupied about Hitchcock with Noel around as it is to be preoccupied with your problems while zooming around on the craziest ride at an amusement park. And since everyone on the Marnie set knew I was getting married as soon as we wrapped that film, I’m sure I also deluded myself into thinking that when Hitchcock got wind of it, he might get discouraged enough to move on from his suffocating obsession with me. Looking back, I wonder if it might have actually intensified it instead. Who knows? I don’t pretend to know what was going on in that man’s mind, and even back then I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure it out.
Wanting to escape someone you don’t want to deal with is a really lame reason to get married. I was putting another barrier between Hitchcock and me. I wasn’t in love with Noel Marshall, but I’m not sure I admitted that to myself when I made the commitment to marry him. I also think he knew I wasn’t in love with him and wasn’t about to let that stand in the way of a great idea like getting married and merging our lives together. When I say yes to something, I honor it, so when I said yes to Noel, I took the commitment seriously.
Just in case you think I’m exaggerating when I say Noel was incredibly impulsive about most things, our wedding was no exception. One Sunday afternoon we were sitting in the backyard of the charming home I’d bought on Knobhill Drive above Sherman Oaks, overlooking the San Fernando Valley. It had three different levels built into a hillside, complete with a beautiful private pool with a shaded patio. It was the first home I’d ever bought, I was proud of it, and I loved it there.
So there Noel and I sat, poolside, trying to decide where our wedding should be held, considering our guest list numbered about 250 people. We talked about hotels, we talked about churches, we talked about friends’ houses, and then suddenly Noel said, “Why don’t we just get married here?”
I looked at him as if he’d just grown a pair of antennae and patiently pointed out the obvious: “There isn’t enough space here for 250 people.”
He didn’t bat an eye. “There can be. All we have to do is add two baths and two bedrooms and extend the living room. We’ll just install a concrete pad over there, and . . . wait here.” He suddenly went running off to the garage while I was still sitting there trying to picture some fraction of what he’d just blurted out off the top of his head. I hadn’t begun to figure it out when he came running back carrying a sledgehammer, with which he began demolishing the wooden stairway that led from the yard twenty feet up to the street level.
Dissolve to a few weeks later, new rooms and extensions added, cutting it so close that we were pouring concrete with our own pumps the night before the wedding, concrete that wasn’t completely set until about an hour before our guests arrived.
It turned out to be a perfect wedding. I wore a pale green lace wedding dress I designed myself, and we had a star-studded guest list. Everyone was well fed and well entertained, and to the best of my knowledge, no one knew that every few minutes I was glancing around at all the brand-new renovations, thinking, “Please, God, if it’s going to collapse, don’t let it happen until after everyone leaves.”
Of course, by marrying Noel I’d now inherited three stepsons—Joel, John, and Jerry—while Noel had inherited a stepdaughter, my darling Melanie. We needed that extra space, and we hadn’t even begun to imagine how much bigger our family was going to grow in the years to come.
Isn’t it funny how sometimes that qualities we find so quirky and funny and interesting in our partners when the relationship is new become the qualities that are the first to drive us crazy after the newness wears off?
Noel’s impulsiveness seemed so brave and exciting at first. “Oh, good, he’s a doer,” I’d say to myself in relief, since I’m not exactly known for sitting around eating bonbons either. He darted like a gnat from one new interest to another, from agent to construction to part-time agent to real estate development to . . . whatever came next. He was perpetually in search of a new challenge, another mountain to climb, another adventure to tackle. I began to look at every one of his new undertakings as the next unwitting target of his sledgehammer, and it got very, very tedious and very, very old.
But just as my first husband was worth it for giving me Melanie, the greatest treasure of my life, my second husband led me to my greatest passion, whether he meant to or not, and I’m eternally grateful.
I had a new husband, a new home to decorate, three new stepsons, a daughter who was growing more beautiful and strong-willed by the day, and, finally, a few new job offers when my Hitchcock contract expired and I was free to work again.
I waded back into acting with an episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre and an episode of the Ben Gazzara series Run for Your Life before an offer came to go to London for a movie called A Countess from Hong Kong, starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, directed by none other than the legendary Charlie Chaplin. Who in their right mind would turn that down? And with a few exceptions here and there, I am a woman in her right mind.
It had been more than two years since Marnie was released, and it was obvious when I read the Countess from Hong Kong script that the Tippi Hedren “heat” in the industry had cooled down (thank you, Hitch). My part was a relatively small one, and my character didn’t even appear until toward the end of the film. Still, no regrets. It was worth it, if only to work with Chaplin.
I found him to be an absolute genius. He wrote, produced, directed, and musically scored A Countess from Hong Kong, which made my head spin. What a stunningly talented man. Even more mesmerizing to me was the fact that before every scene, he would act out each of our parts to show us what he had in mind. Marlon Brando hated that—no one, not even Charlie Chaplin, was going to tell him how to perform a scene. I soaked it up with nothing short of fascinated delight.
Predictably, I’m sure, Marlon thought it would be a great idea for us to have an affair during filming. I made it clear right up front that I thought it would be a terrible idea, and there was nothing he could do or say to change my mind. It wasn’t just that I was married to Noel by then. I also wasn’t naive enough to think that after having known me for maybe about a minute and a half, Marlon had developed deep, meaningful feelings for me, and I had no interest in being his or anyone else’s something-to-do-on-location. He was intense. God knows he was attractive. I would never claim that it wasn’t kind of fun to be hit on by him. And to his credit, he took my quietly emphatic “No, we’re not going to do that” for an answer and left it at that.
Sophia, on the other hand, was a joy, and we became good friends. She’s even been here to visit me at Shambala. She remarried Carlo Ponti, Sr., during the shooting of A Countess from Hong Kong, and I’m so glad I got to know her during such an extraordinary time in her life.
Saying yes to a small part in that movie also led to the privilege of attending Charlie Chaplin’s seventy-fifth birthday party, which was thrown on the Countess from Hong Kong set. The whole cast and crew attended, even Brando, who was never especially interested in socializing with the rest of us. I took ten-year-old Melanie as my date, and I have the most wonderful picture of Melanie, Sophia, and me at the celebration of that amazing man’s life.
I’m the only actress ever to have been directed by both Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin—both of them brilliantly creative dir
ectors, both of them meticulous perfectionists, both of them deservedly iconic. Sometimes it still makes me pause to catch my breath and say, “Really? Me?”
I had that same reaction to being given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1973. My name among such superstars as Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire and Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor, and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin—people who’d committed their lives and their considerable talent to their show business careers, while I’d been handed an invitation to join them with no acting credentials whatsoever. I was so touched, and so honored, and I promise you, no one has ever been more appreciative than I was. Melanie was there to celebrate with me and our family and friends afterward in the historic Blossom Ballroom at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the first Academy Awards ceremony was held, and she gave me my most unforgettable moment of the whole event when she told me she was proud of me.
I almost felt as if I’d stepped into someone else’s life that day.
I’d been home from London and A Countess from Hong Kong for a few weeks when I got a call from an extraordinary man named Johnny Grant. Everyone knew and admired Johnny Grant. Not only was he the honorary mayor of Hollywood, but among countless other achievements, he was also an ambassador for the United Service Organizations, aka the USO, recruiting celebrities from all areas of show business and sports to visit our soldiers at war and at V.A. hospitals throughout the United States.
Johnny was calling with a remarkable question. He was organizing another of his many USO junkets to Vietnam. Would I be willing to go?
My answer wasn’t just yes. It was, “Yes, I’d be honored.”
A few weeks later I met my traveling companions Johnny Grant and Diane McBain at Camp Pendleton, a couple of hours south of Los Angeles, and we were off to Saigon. Diane and I became good friends, not only because we went on this trip together but also because she, like me, was a former teenage model who’d been “discovered” and gone on to an acting career. Neither of us had a clue what we’d signed on for with this trip to Vietnam. We just knew that whatever it was, it would pale in comparison to what was being asked of the men and women who were fighting day after day, night after night, in this ugly, unpopular war. If we could help prove to them that they hadn’t been forgotten by their fellow Americans, and that we cared very much about them and deeply appreciated their service to our country, then by all means, sign us up.
We spent the first night in Saigon, where we appeared on a talk show hosted by a beautiful young Vietnamese actress named Kieu Chinh (pronounced “Ching”), who went on many years later to star in the hit movie The Joy Luck Club. It was traditional for her to welcome and interview all of us visiting celebrities on her show, televised throughout Vietnam. We were happy to oblige, and she was a lovely, gracious hostess, but we weren’t there for publicity. We were there to visit our soldiers, and we were eager to get started.
Early the next morning we boarded a helicopter and headed off to one of the firebases, military encampments that provided artillery support to the infantry beyond the range of their base camps. The chopper flew very low over the trees so the enemy couldn’t detect our location, and those rare moments when our nerves would fray and we’d wonder what the hell we thought we were doing vanished the instant we saw how much our being there meant to those brave GIs so far from home.
Every morning we were off to another firebase, and every morning we were greeted with the same incredible appreciation. We stayed in the most modest quarters, we ate lunches and dinners with the soldiers, and mostly we just sat and talked and hung out and listened to their stories—where they’d come from, the nightmares they’d been through, the lives and families they’d left behind and missed so much, and their dreams for when the war ended. I prayed for every single one of them every night after our long good-bye hugs.
It was a hard, gut-wrenching trip, and when Johnny called a few months later to ask if I’d go again, I said yes. I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t not go.
The second junket was with entertainer and comedian Joey Bishop and several others, and I discovered the hard way what an incredibly nice, patient group I was traveling with. We were about an hour into our drive from Los Angeles to Camp Pendleton when I suddenly, horribly realized I’d forgotten my passport. If they were tempted to just push me out of the car and keep driving, they never showed it. Instead, as we turned around to drive back to L.A. so I could retrieve my passport, because there was no other option, and I apologized eight or nine million times, they were much more gracious about it than I deserved.
(For the record, that kind of thing isn’t typical of me. I might have had trouble convincing those particular traveling companions, but while I’m definitely a natural-born blonde, I’ve never been much of an airhead.)
Once we arrived in Vietnam, we were taken to a variety of remote locations by helicopters and C-130s to entertain the troops. We were well protected by armed soldiers and escort officers, and again, the reception we received everywhere we went was overwhelming. Those men and women were so grateful that they kept trying to give us patches from the sleeves of their uniforms, patches they’d earned, as if everything they were already giving us by serving in the military wasn’t enough.
The hardest part of both those trips to Vietnam was visiting the base hospitals. We saw so many beautiful young GIs whose arms or legs had been shot off, whose injuries had left them blind or deaf for the rest of their lives, whose bodies spontaneously trembled from seizures in the wake of attacks that were more than their minds and nervous systems could handle. Every hospital bed was occupied by one indescribable, heartbreaking testament after another to the obscenity of war, and it made me feel inadequate that all I could think of to say to each of them was “What can I do for you? How can I help?”
We also landed in a jet on the massive aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise to visit our navy servicemen. I still have the solid metal object that’s crucial to stopping the jets when they land. (I wish I’d written down the name of it when it was presented to me.) I use it as a paperweight and a powerful reminder of a tragic time in the history of the United States.
I did another televised interview with Kieu Chinh before we left, never dreaming that she and the Vietnamese people and I would become very important in each other’s lives in the years to come.
I’ve kept in touch with a few of the soldiers I met on that unforgettable trip, particularly Tom O’Keeffe, 1st Infantry, Charlie Company, Cam Ranh Bay. He said to me once, “Tippi, you have no idea the danger that all of you were in when you came over. It was really complicated for us. We’d start four or five hours before you got there, including scanning the whole area by plane to make sure we knew where the enemy was, to make sure you’d be safe.”
I’ve thought about that so often. He was right, I had no idea what all those GIs went through at the time to protect us, just as most of us have no idea of the brave, extraordinary efforts our armed forces go through every day, risking their lives to protect us and our country.
To every one of them, past, present, and future, from the bottom of a full, heavy, grateful heart that caught just a glimpse of those efforts on our behalf, thank you and God bless you for your service.
I hadn’t been home long from my second trip to Vietnam when I was offered the lead in a film called Satan’s Harvest. I was excited. Starring opposite George Montgomery was a lovely prospect, of course, and the script was fairly interesting, but mostly I was looking forward to shooting in South Africa, where I’d never been before. It would irreversibly, gloriously change my life.
It was 1969. We were on location, baking in the brutal Zimbabwe sun. I was sitting in my canvas chair under an umbrella, reviewing my lines for the scene we were about to shoot, when the Afrikaner assistant director announced, “Everyone please stand. The lion is coming through.” My heart skipped. The king was approaching.
I imagine the thirty-some hot, sweaty filmmakers around me
thought the same thing I did—what? But none of us questioned it, we simply stood as directed, including Noel, who was sitting beside me, as if we were about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance among the typical clutter of cameras, reflectors, lights, and booms.
Moments later a man appeared, moving toward us across the veldt. Beside him, impossibly graceful for his massive size, was a magnificent golden lion, his amber-brown mane like an aura around his proud head. The king of beasts indeed, I thought, pure royalty. East African tribes say that when a lion roars he’s declaring, “N’cht ya nani? Yangu! Yangu! YANGU!” (“Whose land is this? This land is my land. Mine! Mine! MINE!”) That’s exactly how this creature approached us, surveying his kingdom vain and unchallenged.
I’d never been close to a lion before. Like most people, I’d seen them only at a distance at circuses and zoos. Like most people, I’d always been fascinated, in awe and deathly afraid of them, so it alarmed me when I realized that there was no rope or chain or restraint of any kind connecting this lion to the man beside him.
“Isn’t he dangerous?” I asked the crew member who was standing nearby.
“Not as long as Ozzie is around,” he replied.
Ozzie turned out to be trainer Ozzie Bristow. The lion was one of his big cats, Dandylion.
They arrived on the set, where Dandylion, purely in passing, playfully reached out a big paw to tap the cinematographer on the ankle, for which he received a disapproving chuck under the chin from Ozzie. They passed on through, Dandylion clearly finding the rest of us humans about as interesting as watching paint dry.
Dandylion and I were going to be working on this film together for several weeks, and I couldn’t get to Ozzie fast enough to ask a million questions.
We were all asked to stand, he explained, because it’s best for humans to be above the height of a lion. Below it, we become potential playthings. The games can easily lead to impromptu wrestling matches on the ground, and the smartest bet is on the lion.