by Tippi Hedren
The paw around the cinematographer’s ankle? A common friendly greeting from a lion or tiger, Ozzie advised, and if the lion or tiger happens to be running as he or she is passing by, that greeting often results in the unceremonious upending of its recipient.
“What happens if he charges me?” I asked, still unable to take my eyes off this utterly majestic creature.
“Well, don’t run, or he might tackle you,” Ozzie warned in his soft-spoken Rhodesian accent. “And he weighs more’n forty stone.” More than five hundred pounds. Good God.
Later that day Ozzie introduced us to Karma, an eighteen-month-old lion who thought he was still a cub. He was two hundred pounds of energy and silliness, as playful as a puppy and every bit as irresistible.
Ozzie injured his back a week later and had to take a few days off to rest. On the day he returned, I happened to be near the compound where the cats were kept, and I watched, moved almost to tears, when Dandylion and Karma spotted him and started jumping in the air, literally dancing in excitement as he went to hug them hello. They stood on their back paws and returned the hug, almost smothering him, making sweet, happy noises that sounded like “aa-oow, aa-oow.”
When I told Ozzie how touched I was by that reunion, he grinned from ear to ear, as much in love with those cats as they were with him. But, he was quick to add, “Under certain circumstances, Dandylion could easily kill me tomorrow and never feel an instant of guilt.” Basic instincts will always trump training and love at any given moment, he said, triggered by any number of things, including possessiveness over whatever they’ve decided is theirs, from food to a pile of leaves to a stepladder to a toy ball. After a vicious attack, they can quickly revert right back to being as sweet and gentle as before, with no remorse or conscience, as if they’ve done no harm at all.
Ozzie introduced me to his five cheetahs before I left that day. They were lithe, sleek, and exquisite, and unlike lions, they purred. Ozzie was only too happy to explain this. Cheetahs, lynxes, cougars, and domestic cats have a bony structure called the hyoid at the base of their tongues, a structure lions and tigers don’t have, which allows them to purr.
My lifelong assumption that big cats were, in the end, nothing more than beautiful, vicious predators was starting to erode. They were infinitely complex creatures, far more extraordinary than I’d ever realized, and the more I learned about them, the more I wanted to learn.
Not long after, I had a few days off, so Noel and I took the opportunity to visit one of the fabled East African game preserves in Gorongosa, Mozambique’s largest preserve. We rented a car and followed an open-air tour bus through the park, occasionally eavesdropping on the tour guide’s lecture. It sounded a lot like the recorded ones I’d heard at countless zoos and wild animal preserves all over the world—“Cats have been around for forty million years . . . Lions are the only family-oriented big cats . . . Pride members hunt together, eat together, sleep together . . . express open affection”—until he added something like, “The largest pride of lions in Africa live in this house, the former home of a game warden until he was flooded out.”
We’d stopped in front of an abandoned Portuguese-style house, and we couldn’t stop gaping at it. There were lions everywhere. Some were reclining on the roof, looking back at us, unimpressed. Some were taking naps in the window frames. Two of them were relaxing in a dilapidated porch swing. One hilarious male was surveying his kingdom from a broken rocking chair, needing nothing more than a plantation hat, a glass of scotch on the rocks, and a cigar to complete the image.
Altogether, we were told, the pride that had overtaken the house consisted of thirty male and female lions and their cubs. We were mesmerized by them. They were barely interested in us. I have no idea how long we stood there taking in this unbelievable family portrait, but I do remember that as we reluctantly drove away, Noel said, “You know, we ought to make a movie about this.”
Now, one of the most tedious things about many people in show business is their habit of viewing everything in the world through a filter of whether or not it has potential as their next project. “You know,” they’ll say, “we ought to make a [movie, sitcom, one-hour drama, play, cable show] about this [grocery store, car dealership, bicycle rental business, pottery class, cheerleading academy, travel agency].” It’s endless, and only a tiny fraction of those bright ideas ever lead anywhere. When Noel blurted out that same tired cliché after the almost sacred sight we’d just witnessed, I’m sure I rolled my eyes.
I did mention that he was impulsive, right? In the five years since our wedding, he’d been in construction, he’d been a Realtor, he’d gone back into being a commercial agent as he was when I met him, and he was currently packaging film projects. Now he wanted to make a movie about a house full of lions? Based on what qualifications? I had a hunch he’d need more expertise than the handful of television shows he’d directed in Chicago.
As for me, my filmmaking expertise was limited to acting. Beyond that, I wouldn’t even know where to start, although I certainly knew people who would know where to start, and to be fair, some very successful films started with flimsier ideas than this. But did I really want to star in a movie about a house full of lions? What would the story be? What would the film be about? No doubt about it, it was crazy.
Although, come to think of it, given a choice, I’d probably prefer working with live lions to working with live ravens.
I couldn’t believe it. I was actually considering this.
We gave Ozzie the best laugh he’d had in months when we told him the bare bones of our idea over a gin and tonic in Zimbabwe.
“One lion, yes. Thirty? No.” He chuckled and went on to outline just the tip of the iceberg when it came to working with wild animals on sets. Professional trainers, for example, usually double for the actors who are in scenes with those animals, complete with wigs and wardrobe and whatever else is required for them to resemble the actors closely enough for the required shots. The trainers aren’t just there to protect the cast. They’re also there to “handle” the animals on the set to get through the scenes in as few takes as possible—even the tamest, gentlest, most well-trained wild animals need to be professionally handled when shooting a movie. “So for thirty lions, imagine the number of trainers you’d need,” he said, then threw back his head and laughed again.
We listened, I swear, and we respected his expertise. He was exactly right; this tiny glimmer of a film concept was insane. Noel and I weren’t qualified to even think about taking it on. The whole thing was impractical everywhere we turned.
And yet we couldn’t stop talking about it.
It was completely unlike me, but it was just exactly like Noel.
When filming was completed, we decided to do some sightseeing before we headed home. We went to Nairobi, on to the Mount Kenya Safari Club, which was owned by the late, great William Holden, and ended up in the Tanzanian Serengeti.
Have you ever visited a place for the very first time and found it to be achingly familiar, as if it’s drawing you to it and won’t let go? The Serengeti and its game preserves had that effect on me. It wasn’t just the gently rolling green-gray landscape and the massive granite boulders defiantly presiding over seas of grass that completely engrossed me, it was also the animals, everywhere, so exquisite and so humbling—this land was theirs, and we were nothing more than honored spectators. Clouds of cawing birds, literally thousands of gazelles and impalas and giraffes, the nearby sounds of the hooves and high-pitched brays of zebra herds and the guttural rumble of lions when the sun set—the word “awe” doesn’t begin to describe what stirred in me.
Looking back, I see it was only adding to the intensity of a perfect storm.
It spread the fire of my passion for animals that ignited when I was a little girl. Before my beloved cat Peter, there was Corky, a funny, frisky terrier mix I adored. He died of distemper because Mom and Daddy couldn’t afford to have him vaccinated. I cried for weeks. After I left for New York to
join the Ford Agency, Peter ran away from our home in Walnut Park and was never seen again. I hadn’t been without animals since Melanie was born. Loving them was and is a part of who I am, and the thought of honoring that love on film for millions of people to see and share and maybe even learn from was becoming more and more irresistible.
Noel, in the meantime, had never shown any particular interest in animals, even during that boyhood summer job at the St. Louis Zoo. That was about the paycheck, not about the zoo. His passion was business. The art of the deal. Getting rich, crazy rich, one way or another, especially in Hollywood, where big money was everywhere, and if other people could make it, why couldn’t he? If a movie about a house full of lions could help make that happen, then sure, he cared about lions.
We’d already agreed that we didn’t want to make just another documentary about big cats. Those had been done over and over again, even by the late, great Walt Disney, who had the skill and the money to do them right. We wanted to tell a story, a story that would entertain and, at the same time, celebrate the connection between humans and animals.
We kept running ideas past each other that would satisfy that intention.
“What if,” one of us would say, “the game warden who abandoned that house came back to find it full of lions?”
“What if he has a wife and kids?” the other one would chime in.
“What if we shoot it in the United States, and somehow . . .”
“. . . all these animals escape from a local zoo and take over a family’s house while they’re away on vacation?”
“What if?”
“What if?”
The one what-if we never got around to was “What if we’re in over our heads and need to give up this whole idea right now?”
By the time we got home we were pretty much obsessed. We couldn’t stop talking to anyone and everyone who’d sit and listen about that extraordinary pride of lions and our determination to make a film about them. Melanie, Joel, Jerry, and John were thrilled by the whole idea, whatever it was, and the possibility of turning it into a family project, while most of our friends and business contacts tried to find gentle ways to convince us we were out of our minds.
We didn’t necessarily disagree, but that didn’t mean we were giving up. We had too much momentum going to be reasonable. No matter what else was going on, I don’t think an hour went by without one or the other of us saying, “You know what we could do?” and off we’d go into another discussion about this still unshaped, still imaginary film we’d begun referring to as Lions.
Then, as if we were getting a huge green light from the universe, I was offered a starring role in a movie called Mister Kingstreet’s War with Rossano Brazzi and John Saxon—shooting in Africa. But wait, there’s more. The script was about a married couple living on and managing a wildlife preserve that’s being threatened by a war between Italian-owned Abyssinia and British Kenya.
I don’t have to be hit over the head with a brick. Clearly Noel and I were supposed to keep moving forward with Lions and make it happen, and who am I to argue with the universe?
On every day off, every minute off, Noel and I visited preserves and talked to every lion expert we could find. The more we explored, the more we realized that filming Lions in the United States instead of Africa wouldn’t just be practical, it would be a necessity. Very few domesticated lions even existed between the Tropic of Cancer and Cape Town, and we definitely needed domesticated animals for this project.
It also became imperative that we not just make Lions to entertain audiences. We also wanted and needed it to be a plea for wildlife protection around the world. We’d heard horror stories about poachers, some of whom used helicopter gunships to kill elephants. Wild leopards and tigers were almost extinct, thanks to the unconscionable, obscene “skin business.” If even one hunter or poacher got the message “Please don’t kill these magnificent thinking, feeling beings!” it would be worth everything we put into it, and maybe showing the potential of human/big-cat relationships would help get that point across next time someone thought about buying a leopard coat or a tiger area rug.
Noel started writing the script later that spring. Now called Lions, Lions and More Lions, the story line was about an American scientist who goes to study a pride of lions by living with them in a house much like the one we saw in Gorongosa. His family arrives to find that he’s gone away for a few days, but offering them a surprising, scary welcome is the pride of lions, who’ve claimed the house as their own. So far we had no answer to the question “And then what?” We’d just established that I would play the scientist’s wife, and Melanie, Jerry, and John would play their children. Joel wanted nothing to do with acting but volunteered his talents in art direction and set decoration. Noel would direct, and he and I would coproduce. Now if we could just find the right actor to play Hank, the scientist.
But first we had to gather our real stars, the whole reason we were determined to make this movie in the first place—cooperative big cats, multiple cooperative big cats. Without them we had no story and no film.
So we tackled the challenge of finding privately owned lions, putting them under contract and then teaching them just a few basic moves, without the use of whips and chains. That was a deal breaker. These animals would be taught through the Ozzie Bristow method of hugs, kisses, and soft words, or they wouldn’t be taught at all. (We hadn’t learned yet that certain lions, just like certain people, don’t care to be hugged.)
Our first “casting session” took place at Africa, U.S.A., in the San Fernando Valley, a wildlife park owned and operated by veteran animal trainer Ralph Helfer. We weren’t the first producers to bring their wild ideas to Ralph. Not even close. He’d heard it all, and he’d been asked every harebrained question Hollywood could dream up, from “Is it possible to train an elephant to sit in a jeep?” to “Do you happen to have an opera-singing parrot we could rent?”
Not only were we there to propose an equally wild idea, we’d actually decided that, for an even more spectacular film, we should increase the number of lions from thirty to fifty.
I didn’t think it was possible, but he laughed even harder than Ozzie Bristow had.
“You can’t force a bunch of adult lions to live together who don’t even know each other,” he told us between guffaws. “They’re individuals. You’re not talking about an African pride, you’re talking about lions who are total strangers. They have to be introduced gradually. You have to let them see each other through a fence for a long time before you put them together, or they may kill each other or you. Even with gradual introductions, there may be fights you wouldn’t believe. Have you ever seen a lion fight?”
No, we admitted, we hadn’t, both of us feeling our brilliant project crumbling to dust.
It reignited again just as quickly when Ralph introduced me to Major, an incredibly gentle lion with a long film résumé of his own. I sat close beside him and rubbed my fingers into his thick mane, and I was rewarded with a wide, contented yawn.
“Ralph,” I said as I luxuriated in my welcome proximity to this gorgeous creature, “isn’t it possible that you’re exaggerating? Look how gentle Major is.”
“Major is twenty-five years old,” he replied. I’d studied enough to know that in lion years, that meant Major was a sweet, docile guy in his eighties.
Okay. Point made. But still, there had to be a way to make our movie happen. We insisted on believing, just like every other producer with a great big dream and barely a clue what we were getting ourselves into.
Noel and I went to a New Year’s Eve party to say good-bye to 1970 and ring in a happy, successful 1971.
We met a writer that night. His name was William Peter Blatty, and during a typical Hollywood cocktail party conversation, we told him about the film we were working on, and he told us about the novel he was working on.
“Lions, Lions and More Lions,” we said.
“The Exorcist,” he said.
On New Yea
r’s Day we watched the bowl games at Bill Blatty’s house and talked more about our respective projects. The Exorcist, he told us, was a story about priests and demons and demonic possession. I remember thinking it sounded as if it might make a spectacular movie.
I doubt if either of us had even a fleeting intuition that spending January 1, 1971, at William Peter Blatty’s house would end up having a profound impact on the filming of our lion story, and on our lives as well.
Seven
By the spring of 1971, after a lot of trial and error, Noel and I had learned, sometimes the hard way, that (a) more people than we ever imagined, all of whom knew one another, were busily buying, trading, and selling big cats, and (b) it wouldn’t be practical to assemble our cast for Lions with other people’s lions. We were going to have to create a pride of our own, fifty home-grown lions, because we’d said the word “fifty” so many times that this figure had become nonnegotiable, etched in stone. As for how we were going to keep or pay for that many big cats, not to mention where, we put those concerns in the “deal with that later” pile. Single-mindedness? Stubbornness? Headstrong determination? Sheer insanity? We didn’t know, and we didn’t stop to analyze it. Again, so typical of Noel and so atypical of me, but I was into it every bit as much as he was. In fact, I couldn’t have been more excited or more driven.
Finally, one Saturday morning, we headed off to meet a man named Ron Oxley in a place called Soledad Canyon. We’d been referred to Ron by several “big-cat people,” and Soledad Canyon was his suggestion. We’d never heard of it, and based on his directions, we got the general idea that it was pretty much to hell and gone, past towns we’d never heard of, like Canyon Country and Saugus, on the route we’d take if we were headed from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert.