by Tippi Hedren
But we’d heard good things about Ron, and he added to the incentive by promising to introduce us to a lion named Neil, whom we could make friends with and even hug if we wanted. Enough said. Noel, thirteen-year-old Melanie, and I were on our way to Soledad Canyon.
“Soledad” in English means solitude, an apt name for the canyon we found ourselves driving through an hour later. The land was brown and rocky, with an occasional dusty driveway leading down to a small wooden house or a couple of single-wide trailers. The rare house numbers were virtually invisible, but we finally arrived at our destination, a modest cluster of cottonwood trees beside a stream and straight downhill from the main road. A rusty old mailbox bore the name Steve Martin—not the one you’re thinking of, but an animal trainer who was getting into the business of supplying trained big cats to the television and film industry. His simple trailer home was surrounded by nothing more than some big cages, an expanse of sandy soil, and a pond.
Ron Oxley was waiting there to greet us. He was big, blond, and friendly, an animal trainer as well, with his own animal-rental business, and he boarded his menagerie of performers at Steve Martin’s compound. Neil, Ron’s lion, was the superstar of the group, with credits like Daktari and The Illustrated Man, but he’d aged his way past the ferocious roles he’d once played and was now quite docile . . . but still a lion, Ron reminded us as he led us to a picnic area beside the stream.
We had a brief coaching session before Ron formally introduced us to Neil.
“First of all, don’t rush up to him,” he said. “He doesn’t know you, so be patient and let him come to you if he wants. He might brush against you. He might decide to take your arm or your shoulder into his mouth. If that happens, don’t be afraid or pull away from him. He’s not trying to hurt you, he’s just getting acquainted. Don’t turn your back to him, because he thinks it’s funny to trip people from behind. If you run away from him or even move quickly, he’ll think you want to play, and he doesn’t know his own strength, so he plays pretty rough. You can pet him, but only if you make your scratches strong and firm, under his chin or in his mane, never on his face. Light scratches get on his nerves, like a fly or a gnat he’ll try to swat away.”
I doubt if he’d ever had a more rapt audience than the three of us. We all turned to silently stare at one another as Ron walked away, ready to be so obedient to those instructions that I’m surprised little halos didn’t magically appear above our heads. No one wanted to keep that lion happy and comfortable more than we did.
A few minutes later Ron reappeared, walking beside his unleashed magnificent superstar Neil, golden brown and huge with a black mane. As advice goes, “Don’t rush up to him” was right up there with “Don’t leap in front of an oncoming train.” Gee, no kidding. We stood there still as statues, openly gaping at this king of beasts who was elegantly approaching us.
Neil didn’t find us even a fraction as riveting as we found him. Like Dandylion on the Satan’s Harvest set, he didn’t even glance at us, he simply ambled over to a tree, stood on his hind legs, put his front paws high up on the trunk, and did a full body stretch, showing off his nine-foot length from the tip of his tail to the end of his nose. That accomplished, he lay down on his stomach, paws extended in front of him as if to say, “Am I unbelievable or what?” And he was still ignoring us completely.
Once he’d made an entrance any seasoned entertainer would envy, Ron turned to me and said, “Go ahead, kneel down beside him.”
I was thrilled. I slowly approached Neil, got down on my knees so close to him that I was almost enveloped in his mane, and began scratching him under the chin—firmly, as directed. No look yet, but no complaints either. I had butterflies in my stomach, from some mixture of awe, respect, and fear, flashing back to Ozzie’s simple comment about his beloved Dandylion: “He loves me, but at any moment he could kill me.” But my God, was it amazing to be nestled into that gigantic, stunning animal.
Then it was Melanie’s turn. “Kneel down on the other side,” Ron told her.
She did, with a look of awe I’m sure mirrored mine.
As soon as she’d settled in beside him, he suddenly turned his head toward her and took her whole right shoulder in his mouth. I was sitting right there, watching half of my daughter disappear into the fangs of a lion.
I froze, terrified. Melanie, on the other hand, young and immortal, started laughing, prompting me to almost scream at her, “For God’s sake, hold still!”
It turned out Neil was just playing with her, and within moments he lost interest in Melanie’s shoulder, opened his mouth into a wide, slightly bored yawn, and began staring almost contemplatively at a distant rock formation.
Melanie was still laughing with delight. Noel was watching Melanie, Neil, and me with the eye of a man who’d been appraising the potential of the last couple of minutes as a scene in Lions, Lions and More Lions. My heartbeat was gradually slowing to normal again as I left Neil’s side and stood, still shaken.
Ron gave me a reassuring smile. “You know, to really get to know lions, you need to live with them for a while. How would you like me to bring Neil to your place for a visit?”
The verdict was swift and unanimous—it sounded like a fine idea to the three of us. And just like that, four or five days a week, we had a full-grown lion in our house.
Our home in Sherman Oaks was fairly secluded. Its two stories, built into a hillside, and its swimming pool and lanai were all enclosed by redwood fences and surrounded by large, healthy subtropical trees and plants. We were also tucked into the crook of an elbow curve on Knobhill Drive so that not even actress Karen Valentine, our neighbor directly across the street, had a clear view of our property. We were blissfully unaware of busy nearby streets like Beverly Glen and Ventura Boulevard, and they were blissfully unaware of us.
So on Sunday, May 2, 1971, when Ron brought a full-grown lion for his first visit to our house, it was discreet as could be. Ron parked his ordinary green van on the curve, looked up and down the street to make sure it was clear of traffic and pedestrians, and then quickly escorted Neil out of the van, down the short flight of steps, and right on through our front door. I already knew he was huge, but somehow he looked even more gigantic as he nonchalantly paused on the landing and looked down to survey the living room and then began casually exploring every room of the house as if he were a prospective buyer.
The one room that was off-limits was the room in which we’d safely sequestered Partner and Puss, my precious mutt and Melanie’s treasured cat. We’d seen how docile Neil could be, but we didn’t doubt for a minute that he might find Partner and Puss to be the two most irresistible members of our family for all the wrong reasons, and we weren’t about to take any chances with their dear little lives.
Neil proceeded to the backyard to check out the pool, the lanai, and the redwood fence, and I watched in anxious silence as he decided to stand up on his hind legs and peer over the top of the fence to scan the Sherman Oaks hills. There was a vacant lot between us and our closest downhill neighbor, but I could still imagine that neighbor relaxing in her garden with an afternoon cup of coffee and looking up to see a giant lion staring down at her. I was greatly relieved when Neil decided there was nothing interesting out there and dropped to the ground again, with no phone call from the police asking if we happened to know anything about a reported lion in our yard.
His tour complete and only marginally intrigued, Neil headed into the living room to sprawl out on the floor for a nice nap while Ron told us more about his hard-won relationship with this beloved creature. It had taken years, he said, starting when Neil arrived from Africa as a young adult. Ron sat every day for hours at a time outside Neil’s cage, and it was months before he even ventured inside. Another month went by with Ron sitting quietly a few feet away, not forcing a thing, before Neil finally trusted him enough to approach him and make friends.
“So what are you saying?” Noel asked.
“I’m saying that you’ll
have to make a career out of establishing a film-ready relationship with an adult lion,” Ron answered him. “If I were you, I’d get several cubs as soon as possible and start friendship routines and basic training right away.”
I hadn’t seen that coming. “You think we should get lion cubs? Where on earth would we keep lion cubs?”
“Right here in the house, where you can have constant contact with them,” he said with an implied “duh” in his tone.
Noel responded without a second thought. “Sounds good to me. How about you, Tippi?”
I forced my eyes away from Neil, whom I hadn’t stopped staring at, and scanned our expensive furniture, our custom-made draperies, and our treasured collection of mementos from all over the world.
Then I focused again on that sublime, magnificent creature, still sleeping safe and peaceful on my living room floor, and took a hard look at my priorities. That made the answer easy.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Bring us some lion cubs.”
Ron began the fairly lengthy networking process of finding us a couple of baby lions, and we began our education in the fine art of sharing our home with an adult one. Neil became a constant visitor, while Partner and Puss accepted the fact that when Ron’s green van arrived, they’d be spending a few hours safely secured in a bedroom that was strictly off-limits to the houseguest they never met.
Neil was a fascinating, sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming Lion Behavior instructor. We learned that when we were in the pool, Neil thought it was very funny to go to the edge of the water, wait for one of us to swim over to say hello, put his paw on top of that person’s head, and firmly push down.
We learned that when he was thirsty, he’d alert us by going into the kitchen and standing up with his paws on the sink. We’d dutifully turn on the faucet for him, and just like a domestic cat, he’d slowly lap the running water from the underside of his tongue.
We learned that sometimes lions grimace, wrinkling their faces and baring their teeth. This makes the animal look ferocious, but it has nothing to do with anger. Instead, it turns out that lions do their most effective sniffing not through their noses but from two holes in the roof of their mouths, and grimacing is simply their way of accessing those two holes to get a better whiff of whatever they sensed in the air. Neil would grimace when he smelled something pungent or musky, from food or perfume to the scent of a nearby animal. Once we learned the difference between a grimace, called flehmen, and an angry threat, we found it impossible not to laugh when Neil would turn to us with that open-mouthed, goofy, wrinkly face.
We learned, inconveniently, that whether you want them to or not, lions roar. Sometimes it means something. Sometimes they just feel like it. A roaring session usually consists of about eight or ten roars before they’ve got it out of their system, followed by somewhere between two and ten bark-like sounds, the lion’s way of essentially saying, “This conversation is now over.”
Neil’s first roaring session at our house came just after sunset one quiet evening while he was taking a stroll between the pool and the redwood fence. It came out of nowhere, and it echoed all through the hills. I immediately tensed up, nervous about the neighbors, and on about roar number two or three I turned to Ron in a bit of a panic and asked, “Any way to stop that?”
He grinned back with a shrug. “Not a chance.”
On which comment, of course, my phone rang. The call was from a woman who lived about two hundred feet away, and her voice was quivering.
“Mrs. Marshall,” she said a bit tentatively, “I keep hearing what I swear is a lion roaring, and it sounds as if it’s coming from your backyard.”
Without batting an eye I replied, “Yes, I heard that, too. I thought it sounded more like a motorcycle revving up.”
She didn’t seem completely convinced, but that certainly made a whole lot more sense than her lion explanation, and we hung up.
Thank you again for the acting lessons, Hitch.
I didn’t learn until many years later how naive and stupid we were. I was so caught up in the thrill, the awe, the challenge, the passion, and the prospect of making our movie and sharing my life with these magnificent wild animals that my logic went right out the window.
We took countless pictures of Neil in our home to start some buzz about our great undertaking, all of them creating the illusion that Neil was actually living with us. The truth, of course, was that he never lived with us, never even spent the night in our house; nor did any adult wild cat. Most of those photos were staged, and not a single photo of Neil was taken without Ron being right there, just off camera. The picture that makes me cringe the most is a shot of Neil and Melanie side by side, “sound asleep” in Melanie’s bed. In real life, that never happened and never would have, and I will always regret that we made it look as if wild cats can be trained into being predictable and harmless.
Eventually, a couple of decades later, I did everything in my power to make up for my stupidity. At the time, as the saying goes, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Our efforts at creating buzz were so successful that one day an editor at Life magazine called. He’d heard we were educating ourselves about big cats in preparation for a movie and that we actually had a full-grown lion in our house, and he wanted to do an article and photo essay about it. Our response, of course: “How soon can you be here?”
The day of the shoot arrived, and we were one excited household. After surveying the layout of our home, pool, and property, the Life photographer had decided he’d like to capture some Norman Rockwell shots of the Marshall family having a typical evening meal together, while our supposed “live-in” lion watched from his perch on the landing above the oval dining room table.
Our loyal, intrepid housekeeper, Emily Henderson, was on hand as always. She’d been an incredibly good sport about cooking and cleaning for us with the added complication of a four-hundred-pound wild cat in the house. The day I formally introduced them—yes, I actually said, “Emily, this is Neil”—I was braced for her to either run screaming from the house or freeze in panic-induced shock. Instead, she greeted him with a wide, beaming smile and not a trace of fear. She even happily posed for some “candid” shots with Neil in the kitchen, Neil lying in the middle of the floor while Emily stepped around him, preparing a meal as if he were just another routine occupational hazard.
Partner and Puss were safely secured in their room. Noel and the boys entertained Neil and Ron and photographer Mike Rougier. Emily, Melanie, and I prepared the broiled chicken, rice, vegetables, and salad and set a beautiful table with Wedgwood china, polished silver, candles, cut-glass stemware, and flowers. Then, after beautifying ourselves as well, Noel, Melanie, Joel, Jerry, and I sat down to eat, while John and Ron hid on the landing near Neil, John feeding Neil bits of chicken to keep him engaged right where he was.
The camera starting clicking away, taking shot after shot after shot of the Marshall family enjoying a typical evening meal while “their” lion raptly loomed above them. Unfortunately, Neil wasn’t in as rapt a mood as any of us had hoped, so all the camera captured was shot after shot after shot of him looking away, looking around, looking anywhere but at us.
Thirty wasted shots later, while, unbeknownst to us, John ran out of Neil’s chicken bits, the photographer told us all to relax for a minute or two while he reloaded the camera.
We did.
Neil didn’t. Neil did what big cats do. In an instant, in one incredible, heart-stopping move, he leaped over the railing of the landing directly onto the dining room table to help himself to some broiled chicken, his right front paw ending up in the middle of my plate. The table teetered on two legs for a second and then tipped completely over in my direction, and next thing I knew, I had a lap full of food, broken Wedgwood, stemware, silverware, and flowers, while Neil gracefully bounded into the middle of the room to finish his entrée.
Too many years of modeling and acting, I guess—my immediate reaction was “Mike! Did you get th
at shot?” Then I joined my family in assessing the damage to our best dishes and stemware, our table, my clothes, and the rug, every square inch of which were decorated with rice, vegetables, salad, and beverage stains.
Mike Rougier informed me with disgust that no, he did not get that shot. He and the Life crew hurriedly packed up and left, cursing the day they were stuck with the assignment of capturing the Marshall family and their “pet lion” on film, I’m sure.
Fortunately, we discovered that a second camera, unmanned on a tripod, had tripped automatically and caught Neil in the middle of his leap from the landing to the table, headed straight for my plate.
For the record, none of this came as any surprise to Ron, and Neil was never reprimanded. Neil had behaved exactly as a big cat can be expected to behave, Ron pointed out, and trying to teach him counterintuitive manners like “don’t go after food that’s sitting right there in plain sight” would be an exercise in futility. The two of them simply disappeared into the green van and drove away, leaving our dinner party, our dining room, and my designer casual wear in ruins.
A week or so later we entertained several members of a BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) public relations team. They were understandably anxious when Neil and Ron first arrived, emitting frightened little laughs from the backs of their throats and fiercely clinging to their British stoicism as best they could. After a few minutes, when it became clear that they weren’t on Neil’s menu for the evening, they relaxed, slowly but surely, into pure, fascinated awe.
Everything was going beautifully until later that night. Something terrifying happened that I’d heard about from Ron but never seen. With no warning and for no apparent reason, Neil suddenly became possessive, which is one of a big cat’s most dangerous emotions, and the object of Neil’s possessiveness was Ron. Maybe Ron had been paying too much attention to everyone else and not enough to him, and he didn’t feel like sharing right then. There was no way to figure out the reason for Neil’s sudden change in behavior, it just happened, and it made my blood run cold.