by Tippi Hedren
To my amazement, it did. I glanced behind me and, sure enough, Casey wasn’t just following me, he was stalking me, almost crouched to his belly as he crept along. It must have been an astonishing sight for the neighbors, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had to get this boy safely back to the house.
As soon as I saw that he was closing in on me, I took off at a dead run. He was tensed to jump me, not moving a muscle, when I stopped at Ron’s van and, taking advantage of my motionless target, threw the lead around Casey’s neck. The van began lurching wildly as Neil, accompanied by growling noises, tried to escape to see what on earth was going on out there.
At that instant I heard the phone ring. Let me guess—either the police or animal control, neither of whom I wanted showing up for a home visit at the moment. I tied Casey’s lead to the bumper of the van and flew inside through the kitchen door.
It was just a friend calling. “I can’t talk right now!” I yelled into the phone. “My lion’s out!”
I was reaching to unlock the front door and retrieve Casey when the phone rang again. It was the same friend. “Tippi, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I could hear you perfectly. There’s nothing wrong with your line.”
Out of sheer relief, I was laughing as I untied our resident explorer and escorted him into the living room, where he settled in for a nice nap, exhausted from all that fun he’d had scaring the life out of me.
Miraculously, nothing happened until a couple of months later. I was on my knees doing a little gardening in front of the house on a bright, crisp morning when I looked up to see Bridget about ten feet away, beaming at me from the sidewalk.
I did my best to sound nonchalant, with a friendly “Hi, Bridget,” while my stomach tightened into one huge knot. She strolled over to nuzzle my cheek, but before I could grab her, she trotted off to Knobhill Drive and loped away.
I had to make a split-second decision—run back into the house for a lead or chase her. This time I chose the latter. Bridget ran for about thirty yards, past Karen Valentine’s driveway and up a wooden stairway that led to a hilltop house. I flew up the stairs two at a time and managed to get a firm grip on her tail.
Now what? Bridget was five months old now, too big for me to lift and probably too big for me to keep hold of her if I tried to drag her back down the stairs by the scruff of her neck.
I started yelling, “Help!” over and over, during which I noticed that part of the yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence. A perturbed-looking woman finally came out of the house to find me still holding on to Bridget’s tail for dear life.
“Hi,” I said inanely. “I hate to bother you, but would you mind if I put my cat in your yard while I make a quick call?”
She wasn’t crazy about it, but said, “Sure,” adding as I started pulling Bridget toward the chain-link enclosure, “I heard you had some cubs down there.”
“I’m sure you did,” I thought, feeling a noose tightening around all of our necks.
I called Emily from the woman’s house, and a few minutes later she arrived with a lead and we walked Bridget home.
It was January 14, 1972, when the same animal control officer rang the doorbell. He was still polite, but there was no more stalling to retrieve a bathrobe, no more escaping over the back fence.
“You have twenty-four hours to get those lions off this property.”
I tried to defend them. They weren’t harming anyone or destroying anyone’s property. They didn’t bark, and they were strictly confined to our house and yard. Most of the time. They were still just sweet, funny babies, not even old enough to be dangerous yet.
He wasn’t having it. “It’s illegal to keep lions of any age within the city limits unless they’re in a licensed zoo,” he recited back to me.
Even if I’d had an argument to that, I was weeping too hard to offer it.
Noel came home a few minutes later, and we put in an emergency call to Steve Martin in Soledad Canyon, a call he’d actually been expecting sooner or later. Yes, of course, he’d be glad to board the six cubs for us.
We rounded them up the next morning and drove them to Steve’s compound. It broke my heart to see them led away into confinement, but there was obviously no way around it. I went to Soledad Canyon every day for the next week to talk to them and nuzzle them and take them for walks by the river, missing them even more, I was sure, than they missed me and the only real home they’d ever known.
I honestly hadn’t realized how natural our accumulation of baby lions had seemed to me, or how completely I’d lost my objectivity about them, until I had lunch one day with a good friend. She was excitedly telling me about a great surprise she’d just given her two teenage sons—she’d bought each of them a motorcycle.
I hate motorcycles. They’re noisy, they’re dangerous, and I cringe at the sight of them. I instantly blurted out, “How dare you do that? How dare you risk your children’s lives by giving them motorcycles so they can ride off and kill themselves?”
She gave me a long, cool look and came back with an incredulous “You let your children live with wild animals and you’re lecturing me about motorcycles?”
It was like a slap in the face, but I had no comeback.
And as fate would have it, these animals really were here to stay for us. A few weeks later, I returned home from a trip to find Noel there, greeting me with a smug smile I’d learned to recognize over the years. He’d done something he was very proud of without discussing it with me, and he couldn’t wait to tell me.
I knew the drill. All I had to do was ask, “What’s new?”
“Oh, nothing much,” he said casually as he helped me carry my luggage to the bedroom. “I bought Steve Martin’s acreage in Soledad Canyon while you were gone, but other than that—”
“You what?” I cut him off, in complete shock.
Noel’s impulses were rarely driven by logic. By the time he explained this one, though, I had to hand it to him, it made perfect sense. We were currently paying Steve $25 per lion per day for our six cubs, and we planned to double or triple our animal population before we started filming Lions, Lions, and More Lions. We might as well be investing that same money in a mortgage.
But there was more.
“We’ll use it for the movie location.”
We still hadn’t decided on the right location, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Soledad Canyon. “Noel,” I pointed out, “there’s nothing but desert out there. It’s river bottomland, just sand and rocks and maybe three trees on forty acres. It looks nothing like African lion country.”
“It will.” He grinned, sure of himself as always.
In spite of myself, I started to get excited about the prospect of building our own compound in Soledad Canyon and bringing in all the animals we wanted. Lion movie or no lion movie, what a beautiful dream.
But first we had another movie to make, the movie I was starring in and Noel was producing, the movie I’d hurried home from my trip to shoot. It was called The Harrad Experiment, and it would costar veteran actor James Whitmore and a much-too-good-looking twenty-two-year-old hotshot named Don Johnson.
I’d never encouraged Melanie to become an actress. There were things about it I loved, of course, but there were also obviously things about it I would never wish on anyone, let alone a child. Following my parents’ example when they raised me, I’d just given a free spirit her freedom and promised myself that I’d always be her most enthusiastic cheerleader and as unselfishly supportive as Mom and Daddy were.
I didn’t think a thing about it when Melanie went with a girlfriend to an interview for work as an extra when she was around twelve. So I was really unprepared when Melanie called, beside herself with excitement, and announced, “Mom! I have an acting job!”
It seems the casting director of a Glenn Ford movie called Smith! had taken one look at Melanie’s girlfriend and told her she was too old, then had turned to Melanie and said, “You’re perfect.”
I congratu
lated her and said something like “How great! Good for you!” just as my parents would have done. Then I hung up, reminded myself she was only working as an extra—this time—and that just because this news came as a shock didn’t mean it was a bad idea for her to give acting a try if she decided she wanted to. She might be very good at it. She might enjoy it. If she didn’t, she could walk away from it any time she wanted to pursue something else.
God knows she was pretty enough, and it was already apparent she was going to be a beautiful young woman. By the time she became a teenager she was as tall as I was, with long, slender legs and an air of total self-assurance I was just beginning to hope for when I was her age. She’d had a mind of her own all her life, which made her both a lot of fun and impossibly defiant depending on the situation, and she was maturing mentally and physically much more quickly than I knew how to handle. She was also becoming much more unpredictable—my childlike baby girl one day and a sullen, combative, secretive stranger the next. Mothers and daughters classically begin to have their toughest times together when daughters reach their early teens, and I wondered constantly if I’d made a mistake encouraging her to be quite so independent.
Melanie was fourteen when we began shooting The Harrad Experiment. Noel, the film’s producer, suggested one day that we hire her as an extra.
“Sure, why not?” I said.
It changed everything.
As I look back on it, the subject matter of The Harrad Experiment is nothing short of ironic. The script was based on a novel of the same name, written by Robert Rimmer. It was about a fictional school called Harrad College, where students were taught sexuality and encouraged to experiment with their fellow students. It was a commentary on the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, and James Whitmore and I played the married couple who ran the school.
Don Johnson played one of our more, let’s say, experimental students.
What I didn’t realize was that this apparently wasn’t just the case for the camera. I was oblivious and/or Don and Melanie were very, very discreet. When Melanie announced that they’d fallen in love, you could literally have knocked me over with a feather.
Don was eight years older than Melanie. He’d already been through two brief marriages, and he terrified me. He was handsome. His acting career was taking off. He was wild as a deer. There wasn’t a trace of naiveté in him, and there was nothing about him that led me to believe he’d give a damn about my objections. I knew my daughter, my willful, headstrong daughter. If I’d tried to forbid her from seeing him or tried to talk her out of him, it would only have intensified her feelings for him and alienated her from me, and above all, I didn’t want to lose her.
I hate admitting this, but it’s true: As horrified and panic-stricken as I was, I had no idea what to do—not when she fell in love with him, and not when she moved in with him at the age of fifteen. I did have a serious talk with Don, needless to say. He was old enough to know better but too young and arrogant to be interested in what his beautiful new girlfriend’s mom thought of him.
Many times over the subsequent years, I’ve wondered if Melanie felt I’d devoted so much attention to the big cats we were amassing that there wasn’t enough left for her.
I’ve thought a thousand times how much easier the lions were to handle than my daughter was back then. There were no simple Ron Oxley rules like “When they do this, you do this”; “When they make this sound, they’re telling you this”; and “When you need to discipline them, here’s what works and what doesn’t.” It was the early 1970s, and help wasn’t nearly as accessible as it is today. Therapy, rehab, programs for troubled teens, tough love, Dr. Phil—you name it, help was either rare or nonexistent in that era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and not for one moment do I believe Melanie would have cooperated, even if I’d exercised my right as the mother of a minor and forced her. If I’d tried to have Don prosecuted for statutory rape, I’m convinced to this day that my daughter would never have spoken to me again. As far as she was concerned, she was free, living happily with the man she adored, finishing Hollywood Professional School a year early, at the age of sixteen, booking acting jobs, and having a great time. What on earth was “troubled” about that?
I still remember standing at my kitchen sink on Knobhill one day in January of 1976 and answering the phone to hear my giddy eighteen-year-old daughter yell, “Mom, we’re in Las Vegas and we just got married!” She was so excited, and I was so heartsick. My precious only child, much too young for all this to begin with, had her wedding without me, and she was headed for a world of hurt, I knew it.
The marriage was annulled after only a few months. Melanie’s career was starting to take off by then, and she could afford a place of her own. From the day she moved out of our house at the age of fifteen, we’ve never lived together again.
Thank God, though, we were never estranged. There was an underlying distance between us for a while that neither of us knew how to talk about or mend, but—another thank God—we got through it, and we’ve been close ever since, probably more like best friends than like mother and daughter.
Of course, I’m well aware of the substance abuse problems she’s struggled with, but that’s a subject for her memoir, not mine. I’m sure she was genetically predisposed to addiction, since both her father and his father before him were alcoholics. I couldn’t be more proud of her for continuing to fight that battle and for being so open about it. Melanie has never been shy or apologetic when it comes to expressing herself, so it’s no surprise that when the press asks, she answers, unedited. I feel no moral superiority in the fact that I can’t relate to addiction, with the exception of my years as a smoker, which ended as soon as I learned smoking could cause countless health problems. I’ve just been lucky enough to have a complete lack of curiosity about drugs and a healthy limit to my interest in alcohol, coming down, I guess, to the simple logic, “If you know it’s not good for you, don’t do it.”
As for Don, to his credit, he sat me down many years after that nightmarish time in the 1970s and said, with utter sincerity, “I’m sorry I hurt you.” I don’t mind admitting that I used to wish I’d never even heard of a movie called The Harrad Experiment; if it hadn’t been for that film, Melanie and Don might never have met, and life would have been so much easier.
After a lot of soul-searching and reading that book I mentioned earlier called The Other Side and Back, I don’t wish that anymore. Without the journey Melanie and Don took together, there would be no Dakota Johnson, and I can’t imagine my life without her. All three of Melanie’s children are so precious to me. I love them so much and cherish my closeness to them. I’m even close to Don’s son Jesse, by actress Patti D’Arbanville, thanks in large part to Melanie’s inability to stop loving anyone she’s ever loved, and her magnanimous, unselfish definition of the word “family.”
Melanie Griffith is the great love of my life. It’s an impossibility that I could love her more. That I could have loved her better will occasionally keep me awake at night for the rest of my life.
Nine
Meanwhile, back in Soledad Canyon . . .
Work was under way at our newly acquired lion complex. Noel, now sporting a “designer” hat, was busy building high chain-link fences to create spacious compounds for the big cats so they’d have ample room to do their exercising, marking, sleeping, rubbing, and just being lions. Using Noel’s sketches, Ron Oxley was working on a model of the African Gorongosa house for the movie. Boomer, who’d finally lost interest in his infamous BOAC flight bag, had been an added bonus with our purchase of the property, making him our first official adult lion, and Noel had bought six more adult lions from an overcrowded animal park—Monte, Buddy, Scarface, Buggsy, Suzy, and Jenny. They hadn’t been treated well and had no reason to like humans, and we christened them the Wild Bunch.
Poor Bridget, our little Knobhill lioness, who’d already had her share of misfortune in her life, including abuse whe
n she was an infant and being thrown thirty feet from a truck in a traffic accident on Soledad Canyon, was the first victim of the Wild Bunch. She’d spotted Jenny, the wildest of the group, in a compound by the pond and swum over to say hello. Cubs have a natural fascination with their elders, which, sadly, isn’t always reciprocated—Jenny quickly dug under the compound fence and attacked.
Noel and I heard Bridget’s terrified screams, ran to the pond, and lifted her out of the water. She was bleeding badly and more dead than alive, and I wrapped her in a towel and held her in my lap while we raced her to Dr. Martin Dinnes, a brilliant veterinarian who specialized in treating wild animals. Dr. Dinnes performed a three-and-a-half-hour operation on her, and the next day I took her home to Knobhill to recover. Dr. Dinnes believed that sick cats desperately need affection, so if that’s what Bridget needed, that’s exactly what she was going to get, whether the neighbors and animal control liked it or not. I drew the infection out of her sliced-up stomach four times a day, I gave her nonstop affection, and slowly but surely she fought her way back to normal.
At Bridget’s expense, Noel and I had learned yet another valuable lesson. That attack wasn’t Jenny’s fault, it was ours. We had no business letting a cub wander around near strange adult cats, and we also had no business enclosing big cats inside fences without concrete bases that could keep them from digging their way out.
We needed a bigger staff in Soledad Canyon, sooner rather than later, and it was amazing how exactly the right people started showing up at exactly the right time.
Expert trainer Frank Tom, a stocky, personable Chinese Mexican, needed a home for his pet cougar and came to work for us to be near his beloved cat.
Sylvie Loboda signed on as one of the handlers. A tiny woman who talked baby talk to the animals, Sylvie was a veteran of a Mexican circus who, during her first performance, experienced an improvisational elephant taking her head into its mouth and trotting her around the ring. She kept right on working for that circus, and we decided if that wasn’t enough to scare her off, Soledad Canyon might be just the place for her.