Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  Joining the maintenance staff were our indispensable Liberato and Jesus Torres from Guadalajara, with a perpetual team of helpers at the ready, and Ben Sanders, who became boss of a five-man crew in charge of installing concrete bases for the fences and regularly tending and maintaining what had now become more than a mile of chain link.

  The lion acquisitions kept on showing up almost weekly, a huge, belligerent cat named Togar among them. He arrived with a lioness named Alice from the San Francisco Zoo, and he’d been too tough and defiant for the zookeepers to handle. I was afraid of him from the first moment I laid eyes on him, but he was a playful, wonderful father with the more than thirty cubs he sired in Soledad Canyon.

  Of course it had all started with the idea of telling a nice, interesting little story about a scientist and his family finding themselves sharing an African house with a pride of lions. So I was completely blindsided when Noel announced in the “by the way” tone he used when he was anticipating an argument from me, “We’re getting a pair of tiger cubs.”

  “Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world,” I shot back, “since you know as well as I do that there are no tigers in Africa. How are you planning to handle that in the script?”

  “Beats me,” he answered with a shrug and what I’m sure was supposed to be an adorable little smile.

  Arguing about the tigers was pointless. Two six-week-old Siberians, Natasha and Ivan, were already on their way from the overpopulated Okanagan Game Preserve in British Columbia. Noel’s vision for our movie was getting more expansive and expensive by the minute. In fact, the only animal I ever heard Noel turn down was a hippo, and even that was probably a close call. He revised the script from a zoologist studying a pride of lions to a zoologist studying a collection of big cats under one roof.

  I admit it, though, I loved those little tigers from the moment they arrived. I settled them into the Knobhill home with Bridget, who had almost recovered from Jenny’s violent attack on her. Our naiveté really did know no bounds. Our theory was that if six-month-old Bridget grew up with six-week-old Ivan and Natasha, the three of them would be perfectly happy to share the same compound when they grew up. That theory, of course, was based on our uneducated, preposterous assumption that, other than the obvious physical differences, all big cats are alike.

  I was enchanted that Ivan and Natasha immediately began following me everywhere I went and insisted on being petted constantly, just like little lion cubs; but I quickly learned that while lion cubs love to be picked up and cuddled, tiger cubs want nothing to do with it and start screaming until they’re put back on the ground. When I moved or rolled over during the night while sleeping with a lion cub, it would make quiet, contented little sounds and nestle even closer. When I did the same thing while sleeping with Ivan and Natasha, they scolded me with loud cries of complaint that clearly translated to “How dare you wake me up?”

  From cubs to adults, tigers are edgier than lions. Their hearts even beat faster than lions’ hearts do when they’re at rest, so maybe that contributes to their being more high-strung. Tiger cubs love to play, but this activity can quickly escalate into combat, with their ears flattened back and their eyes almost glazed, and their genes dictate that they always finish a fight. We learned early on to end the contact and walk away.

  From cubs to adults, tigers also happen to make the sweetest, most heart-melting “ff-fuff” sound through their nasal passages. That sound is kind of an all-purpose part of their vocabulary; it can mean hello or good-bye or how are you? It might even be just an expression of contentment while they lick the back of your hand. But again, unlike lions, who occasionally will enjoy sucking your fingers or your thumb, offering your fingers to a tiger is almost guaranteed to be a very, very bad idea unless you’ve been wanting to get rid of those fingers anyway.

  Adult tigers seem to like people, but they’re likely to lose interest in them quickly, too. I’ve looked into a tiger’s eyes and wondered more than once who’s in there at that particular moment—the friendly one or the distant one who might get aggressively unfriendly if I try to push my luck.

  Ivan and Natasha also proved to be much more efficient at demolishing our home than our lion cubs, and at least twice as rambunctious. One day, in a desperate effort to calm them down, I turned on the television. Ivan didn’t care. Natasha, on the other hand, walked right over and put her nose on the screen, which became a common practice. She’d then curl up on the couch or the bed to check out what I was watching. Her attention span left a little to be desired, but I appreciated any breaks I could get from the tiger cub insanity, no matter how brief.

  The Knobhill house had become a way station for cubs en route to Soledad Canyon so that they could get used to human contact while they were babies. I slept with them, I made sure to take them outside for bathroom breaks after every meal and nap, they were never confined and had full run of the house twenty-four hours a day, and I loved them . . . most of the time.

  By late summer I’d taken Bridget, Ivan, and Natasha to the canyon and brought in Bacchus, another lion cub. Next came three four-month-old cubs—Peaches, Cherries, and Berries, the Fruit Salad trio—from the Texas Animal Preserve, courtesy of Dr. Marty Dinnes. I was making daily round trips from Sherman Oaks to Soledad Canyon, scooping up a few cubs at a time to bring home for a few days of socializing. It became the “new normal,” and I did it without a second thought about the toll it was taking on me. The life I was living was self-imposed, after all, so I wasn’t about to indulge in complaining or feeling sorry for myself until one week when, temporarily, I “hit the wall.”

  We’d adopted two desert tortoises, Samantha and Charlie. (More inaccurate “atmosphere” for the movie, I guess.) They lived in the backyard on Knobhill, and in many ways they were ideal pets—no barking, no roaring, no shedding, and certainly no chance that neighbors would see their little heads peering at them over the top of the fence. They were about the size of dinner platters and weighed less than twenty pounds apiece, and they were infinitely fascinating and fun.

  I came home one day from some very chic luncheon to find Charlie alone in the backyard. I started looking around for Samantha, getting more and more frantic by the moment, and finally spotted her, helplessly submerged at the bottom of the swimming pool. Chanel suit, Valentino heels, and all, I leaped into that pool and rescued her. She survived, thank God, but it was a frightening several minutes for poor Samantha, Charlie, and me. (By the way, a friend of mine offered to keep the tortoises in her garage for me for a few days when I had to go out of town. When I got home and hurried over to pick them up, my friend told me that, sadly, while I was gone, her children had accidentally left the garage door open and Samantha and Charlie hadn’t been seen since. We never found them. If you happened to find a couple of desert tortoises wandering around Sherman Oaks in the 1970s and were kind enough to take them home, I hope you had very happy lives together and let Charlie hibernate for the winter in your guest bathroom, as he insisted on doing in ours.)

  Less than a week after the dramatic Samantha rescue, and the demise of a suit and pair of heels that is beside the point, I came back from my daily trip to Soledad Canyon to discover Peaches, Cherries, and Berries, aka the Texas Fruit Salad, in the process of pulling our king-size mattress out the sliding glass door, apparently thinking it would look much better on the patio. In the meantime, the mattress cover had been torn off; the mattress was full of holes as large as frying pans; and the bedroom drapes had been ripped from the traverse rods and were hanging at a pitiful half-mast after what was clearly a very enthusiastic tug-of-war. It looked as if a tornado had touched down in the house while I was gone and destroyed everything in its path before it disappeared again.

  The cubs scattered like a small gang of young vandals as I stood there yelling at them, and within moments, once the initial shock wore off, I lost it. I burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying from exhaustion, frustration, and a lightning-bolt awareness that I was in way over my he
ad. We didn’t own these precious animals. They owned us, and it wasn’t their fault. They’d been shuffled from place to place with no say in the matter whatsoever, and no guarantee that they’d be taken care of and treated well. Again, it wasn’t their fault.

  But suddenly, at that moment, I wanted nothing more to do with them, nothing more to do with this stupid, ill-conceived movie, and most of all, nothing more to do with my crazy “We should make a film about those lions” husband. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with myself, either. At no point had there been a gun to my head. At no point had I said no, let alone, “Absolutely not.” If I really wanted someone to blame for this insanity, I could simply step to the nearest mirror.

  Our dear housekeeper Emily had been upstairs vacuuming and hadn’t heard the demolition derby going on beneath her. She walked in to find me sobbing and, incredibly, didn’t even seem to notice the path of destruction around me but instead headed straight over to put her arms around me.

  “Don’t cry,” she said, gently patting my back to comfort me. “Those little lions are going to pay you back.”

  It was exactly what I needed to hear at that exact moment, having nothing to do with money. “Those little lions” had already paid me back in more ways than I could count, touching my soul so deeply that I couldn’t imagine my life without them.

  Financially? That remained to be seen. There were days when Lions, Lions, and More Lions seemed like a dream as distant as Jupiter. But then the movie The Exorcist opened and turned out to be a blockbuster, breaking box office records at theaters all over the world, with Noel’s “executive producer” on-screen credit and his promise from William Peter Blatty of 15 percent of the profits. It would realistically take a few years for those profits to show up in our bank account, but at least we were relieved of the stress of wondering where the money was going to come from to make our lion film.

  Emily was right. “Those little lions” weren’t just worth it, they were priceless. She and I took a deep breath and started restoring order to the house, but not before I went to find and hug the Texas Trio and promise they’d never have to be afraid of me again.

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the timing was probably perfect for me to get a phone call from Dr. Larry Ward.

  Dr. Ward had met Noel a year or two earlier and asked if I’d be interested in working with a relatively new organization he’d founded called Food for the Hungry. FH, as it came to be known, was an international, evangelically based relief organization inspired by Psalms 146:7: “He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.” Since that very first introduction, I was instantly interested in helping, with fundraising and anything else I could do for the incredibly worthy cause.

  My first trip with Food for the Hungry had been focused on providing food, medical supplies, and financial aid to the impoverished survivors of the horrible, bloody Indo-Pakistani War, and I had joined Dr. Ward to help bring relief to newly liberated Bangladesh. As would also be the case on trips to come, I expected the situation to be heartbreaking, but there was no way to prepare for the heartbreak of the issue we took on. Among the victims of that war were civilian women who’d been brutally raped by rebel soldiers. Their tragedy was compounded by the fact that in their culture, rape victims were ostracized by their families, friends, and communities, as if they were now somehow unclean and unworthy to be a part of acceptable society. It was an outrage, but it was what it was. There was no time to try to enlighten the culture or debate the social insanity of victimizing the victims. It was an honor to work hard side by side with Dr. Ward and the other volunteers, finding refuge for those women, as well as medical doctors and psychologists, to get them through this unspeakably tragic time in their lives. Anything we did to help, even as little as it sometimes felt, was gratifying work.

  Which was why I was so grateful to receive Dr. Ward’s second call. As he told me, Food for the Hungry was headed to Guatemala to help the survivors of a series of devastating earthquakes there and he wanted to know if I could come along. When he asked me if I was, by any chance, available to go on that mission with them, what else was there to say but yes. And again, thank you, God!

  There were plenty of skilled, wonderful people in Soledad Canyon to take care of the animals while I was gone. I was suddenly feeling very foolish for being so upset about cleaning up after a few rambunctious lion cubs when those poor earthquake victims were going through real devastation. I didn’t just want to help them, I had to.

  Next thing I knew I was in a DC-3 transport plane with four or five other volunteers, flying over Mexico en route to Guatemala. There were no seats. We sat on the floor, surrounding a huge pile of medical supplies strapped onto the floor of the plane’s body. We were all preoccupied with thoughts of the tragedies we were about to face when the DC-3 flew into a horrible rainstorm and began lurching violently around in the stomach-turning turbulence of the dark, angry clouds. Before long we heard the pilot yell, “I’ve got to land this plane!”

  It was nighttime. The plane dropped below the clouds, and it was immediately apparent that the storm had knocked out the electricity in whatever civilization might be below us. There was nothing but pitch-blackness down there for as far as the eye could see. Somehow the pilot was able to detect a small town and began circling and circling above it, prompting one of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen.

  I can only guess that the townspeople had heard planes in distress before under these same circumstances. If not, they were the most spontaneously resourceful people on the planet. While the DC-3 continued circling, it seemed as if everyone in that town who owned a car drove out into the nearby countryside, formed two rows of cars facing each other, about a hundred and fifty feet apart, turned on their lights, and created a runway for us. I saw it with my own eyes and I still can’t quite believe it. We landed safely, and there’s no doubt about it, we owed our lives to those anonymous heroes.

  Impossible as it seems, the trip became even more unbelievable from there.

  Our pilot was so sick and so shaken from that emergency landing that he couldn’t continue with the trip and had to be transported back to the United States.

  We volunteers had regrouped in the belly of the plane after the pilot had departed and were sitting there wondering what could possibly happen next when we got our answer, exactly the last thing any of us expected.

  The copilot boarded the plane again, scanned us for a moment, and then announced, “Okay, Tippi, I can’t do this alone. Come with me. I’m going to teach you how to fly a DC-3.”

  What?!

  He disappeared into the cockpit. I took a beat to recover from the shock, glanced around at my fellow passengers, saw surprised smiles on their faces and some confident thumbs-ups, and headed for the cockpit to learn how to fly.

  I don’t have words to describe what a thrilling, challenging, unforgettable experience it was, or what a brave, patient man our copilot was.

  He taught me how to read the clouds, including rotor clouds and standing lenticular clouds, which could contain dangerous wind shears. He taught me the basics: what each of the instruments on the instrument panel does and how to read them. It all fascinated me. That education continued hour after hour, day after day, while we flew from one destination to the next, dropping off supplies and volunteers. Somehow, maybe because we were so needed and were doing such important work, I was never frightened, not for a minute, and there was only one “yikes” moment I remember—we were flying along on a bright, clear day when the former copilot, now the pilot, stood up, said, “Take over, will you, Tippi? I’m going back for coffee,” and left the cockpit.

  Yes, I did it. I flew that DC-3 all by myself. It was one hell of a workout, and an accomplishment I’ll always look back on with utter amazement.

  I still have my logbook from that once-in-a-lifetime adventure locked away in my safe, and I’m proud and grateful to say that my work with Food for the Hungry was just getting started.

 
I arrived back in Soledad Canyon early one morning to learn that some time during the night Ivan and Natasha had disappeared. In fact, the prevailing theory was that they’d been stolen. A frantic search of the grounds was under way, but there wasn’t a trace of the two babies, and we were all heartsick.

  It had never occurred to any of us that we needed to worry about someone stealing our animals. Who in their right mind would run the risk of climbing the fences of a preserve filled with some of the most lethal predators in the world? On the other hand, who said the culprit would be someone in their right mind?

  The search of the grounds expanded to all of Soledad Canyon while I called every airline at every airport in California asking if anyone was trying to ship or had shipped a pair of tiger cubs. We posted flyers everywhere and put ads in all the local papers. We questioned every member of the staff to ask if they’d seen anything, heard anything, suspected anything or anyone? One helper, a young man none of us knew very well, happened to be a no-show that day and was immediately added to the short suspect list.

  Finally, the next day, after an anxious, sleepless night, I got an anonymous call telling me there were two tiger cubs in a silo on an abandoned farm a few miles away. We raced over to that farm, and there in the silo were Ivan and Natasha, frightened and hungry but unharmed and almost as thrilled to see us as we were to see them.

  The tiger thief turned out to be the young helper who’d been playing hooky from the compound since the cubs disappeared. It seems he’d had too many beers after work and made the brilliant, drunken decision that it would be awesome to drive around in his pickup with the cubs in the truck bed and show them off. When the night was over and he’d sobered up a little, it occurred to him that it might not have been that great an idea after all, but he was too afraid to get caught bringing the little tigers back to their home, so instead, he just abandoned them.