Tippi: A Memoir

by Tippi Hedren

  We couldn’t figure out what the problem was. It didn’t occur to any of us until later that my sweet elephant pal had no way of knowing that my screaming and flailing were just acting. How was he supposed to figure out that I wasn’t really frightened and in danger? Having to do take after take was only making him more confused and more upset, and frankly, I felt exactly the same way.

  On take number thirteen, when Timbo lifted me, I didn’t quite manage to get myself pulled up onto his head. I tried to adjust by holding on to his ears, arms outstretched, while my right leg ended up under his trunk on top of his right tusk. He then brought his trunk down and, in the process, pinned my leg between his trunk and his tusk.

  The pain was instantaneous and excruciating. John and Noel raced over to try to help, which only confused and upset Timbo even more than he already was and caused him to freeze in position so that my leg continued to be crushed.

  Mercifully, I blacked out.

  I was told later that I continued to hang upside down in midair, unconscious, swinging back and forth, until Tim Cooney finally yelled, “Trunk up! Trunk up!” Timbo obeyed his trainer, lifted his trunk, and let me go. I have no memory of hitting the sand.

  I was rushed to Palmdale Hospital in the back of a van, in terrible pain. At first all they observed was a pink area between my ankle and my knee, where it had been pinned against the tusk, but an X-ray showed a hairline fracture of my fibula.

  It was late afternoon by the time I got home, limping badly and still in severe pain. I was just settling in when Alex Newman, our vet tech, reluctantly broke the news to me that Cookie, one of the Knobhill lion cubs, had finally lost her long, brave battle with cancer. I was devastated, but relieved for Cookie.

  Noel, trying to be helpful, asked if he should cancel the crew party we’d scheduled for that night, a party we held twice a month in the crew dining room to keep up morale.

  The combination of my pain and sadness felt like anger. “Don’t you dare,” I snapped at him. I needed the distraction, maybe even some laughter, to take my mind off Cookie and my throbbing leg. It worked, a little, temporarily.

  The next day we filmed another sequence, disguising the fact that I could barely walk. My leg had turned black and blue and was horribly swollen.

  Two days later I tried to do a kitchen scene on crutches with Boomer, our inherited lion, but the pain became too much to handle.

  The day after that we announced that we were shutting down production again, blaming it entirely on my ghastly purple leg.

  But the truth was, we were out of money.

  Thirteen

  It was late May. Noel was in Japan, virtually going door to door trying to raise money for us to continue production on Roar. I was sitting quietly with my leg propped up when Jerry arrived with a pretty new blond girlfriend named Mona Emigh. The ostensible reason was to introduce her to me. The real reason was to show off with the big cats, to let Mona see him walk into a compound and roll around in the sand with a few lions and tigers. What could be more macho than that? It had worked effectively on previous girlfriends, so why not with Mona now that she’d entered the picture?

  Sadly, Jerry forgot two very important things. He was wearing tennis shoes, and he happened to stroll into a compound in which Mike was living—former Knobhill lion cub Mike, tennis shoe freak, who had to possess every tennis shoe he came across, whether it was under a bed or on someone’s foot.

  The instant Jerry stepped into the compound and closed the gate, Mike was on him, determined to separate Jerry from “his” tennis shoes with his teeth. In the process, he bit Jerry in the thigh, close to the groin, inflicting deep, serious wounds.

  I heard yelling and hobbled out on my crutches to see what had happened; I arrived just in time to see John helping his brother into a car to rush him off to Palmdale Hospital. Mona hurried up to me and said, “Mrs. Marshall, would you like me to drive you to the hospital?” She was sweet and thoughtful and refreshingly calm under the circumstances, and as we climbed into Jerry’s car to follow him and John to Palmdale, I wondered what on earth she must be thinking. Her new boyfriend had just been pounced on by a lion with a sneaker fetish, and now she was taking care of his badly limping stepmother, who’d been disabled in an elephant mishap. If she’d run screaming for the exit, I wouldn’t have blamed her a bit.

  The doctor on duty in Palmdale happened to be the same doctor who’d sewn up both Noel and Jan de Bont, and while I waited for word about Jerry, I decided it might be a good idea to have him check on my leg, which was still extremely painful and looked like it had been made up for a horror movie.

  He examined it, with that facial expression doctors get when they’re about to give you bad news.

  “Tippi,” he said, “I’m afraid I can’t let you go home. Not even for a toothbrush.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I just came here to be with my stepson.”

  “You have gangrene.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Gangrene? Was he kidding? Gangrene? To be fair, I guess gangrene was the one thing that hadn’t happened to us yet, but what was next, Noel getting amnesia while he was in Tokyo and wandering off to Tibet to become a monk?

  Jerry and I were both sent to Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster. He needed more medical care than emergency services could provide, and I needed to be treated for gangrene. (What?) We were checked into rooms across the hall from each other so we could visit back and forth. I’m sure Dr. Esfandiar Kadivar, a plastic surgeon who’d be tending to both of us, appreciated the convenience, and we certainly came to appreciate him. A lot of people have GPs as their family doctors. We ended up having plastic surgeon Dr. Kadivar as ours.

  Here’s a bit of information I never wanted to know: There are apparently two types of gangrene, black and green. If you get to choose which type you’d prefer to come down with, black is better. I had black. Yippee. I was hospitalized for two weeks to receive and recover from the skin graft Dr. Kadivar performed on my leg, while Jerry was released after just a few days. We both had to steer clear of the compounds until we were healthy enough to keep the big cats from perceiving us as infirm, aka potential prey.

  Independent films are often shot intermittently due to lack of money, and that’s exactly how we proceeded with Roar when Noel returned from Japan with no success to report. We managed to accomplish five days of filming in two months, Jerry and I gamely limping our way along, and with about 70 percent of the movie completed, I insisted on believing that somehow, sooner or later, our luck would turn and all this hard work would pay off.

  Apparently it would have to be later. Word arrived that EMI, after carefully screening the footage we’d sent them, didn’t just disagree with our pride in what we’d accomplished so far, they actually wanted their half-million-dollar investment back. It was a devastating, sickening gut punch. We didn’t have half a million pennies to send them, let alone half a million dollars.

  I can’t explain it, I just know it happened—instead of discouraging us, that latest setback made us more defiant and determined than ever.

  Noel, resourceful as ever, started a new TV commercial production company called the Film Consortium, spurred on by the fact that the commercial business was booming at the time. Chuck Sloan, head of production on Roar, was put in charge, and we finally had some steady income to feed the animals and keep up with the canyon payroll.

  Our cast, film crew, and animal handlers caught the same defiant determination fever, and morale was at an all-time high that summer. They all knew about the EMI rejection, and that their paychecks might be more sporadic than they would have liked, but with few exceptions, they made it clear that they were in it for the long haul, and in it to win it. Some combination of the big cats and the challenge of finishing the film kept them driving down that rutted dirt road off of Soledad Canyon every day, and I grew to love them like family. Several of them even moved onto our property, creating a little village of small trailers we named Gumpsterville, in h
onor of the portable toilets set up nearby.

  But then came August 19, one of those days full of images that woke me up at night for years.

  It was about five p.m. Jerry, John, Melanie, and I had just finished a scene with twenty-five or so young cats.

  Melanie casually knelt down to play with and scratch one of the cubs.

  In a heartbeat, a three-year-old lioness named Sheila, apparently wanting some attention of her own, rose up and jumped Melanie from behind, essentially hugging her head with both paws on her face and holding on while the two of them went down.

  We rushed Melanie to Antelope Valley. Dr. Kadivar, whom we should have just put on retainer, started carefully repairing the claw damage while I kept having to remind myself to breathe, especially when I saw how close one claw had come to my daughter’s right eye.

  I wished a thousand times that it had happened to me instead of her.

  I wished a thousand times that I had never mentioned the word Roar to her. Yes, she’d known the risks involved, and yes, she’d come back on her own with absolutely no pressure from me. But there was no way around the fact that she wouldn’t have been there at all if it hadn’t been for me, and the guilt was crushing.

  Several hours later, back home again, Melanie looked at me and said, “Mom, I’m not quitting.”

  “You should,” I told her, choking back tears. “You’ve been through more than enough, and I can’t ask you to.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders. “You’re not asking me. I’m telling you. This is my movie, too, you know, and we’re going to finish it no matter what.”

  I felt such a surge of pride, love, and gratitude. Here stood my girl, pale, blood still on her shirt, her face full of stitches, reassuring me. Here stood my girl, who’d been a target of countless often malicious gossip columnists and tabloids. Here stood my girl, whom I’d often found so stubborn and strong-willed and impossible to understand, and now here stood my girl, brave, responsible, selfless, and grown up. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly love her more.

  So much for soaring morale—another crew member quit that day. As always, I hated to see him go, and as always, I couldn’t blame him a bit.

  Besides, I was too preoccupied with Melanie’s injuries, and with shooting an upcoming scene I’d been dreading for months, to worry about much else.

  Yes, it was time to reshoot the scene in which I was sprawled on a log across the river while a single-file parade of lions and tigers jumped over my back. I made sure the handlers had Cherries securely locked up, but I couldn’t shake my memory of the sound of her canines scraping against my skull. I was more afraid that morning than I’d ever been in the compounds. With or without Cherries, I’d still be below the big cats’ eye level, their cue that they had total control, and who was I to argue with them?

  Jan de Bont sensed it and put his arm around me. “It’ll go well this time,” he promised, and I managed a smile at this amazing man. He’d never lost hope, not once. He’d never said a word about quitting, although he’d had offers for other films that paid a whole lot more, and a whole lot more reliably, than we could.

  I did pause, though, before I took my place on the log, to yell to the handlers and crew, “Watch these cats! If one of them decides to do something, don’t just stand there!”

  Then, after a long, deep breath, I laid down, Noel announced, “Roll film,” and Jan kept his promise—it went beautifully. Twenty-six lions and tigers, one after another, filed along the log, leaped gracefully over me, and moved right on along.

  When Noel yelled, “Cut!” I felt months’ worth of anxiety lift off me as we moved on to the next sequence. Lynn, a lioness, was to come back and lie down on top of me, for no other reason than that she felt like it. Then Noel/Hank would heroically rescue me by pulling her off me, and, because I was so angry with him, in the script, for allowing the whole family to be scared senseless, I would knock him into the water.

  As scripted, Lynn flopped down on top of me. A fiberglass shell had been built to protect me, but it was visible on camera and I had to abandon it. So there we were, 100 pounds of me beneath 450 pounds of lion, for what must have been ten minutes, waiting for Noel to get the shot he wanted. (By the time he came to “rescue” me, being angry with him required no acting at all.) All I remember of it was straining to breathe under all that weight and the putrid smell of Lynn’s mouth from her diet of raw meat. Other than that, my mind shut down, presumably to prevent me from panicking. Not once did Lynn make an aggressive move toward me, which made me think Cherries’s attack on me had a lot more to do with her difficult personality than it did with my being lower than she was when it happened.

  Finally Noel/Hank raced onto the log to pull Lynn off me, and as the script dictated, I knocked him into the lake.

  Lynn, scene-stealer that she was, then made a spontaneous, unscripted decision and pushed me into the lake. It was a much better ending to the sequence than Noel had written, and God bless Jan de Bont yet again for capturing every second of it on film.

  It had been a relatively easy, fun day of filming, and we’d desperately needed one of those.

  We wouldn’t have another one for a very long time.

  It was January 29, our first day of filming in the new year. The scene involved Noel and Mativo sitting on the front steps of the African house, a few cats sprawled around them, talking about the impending arrival of Noel/Hank’s family.

  For the first time since we’d started shooting, Noel had decided to wear shorts instead of his usual jeans. His stark white legs required body makeup to prevent camera glare. He was a little concerned about the cats’ reaction to the smell of the makeup but not concerned enough to refuse to wear it. That was a very, very bad decision.

  When I screened the footage later, I could clearly see that the cats in that scene were in a bad mood that day. They looked annoyed, possibly just tired of this whole tedious moviemaking thing we humans had inflicted on them.

  Cameras were running and dialogue was being recorded as Togar’s son, a young, rough, tough lion named George, approached Noel, who was now standing. Noel tried to ignore him and press on with his dialogue while George started sniffing the makeup on Noel’s leg, with an expression that said, “Okay, buddy, what’s the story with this smelly brown stuff on your skin?”

  Then in an instant, he clamped his jaw around Noel’s knee and dragged him off the steps and into a corner, where the handlers raced to pull George away and return him to his compound while everyone else rushed to help Noel.

  Despite the eight puncture wounds in his leg, Noel wanted to keep working, driven to compensate for the previous two months when no film had been shot. But wiser heads prevailed, and he was treated by Dr. Kadivar in Palmdale, refused hospitalization, and was home again within a couple of hours.

  A few years earlier, my mom and dad had moved to a perfect, comfortable house in Palm Desert. I was visiting them and didn’t know a thing about Noel’s latest crisis until I got home to the canyon later that day. Even with puncture wounds as severe as his, the pain doesn’t set in for about ten or fifteen hours. Then it’s excruciating. So the next day, when we entertained Banjiro Uemura and the other Japanese investors he brought to meet us, Noel greeted them on pain pills, in a wheelchair, and chatted away with them thanks to the adrenaline of desperately needing money, only occasionally speaking through tightly gritted teeth.

  I checked him back into the Palmdale Hospital the next day, where the doctors managed to keep him for a day or two. He came home from there worse than before and utterly miserable to live with. The puncture wounds weren’t healing, his knee looked like an eggplant, and finally I insisted on taking him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with severe blood poisoning.

  The doctor wanted to immediately hook him up to an antibiotic IV drip and hospitalize him.

  Noel said no.

  The doctor warned him that he had two choices—cooperate or lose his leg.

  Noel was
immediately hooked up to an antibiotic IV drip and hospitalized.

  I didn’t think a thing about the rain that was falling when I drove back to the canyon from Cedars-Sinai that day. The hills around the canyon were dry and could absorb a lot of water.

  But five days later, when the steady downpour hadn’t stopped, the ground was saturated, and the modest little Santa Clara River that wound through the canyon was looking almost threatening.

  There was a twelve-foot wooden bulkhead on the far north side of our property, with a visible high-water mark from the Soledad Canyon flood in 1969. Since then, houses, buildings, and trailers had been built, for the most part, three or four feet above that high-water mark, but some of the animal compounds were below it.

  And there were a couple of things we didn’t know.

  One was that over the past eight years the Southern Pacific Railroad had built berms to direct water away from the tracks and roadbed in case of floods—and straight toward our property. We’d seen some flooding from those berms over the years, but it never did anything more than scare us for a few hours and then recede, and there was no reason to believe that this storm would treat us to anything more than that.

  Another was that eight miles upstream at Aliso Canyon, where an unpaved road crossed the river, the county had built up the road with large pipes underneath it to divert heavy rains and keep the road from becoming impassable, as it often did. Apparently no one at those planning meetings ever thought to ask the question “What happens if those pipes get clogged with debris?”

  The rain was still falling hard, without a single break, on the morning of February 9. According to the weather bureau, the forecast was for the eye of the storm to pass over us at around midnight, with clearing expected the next day.