by Tippi Hedren
I put on my waders and took a long walk to check on the animals. Most of the cats were in their houses. The tigers were out and about, dripping wet and enjoying every minute of the rain. Timbo was contentedly tucked away in his heated barn. I allowed myself a long exhale as I stood for several minutes beside the gray, swelling river.
Back in the house again, I freshened up, changed clothes, and headed off to see Noel in the hospital. I’d driven only a mile when I stopped to look at the river again and saw water flooding over some of the roadways in the trailer park. My heart sank, and I turned around, went home, and called Noel.
“I’m not coming,” I told him. “It’s not good out here.”
A couple of hours later, Jan’s wife Monique and I drove out to check on the river again. It was getting uglier by the minute. There was no way around it—it was time to mobilize, just in case.
John began calling in cattle cars and horse vans while I started calling our “regulars”—Gardner McKay, Chuck Sloan, Leo Lobsenz, and a dozen others—to say that we might be in trouble and hoped they’d be available to help move the cats. Not one of them turned me down.
Weeks earlier a tall, tough, ponytailed biker dude named Chris Gallucci had come roaring onto the property on his Harley-Davidson, looking for work. He was an ex-drifter and intensely private, with no apparent purpose or direction in his life, and he offered us his welding and general manual labor skills. We could use all the help we could get, so we hired him, while I privately doubted he’d stick around too long—which goes to show how gifted I am at predictions. He became invaluable, and he’s still with me almost forty years later.
So when cattle cars and horse trailers began arriving midafternoon, Chris got to work with his welding torch, closing the gaps along the sides of the cattle cars with chain-link fencing to keep the cats from wriggling through and escaping while they were being transported to safer ground. A chain-link chute was made from portable fence panels to funnel cats from the compounds to the vehicles, and a few cats were safely moved to higher ground in emergency cages and den boxes.
Filming had been suspended indefinitely, so very few members of the film crew were on hand. Jan de Bont, Jerry, and three members of the sound crew, residents of Gumpsterville, had been busy editing, but by midafternoon Jan took every inch of sound tape to higher ground in John’s house. Bill Dow, in the meantime, emerged from his darkroom at about five-thirty, stepping out into heavy, wind-blown rain and numbing cold, and immediately began helping handlers and the fence crew. In no time at all the water was above his ankles.
Alexandra Newman had parked her camper-top truck up on the paved road, which safely housed two of the leopards. Then she went right back to work with the rest of the crew, moving cats and wiring protective plywood against the compound fences.
I put in a call to the 49er Bar and Grill in Acton, ten miles away, and asked if we could use their parking lot for our cat transport vehicles if it turned out to be necessary. God bless them, they said yes. Never underestimate high desert people when it comes to being rugged and sticking together in a crisis.
Darkness was falling, and we were racing against it. Except for the area around the commissary, kitchen, and animal support buildings we called Up-Front, there were no outside lights on the property, since big cats couldn’t care less about lighting. Volunteers were scrambling to gather flashlights. About forty of our biggest feline troublemakers were still down in the compounds needing to be moved, so tranquilizer guns were being loaded just in case. People ventured down to the river throughout the evening to check it out with their flashlights and report back to Up-Front, where we kept hot food and coffee available, and the dryers in my house and Monique’s were constantly running to keep up with the steady influx of water-soaked clothing.
Moving the troublemaker cats in the darkness was made even more difficult by the fact that it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart in the beams of our flashlights—they were soaked and matted, and very nervous. We’d learned the hard way over all these years that it was dangerous to put random cats together, so we were having to temporarily secure some of them along the upper perimeter fence, about ten feet apart, to keep them safe from each other until we could identify them and take them to safe cover. The only good animal news was that the water was staying away from the elephant barn, so Timbo could remain in his house.
There were gaps in the chain-link corridor that led from the compounds to where the trucks were parked two hundred feet uphill, and humans began filling those gaps. Bill Dow, Chuck Sloan, Gardner McKay, Liberato Torres, and a half-dozen volunteers, some with no experience with big cats, stood guard as the soaked troublemakers made their way through the darkness to the trucks.
The night was surreal. Pounding, wind-driven rain. Blue-red sparks from the welding torch. Random beams from scattered flashlights. Long stretches of fencing, part chain link, part human. Grumbling, upset cats moving tentatively, single file, through the corridor, while the experienced humans yelled to the novices, “Stay steady. If a cat comes up to you, don’t move!”
And all the while, without knowing it, we were fighting a battle we couldn’t win. A few miles upstream at Aliso Canyon, more and more water was collecting behind the clogged, debris-filled pipes beneath the county roadbed.
Just as the rain stopped, all that water let loose.
I’ll spare you, and myself, all the details of that horrible, horrible night. But by the time it was over, a ten-foot-tall wall of water roared into the canyon. I had time to grab only a few clothes and belongings before it crashed into the house. The commissary building, crew kitchen, editing building, and sound building and all their contents were swept away. Fences, cages, and animal compounds collapsed, along with the chain-link chute from the compounds to the rescue vehicles. The teardrop trailers of Gumpsterville were overturned and thrown around.
Thanks to the depth of its foundation of telephone poles, the African house survived, but it was tilted at one end. A huge tree and a dressing-room building rammed into it, and a car and a tree were embedded in what used to be the dining room.
More than 100,000 feet of film were scattered as far as five miles away. Thank God the negative was safely stored in a lab in Hollywood. Tranquilizer guns were used to stop numerous fights among terrified cats waiting to be driven to safety. Four members of the sound crew had to be rescued from the raging waters by firemen with a grapple rope.
Noel, alerted by Bill Dow, got dressed and literally bullied his way out of the hospital, hours before his scheduled knee surgery, and summoned a friend to drive him home. The road was washed out for the last quarter-mile, so he hobbled the rest of the way and immediately went to work moving animals. The second cat he freed from the perimeter fence where she’d been restrained managed to wrap her five-foot-long lead chain around his injured leg, squeezing and forcing pus out of his swollen, infected knee. He no longer needed surgery. A frightened lioness took care of it for him.
Twenty-eight panicky, disoriented cats escaped. Twenty-five of them were finally rounded up. The other three—Mary, Melanie, and Robbie—were shot to death by sheriff’s deputies, who, I had to admit despite my grief, had no choice.
And I finally found myself standing in the middle of the road, screaming hysterically, until someone—I don’t know who—took me to John’s house, above the flooded area. The next thing I remember was Monique, pounding me on the back, yelling, “Breathe! You have to breathe! You have to breathe!”
The sun came up, the waters finally receded, and Noel and I started walking around our decimated property. Neither of us said, “We’re wiped out.” Neither of us needed to.
He looked terrible. His eyes were sunken, with circles around them so dark it looked as if he’d been beaten. His face was ashen behind his damp, stringy beard, and the severe pain he was in furrowed his face.
I was a zombie. I vaguely remember driving to Acton to call my parents, my sister Patty, and Melanie to fill them in, and their shocked,
helpless silence on the other end of the line. I vaguely remember stumbling through debris and stepping over fallen cottonwoods to uselessly pick up a frying pan, a crew member’s T-shirt from Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada, and some wet, torn lion and tiger posters that had hung on the now-exposed interior walls of the editing building.
But there’s one thing I remember with crystal clarity.
I remember that not one member of the maintenance crews or the animal crews or the film crew, not one volunteer, not Marty Dinnes or Steve Martin or Martin Downey, not a single one of them had left. Beyond exhaustion, sleep-deprived, scratched and damp and hungry, they were all still there, and I marveled at their courage and loyalty.
Jan and Monique found a place to stay in town so that Noel and I could sleep in their still-intact house on high ground that night. We were too bone-tired and in shock to talk, except for one brief, quiet exchange.
“We don’t have any choice but to finish it, do we?” he said.
“No, we don’t,” I replied.
Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times reported the Soledad Canyon devastation and the plight of our homeless lions and tigers. Friends and literally dozens of complete strangers responded. Truckers offered vans and trailers. Ranchers and hardware stores showed up with portable fencing. The Southern Pacific Railroad office in Omaha called, ready to send railway cars to house the cats. Friends came to begin shoveling sand out of our house, and one of them even found our supposedly waterproof seven-hundred-pound safe five miles downstream. Herb Dorfman, one of the most important men in our lives at the time, owned a place called Mission Meat in the San Fernando Valley, and he agreed to carry us so that we could keep the animals fed. Handlers and maintenance men started hauling food to the cats in the 49er Bar and Grill parking lot every afternoon and worked in shifts so that one of them was always there twenty-four hours a day. We were overwhelmed with gratitude.
A day or two later, to no one’s surprise, a man from the insurance company declared our house a total loss. By week’s end, President Jimmy Carter declared parts of Los Angeles County, including Soledad Canyon, a total loss, which could potentially make us eligible for a low-interest loan.
Even with all the amazing help, we knew it would take months to restore the compounds and weeks before our house would be livable again, so Jan and Monique rented an apartment in Los Angeles and Noel and I moved into their mobile home.
Every day I’d think of another piece of my life that had been lost in that river. When it was all said and done, the only one I really mourned was a reel of black-and-white film that had been housed in the demolished editing room—commercials I’d done in the 1950s, including the Sego commercial that had attracted the attention of Alfred Hitchcock.
Did that really happen in the same lifetime I was living now?
The stress, anxiety, and grief were widening the chasm between Noel and me. We seemed to have very little to say to each other, and what we did have to say was invariably sharp-edged.
“I don’t know why I’m so angry with you,” he said one night. “You didn’t cause the flood.”
“No, damn it, I didn’t.” I simmered over that for hours. I didn’t like him anymore, but this was hardly the time to deal with it.
The crisis at home was only one piece of the crises that were building up around us. Crises attract the press. And our crisis was no exception.
On March 5 the Los Angeles Times’s Wayne Warga wrote:
Noel Marshall, with his ferocious intensity, his thick wavy hair, his long unkempt beard, and his watchful eyes, actually looks something like a lion. It is as if he is some rogue human being who has come to try to dominate the animals that surround him, and instead they have metamorphosed him.
He is a man passionately obsessed to complete the film called “Roar,” one of the most improbable productions in an industry long ago given to the unlikely.
A few weeks later William Arnold’s story appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
With a kind of Ahab-like single-mindedness, a Hollywood producer named Noel Marshall has been sinking millions of dollars and herculean effort into making a unique and deeply personal kind of wild animal picture . . . Many Hollywood insiders are betting it will be the grandest unfinished movie since “I, Claudius.”
A Daily Variety editor was quoted as saying:
People in this industry simply do not understand a man who’ll gamble everything on a personal vision. They don’t know if he’s a gutsy genius or a colossal madman. He’s already broken every rule of big-budget moviemaking, and in a town that always plays it safe, that alone is enough to be considered a lunatic.
We literally couldn’t afford that kind of publicity. We screened what we had so far of Roar for Wayne Warga, and to his credit, he did admit, in print, “What has been completed contains some of the most remarkable—and frightening—photography of animals and people that has ever been produced.”
Thank you!
But of course we hadn’t completed the film yet, and, with the exception of Jack Rattner and Banjiro Uemura, our few remaining money people dropped us as fast as they could dial their phones. “You’re in too much trouble” was the consensus, and how could we disagree with that?
Then, to our complete surprise, two longtime friends, a married couple, gave us a check for $50,000. Gifts like that lifted our spirits and, for better or worse, kept us going.
Noel threw his “ferocious intensity” into raising money, which we needed more desperately than ever, while the rest of us threw our shoulders into rebuilding. I learned to operate a backhoe and fill a dump truck and work shoulder to shoulder, shovel to shovel, with our loyal, underpaid crew. I fell into bed every night with blistered hands and aching muscles and the satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve put in a good, hard, honest day’s work.
Not once did any of us think of giving up. Our animals needed us to keep going. We needed us to keep going. And with Roar 80 percent complete, there was no way around it, we had to finish that movie.
Fourteen
Eight months later we were finished rebuilding. Our house was livable again, the African house was intact, our homegrown African location was a perfect match to what we’d already shot, our animals were relieved beyond belief to be back in their compounds again, and we were relieved beyond belief to have them there.
We even had a new addition to the family. Her name was Kura, and she was a notoriously uncooperative elephant who’d worn out her welcome at Circus Vargas. We had a crowd of vets and handlers here to greet her, all of us praying as she emerged from the back of the huge transport truck that Timbo wouldn’t resent her usurping his status as the only elephant in the canyon.
It was instantly apparent that status meant nothing to Timbo. If he’d been capable of doing backflips, he would have done them all the way to Hollywood and back the moment he laid eyes on her, and thank God the feeling was mutual. He trumpeted to her as she strolled down the ramp, and she called back. They walked to each other, and he touched her all over with his trunk as if he were making sure she was real. Then they intertwined trunks in the sweetest elephant hug and began making happy rumbling noises in their bellies. It was joyful to watch.
It’s a popular East Indian belief that elephants bring good luck. Now we had two of them. There were days when we started sharing that belief, and days when we wondered if maybe having two of them meant they canceled each other out.
Now that President Carter had declared us part of a disaster area, we could at least apply for a Small Business Administration loan and hope for the best. We needed it, and we certainly felt we were qualified for it. But when the SBA appraisers came to visit the compounds, appraisers who were accustomed to assessing damages at shoe stores and pizza parlors, they had no idea what to make of us, or of this “moviemaking is a business” nonsense Noel kept blathering about.
The only way we could legitimize ourselves with the Washington bureaucrats was to appeal to an actual human being, one t
o one, so we made an appointment to screen what we had of Roar for California representative William Ketchum. He watched it, fascinated. He studied the still photographs of the flood damage. He listened sympathetically to our tale of woe, and he promised he would do absolutely everything he could to help us.
Two days later he dropped dead of a heart attack.
Eventually our case found its way to Senator S. I. Hayakawa, who persuaded the SBA that yes, we really did warrant a disaster loan.
We spent the summer of 1978 getting ready to start filming again in the fall. We needed only ten more minutes of footage and Roar would be completed. We were almost afraid to say it out loud, but it was possible that we were headed for the finish line.
On Friday, October 13, 1978—the seventeenth anniversary of that phone call asking if I was the girl in the Sego commercial—cameras in the canyon started rolling again. And for the first time I was beginning to wonder why we even bothered.
In October and November we trotted around town with the 80 percent of Roar that was ready to show and screened it for every studio in town, as well as independents like Francis Ford Coppola. The response was unanimous—“No, thanks.”
Studio heads wanted sex and violence, not furry family entertainment. They all admitted that Roar contained the best animal footage they’d ever seen, but “even Disney has given up on animal flicks—they never make back negative costs.” Of course, only one out of ten Hollywood movies ever turns a profit, and studio heads have been proven wrong more often than right when it comes to what audiences want to see, but why get in a debate we didn’t have any hope of winning?
And then, as a reminder of what Roar was really costing, there was another near-death attack in the compounds, and our last, thank God.
Our handsome twenty-seven-year-old assistant director Doron Kauper had been raising cubs for us, and he’d made friends with several of our four-legged cast members. So he was respectful but confident when he stepped into a compound where Steve Miller and Darryl Sides were preparing two of the lions—Zuru and the notorious Tongaru—for a mock fight scene. All Doron wanted to do was talk to Steve about something. He almost paid for it with his life.