by Tippi Hedren
When Doron swung the compound gate open, Tongaru was stretched out on his stomach, relaxing in the sand. Doron said hello to him and bent down to scratch him under the chin as a passing friendly gesture. But when he stood again to talk to Steve, still bent at the waist, Tongaru leapt at him and rammed the left side of his head, breaking three teeth. Doron went down, with a 475-pound lion on top of him, and Tongaru plunged his canines into Doron’s throat a few millimeters away from his jugular vein, almost severing his left ear in the process.
Steve and Darryl jumped onto Tongaru and pulled him away while Doron started crawling toward the gate. He’d just reached it when Tongaru broke loose and sank his teeth into Doron’s butt, until Steve and Darryl managed to restrain Tongaru again and a maintenance man dragged Doron out of the compound.
After a five-hour surgery by Dr. Kadivar and three weeks in Palmdale Hospital, that brave, resilient man didn’t just survive, he was back at work eight weeks after the attack, back in close, happy proximity to the big cats. He even wanted to see if he and Tongaru could make friends, but I ordered him to never go anywhere near that lion again.
Being broke is one thing. Coming within a few millimeters of a good man losing his life for the sake of a movie nobody even seemed to want was quite another. There was no way around it—the future of our blockbuster looked very, very bleak.
Christmas of 1978 looked bleak, too—rainy, with a cold wind. Noel and I didn’t even go through the motions of exchanging gifts, neither of us in a mood that was on the same planet as “festive.”
Then, at about eight a.m., Brad Darrington, one of our handlers, knocked on the door, holding a gift that instantly raised my spirits. It was tiny. It had stripes. It weighed one pound, ten ounces, and it looked like a thoroughbred tiger.
“I found her hidden behind the den in Nikki’s compound,” Brad said. “She was screaming.”
I couldn’t have been more surprised—as far as any of us knew, none of the cats was pregnant. “Who’s the mother?”
“Debbie, I think.” Debbie was an orphan lioness we’d had for four years. I hadn’t noticed any difference in Debbie’s appearance lately, but she wouldn’t be the first cat to surreptitiously give birth.
If Debbie was the mother, there was no doubt that 600-pound tiger Nikita was the father, which meant that the cub Brad was holding was a rare tigon, the offspring of a tiger and a lioness. So far as I knew, there were only three other tigons in the United States.
“I don’t think Debbie wants this one,” Brad added. “She didn’t even look at me when I picked it up and carried it away.”
The orphan tigon, a clearly premature female, was wet, cold, and shivering. I wrapped her in a thick towel, rubbing her vigorously to speed up her circulation. Then I pulled a heating pad around her and held her in my arms for three or four hours.
In honor of both the holiday and Noel, we named her Noelle. It was a safe assumption that since Debbie had obviously rejected her, she’d also refused to feed her. I was an old hand at that by now, and within a couple of hours the tiny warm, dry cub was contentedly nursing from a bottle.
Noelle was unique from the beginning, unlike any other cub I’d known. She spoke both the lion and the tiger languages. When she was five days old she began making those delightful nasal puffing “ff-fuff” tiger sounds, but she also started making the happy little lion “aa-oow” sounds. While tiger cubs don’t like to be held under any circumstances, Noelle loved to be cuddled. She definitely had a tiger’s nose, though, not as blunt as a lion’s.
She was magic from the first moment I saw her—without even trying she turned a gray, gloomy Christmas into one I’ll never forget.
In early January, Noel and Jan de Bont and I flew to Kenya for some location shots that could never be captured anywhere but in Africa. There’s something indescribably sacred about seeing wild animals en masse in their natural domains, especially during the annual migration at Masai Mara. As many as 100,000 zebras, gazelles, antelopes, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, jackals, lions, and other wild creatures can be seen traveling in slow congregations, and while we didn’t get to witness the full migration, what we did see and film held me spellbound.
For the briefest moment, I wished that somehow I could release all our animals from their steel-wire compounds, jet them to Africa in some kind of state-of-the-art Noah’s Ark, say my tearful good-byes to them, and set them free where they belonged. But after being in captivity, they would never survive in the wild. It was just a futile fantasy, inspired by watching those great herds move across the plains, and if nothing else, it was a good reminder of why we were making our film.
Jan got a spectacular array of footage for the “establishing shots” of Roar, and on the first day of photography he also got a wonderful “gift shot,” one of those little additions to the film created and performed by the animals that we could never have dreamed up ourselves.
Noel was on a motorcycle, going right to left across the screen, with some of the migration as part of the backdrop. Suddenly a huge bull giraffe split off from its herd and decided to race him. He joyfully galloped at thirty-five miles an hour and kept up with the bike for almost a quarter of a mile, his head about eighteen feet in the air, having the time of his life, providing us with an opening sequence it would have been impossible to stage.
I was abruptly yanked away from the obsessive, addictive drama of Roar when, on April 1, 1979, Daddy passed away at the age of eighty-six. Even though he’d struggled with his health for much of his life, he’d been doing better, we thought, so his death seemed sudden and shocking. Mom and Patty and I, the three women he loved, who loved him right back, were with him when he peacefully left this earth. It didn’t feel real that he was gone, and for weeks if not months afterward I just went through the motions of being alive, hoping it wouldn’t show too much how numb I was inside. The grief of losing him was as deep as my gratitude that I’d had the privilege of being his daughter. I’ve never known a finer, gentler man. I have framed photographs of him in my bedroom, and I smile at him every day.
In late June I joined Food for the Hungry again, this time in Singapore, to board the SS Akuna and search the South China Sea for more refugees from the Communist regime in Vietnam.
Those poor, brave people, packed into those overcrowded boats with very little food and even less hope, were being beaten, raped, and robbed by a network of Thai fishermen, as if they hadn’t already been through more than enough. Holding a starving, badly sunburned baby or a raped pregnant woman is an instant cure for self-pity, believe me. And coming upon the wreckage of a makeshift wooden boat and finding a tiny sandal floating nearby makes struggling to finish a movie in Hollywood seem embarrassingly trivial.
Those two weeks on the Akuna were humbling and inspiring, exhausting and energizing. Once again, I flew home from a Food for the Hungry trip hoping I was able to give as much to the refugees as they gave me.
Call it karma, call it justice, call it sheer stubbornness, but while I was gone, the lawsuit Noel had filed years earlier for his fair share of Exorcist profits was finally settled out of court. As soon as all the legal paperwork was properly signed, sealed, and delivered, Warner Brothers would start making direct payments.
It was almost impossible to believe, but we were about to have enough money to finish Roar in this lifetime.
September in Southern California typically brings the hot, dry Santa Ana winds that make fires a constant danger. The floods had taught us a lot about being prepared for natural disasters, so by the time September rolled around, we were as ready, just in case, as we knew how to be. We had forty horse trailers and cattle cars lined up to evacuate the animals. We’d gathered firefighting tools and pumps and high-pressure hoses, and we had a long list of volunteers who promised to be on call. We kept the property well watered and irrigated and the low brush cut back to a safe perimeter.
On the morning of Thursday, September 13, as Noel was getting ready to shoot the final sequence of Roar,
two fires broke out, one named Sage and one named Monte by the Forest Service, both of them on the Angeles Crest Highway—some distance away, but too close for comfort. We were awake throughout the night, watching the ominous glows west of us and listening to radio reports on the progress of more than a thousand firefighters as they battled the flames on the ground and from the air.
On Friday morning I was scheduled to leave for a weekend Food for the Hungry board meeting in Dana Point, south of Los Angeles. Anti-famine representatives from all over the world would be there, along with Dr. Larry Ward, and I didn’t want to miss it. But when I looked out at the column of smoke about five miles wide and thousands of feet high spreading across the sky, I told Noel I was thinking I should stay home where I might be needed.
“Go to the conference,” he assured me. “We’ll be fine.” Between the film crew, the handlers, and the maintenance crew, and John, Jerry, and Joel, he reminded me, there would be more than sixty people on hand for the next two days to move the animals if it came to that. He repeated, “We’ll be fine,” and with some reluctance I left. Gray ash was floating onto my windshield, and I could smell burned brush until I’d driven about half an hour of the 130-mile trip. According to the radio, the two fires had become nine, and the Sage Fire alone had already consumed twelve thousand acres.
I was tuned in to the news again the next morning while I dressed for a breakfast meeting and heard a Forest Service official say, “This is a perfect day for a fire.” My heart sank. Oh, Lord, not again.
I immediately called the canyon office and asked our bookkeeper Nancy Landry, “How close are the fires?”
“Nothing to worry about,” she told me. “There’s a breeze, but no heavy wind, and everything’s fine. In fact, Noel’s filming.”
I was so relieved. I went on with my day feeling much better and enjoying every minute of the valuable time I was spending with this extraordinary group of people.
But then at two p.m. I was summoned out of a board meeting for an emergency call from Nancy Landry.
Out of breath, voice trembling a little, she managed to get out the words, “Tippi, we’re completely surrounded by fire. Noel’s evacuating the cats.”
“I’m on my way,” I said with a lump in my throat.
Two of the board members, Don and Fritzi Simonson, had flown down from Santa Barbara in their twin-engine Cessna, and they immediately volunteered to fly me to a small airfield less than ten miles from Soledad Canyon.
As I left the conference room my good FH friend Larry Ward put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and promised, “We’ll have a prayer session for you.”
“Thank you,” I said from the bottom of my heart.
I believe in the power of prayer.
By midafternoon, twelve fires were burning over an area the newscasters reported to be 250 miles long. As we approached the airstrip near Acton through columns of roiling black smoke I could see our preserve far below in the canyon, and I prayed, pleaded for the safety of our animals.
Nancy met me at the airport. She’d clearly been crying, and we gave each other a long hug before we got in the car and headed home. We’d been driving for only about five minutes when we found ourselves stopped at a roadblock. One of the deputies on duty stepped up to the car.
“Sorry, lady, you can’t go up there.”
“Yes, I can, Officer. I have to. My animals are there. My husband is there.” I explained, talking a mile a minute, and they let me through.
When we pulled onto our property we could see fire in the canyon on both sides of us, but it was being knocked down by aerial tankers and county fire crews.
Nancy looked around, gaping. “I don’t believe this. When I left here, we were surrounded by flames, and the smoke was so thick I could barely see well enough to drive.”
Burning ash was still falling here and there, and the air was yellow-gray with smoke near the compounds. I ran up to Noel, who was directing traffic for the evacuation vehicles. About half the animals had already been moved, he said, and Tim Cooney had led Timbo and Kura westward, with a police escort, to one of the trailer camps upriver where the cats were being housed until the danger passed.
A half hour later we were all busy loading and trying to calm the rest of the cats, calling out to each other over the whir of the overhead choppers and coughing our way through the acrid smoke, when someone yelled, “Oh, my God, everybody, look!”
We shifted our attention from the animals and to the hills around us. The flames that had been bearing down on us were miraculously flickering and dying, almost literally at the perimeters of our property line. The smoke was starting to recede. We couldn’t believe it, but the danger was over.
I heard one of the volunteers say to Noel, “You finally got lucky.”
I don’t think luck had anything to do with it.
Thank you, Dr. Larry Ward, for the prayer session. I may not have been a practicing Lutheran since I was in my teens, but I believe to the core of my soul in God and the power of prayer.
It worked.
Profits from The Exorcist allowed us to start shooting again and to pay back some loans.
On Tuesday, October 16, 1979, one month after the fire, I wrote in my datebook, “Finished filming ‘Roar.’ ”
That same day one of Noel’s brothers was killed in a car accident. Somehow, through all those years of filming, it seemed as if every win was followed by a loss. Noel and some of the crew started calling it “the Exorcist curse.” I don’t believe in curses. I don’t really believe in luck, either, good or bad. I believe life happens, and you shoulder through the worst of it with your head held high and give thanks to God for the rest of it. I learned part of that lesson in Soledad Canyon and the rest in the South China Sea.
I celebrated the completion of Roar with a walk through the compounds, congratulating the most important members of our cast and doing a nose count: seventy-one lions, twenty-six tigers, ten cougars, nine black panthers, four leopards, two jaguars, one tigon, two elephants, six black swans, four Canadian geese, seven flamingos, four cranes, two peacocks, and a marabou stork.
Thank you, God.
Now that filming was completed, a relative quiet settled in over the property on Soledad Canyon. It deserved a name of its own, and my friend Elaine Newman suggested a Sanskrit word that means a meeting place of peace and harmony for all beings, animal and human.
The word was Shambala. Shambala it became in 1980, and Shambala it remains today.
In the meantime, Roar still needed editing, a sound effects track, and a musical score. Jan and our editors were hard at work on cutting the film and attaching the sound effects. We hired a young composer named Terrence Minogue to write the score and another young talent, Robert Hawk, to write lyrics for some of Terry’s music. They both moved to Shambala for a while to get added inspiration from the movement and sounds and magic of the cats. The National Philharmonic in London beautifully recorded the perfect score Terry and Robert created for us.
Now all we needed was a distributor.
The search began in September of 1980, when we finally had a fully completed movie.
My datebook for September 20, 1980, reads, “Screening ‘Roar’ everywhere. Charlie Bluhdorn (Paramount/Gulf & Western) saw it last night.”
A month later I wrote, “Paramount wants ‘Roar.’ ABC wants ‘Roar.’ ”
Two months later, a slightly less optimistic datebook entry: “Screened ‘Roar’ for Warners.”
The reaction was favorable across the board, despite the fact that instead of the sex-and-violence movies they were looking for, we just had a family film, “an animal show,” as one of the executives described it.
It was great news that some networks and studios wanted Roar, but as usual, there was a catch. According to the deals they offered, they would keep the lion’s share (pardon the pun) of the profits, even though they hadn’t spent a dime making the movie. That made absolutely no sense to us, so it was back to the drawing board.
On February 22, 1981, Noel and John started screening Roar all over the world, and it worked. We made deals in England, Japan, Germany, Italy, Australia, and a handful of other countries, but not a single deal in the United States.
The slowly dawning reality was devastating: We hadn’t made an international blockbuster after all. We’d captured wild animals on film in an awesome, unprecedented way. But the human story, the story line about the people that would drive the film forward from beginning to end, wasn’t there. We two-legged characters seemed like nothing more than an excuse to show off, react to, and interact with our four-legged cast, and it just plain wasn’t enough.
We’d gambled everything. We’d risked our lives, the lives of our children, and the lives of our crews for eleven long, painful, joyful, incomprehensible years. Our personal financial stake was staggering, and we were deeply in debt to several investors. We’d defied the odds and countless warnings from people who knew infinitely more about what we were getting into than we did, and we’d lost. The damage to our pride was crushing.
I spent that summer with the animals, knowing I could count on them to help me heal. I walked around the compounds for hours every day, and swam in the lake with Timbo and Kura, talking to all of them, sitting with and touching the cats who could safely be sat with and touched. I needed them every bit as much as they needed me.
I’ve heard it said that the loneliest place in the world is on the inside of a bad marriage, and I believe that. Even now I can honestly say that I’ve never experienced loneliness when I’ve been alone. But my marriage to Noel had collapsed, and for the first and only time in my life, I was lonely, and I ached from it. The goal of seeing Roar through to completion had kept us together. Now that the goal had been accomplished, there was nothing between us but bitter arguments, recriminations, and tense, hollow silence.