Tippi: A Memoir
Page 22
Somehow, in late October, we managed to put on a good front for the world premiere of Roar in Sydney, Australia. Melanie, John, Mativo, and Robert Hawk joined us for the traditional press parties and interviews. We were welcomed with such enthusiasm that I almost convinced myself that maybe, just maybe, the future of Roar might not be as dismal as we thought, that it might come charging out of Australia with a life of its own and become an international blockbuster after all.
The day after the premiere, Daily Variety’s representative critic telegraphed his review for publication in the Hollywood trade paper:
The noble intentions of director-writer-producer Noel Marshall and his actress-wife Tippi Hedren shine through the faults and shortcomings of “Roar”—touted as the most disaster-plagued pic in Hollywood history.
Given the enormous difficulties during production—devastating flood, several fires, an epidemic that decimated the feline cast and numerous injuries to actors and crew, it is a miracle that the pic was ever completed.
Here is a passionate plea for the preservation of African wildlife, meshed with an adventure-horror tale which aims to be a kind of “Jaws” of the jungle. If it seems at times like a “Born Free” gone berserk, such are the risks of planting the cast in the bush surrounded by 150 untrained lions, leopards, tigers, cheetah and other big cats, not to mention several large, ill-tempered elephants.
Pic is flawed by lapses in continuity and silly dialogue.
Hedren and her daughter, Melanie Griffith, have proved their dramatic ability elsewhere; here they and their costars are required to do little more than look petrified.
The film’s strongest selling points are the spectacles of wild animals and humans filmed at such close quarters, something akin to the perverse fascination of going to the circus and watching agog as the lion tamer puts his head into the beast’s mouth. That, plus the Marshall family’s laudable desire to focus attention on the slaughter of many animal species.
When Roar opened in England, David Robinson of the London Times wrote:
It is better to forget and forgive the story. The animals, though, are superb, and shamelessly skillful in all techniques of upstaging; and there is an irresistible thrill in seeing an understanding between humans and animals that overturns centuries of preconceptions about relationships in nature.
When all was said and done, Roar cost seventeen million dollars and grossed two million dollars worldwide.
It would take a very long time to recover, financially and emotionally. But as long as the animals at Shambala were safe, content, and well-fed, I could handle it.
As for Noel and me, it turned out we had one more drama to deal with before we both moved on.
Fifteen
I promise that there’s a reason I’m telling this story.
I had a very, very handsome older cousin named Jimmy Hedren. He was a pilot in World War II, and his plane crashed when they were flying over Germany. He survived, but half of his face was burned and he was terribly disfigured for the rest of his life.
I was in my teens when he came home from the war. I hadn’t seen him until he and his wife came to visit us. I was really looking forward to giving him the warm, loving welcome he deserved. But the instant he stepped in the door, I saw his face and fainted. I was so ashamed and so embarrassed, and I apologized over and over again. He was very understanding about it, but I never quite forgave myself. I kept reminding myself that it wasn’t as if I chose to faint, it was completely involuntary. It didn’t help. I wouldn’t have hurt his feelings for anything in the world, and I was sure I had.
I remember asking his wife, who’d married an incredibly handsome man before he left for the war, how she handled his awful disfigurement. Her amazing answer was “I never saw it.”
Since then, of course, between the animals and the injuries they’d inflicted and the Food for the Hungry victims around the world and the many veterans hospitals I visited, I’d seen a lot, and as hard as it always was to witness, I’d never fainted again, not until one day early in 1982, and I paid a stiff price for it.
Noel was in the hospital. It wasn’t the big cats’ fault this time. He was there for serious kidney surgery. I was waiting in his room for him to come out of recovery. Finally they wheeled him in, and he must have still been under the effects of anesthesia, because, very uncharacteristically, he was screaming at the top of his lungs in what sounded like mortal pain.
And I fainted. I went down like a bucket of rocks and, on my way to the floor, hit my left temple on the metal guardrail at the foot of his hospital bed.
I was in a coma for three and a half days and woke up in the room across the hall from Noel’s. He was recovering well and was standing beside my bed when I opened my eyes. I was stunned when he told me what had happened and how long I’d been unconscious.
A nurse brought me a tray of food. IVs had been keeping me fed and hydrated while I was out cold, but I was hungry and eagerly dived in. After a few bites, though, I pushed the tray away and said to the nurse, “I’m sorry, I know I’m not in a five-star restaurant here, but this is the blandest food I’ve ever eaten. There’s no taste to it at all!”
I expected her to shrug and leave with the tray—I could only imagine how many complaints about the food nurses have to put up with in a hospital full of patients. Instead, she looked a little concerned, briefly left the room, and returned a few minutes later with a doctor and a collection of small vials of liquid.
One by one the vials were put under my nose and I was told to sniff each of them and, if I could, identify the smell. I did, and as far as I could tell, every vial was filled with nothing but water. They had no odor at all . . . not even the one the doctor showed me that, according to the label, was filled with formaldehyde.
The way the doctor put it was “You’re in serious trouble with your olfactory senses.”
The way I put it was, and is, that since that day I fainted and hit my left temple in early 1982, I’ve had absolutely no sense of taste or smell.
I know there are far, far worse things that can and do happen to people, but from the very beginning I can honestly say that the psychological effects are even worse than the physical ones.
I put up a constant fight against anorexia. I make sure to put a certain amount of healthy food on my plate, just to keep up my weight and my stamina. Otherwise, believe me, food is of no interest when you can neither taste it nor smell it, which makes Thanksgiving dinners and meals in gourmet bistros no fun at all. In fact, when I eat in restaurants I have to be sure to order what someone else orders, so that on those very rare occasions when the food tastes or smells a little off, they’ll notice and alert me not to eat it. It’s boring, and it’s painful knowing that I’ll never be able to look forward to another meal or some special treat I used to love.
One day, trying to be a good sport and cook a nice healthy lunch for myself, I fixed myself a casserole, slid it in the oven, and kaboom! The stove exploded, burning off my left eyelashes, my left eyebrow, and the left side of my hair because I couldn’t smell the gas leak. I had to have all the gas appliances in the house switched to electric.
Rain, flowers, freshly mown grass, fresh-baked cookies, perfume—all those smells I used to love are just memories now. It took me years to stop walking over to a vase of roses to take a nice long whiff. I still enjoy having them around to look at and appreciate how beautiful they are. I’m sure they fill the house with that wonderful aroma. I wouldn’t know. I love Joy perfume. I’ve worn it every day since I was in my teens, and I still do—just because I can’t smell it doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t enjoy it.
It’s amazing how much of life is based on taste and smell, and I miss those senses terribly. I’m resigned to the fact that they’re irreversibly, irretrievably gone. I resent it when I let myself think about it, which is why I refuse to let myself think about it very often. What earthly good does it do?
Noel and I were divorced on January 19, 1982. Happy birthday, Ti
ppi.
I’d filed months earlier, when it had become impossible to ignore the fact that there was nothing between us anymore to support and sustain a healthy marriage. The divorce’s being finalized on my birthday was a sad gift of relief to both of us.
There was never a question of which of us would be leaving. Noel moved to a cottage in Beverly Hills and continued with his TV commercial business, the Film Consortium.
I stayed right here in Shambala with the animals, more beautiful than Beverly Hills any day as far as I’m concerned.
Once the marriage was over, once the anger and the hurt and the turbulence were over, I felt the most peaceful relief, a deep inner sense of freedom. I believed in myself again. I was in charge of my own life again, after seventeen years of nonstop impulsive chaos at a dead run. There had been enough excitement, enough surprises and challenges, to fill several lifetimes, so I didn’t regret those seventeen years. I’d just reached the same moment that still resonated in me from a hill in Minnesota when I was ten years old: “I’m not going to do that anymore.”
And how could I ever regret my years with Noel, when if it weren’t for him, there would be no Shambala?
In 1982 I had the joy of giving Melanie and her fiancé Steven Bauer a small, wonderful wedding in New York. I’d missed her first wedding, and I didn’t just want to attend this one, I wanted to make it as special as possible. Melanie was a breathtaking bride, she and Steven were glowing, and I was the proudest mother of the bride in the history of weddings. I remember waving good-bye to the newlyweds as they left the church in a horse-drawn carriage and sending off a silent prayer for their happiness, and for Melanie and me to always stay as close as we were that day.
Three years later I had the awesome thrill of being in the hospital room when Melanie gave birth to my first grandchild, Alexander Bauer. Maybe it’s because I saw him take his first breath, maybe it’s because he’s been so uniquely him from the day he was born, but Alexander and I have always had a special connection that I treasure.
I’ve never been a woman of leisure, or even aspired to be one. Part of reclaiming control of my life after Noel and I divorced was getting back to work and starting down the long road toward financial recovery.
At the top of the priority list was making sure the wild animals were taken care of—not just our animals at what was now the Shambala Preserve but wild animals everywhere. I did a lot of research and a lot of footwork, and in 1983 the Roar Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, officially came into being, with a mission statement that reads, “The Roar Foundation supports The Shambala Preserve and shares its mission: to provide sanctuary to exotic felines who have suffered from gross mistreatment and neglect so they can regain their physical and mental health and live out their lives in dignity; to advocate no buying, selling, breeding or trading of exotic felines; to educate the public about exotic felines; and to advocate for legislation to protect them. P.S. And elephants too!”
Noelle, our tigon, had already become one of the Roar Foundation’s greatest goodwill ambassadors, a celebrity in the cat world. Photos of her were being published all over the world, from Moscow to Bombay to Manila, and with good reason—she was exquisite. Full-grown now, she was a little larger than the average tigress, tall and long-legged. Her stripes had softened from coal black to subtle brown. Her base coat was orange, with a pure white belly and some mottled spots on top of her head. I’d never seen a big cat quite like her, and apparently neither had anyone else.
Her personality was as unique as her looks. She spoke fluent “lion” and “tiger,” both with an almost feminine shyness. She loved to swim, and she was the best jumper at Shambala—she startled me awake more than once by leaping up on the roof of my house at dawn, seemingly just for the fun of watching me and Liberato or Penny or Jesus try to entice her back down to the ground again. She was affectionate and playful with humans, especially skilled at the lions’ art of tripping innocent passersby with her paw.
I was in Orange County at a breakfast meeting one day when I got a call from Penny, who responded to my hello with an urgent, “Are you sitting down?”
Oh, God, I thought, what now? Cats were loose? Another fire in the canyon? Someone was injured? I braced myself and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Noelle just had a cub.”
Within minutes I was on my way home to Shambala.
I’d visited the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens while I was in Australia for the opening of Roar, and I had a long talk with their head veterinarian, Dr. Ray Butler, about the population problem in the compounds. Thanks to a birth control pill called megestrol acetate, not a single cub had been born in the Melbourne Zoo for more than two years, and there were no potentially harmful side effects. The minute I returned to Shambala, we put every female big cat on the pill . . . except Noelle, who, as a tigon, was supposedly sterile, with an obvious emphasis on the word “supposedly.” We knew she’d mated many times with a very handsome tiger-about-town named Anton, but since she “couldn’t get pregnant,” their sex life was none of our business.
Now, though, I suppose it was. Noelle’s cub was a male. I named him Nathaniel, a derivation of my given name Nathalie, and according to the zoologists I contacted he was very possibly the only “ti-tigon” in existence at the time.
I was mesmerized by that cub and by Noelle’s approach to parenting. She was understandably possessive about him. He was about ten days old when Noelle saw Penny sitting on the floor beside Nathaniel, leaning toward him, talking to him and petting him. Noelle walked up behind her and took Penny’s neck in her mouth, her teeth closed firmly without puncturing the skin. Penny was experienced enough not to move a muscle; she just quietly said, “I understand, Noelle,” and Noelle let go of her neck. But Noelle wasn’t done yet—she then used her paws to move Penny to the middle of the room and away from her cub.
Noelle was also diligent in teaching Nathaniel about manners and proper behavior around humans. While she loved playing with him, she also didn’t hesitate to box his ears and literally sit on him, nonchalantly gazing around and ignoring his screams of protest at being pinned to the ground, when he got too rowdy. A lot of the credit goes to her for the fact that our one-of-a-kind ti-tigon, who had the physique of an NFL linebacker when he reached adulthood, was transformed from a wildly rambunctious cub into an absolutely angelic grown-up.
Another transformation at Shambala I had the privilege of witnessing had its roots in the elephant barn, of all places.
Chris Gallucci, our welder/handler/maintenance worker, had proved his dedication over and over again, especially on that horrible night of the flood, when he worked nonstop in a blinding rainstorm for what must have been fifteen hours straight. He still seemed to be looking for some kind of real purpose, but there was something special about him that I hoped we could find a way to harness; we didn’t want to lose him, and he was too good a man to live a disconnected drifter’s life.
Suddenly one day our elephant handler was gone, and to my complete surprise Chris spoke up and said he’d like to give it a try. I thought of it as a huge help, nothing more, until we could find someone experienced and permanent.
Not long after Chris became Timbo and Kura’s fill-in handler, I stopped by the elephant barn one evening at feeding time. There was Chris, just finishing preparing their dinner. He’d arranged a giant semicircle of oat hay for each of them. On top of the hay were separate mounds of a grain and molasses mixture, and inside all that, he’d hidden four apples, three oranges, six bananas, and a half-dozen carrots. Dessert—four fresh coconuts—was waiting near Chris’s feet to be served when the elephants had finished their meal. The only things missing were candles and monogrammed linen napkins.
He’d gone to so much trouble, and it was so sweet and unexpected. I asked if he did this every night.
He grinned, a little sheepish. “Not every night,” he said, and I walked away not sure which of them I was happier for—Timbo and Kura, or Chris.
“I’m sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour,” I told him, “but Timbo’s smashed the barn door to pieces. Kura’s fine.”
I waited with the elephants for Chris to arrive, explaining to Timbo that this behavior was unacceptable, not to mention expensive, as if he cared, and reassuring Kura that I knew she hadn’t participated in this act of vandalism.
Timbo was obviously feeling guilty, because he started making low rumbling noises when he heard Chris’s car pull up. Chris marched toward us, and the minute he was close enough, Timbo gently wrapped his trunk around Chris’s head, then placed the top of his trunk on Chris’s head, then rubbed his cheek, then pulled Chris’s head toward his mouth, almost engulfing it. Finally he lifted one of his giant feet and held it above the ground, almost begging Chris, who had yet to say a word, to please forgive him and tell him they were still friends. There was clearly a connection between Chris and those elephants, and a lot of love and trust and affection. The only remaining question was who had conquered whom.
Former loner/drifter/biker dude Chris Gallucci, the man I thought would move on a few short weeks after he roared up to our door on his Harley, is still here forty years later, director of Shambala, vice president of operations, and one of my closest, most trusted, most valued friends.
In the meantime, after a few months of regrouping, I wanted to work beyond my work at Shambala—something that would actually bring home some money. I needed to work, and I still didn’t know how to type.
It was time to do what I’d learned how to do and see if Hollywood still remembered me.
They did, and within a happily short time I was cast in a movie called Foxfire Light with a wonderful group of actors who included Leslie Nielsen, Faye Grant, and Lara Parker. After all those years of insanity making Roar, with coproducer responsibilities on top of performing, I was overjoyed to just act and leave the rest of the work to the crew.