Vintage Tippi Hedren Interview

This vintage interview was featured in The Sunday New York News Coloroto Magazine, August 23, 1964. I figured it would be appropriate to post it on the day that "The Girl," the very 'creative' HBO movie based on supposed events that occurred between Tippi Hedren & Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of "The Birds" and "Marnie." This article comes off as a bit wacky (Tippi buying cement mixers as an investment?!?), but is quite fun to read in retrospect. Keep in mind this came out one month AFTER "Marnie" was released, and one month before her marriage to Hollywood agent Noel Marshall (which makes it even more bizarre, since the thrust of the article is about how independent she is). The photo seen above is the same one used on the cover of the magazine, and was shot by Harry Warnecke and William Klein on the set of "Marnie." Here goes...

'I'm too independent'

New movie star Tippi Hedren tells why she relies on no one but herself.

By MAY OKON

On a hot summer's day, a chat with a cool-eyed blonde named Tippi Hedren turned out to be as refreshing as a cup of lemon ice. Tippi achieved instant stardom last year in her first film, "The Birds," a scary produced by Alfred Hitchcock, under whose wing her movie career was hatched. Now Tipi was in town on behalf of her second Hitchcock starter, "Marnie," in which she is teamed with Sean Connery, he being between James Bond adventures.



Where did she get the name, Tippi? (The record books in Lafayette, Minn., where she was born on Jan. 19, 1935, list her as Nathalie Hedren.) She explained: "My father gave me the name when I weighed six pounds, seven ounces. It comes from Tupsa, a Swedish term for 'little girl.'"

Was there any truth to the story that pixie producer Hitchcock offered Tippi a 7-year contract after seeing her do a one-minute canned milk commercial on TV…through his agent and without meeting her?

"It's the absolute truth," said Tippi. "I was so stunned when I found out who the producer was, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I had started modeling at the age of 13 back home in Minnesota, but I didn't think about becoming an actress then or later, when I was modeling in New York and doing TV commercials.

"The road to acting is a very tough one, and being a starving would-be actress was not for me. I chose modeling because it was very lucrative. Being a model certainly isn't as mentally stimulating as acting, but it's a marvelous way for a girl to make a living—it's slightly glamorous and you meet exciting people—and I was terribly happy doing it.

"I was very lucky. I arrived in New York on a Friday in 1953 and on Monday morning I went to a model agency. I worked for the first person they sent me to that afternoon,a nd I worked from then on.

"I wasn't sophisticated when I came to New York. But there are situations that you live through…you survive…I was married in 1954, and divorced five years later. I have a daughter, Melanie, who's 6 now…she's the light of my life. I worked very hard at my marriage, and when I came to the realization of divorce, it was kind of the end of the rope. Everything leaves its mark. I gained strength through it, but I absolutely believe it's the wrong kind of strength.

"I'm too independent…much too much so. I think women can get into a lot of trouble by being this independent. Because you rely on no one but yourself. You say to yourself, 'I don't need anybody,' and every man reads in your eyes, 'I don't need you.' I think a woman should absolutely feel that she needs someone to take care of her.

"When you're thrown into a position of having to take care of a child…run a house smoothly…and you see that you can do these things yourself, and you're reasonably happy doing them yourself…well, this scares men off. I don't meet many men who are as capable of doing these things as I am. That's the problem…and I recognize it as a problem. When I meet the man that I look forward to marrying some day, I think I'm going to have to fake a certain amount of dependence.

"Meanwhile, I find myself being a sort of a strange character. I am not a lonely person. I can be alone and live alone…without a husband, I mean. I work very hard at being an actress…at learning my craft. But I found that I need other outlets, so I started thinking about what I could do with the months I'm not involved in pictures. First I produced some rock 'n' roll records, but the 'singers' are a temperamental, kookie group, so I gave that up. Then I bought two cement pumps—huge mechanical monsters that are used in the construction of high rise buildings and tunnels. They're very expensive new—about $25,000 apiece—I bought mine secondhand. I rent them out, and it's quite profitable. I'm in the process of buying two more.

"This wasn't enough, so I started buying houses. I own two in Sherman Oaks, Calif.—one I live in with Melanie and our housekeeper, the other I rent out. Then I bought two more that had been vandalized—you know, broken into and only the bare walls left. I had them fixed up and they're for sale. Now I'm looking for more to buy.

"I enjoy the money I'm making in pictures because it gives me the opportunity to do these things. And I need things to keep me busy or else I'll end up hanging around the pool all day.

"Being interviewed time and again doesn't bore me—I try to make a game of it. I try to change things as much as I can without changing the story or the truth. All the questions I get asked—just thinking of truthful answers helps me get to know myself better.

"I've learned several important things about myself: one is that I don't run scared. Another is that I have to think very hard to find a real big problem in my life."



To find out more about the hailstorm surrounding the content of "The Girl," visit savehitchcock.wordpress.com, which has daily updates with those who worked with Hitch on "The Birds" and "Marnie." Very interesting stuff!

See more Tippi Hedren and Shambala photos on my Tippi Hedren/Shambala web page.

Screen Gem Saturdays: Noble Failure—Marnie

This was the title of an article from Premiere magazine back in August 1998 which discussed famous flops in movie history that might actually have had more going for them than their contemporary audiences gave them credit for. “Marnie” (1964) is just about the only movie mentioned that the magazine doesn’t really have anything negative to say. Instead, it puts it in the misunderstood classic category. Read for yourself:

Alfred Hitchcock directed “Notorious” in 1946, but that title could easily have been applied to Hitchcock’s 1964 mystery, “Marnie.” The previous year, the filmmaker had launched the career of Tippi Hedren, with “The Birds,” and when he cast her again, in “Marnie” (after failing to convince Grace Kelly to temporarily set aside her crown and come out of retirement to take the lead role), Hitchcock was determined to make Hedren a major star—one who would be beholden to him. But, as in the convoluted plots of many of his films, things went awry. Hitchcock’s unnerving fixation on Hedren, about which much has been written, led to an altercation on the set. All the director ever said about it was, “She did what no one is permitted to do. She referred to my weight.” In his later years, Hitchcock freely discussed his movies, but he seldom went into much detail about “Marnie”—and he never spoke of Hedren. That “Marnie” deals with a man’s fetishism and a woman’s psychosexual repression makes the film’s relationship to reality all the more creepy, not to mention endlessly fascinating.



CRITICAL RESPONSE: By the time “Marnie was released, the French New Wave critics (including future directors Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer) had transformed the master of suspense into an artist, and the American critics weren’t having it. In the New York Herald Tribune, Judith Crist said of “Marnie,” “New it isn’t, in form or content. Mr Hitchcock himself made this kind of movie nigh on to twenty years ago, and made it a lot better.” The New York Times wrote, “A strong suspicion arises that Mr. Hitchcock is taking himself too seriously—perhaps the reuslt of listening to too many esoteric admirers.”

BOX OFFICE: After the huge success of “Psycho” in 1960, and the strong showing of “The Birds” in 1963, “Marnie” was a disappointment, if not an outright flop. On 1964’s box office list, it landed at number 30 out of 73 films, and it returned only $2.25 million to the studio.



WHY IT MATTERS: This “great flawed film” (as François Truffaut later dubbed it) was the lst picture of Hitchcock’s moviemaking prime, an amazingly fertile period that began with “Rope,” in 1948. It was the last time he would work with his longtime cinematographer, Robert Burks, and his trusted editor, George Tomasini. It was also the last of his filims to feature the music of the legendary Bernard Herrmann, who would have a falling-out with the director on his next film, “Torn Curtain.” Coming after the visceral shocks of “Pyscho” and “The Birds,” “Marnie” must have befuddled audiences, for it deals almost exclusively with emotional violence; its characters—each tending his or her own particular wound—maneuver themselves like neurotic chess pieces in a game of attration and denial, lust and repression. These characters don’t invite easy empathy, as even screenwriter Jay Presson Allen concedes. “The character of Marnie is a liar and a thief, and there’s nothing sympathetic about her,” she says. But Hedren does her seemingly impenetrable characer proud, and Sean Connery, playing a man who is unnaturally attracted to a woman he knows is a thief, imbues his vexing role with impressive grace and virility. While some of the technical trickery is strained, certain individual moments—the scene where Marnie washes the black dye out of her hair is one of many—have a power that recalls Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Vertigo.” In some ways “Marnie” is an even more tortured and ambivalent ode on obsession than that great film; definitively unsettling, it grows more so with each viewing.



Believe it or not, there is a Disney connection with Marnie. For most of the scenes that show Tippi riding Forio, she is on an actual horse that is on top of a running treadmill, with rear-projection for the background. The 30' treadmill was borrowed from MGM. Even though it was extremely dangerous, Hedren did so without wearing any kind of safety harness.



For closeups, the studio interior filming didn’t work very well, so an alternative solution was sought out. From the book “Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie” by Tony Lee Moral:

Certain shots, such as the close-ups of Marnie on Forio jumping, could not be achieved with a real horse inside the studio, so Hitchcock asked [Hilton] Green [the unit manager for “Marnie”] to investigate a mechanical horse owned by Walt Disney, which he had heard was very authentic. Green met Disney and borrowed the mechanical horse, which was later used for extremely close shots of Hedren and also for [actress Diane] Baker when she is riding in the hunt.



See more “Marnie” photos at my website.

Screen Gem Saturdays: Trouble at the Pet Store

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I am a huge admirer of Tippi Hedren. The Alfred Hitchcock movie, “Marnie” (1964) ranks as one of my very favorite movies; one of those rare films that has so much going on that it bears repeated viewings. Tippi’s film career with Hitch began with “The Birds” (1963). Although it definitely was a much more successful film, it just never really appealed to me very much—it comes off as trying too hard to be arty. There are many extremely well-done and memorable scenes, but as a whole, I feel it was an experiment that just didn’t really gel. Tippi’s performance is passable, especially when one considers that this was her first lead in a major film. Still, her acting in “Marnie” blows this one away. More on that in another post. The photo posted here shows Tippi in the bird store at the beginning of “The Birds,” where she playfully flirts with Rod Taylor. A lobby card from the original release follows; it is often mistakenly thought that the image on the right side of the lobby card is also Tippi when it is actually Jessica Tandy.



Hitch did a huge build-up for Tippi, as he wanted her to eclipse Grace Kelly and all the other “cool blondes” from his past. Here are some publicity photos of her:





See more Tippi Hedren photos at my Tippi Hedren web page.