‘The Birds is coming’ screamed the posters for Tippi Hedren’s only famous film. Well, the cats is coming in her memoir. More than half the book is given over to Shambala Preserve, the lion and tiger sanctuary that Hedren set up in California in the 1980s. If you want to know how to stroke a big cat (‘strong and firm, under his chin or in his mane’), or what it means when they bare their teeth (‘it has nothing to do with anger; lions do their most effective sniffing from two holes in the roof of their mouths’), this is the book for you. But if you’re after the lowdown on what went on between Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock during the making of The Birds and Marnie, this memoir is rather less satisfying.
Ever since the publication of Donald Spoto’s biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, movie fans have wanted to know exactly what the ageing auteur got up to with his latest blonde starlet. Did the man who liked to tell his leading ladies to ‘Call me Hitch, hold the cock’, really fall head over heels for Hedren? Did he really follow her into her dressing-room during the Marnie shoot? And once in there, did he really make what Spoto calls an ‘overt sexual proposition’?
He certainly did, says Hedren, though since she adds that ‘I’ve never gone into detail about this and I never will’, you wonder what kind of autobiography the publishers thought they were buying. The blurb promises ‘the entire story of her complicated relationship with Hitchcock’, but all we get is the familiar story about how Hitchcock ‘suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn’t have been more shocked.’
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