Christopher Bray

Hitchcock’s favourite bird

We are promised the full story of her lurid relationship with Alfred Hitchcock. What we get are tedious descriptions of her animal sanctuary in California

issue 31 December 2016

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.

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