TIPPI HEDREN: Young actors always want advice from us, which I find funny.
CHRIS NEUMER: I read a quote of yours and I don’t know if it’s actually something you said or just something attributed to you, but you said, "If you want to be an actor, be independently wealthy or have a backup plan.
TIPPI HEDREN: Yes.
CHRIS NEUMER: I talked to Morgan Freeman recently and he said that whenever people come up to him and ask him how they can break into the industry, he tells them not to have a fallback plan because if you do, that’s where you’ll end up.
TIPPI HEDREN: I can see that. That’s very easy for him to say because he’s successful, but however, many many times that success doesn’t come. That can be very painful.
CHRIS NEUMER: And you don’t see the failures. You never see the people who tried really hard and didn’t get it.
TIPPI HEDREN: That’s true and there are many more of them.
CHRIS NEUMER: Hold on, I have to move. I can see my reflection in the window behind you and it’s freaking me out looking at myself while I’m talking to you. I don’t like being constantly distracted by anything, let alone me. I can’t stay in those hotel rooms where the mirrors reflect on the beds and I can’t do interviews while I’m facing a glass window.
TIPPI HEDREN: I have a hairdresser who is always looking in the mirror and she is always watching herself. It’s very odd.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s worse than if there’s a television up there that I could be watching. Let’s be honest though, I’m pretty and I can’t not look. That’s what I was getting at.
TIPPI HEDREN: Well you are too. Helen Reddy did a song about that a year or so … "you probably think we’re talking about you".
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh yeah. Was that the one that was supposedly about Paul Simon? You’re so vain, you think this song is about you.
TIPPI HEDREN: Yes, yes. Something about walking by the mirror looking at himself.
CHRIS NEUMER: Generally I try not to look in the mirror after I’ve left my house, but this one is right there, I can’t help it. But I have to say I was excited about the opportunity to talk to you. Every once in a while I see actors and I don’t know the first thing about acting. I think it’s pretending. Some people get really angry if I say that.
TIPPI HEDREN: A lot of actors will say it’s pretending.
CHRIS NEUMER: Other people will say, "No you’re right. It’s pretty much that." I always remember liking Marnie. Now I’m apparently one of the few people who hold this distinction. There’s this girl with obvious psychological problems and you pulled it off. When I heard that you were coming to town, I thought, "This gives me an opportunity to take a look back at some of the other stuff you have done. And then, while researching you, I learned about the whole thing about Hitchcock not putting in a good word for you, actually putting in many bad words about you. I didn’t know about this. I thought well we have things to talk about and I leapt at the opportunity. It seems interesting to me that your first real two films, The Birds and Marnie, here are these enormous successes, maybe Marnie wasn’t the big box office success …
TIPPI HEDREN: (looking at an ad for the movie Nathalie) You know what? Nathalie. You hardly ever see that name and that’s my real name, Nathalie?
CHRIS NEUMER: The film title is pronounced Natalie though. It’s French.
TIPPI HEDREN: Yes and in Russian it’s spelled with an h as well. I like Na-tal’-ee. I’ve never been called that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Na-tal’-ee?
TIPPI HEDREN: Nathalie, Na-tal’-ee, nothing like that. It’s always either Tuksa which my father gave me and that went on to be Tippi.
CHRIS NEUMER: Or darling.
TIPPI HEDREN: ‘Tuksa’ meant sweetheart or little darling, whatever, in Swedish.
CHRIS NEUMER: As we were saying, you had these enormous successes right at the beginning part of your career. You were I think 31 or 30 then. I know you had been modeling and all that. Had you been working really hard to become an actress?
TIPPI HEDREN: Not at all. In fact I had several studios come to me while I was modeling. That was in the fifties. During that time television had taken over everybody’s home and people weren’t going to the movies. That was the demise of the big film studios, that’s when it started to crumble.
CHRIS NEUMER: Which elements of the big …
TIPPI HEDREN: The building of the stars where they put the actors that they wanted to really push into one film after the other. All of that was going away in the fifties.
CHRIS NEUMER: The contract thing was sort of breaking down?
TIPPI HEDREN: Yes.
CHRIS NEUMER: I got to figure that your situation might have put the fork in that one, almost, like not being contracted to certain studios.
TIPPI HEDREN: Sure, but I didn’t want to take anybody up on that because I had really good momentum going with my modeling career. To move to California and have the possibility of them saying, "Your option is up and we have nothing for you to do so it’s adios." By that time the momentum that I had in New York would have been over, so I thought that wouldn’t be a good business move at this particular time.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, how do you turn it down either?
TIPPI HEDREN: Well when Hitchcock …
CHRIS NEUMER: At the end of it, yes, but at the beginning of it you can’t.
TIPPI HEDREN: I couldn’t. I mean I was doing just great.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m sure that you had a little bit of training in acting or …
TIPPI HEDREN: Only as far as the commercials went. It’s one thing to be involved with a product, but becoming a character is another different thing.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is true. I used to be of the opinion that none of Hitchcock’s stuff should ever be remade and then I saw Topaz or it could have been Torn Curtain. It was one of his 60s films that you weren’t in. I saw it and I just wished that somebody could take this script, take the edits he made and just remake it but on location with different lighting and not even necessarily better special effects, just make it look better. Then I realized that that was exactly what Gus Van Sant tried to do. Then I came full circle. With the exception of North by Northwest, Rear Window and The Lady Vanishes, I am of the opinion now that everything should be remade. I happened to see The Birds again recently. You walk into a room and there will be shadows of you going in about 7 different directions because of all the different lights. The special effects aren’t bad. They work. What drives me nuts, it might even be the opening shot of you in The Birds is you are walking across the street in downtown San Francisco. You pass a bus stop or a street light and you are off set. The difference in lighting always gets me. I’m the only person apparently who feels this way. I’m curious, as an actor in creating a character, did having rear projection things where you were on the boat and where you have these huge lights pouring down on you from things, did that make it difficult to create a character?
TIPPI HEDREN: No, it didn’t. That’s the way it was done then.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was it easier when you were on location?
TIPPI HEDREN: We were on location only for the far shots.
CHRIS NEUMER: There were a couple of shots in the birthday party I believe.
TIPPI HEDREN: Where Rod and I go up on the hill? That was in studio.
CHRIS NEUMER: The whole hill or just the top of the hill?
TIPPI HEDREN: It was the top of the hill.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, but the four times when you had it in these films when you were on location … again I’ve been on set and I think it’s the most boring place in the world and I can’t figure out how the actors do it, but is it easier as an actress to get into this and forget about the crew and all that when you’re on location as opposed to on a soundstage?
TIPPI HEDREN: No, I think it’s easier on set.
CHRIS NEUMER: Why is that?
TIPPI HEDREN: Because there is more control.
CHRIS NEUMER: For you?
TIPPI HEDREN: Well that’s probably because that’s the way I was brought up in the motion picture industry. The Birds was my first film and Marnie was the second. Hitch wanted to do most of the close-ups indoors. In the studio he had more control of the light rather than giving it a perfectly natural look.
CHRIS NEUMER: His day for night shots in To Catch a Thief should go down in the annals of history as one of the all time bad, bad decisions. I just keep yelling, "The sky is blue, the sky is blue." And yet both films still come off and they play very well. Do you watch them at all?
TIPPI HEDREN: Uh….
CHRIS NEUMER: Do any little things like that bother you or do you think you should spend an extra day on location or maybe he shouldn’t have had the Vaseline lens on me so much?
TIPPI HEDREN: Oh sure. I don’t know of an actor who doesn’t look back and say, "I wish I would have done this a different way."
CHRIS NEUMER: But the big things. There’s a difference between, "I should have worn a zip-up sweat shirt and I should have worn a button-down" versus "I really don’t like the lighting scheme on this film."
TIPPI HEDREN: My looking at the films is directed to the acting part of it more than the technical part of it. Much more than the technical part of it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you find that the technical can ever affect the actors, and take this for any of the projects that you have ever worked on?
TIPPI HEDREN: I think the worst part is a director who doesn’t know what he is doing. That’s the most difficult.
CHRIS NEUMER: In what sense?
TIPPI HEDREN: Well, not having a plan for the picture as a whole. Not just picking it apart scene by scene, but having a real thought about how this picture is going to look. Not filming in sequence, you have to think about what you have already done, whether you have done it or not. It’s a great deal more difficult I think than doing a Broadway play. There you can build up to your whatever and carry it through. With film you are stopping and starting and then you go to lunch and then …
CHRIS NEUMER: Someone once described the act of being a director as making the movie before you make the movie.
TIPPI HEDREN: That’s what Hitchcock did. He felt like the film was finished the first day of shooting.
CHRIS NEUMER: That sometimes seeped through. If you can say anything negative about him, I think that’s about the only thing you can say. It’s almost hard not to like his films though because they were so well thought out.
TIPPI HEDREN: Oh absolutely.
CHRIS NEUMER: Every once in a while you hear that catchy tune from the 60s or 80s and somebody goes, "Oh, I don’t like that." You can’t not like this song. He’s one of the few filmmakers in history who you can’t not like his films.
TIPPI HEDREN: They are gripping.
CHRIS NEUMER: They are. I just saw yesterday that apparently not only are they remaking The Birds, but Michael Bay is attached to it. Like him or hate him, he is a very polarizing filmmaker. Your thoughts on this?
TIPPI HEDREN: I prefer not to discuss it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did they call you for a cameo?
TIPPI HEDREN: I doubt that they will.
CHRIS NEUMER: But if they did?
TIPPI HEDREN: I would have to think about that.
CHRIS NEUMER: Artful dancing. I will let you off the hook. Going back again, you had this enormous amount of success very early on in your career and you’ve certainly been successful throughout, but there was that little hiccup there with Hitchcock. How did you not get burned out after that? How did you not just want to take a big urn and throw it at something? How did you deal with that?
TIPPI HEDREN: I don’t know if my parents taught me this or whatever, but what happens, happens and if you let it eat you up, it will eat you up and I never let that happen. This was something of my own choice to get out of that contract, so it was my doing.
CHRIS NEUMER: That certainly does make it easier I suppose. My hat is off to you. Every once in a while when I get in these weird positions, I don’t know why this still strikes me as odd, but I had lunch with Lou Diamond Phillips at Ivy by the Sea over in Santa Monica. I’m walking around in Santa Monica going back to my car an hour or hour and a half after our lunch ended. These two people, obviously tourists, come up to me and say, "Oh my God. You were the guy eating with Lou Diamond." I’m like, "It’s Lou Diamond Phillips." Let’s be honest, the guy is making B-movies that go straight to DVD. I just was seen talking to him and it’s this weird thing where I get into the headspace of what it’s like to be an actor. I realized I would make the worst actor in the world. I would make the worst famous person. I’d be yelling at people all the time. Stuff would be eating me up. It would be a combination of George Clooney and someone with an extreme anger problem. When you say it just didn’t eat you up, I just can’t comprehend that. To me it would just be like game on. More power to you. With this being almost your entry into Hollywood and acting, were you surprised, when your daughter decided to try and get into this as well?
TIPPI HEDREN: I was very surprised when she did because I had nothing to do with her getting into films. She got into it, she went with a friend of hers who was going on a meeting about Night Moves. Her friend was a little bit older than Melanie and they said that that girl was too old for the role. They looked at Melanie and said, "You would be perfect."
CHRIS NEUMER: So she wasn’t actually going in for the role.
TIPPI HEDREN: No, she was just with her friend.
CHRIS NEUMER: I hate those people. I’ve never gone anywhere and had somebody just been like, "Just accompany my friend, but we’re going to give the job to the guy over there who doesn’t know anything." But please continue.
TIPPI HEDREN: So she came home and said, "I met … I can’t think of the director’s name. I said, "Oh that’s nice." The next day they called again and they wanted her so she got the job. She’s seen the disappointment, the hurt, the hard work, the hours that it takes.
CHRIS NEUMER: And the Golden Globe. Don’t leave that out.
TIPPI HEDREN: And the Golden Globe and the klieg lights and the red carpet. She’s seen all of that and she really decided to get into it. After a couple of films she went to New York and studied with Stella Adler and she took it very seriously.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was just struck with your comment when you said she saw the hard work and the hours and all that. I’m wondering what the ratio is…
TIPPI HEDREN: And the disappointments.
CHRIS NEUMER: And the disappointment. I wonder what the ratio of the bad … Like when you are working, you are working. 18-hour days are nothing. I can’t get over all the makeup time you guys have to put in. You see all the immense amount of time and work that goes into it. I’m wondering what the ratio is where you go, "It’s just not worth it." Obviously almost nobody who is in the business looks at the amount of work and goes, "I just can’t do this." I wonder where that ratio is between heartache, hard work and disappointment and "Oh, okay. I think I’ll do it." Your daughter must be very, very, very driven.
TIPPI HEDREN: I think that she is. She called me one day and said, "Mom I’m going to play Roxie in Chicago. I said, "Oh, you are not." She said, "Yes I am." She had a dance studio made out of one of her living rooms in Hancock Park and she also had the studio in New York to go to. No matter which coast she was on, she could practice and rehearse. The singing coach and the dancing coach and all of it, she had them on both coasts. Did you see her in Chicago?
CHRIS NEUMER: I did not.
TIPPI HEDREN: It was so great. When the critics went, they all went with the idea that they were going to pan her and they couldn’t. She was just wonderful.
CHRIS NEUMER: I sat through the Broadway showing probably about 5 years ago and I never quite recovered from it. It was 3 1/2 hours plus intermission.
TIPPI HEDREN: Who was in it? Who was the star?
CHRIS NEUMER: Sandy Duncan? Is that possible?
TIPPI HEDREN: Maybe. I can’t imagine her doing that.
CHRIS NEUMER: The weird thing was that she bowed out at intermission. She played the first part and then her understudy came in and did the second half. That was my reaction; you can do that? I didn’t even know that was possible.
TIPPI HEDREN: Something traumatic must have happened. They never explained it?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, she just waved and said goodbye. She came out and said she wasn’t feeling that well and here was her understudy. We could continue watching. That was my entry into the world of Chicago. Well that and the fact that I live there.
TIPPI HEDREN: (laughter) Oh, wow.
CHRIS NEUMER: There are a couple of questions that I have . I’ve interviewed probably over 350 people since I’ve been working for the magazine and there are certain questions that you ask and you get a good response to or you think you could get a good response to. You sort of keep them and roll them over. One of those is this standard question; how did what you as an actor look for in a director change after this project? I thought I can’t ask that question without obvious exclusions or things like that because I was imagining what kind of comical reactions you might have to that. I am still curious to know outside of non-stalker-like obsession, what sorts of traits you noticed you would like in directors after this? There are a couple of other questions that I had too about how your opinion of a given project would change once you got away from it. I read a couple of comments after you learned that Hitchcock had died, something about relief. I realized that like it or not, we as people who write, cannot tell your story adequately without mentioning this unfortunate incident. What’s your thought? Is that just the way it is?
TIPPI HEDREN: Ahhh, probably. There was a lot of hurt with the Hitchcock relationship. It was very, very difficult. He was a very complicated man. When he became obsessed with me, it was a very difficult time. To be the object of someone’s obsession when you are not interested, is very hard. I had great empathy for him because when somebody is obsessed, it envelops you.
CHRIS NEUMER: Envelops you or the obsessor?
TIPPI HEDREN: The obsessor and that’s very difficult.
CHRIS NEUMER: I cannot begin to imagine. I know you have told the story a number of times about how real birds were not supposed to be used when they were throwing them at you in the attic and Cary Grant came by and said that you were the bravest actor he had ever seen. When he came by did anyone pull you aside and say, "Oh by the way, Hitch is certifiably crazy. Makes Nick Nolte look like Tom Hanks." Anything like that?
TIPPI HEDREN: They all went along with the lie telling me about the mechanical birds.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, I was talking about Hitchcock’s behavior.
TIPPI HEDREN: Oh, nobody really talked about it. It was extremely tense at times on the set. Extremely tense.
CHRIS NEUMER: I saw Marnie before I learned what was going on, but with the almost blackmail type control over a woman and a woman played by you no less, that was interestingly enough what drew me to the material. I thought this was the 60s and they were talking about this and there’s not just one pseudo rape, there’s two. What is going on? Where is this guy’s head. Then I learned that this is almost in a very principled sense what is going on on set while you are shooting this material as well. Did this translate over to the crew or other people?
TIPPI HEDREN: Oh, yes. Sure it did.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did that make things harder?
TIPPI HEDREN: Of course.
CHRIS NEUMER: In what sense?
TIPPI HEDREN: Have you ever had in a working situation a really strange relationship?
CHRIS NEUMER: I deal with publicists. All relationships are strange.
TIPPI HEDREN: (laughs) Okay. From morning to night, having to deal with this. It is so restricting and you are on guard all the time and then have the responsibility of a major motion picture.
CHRIS NEUMER: That it turned out with any semblance of coherence is … No, the obsessor could probably put the thing together well , but that the acting came off with any degree of clarity and precision is a testament to that. What kind of headspace do you have to go into to pull that off?
TIPPI HEDREN: I think about how I managed it, because at the time it was … I think what I did was to say, "This is what I have to do right now. This is my job right now and it’s hard. It’s very difficult.
CHRIS NEUMER: In that sense would it have been easier when you were in character than when you were just getting ready to get into character? If the camera is on you at least know what is going on.
TIPPI HEDREN: Sure. It’s interesting too because when you are actually working and you are in character, if you had a headache prior to going into action, it goes away. I think you could talk to almost any actor and they will say the same thing. It’s just bizarre!
CHRIS NEUMER: And you noticed that actually with that or other roles as well?
TIPPI HEDREN: Mostly with that one.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now if we could somehow translate this over to cancer, I think we would be on to something.
TIPPI HEDREN: Totally. Absolutely.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’ve heard about things that are like that. You forget about your worries of the day or you forget about a bad day, but I’ve never actually heard the ‘I had a headache, got into character and it went away.’ Does it come back when you are out of character?
TIPPI HEDREN: Sure.
CHRIS NEUMER: Really? Does it ever go the other way where your character has a headache, a migraine or something like that, you get into character and then you get the headache?
TIPPI HEDREN: That hasn’t happened to me.
CHRIS NEUMER: So the idea is, and I realize it might sound a little flippant... I don’t mean it with any lack of respect. The key is to get a character who is doing better than you are in real life. That way the pangs of the headache and things like that go away when you get in character.
TIPPI HEDREN: Yes… In a perfect world wouldn’t that be wonderful. You could say, "Okay, now I’m going to become somebody who is in great shape, mentally very focused and feels wonderful. That’s who I am going to be today."
CHRIS NEUMER: Unfortunately I think that you would have to be criminally insane for that to work.
TIPPI HEDREN: Yeah, that could be a little scary.
CHRIS NEUMER: One of the other things that has always fascinated me about directors; either they are the most normal guys you will ever meet or they are just so far out there . They are just way out there. I see this circumstance with him. I had the misfortune of meeting his daughter. She was here last week. Worst interview I’ve ever done, hands down. At one point in time I asked her to help me out with an answer she was being very short with and she told me that she wouldn’t. I thought about the idea of a legacy of that. This is what you grace people with. I was just doing the backwards math on that. I thought that if I ever have a kid who does that, I’m just going to … Well wait a minute. What does that say about me. That’s just very, very interesting.
TIPPI HEDREN: Was she not answering?
CHRIS NEUMER: (crosses arms and legs) She sat there like this.
TIPPI HEDREN: Really! Why?
CHRIS NEUMER: Lord knows.
TIPPI HEDREN: If you’re going to do this sort of thing, what’s the point?
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t know. I have zero idea. There was actually a conversation I had with her where it went; I mentioned the possibilities of remakes and asked her if she viewed them as good or bad and she said, "Eh, you know." I asked if there were any films she would like to see remade more than others or less than others. She said, "Potentially." I asked if that was a yes or a no? She said, "Yes." ‘Yes’ some would like to get remade or no you don’t. Then she said, "No." That was when I asked if she could give me some help here, ‘yes’ full sentence. That was when she said, "No." Okay, we’re done here. That was the only first-hand experience I had at seeing somewhat of the psychology of what was going on.
TIPPI HEDREN: There’s so much to talk about Alfred Hitchcock. We could go on for several days. You know what doing those two films did for me was to give me an opportunity to open doors to do things that I wanted to do. It made it much easier.
CHRIS NEUMER: What were the things that you wanted to do?
TIPPI HEDREN: I wanted to be involved with an organization to do relief work as a volunteer. I went all over the world with them. Every time we’d get in trouble, the actress from The Birds opened the doors and things would be a lot easier. We were able to meet politicians who made our programs better. I’m working trying to get a bill passed in Washington on a federal to stop the breeding of the big cats in the United States to be sold as pets.
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, football players have to have something that they can own.
TIPPI HEDREN: (laughs) Very good.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you expect them to be satisfied with just pit bulls?
TIPPI HEDREN: I guess you are right. However, just because of my being in The Birds, it has made it possible for me to accomplish things a lot faster than it would ordinarily take. That’s very gratifying.
Chris Neumer, To Catch a Thief, Columns, Subscribe
