Chapter 1 A Fairy Tale Tippi Hedren was not afraid of birds. In her dressing room, the thirty-two-year-old actress had a raven named Buddy. Hedren was costarring in The Birds , Alfred Hitchcock''s film set in the Northern California seaside town of Bodega Bay, whose avian population was slowly, strangely turning on the residents and attacking them. Buddy was not like those birds. He pranced around, messing with Hedren''s makeup, amusing her endlessly. Buddy was her one true friend on the set, so much so that she put a sign on her dressing room door saying "Buddy and Tippi." As far as Hedren was concerned, her Hollywood story had begun as a fairy tale. One morning Hitchcock saw the blond model in an ad for a diet drink on television; the renowned director was so enraptured that he signed her to play the female lead in his next film.
At her age, Hedren''s days as a top model were over. She knew how lucky she was that Hitchcock had come forward. Hedren knew almost nothing about acting, but Hitchcock took her and molded her into the image he desired. That was all wonderful, but strange things started happening once The Birds began shooting. Hitchcock warned the other men involved in the production to stay away from Hedren. She was often alone on set and increasingly isolated. A single mother, Hedren was lonely and missing her child during the long shooting days. One day, she said Hitchcock tried to embrace her in the chauffeur-driven car in which they were traveling.
As Hedren waited to be called to the set, the assistant director, James H. Brown, entered her dressing room. He appeared worried. "What''s the matter with you?" Hedren asked. "We can''t use the mechanical birds," he said, the words barely audible. "Uh, well, what are we going to use?" Hedren asked, though the answer should have been obvious. "The mechanical birds don''t work, and we have to use real ones." This startled Hedren, and it took her a while to compose herself.
Hedren had already suffered through the birds attacking her and various schoolchildren as they ran down the street in Bodega Bay. But that was nothing like the scores of birds set to go after Hedren this morning as she opened the attic door. In Hitchcock''s four decades of filmmaking, there had never been a scene like this-two minutes so dangerous and, in the director''s mind, so pleasurable to an audience seeking vicarious thrills. Hedren knew the scene had to be shot. As apprehensive as she was, what choice did she have but to leave her dressing room and walk out on the set? Hedren saw that the crew had built a cage attached to the attic door. The trainers inside wore long, thick leather gloves to protect themselves. Beside them sat four good-sized boxes full of ravens and gulls. As Hedren stood before the closed door, Hitchcock yelled, "Action!" She opened the door, and the handlers started hurling live birds at her.
The flapping of feathers, the screams, the squawks-it was terrifying for everyone on set. If this had gone on for a few takes, that would have been one thing. But Hitchcock insisted on continuing until he got every shot he believed he needed. Days passed. On the fifth straight day of shooting this scene, to get the most intimate perspectives of the attacking birds, the crew attached elastic bands to Hedren and tied the feet of several birds to the bands. "Action," Hitchcock shouted. The birds had been trained to claw at a person, and they did their job well. Hedren already had bruises over much of her body from days of working with the creatures, but this was a whole new level of hurt.
The assault continued until the middle of the afternoon, when one of the birds pecked near Hedren''s eyes. An inch or two closer, and she might have lost her sight. Hedren could take no more. "I''m finished," she said. The handlers untied the birds and put them in the cartons. Hedren lay on the floor of the set, crying. Silence fell. When she finally looked up, everyone was gone, and she was alone on the vast soundstage.
She did not know whether her colleagues were ashamed or just glad the business was over. When she managed to pull herself together enough to get up and retreat to her dressing room, her raven, Buddy, was there to greet her. Chapter 2 A Naughty Boy When twenty-five-year-old Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Berlin in the fall of 1924, he was shocked. Not by one thing; by everything . Nothing, it seemed, was verboten in Berlin. Hundreds of nightclubs and bars featured every kind of sexuality, including heterosexual sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, transsexuality, and nudity. In certain corners of this world, it was possible to see the most intimate act between two humans (or maybe more) performed in public like a piece of theater. It was like nothing the cloistered young art director had ever seen back home in England.
Hitchcock was a voyeur, and he had come to the right place at the right time. In Weimar-era Berlin, anything went as bourgeois German society expired. Hitchcock liked to stand outside the circle of life, watching everything that happened within its boundaries. It made sense that his preferred position was behind a camera-observing everything, but at a safe distance. The young filmmaker had a plain, abrupt face obscured by jowls. At his peak, in later years, he would weigh over three hundred pounds. His size was a burden he could not shirk. But as a young man he was merely portly, and he cared deeply about how he looked and the way he came across to others.
Hitchcock was a natty dresser; he wore carefully selected clothes that shrouded his size and drew attention away from his weight. To an outside observer he appeared a worldly sort but, by his admission, he was at that time a complete rube. In fact, he did not even know how the sex act was performed until he was twenty-three. If he had been less shy at his Jesuit school, some of the boys might have taught him the facts of life in the schoolyard, but he had been friendless. Berlin was a revelation. One evening in the German capital, Hitchcock went with two of his associates to a nightclub where men were dancing with each other, a scene straight out of Christopher Isherwood''s quasi-autobiographical The Berlin Stories , the basis for the musical Cabaret . It must have been confusing, disturbing, and possibly alluring for a man of Hitchcock''s secret proclivities. He said later that if he had not married his fiancée, Alma Reville, he might have become a "poof.
" But to a fearful Catholic like Hitchcock, the idea that he would act on his temptation was unthinkable. He boarded up these closeted feelings and walked ahead, never veering from the narrow and straight. The adventure was not over. The group later met two German women at the nightclub, one in her late teens, the other around thirty. Hitchcock said the women offered to drive them home, but took the group to a hotel room instead. A savvier man would have recognized the situation for what it was, but Hitchcock''s naivete again seems to have prevailed. Once in the hotel, the women attempted to woo Hitchcock into having sex. He was shocked-titillated, yes, but also frightened.
No way was he going to lose his virginity to a woman of dubious repute as his acquaintances watched, gauging his performance. As Hitchcock knew too well, fear-real fear-was not only apprehension that some evil menace would come out of the fog to bludgeon one to death. It was something like this evening''s event. It was being asked to perform an act he had never performed before, that he did not know if he could do or even wanted to do-with an audience no less! But one that he must do if he wanted to be called a man. Hitchcock kept saying, "Nein, nein," his words so definitive that the women gave up, got into bed, and made love to each other. It was a spectacle worth observing, and one of the young women in the group pulled out her glasses so she could watch in detail. Hitchcock did not need glasses. Hitchcock never said whether the German women were blondes; if they were, he would have enjoyed the sexual spectacle even more.
To Hitchcock, blond women were the epitome of female beauty, and he fixated on them. Blondes, to his eye, were not just some quirk of genetic nature; they were superior beings, Valkyries with coolness as pure as the Arctic snows encasing fiery inner beings that, to the right man, opened up in lusty wantonness. Blondes'' natural home was Scandinavia and other nations around the Baltic Sea, a region where intense sunlight came with a short, bright summer-a sun-drenched season that was gone scarcely as soon as it arrived. The blondes seen in his native London, however, were almost always the product of chemistry and artifice. Hitchcock looked at the world of women with geographic absolutism. "I more or less base my idea of sexuality on northern European women," he said. "I think the northern Germans, the Scandinavians, and the English are much sexier, although they don''t look it, than those farther south-the Spanish, the Italians." Hitchcock knew that an inordinate amount of his success lay with the women he chose to play in his films.
As a young director in London, he often watched films at newly built movie palaces as large as cathedrals. To achieve success, he would have to fill those seats again and again. As he looked across the theaters, he saw that "women form three-quarters of the average cinema audience." Since they often convinced t.