Lou Lumenick

Lou Lumenick

Movies

Tippi Hedren: I was sexually harassed by Alfred Hitchcock

HOLLYWOOD — Actress Tippi Hedren told a crowd on Wednesday that she endured bizarre sexual harassment at the hands of director Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of “Marnie.”

Then a 32-year-old model, Hedren had no acting experience at all when Hitchcock spotted her one day in 1962 appearing in a commercial on the “Today” show, she told interviewer Ben Mankiewicz during a Citi Card-sponsored conversation at the TCM Classic Film Festival.

“When they told me he was interested, I picked up my jaw from the floor,” she recalled. After an elaborate, $25,000 screen test that he personally directed, Hitchcock signed her to a five-year personal contract that turned out to be a nightmare.

“I admire the man for what he’s given us in film,” she said. “Unfortunately he also had a tendency to become enamored with his leading ladies.”

Though “The Birds” is considered to be Hitchcock’s last unqualified masterpiece, playing the main character caught in an avian holocaust was a harrowing experience for Hedren. She was originally told that mechanical birds would be used in a scene where her character is attacked by crows and seagulls in a house.

The morning that shooting was to begin, an assistant director — “he couldn’t look me in the eye” — told me “the mechanical birds don’t work. So we have to use real ones.”

So real birds — not all of them declawed — were thrown at her for a solid week while the cameras rolled.

“On the last day, one of them got way too close to my eye,” she recalled. “I got him off of me. I sat down and started crying, and then somehow I drove myself home.”

Her doctor told Hitchcock she was so traumatized, she needed a week off. When the director said that wasn’t possible, Hedren quoted the doctor as saying, “What are you trying to do, kill her?” She spent a week at home in bed, recovering.

Rod Taylor, playing her romantic interest in “The Birds,” was given instruction to “not touch the girl” — meaning Hedren — and the possessive Hitchcock gave the same order to Sean Connery, her co-star in Hedren’s second and last movie with Hitchcock, “Marnie,” in which she played a frigid kleptomaniac.

Ben Mankiewicz (left) and Tippi HedrenLou Lumenick

It was during the making of “Marnie” that Hitchcock’s demands for Hedren to have lunch with him in the studio commissary escalated to lunches in his office, and finally to intimate Champagne toasts after each day’s shooting was completed. She became increasingly uncomfortable with his suggestive behavior.

“I was stunned and alarmed by his actions,” she recalled. “In the end, he made unqualified demands of me that I could not assent to. He said things like, ‘I want you to be available to me at any time, whenever I choose.’

“I don’t care about being an actress if this is what it involves,” Hedren says. Hitchcock never used her in another film, and refused all requests to loan her out for other movies while she was under contract, derailing her then-promising career.

She finally returned to the big screen in 1967 with a supporting role in Charlie Chaplin’s last movie, “A Countess From Hong Kong,” starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren.

“Hitchcock would tell us what he wanted the actors to do,” Hedren recalled. “But Chaplin would act out each scene for us beforehand, playing all the parts. Brando got so mad, he walked off the set and threatened to quit the film.”

The movie was made at the same studio where Hitchcock had his headquarters, and Hedren suggested that her former boss pose for a picture with his fellow Englishman.

“Now why would I want to do THAT?” the still-beautiful actress quoted Hitchcock as responding.