‘We were stupid beyond belief to have that lion in our house’: Tippi Hedren reveals her regrets at letting beast share family home – and even letting it sleep in daughter Melanie Griffith’s bed!
- Picture set from 1971 shows Griffith relaxing outside with her pet - called Neil - at her home in Los Angeles
- The intimate set even show her sharing a bed with Neil, and seeming carefree even as he grabs at her legs
- Griffith's mother - starlet Tippi Hedren - and her then-husband Noel Marshall, a Hollywood Agent, are also shown
- Hedren says she is now embarrassed and regrets letting a fully grown lion live with her family in the 1970s
- Neil inspired them to make a film - Roar - about the majestic beasts, which ended up being a box office flop
Hollywood actress Tippi Hedren has revealed her embarrassment and regret that she let a fully grown lion live with her family in the 1970s, saying they were ‘stupid beyond belief’ to let the beast play with her daughter Melanie Griffth, then aged just 13.
In pictures taken for LIFE magazine, the Lion – named Neil – can be seen relaxing by the family’s pool, lounging in Melanie’s bed and becoming a distraction in the office.
But Hedren has revealed that looking back she finds the pictures humiliating and admits she ‘should never have taken those risks’.
Mane event: Neil grabs Melanie's leg as she jumps into the pool, aged just 14, in her Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, home
Life in the roar: Melanie Griffith's mother Tippi Hedren, muse to the famed director Alfred Hitchcock, fearlessly toys with Neil the lion
‘I cringe when I see those pictures now,’ she told me this week. ‘I have to tell you we were stupid beyond belief. We should never have taken those risks. These animals are so fast, and if they decide to go after you, nothing but a bullet to the brain will stop them.’
Although she stresses now that his trainer, Ron Oxley was always shadowing his animal, Hedren writes in her memoirs of how their ‘first live-in lion’ had ‘no room off limits to him’.
He loved to sleep on Melanie’s bed, she writes, and ‘one night I went down to find them both asleep, side by side’. Neil’s mouth was no more than two feet from her daughter’s body, she recalled, adding: ‘It was a sight some mothers might not relish.’
The pair ‘battled it out’ for dominance in the kitchen, with the lion snarling and batting at the man with a huge paw. Oxley tried to regain control by raising his hands and arms threateningly.
Neil eventually tossed his head and mane in surrender, making subdued muttering noises, and the pair marched out of the house.
‘We’re dealing with animals who are psychopaths,’ says Hedren now. ‘They have no conscience or remorse genes, and they will kill you for their dinner.’
Though Melanie Griffith became a classic Hollywood wildchild - who was going out with Miami Vice actor Don Johnson by the time she was 14 - she says Neil was her ‘best friend’. And she clearly loved being photographed with him.
‘She was the talk of her school, it was fun for her,’ explains Tippi Hedren. But wasn’t she scared that she or her daughter would be injured or killed?
‘No, it’s not good to be scared around lions. Ron told us exactly what we could do and what we couldn’t do. And we listened very carefully to him.’
She adds: ‘He taught us, and Melanie especially, to respect the animal and not do anything that might annoy him, like scratch his nose or suddenly run up and put your arms around him.’
Other advice included not turning one’s back on him as he loved to come and trip people, knowing that if you move quickly he will want to play and he plays ‘rough’ and to pet him under his chin or deep in his mane but not on his face.
Most important, they were warned to take care the lion didn’t become possessive about anything, even a chair, which is when they are at their most
Casual: Neil is seen above bothering Hedren's then-husband Noel Marshall at work, and enjoying a session by the pool with Griffith
She also revealed that their extraordinary experience with Neil lulled them into a false sense of security which was to have disastrous, almost fatal, consequences.
Indeed, after she, Melanie and the rest of their family suffered a string of serious injuries inflicted by the big cats they went on to adopt after Neil, Hedren has turned full circle in her attitude to such exotic pets.
Now 84, she runs a sanctuary, California’s Shambala Preserve, for some 32 big cats, and is an outspoken critic of the practice - still legal in much of the U.S. - of keeping them as domestic pets. As an activist she was successful in lobbying Congress to pass a 2003 bill ending the traffic between states of big cats.
She is now trying to push through another bill that will stop the breeding of these animals for personal exploitation or their sale as pets.
But how on earth did two generations of Hollywood royalty come to be sharing a sofa - and a swimming pool and bedroom - with the king of the jungle?
The answer is pure Tinseltown eccentricity. Tippi Hedren had been filming in Africa in 1969 when she and her husband Noel Marshall - a Hollywood agent who would go on to produce the horror film The Exorcist - stumbled across an abandoned game warden’s house in Mozambique. It had been taken over by a pride of 30 lions who regarded it as their home.
The encounter gave the two animal-lovers an idea for a feature film about a family who share their house with scores of lions, tigers and panthers.
Nobody had ever attempted this before – and with good reason, animal experts warned them, because big cats will instinctively fight each other unless they know each other well.
Sensibly, Ron Oxley, who ran a business training and renting animals to film studios in Los Angeles, advised the couple that if they really hoped to understand these deeply individualistic creatures, they must first live with one.
Grappling: Hedren takes on Neil in a dangerous-looking wrestling match on the floor of their California home. She now says she regrets letting the huge animal stay in her home admitting 'we were stupid beyond belief'
It might have sounded like an invitation to an early and painful death, but Oxley insisted he had just the sweet-natured lion for them, which had been trained to interact with humans. Born in Africa, Neil used to play ‘baddie’ lions on screen in the 1960s TV series Daktari.
He has been brought to the U.S. as a young adult, and was good natured because Oxley had put a huge effort into training and bonding with him.
According to Hedren, during training Oxley would sit outside Neil’s cage almost every day for three or four hours at a time, before finally going inside the cage.
Then he would sit quietly four feet away from Neil every day for more than a month, until Neil eventually came over to him, indicating he wanted to be friends.
Even so, one might have thought that, of all people, Tippi Hedren, an actress who endured having gulls, ravens and crows thrown at her while filming The Birds, might have hesitated.
But a mixture of naivety, impulsiveness and sheer determination to make their film made the couple agree. Four or five days a week, Oxley would bring Neil over to their spacious home in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks.
Thankfully, Neil was always kept well-fed. The lion would dine once a day, eating as much as 12lb of raw meat, with added vitamins and minerals.
Plush sofa: Hedren uses Neil as an oversized pillow while catching up on the news. Now aged 84, she still keeps lions
In another, she stands in the water at the pool edge, absent-mindedly reaching up to stroke the chin of the beast looming above her as a giant paw rests gently on her small head.
Hedren – who knew all about unpredictable wildlife as the celebrated star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds – is snapped using Neil as an oversized pillow as she leans against him while reading the newspaper.
In another shot, they lie on the floor wrestling, the film star’s shoulder disappearing into his gaping maw.
He was even allowed in the kitchen, lying in everybody’s way like an oversized Labrador in the middle of the floor as a maid is snapped carefully stepping over him.
In another kitchen shot, Hedren is looking in the fridge with her four-footed friend thrusting his huge muzzle as far as it can get towards the meat compartment.
Perhaps the most remarkable picture of all is of Neil sharing a bed with Melanie - who went on to star in Working Girl - his long tail hanging out from under the covers.
And Neil proved such a delight that, within a few months, Hedren and her husband decided to adopt their own four-month-old cub. Then they took on more and more, usually from private owners who couldn’t cope or who had abused them.
They would keep the cubs in the house until they were about seven months old, before moving them to an animal sanctuary – the Shambala Preserve – they had set up on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
Hedren, whose home was so neat and tidy that her clothes were colour-coded in her wardrobes, says she watched helplessly as they ‘destroyed’ her house.
By the time she had six cubs charging around the house and alarming the neighbours, she realised they had to leave, and moved the family to the preserve. By 1980, they had 71 lions, 20 tigers, 10 cougars, nine black panthers, four leopards, two jaguars and even a tigon (a lion-tiger cross-breed).
Many of the beasts (though not Neil) ‘starred’ in Roar, the 1981 film Tippi and her husband had always dreamed of making. Featuring the whole family – including Griffith and Marshall’s two sons from a previous marriage – it involved a flimsy story that involved them getting chased around their house by the big cats.
Roar cost a walloping $17 million and took five years to make, largely because the animals were so unpredictable as actors. It was a box office flop, and the stress of making it finished off the Hedren-Marshall marriage. It also convinced Tippi that treating big cats like household pets had been an awful mistake.
‘There were seven big incidents, and two people were almost killed while making the film,’ she says. The director of photography, Jan de Bont, had to have his scalp sewn back on after being attacked. Everyone in Hedren’s family was injured by the cats: she was bitten on the head, while Melanie had to have plastic surgery after a lion raked her in the face with its claws.
If only Neil hadn’t been such a pussycat, Tippi admits now, they might never have been tempted to make the film. But the pictures with him don’t tell anything like the whole story, she admits. ‘The breeders will tell you lions are wonderful pets - and it’s an absolute lie.’
