Cat Lady - Tipi Hedren

In the Founder's Room beneath the Magic Castle in Hollywood, an exclusive club inside an already exclusive club, Tippi Hedren was taking a short break from raising money for her cats to watch some sleight-of-hand at the bar.

It was the The Birds star’s 80th birthday, but Hedren declined cake and any celbratory to-do. Instead, she kept the focus on her cats. Photographs of the lions and leopards of Shambala, the wildlife preserve she founded, lined the walls of the room, leading guests to a table where the actress, back with a calligraphy pen in hand, waited to sign prints for hundreds of dollars a pop. It takes one million dollars a year to keep preserve running, to provide the 400-500 pounds of meat the hungry animals eat daily, to clean them and care for them and keep them on the minds of caring people.

Hedren isn’t your average celeb with a bleeding heart. It’s been said (incorrectly) that Alfred Hitchcok plucked her out of a small town in Minnesota to star in her first film; that her short and strange relationship with the noted, reportedly celibate director ended when Hedren criticized the horror master’s weight (this, after Hitchcock allegedly built a ramp between his trailer and hers and once mailed Hedren's daughter a miniature likeness of her mother lying in a tiny coffin). Marnie, the second film they made together, stalled first on set and then at the box office, effectively ending her career in film.

The actual details of Hedren's tete-a-tete with Hitchcock's Hollywood aren't certain because of years of polite "no comments." I’m re-telling these myths because they are precisely what Hedren has fought to eclipse with her Shambala foundation. Hedren didn't have the career in cinema that she was promised, but the career she found along the way was no less meaningful. Regardless of the path that led her to animal activism, Hedren has committed herself to it fully for almost thirty years. Some give up their passions when they become actors. Hedren seems to have used acting to find hers. Currently she’s working to help pass a congressional bill that would prevent the breeding of wild cats as pets, a surprising immediate and modern problem: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the exotic cat trade as a business "just under illegal drugs."

I couldn't think of an octogenarian better suited for this task. Hedren’s fought Hitchcock, forty years of rumors, and Hollywood itself. Surely she can take on Washington, too.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine