Smash hit

The morning before filming, an embarrassed looking assistant director came to her dressing room. “He couldn’t look at me,” she recalls. “He looked at the floor. He looked at the walls. He looked at the ceiling. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ And he said, ‘The mechanical birds don’t work. We have to use real ones’.”

She believes, however, that there had never been any intention to use props. “There were cartons, huge cartons, filled with ravens — very nicely — I mean they weren’t in misery or anything — and three prop men with great big leather gauntlets up to their shoulders. And they hurled birds at me for five days. By the very end of it they had me on the floor.

“Rita Riggs [the wardrobe supervisor] had put bands around my body, about an inch thick, and they tied the birds very loosely to me with the elastic around their little ankles and finally, on the last day, one of them jumped from my shoulder and really cut me, way too close to my eye. And I just got the birds off and just sat in the middle of the set crying, because I was totally exhausted.”

Cary Grant, who visited the set during her ordeal, told her that she was the bravest girl he’d met. Hitchcock, however, would stay in his office until the cameras were ready to roll, as if embarrassed at what he was asking his star to endure. But if Hedren survived the ordeal, Melanie was less lucky. The movie ends with her being escorted, helpless, out of the house — this clever, feisty, controlling person a virtual zombie.

“Catatonic,” she agrees.

“Well, that’s what Hitchcock loves to do with his women. Take a woman who is in control of herself, very sure of herself, and beat her up and see how much she can take.”

But why? “Well, I think there’s some sort of psychological mishap going on there, don’t you?”

Did she ever ask him? “No, but, actually I think he was a bit — what is that word — misogynist.”

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The word almost, but not quite, fits. If Hitchcock was a misogynist, he was one who relied on the judgment of his wife, with whom he had a strong relationship, and also one who included Hedren in meetings with the writer, Evan Hunter, and with the director of photography, Robert Burks. She says that she was a “sponge”, learning everything she could from the master, but was not intimidated. “I don’t,” she explains, believably, “intimidate too easily.”

Perhaps it was this quality that so fascinated a director who liked his blondes icy (and believed that beneath the ice they were nymphomaniacs). As their next picture together, Marnie, began shooting the next autumn, five months after the sensational release of The Birds, Hitchcock turned predatory. The film reprises the plot of The Birds — the destruction of a wilful female ego — as an over-emphatically Freudian psychological drama. Hedren plays the title role, a conwoman who robs businesses in revenge for the damage men did to her prostitute mother. She meets her equal in Mark Rutland, played by Sean Connery fresh from Dr No, a fetishistic millionaire who blackmails her into marrying him but cannot induce her to sleep with him. The film climaxes twice, in two rapes. The first, suggested rather than shown, occurs aboard the ocean liner in which they have until that point endured a passionless honeymoon. The second happens at the end, as Marnie deliriously re-enacts a scene of childhood abuse by one of her mother’s sailor clients.

Off screen, however, Hedren was not about to submit to whatever it was the sexually impotent Hitchcock wanted from her. During the filming of The Birds, crew members noticed he had begun staring at her on set. At one point he employed staff to spy on her during her time off. Between the two shoots, his fixation had grown. He sent five-year-old Melanie a replica of her mother encased in a tiny pine box that the little girl immediately mistook for a coffin. Over the winter he sent Hedren notes and gifts and, on Valentine’s Day 1963, a long romantic telegram signed “Alfredus”. On the set of Marnie he delivered champagne to her dressing room every evening, employed graphologists to analyse her handwriting, and spoke openly to others about his feelings for her — even though he knew she was dating her agent, Noel Marshall, who would become her second husband (of three).

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