It is, of course, a great irony that the lead actress of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’, famed for her ornithophobia, should have spent the past forty years on this planet searching for a goose.
After a failed yeast extracting business with her ex-husband, Peter Griffith, Hedren had set up a petting zoo in her hometown of Closet-Lymph, Minnesota. Amongst the lopsided goats, the barbarous pygmy cows, the squinting skunks, and candyfloss snails, was a solitary Mexican hunting goose (so called due to its habit of hissing ‘la cucaracha’ at its prey before nipping off for a quick nap). And it was this waterfowl that would come to dominate her life for the next four decades.
Hedren became convinced that the goose was the externalised representation of her own soul with whom she felt a symbiotic relationship – an idea callously stolen many years later by the author Phillip Pullman for his daemons in the ‘His Dark Materials’ books.
Quite why Hedren felt that the goose was an extension of her own consciousness is unclear though her cousin, Bernice, claimed that there was a moment that their eyes locked when she was eating souvlaki (a specialty of Tuesdays at the petting zoo), and the actress was never quite the same again.
The two were very rarely found apart from that point. In 1975, Hedren had had to turn down a role in ‘Jaws’ as Richard Dreyfuss’ dental hygienist as the goose was suffering from vertigo. The role was ably filled by Newt Gingrich, though the scene itself was later cut when it tested poorly with focus groups, who claimed the teeth detracted from the title character.
When attending the Golden Globes back in 1978, she’d worn the goose as a wrap. This had worked fine until the creature shat in Ethel Merman’s beef consommé. It had all kicked off, and the goose had spent the next six weeks in traction as Merman had used its neck and the upturned consommé bowl to keep rhythm in a stirring rendition of ‘There’s no business like show business’. Hedren, who once counted Merman amongst her closest friends for dislodging a humbug that had become trapped in her windpipe simply by sustaining a high-c, never forgave Merman for the incident, even going so far as to stipulate in her will that Merman should inherit her haemorrhoids.
Whether Merman was responsible for the bird’s eventual disappearance is not known, though anyone who met her in private in the following years would comment on the frequency she made bird puns before sniggering into a crème de menthe.
When Merman passed in 1984, Hedren had to keep her own haemorrhoids, though rumour has it that Cybill Shepherd better stock up on anusol.
The disappearance was a jarringly disturbing event for Hedren who for months after wore only black and wandered the streets of Los Angeles shouting, “I’ve lost my soul!” at passing traffic.
Eliciting nothing more than blank faces from drivers and passengers alike, and a parking ticket from a myopic police officer, Hedren decided she needed to broaden her search by resorting to the press. She took to posting an advertisement in the local newspaper. “Have you seen our soul?” Hedren dictated the ad over the phone but unfortunately the remnants of her Minnesotan accent, coupled with the secretary’s tinnitus, led to something the LA Times felt was unprintable.
Hedren, having seen her own efforts fail, hired a private detective, a Mr. Leonard Kleinvogel, a lugubrious man who wore heels and a Stetson to get in to faster rides at the funfair. Hedren’s family suggested hiring an ornithologist would have been a better idea, or at the very least a clinical psychologist. Kleinvogel had already worked on several high profile Hollywood cases including locating Bob Hope’s moral compass, scouring out dirt in the De Niro/Pee-Wee Herman divorce case, and helping to settle a property dispute between Peter O’Toole and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who claimed that technically his liver belonged to them. Despite early promise when several white feathers were found in James Cagney, the trail went cold and eventually Kleinvogel had to admit defeat, and Hedren slumped into a malaise, ostracising herself from Hollywood’s social society for most of the 1980s.
Towards the end of this self-imposed exile, the journalist, Chastity Windpipe, gained an exclusive interview with Hedren back in 1989. Despite a suspicious house fire twenty hours later, there remains a short extract from the transcript of that conversation. What survived the blaze is reprinted in full below:
[osteopath?] in Riga
WINDPIPE: I see, Miss Hedren, but that doesn’t really answer my question.
HEDREN: What was it again?
WINDPIPE: To what extent do you feel that this goose [text missing]
HEDREN: I am the goose; the goose is me, darling.
WINDPIPE: I don’t understand.
HEDREN: It’s like kismet, darling.
WINDPIPE: The frog?
HEDREN: Fate, we were meant to be together because we are one.
WINDPIPE: I see.
HEDREN: Once, [text missing] Gobi Desert [text missing] rapidly inserted [text missing] the lovely Humphrey Bogart [text missing] ruined the glockenspiel.
[the rest of the text is lost due to fire damage]
Dr. Falafel Fragrance, a French-Algerian zoologist hired by Hedren’s family in a desperate attempt to break their matriarch out of the doldrums, agreed to sit down with Miss Hedren and explain calmly the nature of geese and their inability to encompass the spiritual essence of even the most emotionally liberal of Hollywood stars. Such was the sincerity and intensity of Hedren’s conviction that far from curing her of the delusion, Dr Fragrance emerged from the meeting claiming to be spiritually linked to a chaffinch she’d once accidentally brushed up against in a Dutch florists.
The zoologist having failed, the family tried at one point employing the services of a hypnotherapist, but due to a misunderstanding at the agency, wound up with a stage hypnotist. Miss Hedren wasn’t cured, but instead now every time someone says the word ‘peanut’ to her, she takes off her shoes and sings ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’.
To finish this treatise, it seems only fitting to include the most recent words on the subject from Hedren, noted a mere fortnight ago in Los Angeles:
“One of the reasons,” declared Tippi Hedren, “I believe I’ve lived into my 90s, apart from my seaweed and lemon curd based diet, is having this purpose, this focus, this drive to search for my goose. And isn’t that the secret to life! Aren’t we all, in some way, searching for our goose?”
“That’s as maybe, Madam, but I’m still going to have to ask you to get out of Ms Shepherd’s duck pond.” And with that the LAPD officer took Tippi Hedren away.
Treatises of Gloria 