In 1971, a photographer named Michael Rougier arrived at a family’s California home with his camera equipment and spent several days documenting what he found there. The assignment was not a news emergency. The scene Rougier was sent to photograph was, on its surface, domestic: a kitchen, a living room, a backyard swimming pool, a set of bedrooms. But what he found in those spaces, alongside the family’s furniture and houseplants and ordinary possessions, was a full-grown male lion.
The lion’s name was Neil. He weighed approximately four hundred pounds. He had access to every room in the house. He swam in the pool. He slept in the bedrooms. In one image, he reclined on a bed beside a teenage girl. In another, a woman in the swimming pool sprayed him with water while he stood at the pool’s edge. In a third, a housekeeper stepped carefully over his body where he lay on the floor, navigating around him the way you might navigate around a large dog.
The woman in the pool was Tippi Hedren, one of the most recognizable actresses in America — the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964), a professional model who had transitioned into film, and a woman whose public image was built around a particular kind of composed blonde elegance. The man in the study, trying to work at his desk while a lion pushed his enormous head into his face, was Noel Marshall, Hedren’s husband and a film producer whose previous credits included executive producer of The Exorcist. The teenager in the bed beside the sleeping lion was Melanie Griffith, Hedren’s daughter from her first marriage, a child who had grown up around cameras and sets and who would eventually become an Academy Award-nominated actress in her own right.