LIFE photographer Michael Rougier spent time at the house in 1971 documenting the arrangement, and his photographs constitute the primary visual record of what this domestic situation looked like. What the photographs show is a family that has normalized the presence of a large predator in their living space to a degree that is remarkable in retrospect. Hedren reading a newspaper beside Neil. Neil by the pool while Griffith is in it. Noel Marshall attempting to work at his desk while Neil’s face crowds the frame. A housekeeper stepping over the lion with the resigned competence of someone who has made this accommodation before.
Melanie Griffith was fourteen years old in 1971. The photographs that show her with Neil include images of them sharing a bed — the lion’s enormous body occupying most of the mattress, the teenager beside him. The photographs are not alarming in the way you might expect photographs of a teenager and a four-hundred-pound lion to be alarming, because the people in them appear so completely unbothered. This is part of what makes them interesting and part of what makes them troubling: the apparent ease of the domestic arrangement is precisely what Hedren would later identify as the source of the danger. The lion looked domestic. It was not domestic. The appearance of ease could not survive a single decision by the animal that the appearances needed to change.
Noel Marshall’s background included a childhood interest in animals — he had worked at the St. Louis Zoo during a summer as a young man — and his vision for the film project was not casual. He understood, or believed he understood, that a sustained period of cohabitation with large cats would provide knowledge that could not be obtained any other way. If the film was going to feature lions behaving in genuinely wild ways in proximity to human actors, the actors needed to understand lion behavior well enough to navigate around it, to read the animals, to know what a particular posture or sound indicated.