Michael Rougier’s photographs were published in LIFE magazine. They show a domestic arrangement that is astonishing to look at half a century later — not because the people in them appear frightened, but because they do not. The family and the lion appear accustomed to each other. Neil looks like furniture that occasionally breathes. The disconnect between what the images show and what the presence of a four-hundred-pound predator in a residential home actually means is what gives the photographs their lasting power.
Hedren has looked back on those images as an older woman and assessed them without sentiment. “We were stupid beyond belief,” she has said. “We should never have taken those risks.” The animals she spent a decade working with, she said, have “no conscience or remorse genes.”
The story of how an actress who had survived Alfred Hitchcock and the live bird attacks of a movie set came to keep a lion in her California home — and what happened next, across a decade of filmmaking that nearly destroyed everyone involved — is a story about ambition, about animals, and about a particular moment in celebrity culture when the possible and the advisable were frequently confused.
## New Ulm and the Education of Nathalie Kay Hedren
Nathalie Kay Hedren was born on January 19, 1930, in New Ulm, Minnesota, a small city on the Minnesota River settled primarily by German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. The city’s German heritage was visible in its architecture, its social institutions, and its name — it had been named for Ulm, the city on the Danube in Baden-Württemberg. Hedren grew up in this environment, one of the specific cultural textures of the upper Midwest that shaped her before she had any awareness of the entertainment industry she was eventually going to enter.