Her family moved to the Minneapolis suburbs when she was young, settling in Morningside, a neighborhood in Edina. She modeled for the Dayton’s department store chain — then one of the most prominent retailers in the Minneapolis area — and attended Morningside School and West High School in Minneapolis. The modeling work that began there was not the professional modeling career she would later build in New York, but it was an introduction to the specific industry in which she would spend her early professional years: the commercial presentation of appearance as a form of selling.
On her twentieth birthday, she moved to New York City and joined the Eileen Ford Agency, one of the preeminent modeling agencies in the country. The Eileen Ford Agency represented the top tier of American modeling talent, and being signed to it was a marker of professional credibility in the field. Hedren became a successful Ford model, appearing on the covers of Life, The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, and Glamour. These were not minor publications; they were the most-read general-interest and women’s magazines in the country, with combined circulations in the tens of millions.
She married Peter Griffith, an actor who had worked as a child performer and was transitioning into advertising work, in 1952. Their daughter Melanie was born on August 9, 1957. The marriage did not survive the decade; they divorced around 1960, and Hedren moved back to California with her daughter. Melanie would grow up between Los Angeles, where her mother lived, and New York, where Peter Griffith eventually settled, and she would be part of the California household when it was occupied by something considerably more exotic than a standard domestic arrangement.