Her humanitarian work extended in a direction that had nothing to do with big cats. In 1975, while working with Food for the Hungry, she visited Vietnamese refugee women in Sacramento and helped connect them with employment in nail care — a visit that, according to multiple accounts, contributed to the development of the Vietnamese-American nail salon industry, which has become a significant economic institution.
Melanie Griffith’s career, from the Night Moves role at seventeen through Working Girl and beyond, produced a body of work that established her identity on its own terms, independent of her unusual childhood and independent of her mother’s career. She has spoken about her mother with warmth in various public contexts. She has been associated with the Shambala Preserve’s advisory board, maintaining the connection to the project that began before she had any professional role to play in it.
Dakota Johnson, born in 1989 to Griffith and Don Johnson, is the third generation. She has become a significant Hollywood actress through the Fifty Shades of Grey films and a range of subsequent projects. She too has been associated with her grandmother’s preserve, connecting a family story that began in a game warden’s house in Africa in 1969 to a family structure that now spans three generations of actresses and a sanctuary that houses sixty-five to seventy large cats in the Antelope Valley.
The photographs from 1971 show the beginning of a story that is not finished. They show Tippi Hedren in a pool with a lion, and a teenager in a bed beside that lion, and a man trying to work at his desk while a lion’s face occupies the foreground. They show the specific domestic moment when an idea about filmmaking and an idea about animals intersected in a California house, before anyone involved fully understood what the intersection was going to cost.