The Long Beach Post is both proud and honored to announce not only their partnership with the 2012 California Women’s Conference (CWC), but the inaugural piece of a series that will focus on the women of the conference.

The CWC and the Post both strongly agree that a conference geared towards the discussion and advancement of women cannot be elitist or exclusive; rather, it must embrace the community it is occurring within, for that is the catalyst needed to change things for the better. Given this, the creatives behind the conference have deeply reached into the Long Beach community to connect its powerful list of attendees with the everyday woman in our phenomenal city, to bring together corporate and philanthropic perspectives on the same stage, and to generate a dialogue that reaches out not only to every type of woman, but to both genders as well.

This series is part of that connection, togetherness, and dialogue that our partnership is attempting to create. This series of pieces hopes to let readers get a background of the speakers and presenters of the conference and, even more importantly, hear some of the most unique and fascinating women share their views and perspectives on what it is to be a woman, femininity, and womanhood in general.

Continue to look towards the Post as well as the CWC’s blog for more features on Women of the California Women’s Conference.

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She was — and perhaps always will remain — The Girl.

The truth is that Tippi Hedren didn’t quite know what exactly was in store for her in 1961 when she was approached by movie executives to come out to Universal’s studio lot — an approach that was entirely shrouded in mystery. She had just moved back to California with her four-year-old daughter, actress Melanie Griffith, while she was still a successful model. Her modeling career — one she described to the Long Beach Post as “absolutely fabulous — marvelous, really” — came with the advent of television, giving her access to commercials which in turn provided her with not only easy money but lots of it.

One commercial for Metrecal, the first-ever diet drink, was viewed by the main cog of this mysterious audition request and he was, to use Tippi’s words, immediately obsessed. “Find the girl,” he told Universal executives, who then called Tippi to come to the studio. When she asked who the audition was for, they kept mum, telling her nothing but to bring her 15 commercial film reels and fashion portfolio on Friday, October 13, 1961.

The audition then became a strange game — “Who is this guy?” kept running through her head — ending with executives asking her to leave her film reels and portfolio over the weekend. She ended up meeting four more executives, none of whom would tell her who was pulling all these strings. Finally, she was asked to go to MCA (Music Corporation of America), the infamous talent agency managed by Hollywood legend Lew Wasserman. There, she met the agent of the Mystery Man, Herman Citron, who slid her a contract.

“Alfred Hitchcock wants you to sign that. If you read it and sign it right now, we will go meet him.”

Her life has never been the same and her appearance in The Birds and Marnie turned her into a star — but creepily, mostly into Hitchcock’s star. She became “the object of a monomaniacal person obsessed with possession.” Her voice doesn’t quiver when saying this, for it was a given at the time that men dominated the professional circles. However, Hitchcock began strangling her career, diverting offers from other respected directors and producers and simultaneously failing to inform Tippi and telling the offerers, “She simply isn’t available.”

This eventually led her to an encounter that few women — even today — have experienced in entertainment: she told one of the most powerful men in Hollywood to shove his contract up his anal retentive space, cementing her position as one of the strongest women to step in (and somewhat out of) Hollywood. She herself doesn’t take this lightly: “Doing this was unheard of, especially for a contracted woman. It was the beginning of a new movement: I told a man who everyone fell to their knees for, ‘No.'”

Her first request to leave fueled Hitchcock’s possessiveness, still paying her $600 week and refusing to oblige Hedren’s renege. Still, she stood her ground. His connections, his power, and his overwhelming dominance failed to sway her in the belief that her personhood was more important than any form of fame.

When I asked her what it felt it like when she was finally out of the shadow of Hitchcock, her response was succinct: “I’m still in the shadow of Hitchcock. He may have ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life,” she said, a hint of a laugh at the end. “That man… That man is incredibly talented — one of the great talents of our industry.” She paused, a hint of an exasperation that is at once expressing genuine belief — we are talking about one of the most significant filmmakers of all time — and frustration — she knew a side of him few ever knew. “I would never take that away from him,” she clarifies. “But as far as a man, as a person, I have no respect for him. Whatsoever.”

Her ordeal is one of Hollywood legend and she is quite proud that a film, The Girl, will finally give her vindication as she puts it. Filmmaker Julian Jarrold has decided to take on head-to-head the Hitchcock-Hedren story, with Toby Jones playing Hitchcock and Sienna Miller playing Tippi. Initially fearful the story at first would not venture in the darkness that enveloped Tippi’s life — ranging from the disturbing sexual advances made by Hitchcock to the switch in personality he would enact once the set was open –, but said that the film succeeds in recreating her nightmarish relationship with one of the world’s most known directors. This was in part due to not only Tippi’s direct oversight, but Jarrold’s heavy borrowing from Donald Spoto’s authoritative Hitchcock book, The Dark Side of Genius, of which Chapter 13 is entirely dedicated to his relationship with Tippi.

Left: Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren in a promo shot for The Birds; Right: Toby Jones and Sienna Miller in a pastiche promo shot for The Girl.

And while Tippi may still be within the lingering specter that is Hitchcock, her act of telling the powers-that-be, “Absolutely not,” brings not just a cheesy sense of hope that the marginalized will eventually rise up, but a tangible sense of engagement that the marginalized, particularly women, have indeed risen. Hope, I’ve often said, is “up here” if anything, an ideal that says-without-saying: “Right now is not good enough for what you want, so hope that it will eventually come, to hope for something else to come, to hope for something else…” It’s a form of passivity in the guise of a sentiment — not an action. Engagement is interference, using dynamism to bring about change; tossing some repellent chemicals towards one another or, instead of simply nodding, like Tippi you say, “No.”

We are all, in our myriad ways, the object of some power’s greedy compulsivity to possess and own. Be it Facebook. A boss. A job. An idealized image of how your body should be. It doesn’t matter what the power is; it matters that you realize the invisible chains attached to you by not engaging the power in a duel. Next time, when someone’s or something’s powerful energy is so overwhelmingly negative that it is hindering you, I encourage you — very much in the vein of Tippi — to grow the massive ovaries needed to say, “Y’know what? No.”

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The aforementioned film, The Girl, will air on BBC in September and HBO in October. Tippi now dedicates her life to wildlife preservation, in which her non-profit, the Roar Foundation, supports a shelter, the Shambala Preserve, which help house and maintain lions, tigers, leopards, and other wild cats just outside of Acton, California. She has been active in wildlife preservation since 1972.