LEELA Page 10

  At one point, a photographer in Geneva asked Maman if he could photograph the two of us. He was excellent at these compositions of women wearing black sheets with only their hands and faces as contrasting areas of light. He was also very persuasive so Maman agreed. The next thing we knew, he had blown up the picture of me—I was twelve years old at the time—and had it made into a huge enlargement that he hung outside his studio on the lake. But when people pointed and stared when I was walking with my father, he would brush it off. ‘You must have a paper fish stuck on your back,’ he said.

  (In those days, children would sneak up to you around Easter and pin a paper fish to your back, as a prank. This was because the fish as Icthus was an ancient Greek symbol for Christ.)

  And so I did not think too much about being considered one of the most beautiful women in the world. It was far more important to me that Mademoiselle magazine honoured me with a merit award for signal achievement in films. I was in the company of Susan Sontag who had been awarded for her writing, Barbra Streisand for her music and Valentina Tereshkova for her bravery in becoming the first woman to travel into space. That was a huge honour.

  After both these events, some well-intentioned friends suggested that I should call press conferences. I refused to do any such thing. There seemed to be something unattractive about calling attention to oneself in such a manner.

  I was ready to leave America when I got a call from my agents. Would I please go to Hollywood? Of course, I would, but once again: could I? After all, I was a young woman who was just starting out on her career, and Hollywood was a distant expensive place in the sun. But once again, my father’s network of friends came to the rescue. B.K. Nehru was then India’s ambassador to the United States of America and he and his wife were going to be in Hollywood at the time. They invited me to spend a few days with them at the Beverly Hills Wiltshire.

  They had been invited to Pickfair, Mary Pickford’s home and they took me along. At that time, two gossip columnists ruled Hollywood. One of them was Louella Parsons; the other was Hedda Hopper. Louella found out I was in Hollywood for a screen test and wanted to interview me.

  ‘Where’s your elephant and your mink?’ she asked.

  ‘Pink elephants? I don’t have any. And I hate wearing fur,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ll find you if I need you,’ she said.

  It sounded ominous.

  At Pickford’s sumptuous home, she found me. She said that she wanted to talk to me again. Pickford had a platinum blonde significant other who was sent to show me her wigs. I did not think I would enjoy this much but when we got there, the beautiful young man and I, the sheer excess took me by surprise. It was not just a rack of wigs, not even a cupboard full, but an entire room of the best wigs. Since these are always made of human hair, there was something odd about her collection, like a body parts spare room. The next time I would be in a room confronted with such excess was when Imelda Marcos took me to see her collection of shoes.

  When I came back down, Parsons had left, and so I was spared any more facetious questions.

  When the Nehrus left Hollywood, I moved into the Young Women’s Christian Association hostel, which, in Hollywood, was a very safe place and designed as a hacienda with a terracotta-tiled roof. It was spotlessly clean and no one could call you up or harass you because they would have to get past the telephone operator. The head of the local branch of the YWCA who took me there was weeping, tears running down her cheeks from under her dark glasses. I was a bit puzzled by this and even began to feel a bit sorry for her when she said in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘It’s just the smog. It makes my eyes water.’

  The first American film I did was called A Face in the Sun, a television film for Universal Studios. It was directed by the Canadian director Harvey Hart. It began so easily—Hart did not even want me to do an audition because he had seen The Householder—that I should have been suspicious. After I had signed on the dotted line, we went through an impressive rehearsal. Not a single detail was left out. All of us had our files with shot break-ups and schedules. Late on a Friday, someone thought to check my status as an actor. That was when my agency told them, oh dear, someone musta slipped urp because gee whiz we didn’t get her a work permit.

  Shooting was supposed to commence the following Monday. The set was ready. All the technicians had gathered. It wasn’t one of those gigantic Hollywood films in which millions of dollars would be wasted if the shooting were postponed for even a day, but it was still a lot of people who would be out of work. And it was Friday evening and the whole of America was slamming its desk drawers, locking its cupboards and preparing for the weekend.

  Oddly, I felt responsible. So once again, I got on to the phone to B.K. Nehru. He called the governor of California. The governor of California, who must have been slightly bemused by this request from the Ambassador of India, interceded with whoever it is who issues these permits. And when the phone rang and I was asked to send someone to pick up the temporary work permit, latest by five in the evening, that would allow me to act in Hollywood, there was a spontaneous cheer from the entire unit.

  A Face in the Sun was quite a simple story. My character, Anna, gets off a train at a small station at a university town. And there, English literature professor, Professor Joseph Howe (Jason Evers), sees her and falls in love with her. Anna is something of a woman of mystery. She is en route from somewhere and the train has set her down for a day. In the end, she leaves again in a cloud of steam.

  For this one, as for Anna’s arrival at the station, we had to shoot a scene with a steam engine. And so we went to the Universal set where an old and beautiful train with a steam engine waited to produce the billowing steam into which various faces had vanished over decades.

  After I had finished the shot, I heard the sound of someone clapping. I turned around and suddenly, there was a fat man with a face like a bull-dog.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he sighed.

  Even then, everyone knew that Alfred Hitchcock had a predilection for blonde women so I looked around for a Nordic goddess.

  Harvey Hart came up. ‘Meet my assistant, Alfred Hitchcock.’

  Hitchcock vouchsafed us a lugubrious smile. Then he pointed to the engine. ‘She is beautiful, isn’t she?’

  The steam engine train was his favourite, he explained as he ran a plump and well-cared-for hand over its gleaming black flanks. Behind that impeccable boiled shirt, there beat the heart of a little boy.

  Harvey Hart was dying to meet Renoir. We visited him in his house in Los Angeles, a reproduction of a Provençal farmhouse. There was a bronze bust of the boy Renoir by his father, Auguste—and this time it was a Real Renoir.

  Renoir was delighted to see me and so was Dido. He said he had seen two of my films at the University of California and Los Angeles. I figured out that those might be Anuradha and The Householder.

  Over a simple lunch, he suddenly asked, ‘Ça va? Ton A à Z?’ (How is it going? Your A to Z?)

  It still goes on.

  TEN

  LEELA NAIDU, PRODUCER

  I was at the Beirut Film Festival to which the Indian government had sent me on the grounds that ‘everyone there spoke French’, when my agent, who was David Niven’s son, rang me from Rome with the news that David Lean was looking for me. I was put on to the next airplane to Rome after the festival. At the MCA office in Rome, I was told that Lean was in Madrid, where he was casting for a new film. Off I went, another aeroplane, another European capital. As I went through the doors of a beautiful boutique hotel in Madrid, I saw Lean himself, posting an envelope in the letter box that stood in the lobby.

  I greeted him and was startled to see that he looked aghast. I had met him with Sam Spiegel in India and I thought we had had an interesting conversation …

  ‘You saw me posting that letter? It was to Geraldine Chaplin. She was my second choice for the role.’

  That was for the role of Tonya in Dr Zhivago.

  Do I regret it? To say that I don�
��t would be silly. To say that I do would be pointless. I shall simply say that my consolation prize was a lovely lunch with David Lean and a visit to the Prado.

  Was that enough? When you are young and the sun is shining on the plain in Spain, and you have just spent a pleasant hour or two examining, among other masterpieces, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins and Velázquez’s Dwarf Sitting on the Floor and Goya’s Saturno who looks horrified at his own savagery … well, it suffices.

  My agents were also disappointed and I was called to London. I went to work on an ITV film for their Man of the World series. I played a doctor, a kind of médécin sans frontières, fighting the plague in India while an enemy advances.

  One day, and this was in 1962, the art director spread out a map and asked me to take a look at it. He asked me where I thought the Chinese would attack India, were they to attack.

  I had no idea why they were asking. I was supposed to be Leela Naidu, actor, not Leela Naidu, political expert or even Leela Naidu, war correspondent. But I looked at the map and saw the name Bomdila. I liked its bounce and its ring so I suggested that we use the name. Later, when the Chinese attacked in 1962 it was at Bomdila. ITV was delighted that their film had proved prophetic.

  Around this time, I took stock. There seemed to be few films around that I wanted to do. I thought it might make sense to make films instead of working in films I felt nothing about.

  The first film I ever produced started when I was put under house arrest. I was not a guest of the Indian government but had been interned by Kamalini Khatau. She had studied psychoanalysis with Anna Freud and had set up the BM Institute of Child Development in Ahmedabad. As a concerned parent and as a human being interested in children, I wanted to make a serious study of child psychology so I was a frequent visitor. I would borrow books from their library and one weekend when I visited, Mrs Khatau told me that she wanted a film to be made about her School, the Sharada Institute within the BM campus.

  I immediately loved the idea. ‘Oh Kamalini, that would be lovely. There is something about children with special needs that …’

  ‘I am so glad you like the idea. I want you to make the film.’

  ‘Me?’ I squeaked.

  ‘Yes, you will produce the film.’

  ‘And who is going to write the script?’

  She gave me a speaking look and I began to get the idea. That was when she told me her master plan.

  ‘I am going to lock you up in my villa in Shahi Baug. You will have lots of paper and pens and pencils. Someone will come with your meals. But you will only come out when you have finished the script.’

  I know this sounds difficult to believe but I went docilely into the house and settled down to write. I know I was an adult and didn’t have to listen. I could have laughed politely, taken my books and gone back to Bombay. But I went into the house, sat down at the table and began to think. I must have wanted to do it.

  It was difficult to sort out all that I knew about the children at the Sharada Institute. There was Manu, mentally retarded as the phrase went in those days, but also spastic. He was making slow progress at the School but his father, a sweet-maker in the old city, wasn’t very bothered about that. It was clear that he was proud of his son. He didn’t just love Manu in the way that one might love a ‘difficult’ or a ‘problem’ child. He brought his son to School every day and would often bring stacks of piping hot jalebis for all the other children. There was a South Indian girl whose father was in the army. She was also Developmentally challenged, but she could speak smatterings of five different languages, including a little English. There was little Pappoo, infra-occlusive (which meant that her lower jaw stuck out), blind in one eye and whose mental age would never rise very far beyond one. And yet when the tabalchi came and the music began, Pappoo’s plump body would begin to respond and a beatific smile would pass over her face.

  If this film had to avoid the Scylla of condescension and the Charybdis of sentiment, it must look at these children and tell their stories. Keeping that in mind, I started to write.

  When I came out of the house, two days later, Mrs Khatau read the script and declared that she liked it. She said that she would get some other psychiatrists to look at it, just in case there were any flaws in my understanding of the science of child Development. When the doctors had approved the script, I ventured to ask Mrs Khatau what kind of budget she envisaged.

  ‘Whatever you can get,’ she said. I goggled at her a bit. I had expected that the Institute would be paying but clearly I had expected wrong. Mrs Khatau thought that the government should pay and so I worked out a budget—which is always a painful exercise for me—and put together a proposal for the film. Mrs Khatau then bulldozed her way through the bureaucracy and we were soon in the bowels of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or whatever its equivalent was called in the government of Gujarat.

  The gentleman behind the desk liked the script. He liked the idea. But he had no money. Mrs Khatau fixed him with a look. Well, he had some money. But who was the director?

  ‘Kumar Shahani,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said the bureaucrat.

  ‘That’s because it will be his first film,’ I said.

  ‘But then why are you paying him so much?’ asked the bureaucrat.

  ‘Because he is a sensitive person, a gold medallist from the film and Television Institute of India and he is the right person to direct this film,’ I explained.

  ‘Give him less,’ said the bureaucrat.

  At this point I could have thrown the proposal at his head and marched out but the thought that we might be able to do some good with this film kept me in my chair. We went through the same process for K.K. Mahajan, who I wanted as the photographer.

  Finally and grudgingly, the government agreed to give us some money. I would have to raise the rest and it would be reimbursed to me when the film was done. (Need I say that I am still waiting for the money?) And so I simply took some mortgages on the few securities I had in my name, including some life insurance policies, pawned my jewellery and put my crew together. A Certain Childhood was directed by Kumar Shahani and photographed by K.K. Mahajan. The music was by Vanraj Bhatia, who was often a visitor at Sargent House where he would play the piano with fingers made a little oily by my mother’s French fries. The Khataus gave us free accommodation.

  One day Kamalini told me that she had shown the script of my film to Erik Erikson, the world-famous German developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst who was her guest in Ahmedabad.

  ‘He wants to meet you,’ she said.

  I thought he would have something to say about my script, but he only asked me why I was borrowing so many books on child psychology and Development.

  ‘Because I would like to train as a child psychologist,’ I said.

  He told me that it would take many years. He explained that if I had found nothing of worth to do in front of the camera, I should think about working on the other side of it. And he gave me a copy of his Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History.

  ‘The young Luther,’ he said gently, ‘was filled with hubris. As a young man, he thought he could change the world, he could change religion.’

  Kamalini must have told him something about my past, I thought. I believe he was trying to explain that the hubris of youth was a condition that arose from the feeling that anything was possible, that there was no sense of limitations, that there was no intimations of mortality. To try and change someone else was to believe that one could do anything one wanted to do, as long as one wanted it enough. The only person one can change is oneself.

  That is what I believed his message to be.

  It was an important moment in my life, a significant meeting. It turned me in a certain direction and when we began shooting, it was with a new sense of where I wanted to go.

  One of my key shots was the children sitting on the bare floor of the auditorium and working with paints. Pappoo
was chosen for this shot and her one eye lit up at the thought of painting. Mahajan wanted a fairly tight frame so he set up his tripod quite close to her. Pappoo began to paint, squinting as she went about Industriously filling the paper with colour, dribbling a little as she daubed happily, cooing to herself as she let her paints spill out of the paper and following them where they led her. This took her, of course, to the wooden legs of the stand, the tripod, and soon she was painting all over the lens. It was a lovely shot, even if we had to cut the last few seconds of it.

  Many doctors wrote to me after that, saying that the film had managed to capture some of the special quality of those who are developmentally challenged. It was the first film of its kind in India and much of its success came from the fact that the children were comfortable while they were being filmed and they smiled at the camera, sudden sunburst smiles that made one aware that there was a purity in their responses. You have to only watch a child with special needs confronted with jalebis, or listening to a tabla and you see pure unalloyed happiness. I thought that they were doing a great job and kept the commentary to a minimum, as if the words were captions to pictures in an album.

  It was a bit of a letdown after that to make commercials, but they presented their own challenge. The film on Terene was particularly trying. How was one to represent what this synthetic fabric was, how it was made, what it could be used for, how it was very fashionable and how you could be a beautiful person wearing it, all in one minute? And then there was the maker of Armour Shirts who was very keen that we show all the eight shades in which his shirts were available. I took the easy way out and had Vanraj Bhatia write me a piece of music to which a beautiful blonde could do the dance of the seven veils with the fabrics. (The eighth shade was wrapped around her head, poor thing.) And all this in one five-hour shoot, through the day, at the Taj. It was all a bit brainless but it was frantic fun and it kept me in pin money.