LEELA Read online

  Sunil Dutt had taken over as the producer of the film. He was a thorough gentleman and when he heard that I was still working almost one hundred and fifty days later, he insisted I be paid. ‘Her metre should be down and ticking,’ he said.

  R.K. Nayyar thought that the film should end with the husband and wife in love again. I was supposed to look at him (Sunil Dutt) with love in my eyes and then run into his arms. But the distributors up north were having none of it. She must die of a heart attack, they opined, or the audiences will not accept it. Like Sita, she has been stained. If Sita had to be banished, a mere mortal would definitely have to die.

  I thought this was ridiculous. I had finished my final shots and I was not going to go back to work because some silly men thought that they should tell us what audiences would or would not accept. So my death scene was left out and I was ‘cremated’. Thus two versions were shot—one for the cow belt and one for cosmopolitan audiences.

  I also did a film called Baaghi. When the director Ram Dayal came to see me about the film, he offered me a thick green leather portfolio. I opened it, thinking that it would need a few days and found that it was a single page. The rest was filled with blank paper. Dayal had obviously assumed that I didn’t actually mean to read the script.

  ‘Who is the rebel?’ I asked.

  ‘You are, Madam. It is a costume drama.’

  ‘And what costumes would we be wearing?’

  ‘Rutu …’ he began. ‘Riru … Turi … Ritu …’

  And then with the air of a man jumping off a linguistic cliff, ‘Ruturania.’

  Ah, so it was to be a Ruritanian film, set in the continent of European Royalist Fantasy.

  ‘And you will design the costumes,’ he said, pushing his luck. But I didn’t mind and so put together Empire-style costumes.

  Thus did it come to pass that I played a rebel princess and I had a maid who left little black patches of mascara on me, when she was supposed to weep in my arms. That maid was Mumtaz.

  I don’t remember much else about the film. It was a piece of nonsense and I am almost amnesiac about it. I don’t think we understood each other, the Hindi film industry and I. They were always perturbed about something or the other that I was doing. In between shooting schedules, I would go riding or swimming.

  ‘Look, you have gone so dark,’ they would say.

  ‘Yes, I have. Isn’t it great?’ I’d ask. This was the first time the colour of my skin had mattered to me. When I was young, my mother told me that I had once said apropos de rien, ‘Daddy is café, Maman is milk and I am café au lait.’ But the good producers could only see my tanned skin as unattractive.

  ‘We will have to put pancake on you,’ they insisted.

  ‘Nothing of the kind. Show me in a garden and the viewers will understand that I’ve gone a little brown.’ I thought a nice outdoors tan was healthy. I seemed to be in a minority of one as far as that opinion went.

  EIGHT

  A MAN POSSESSED

  The first time I met Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, they had an idea. They wanted to make a film based on an anthropologist in the deserts of Rajasthan.

  ‘It will be set in a village,’ said Ismail, bubbling with the enthusiasm that I soon discovered was his trademark. ‘And it will have lots of camels and mosquitoes.’

  I must say I doubted whether the idea would have immense appeal but I kept my reservations to myself. A few months passed and one evening, in the middle of compering a superb Romanian dance performance, I felt a tug on my sleeve. It was Ismail Merchant and he looked a little green about the gills. ‘Please come, Leela,’ he said.

  On the stage, the Romanians were dancing. At my sleeve, a worried Ismail and behind him, James Ivory, in the darkness of the wings, a position he enjoyed. I told him I would meet them at the coffee shop of the Astoria after the performance.

  ‘Can’t you come now?’ asked Ismail.

  I couldn’t. I was in the middle of a performance—I was doing a job but Ismail was always blinkered when it came to anything that concerned him. I did meet them later though and he poured out his woes while the Bostonian Baba sat quiet, his lips zipped. There was no money forthcoming for the anthropologist beleaguered by mosquitoes and surrounded by camels. Not even if Shashi Kapoor was in it, could I imagine.

  I could actually.

  We talked for a while and then I told him about a beautiful novel I had just read. It was The Householder by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who lived in Delhi. I had loved it for accuracy of detail and for the nuances of the relationship that was developing between two young Indians, caught between the modernity of the city and the memory of the village.

  That evening at the Astoria’s coffee shop, I told the pair to go off and read the book. The next thing I knew they were in Delhi talking to Ruth.

  I once asked Ruth, later, when we were making the film, how she, a Jew married to a Parsi architect, caught the two young Hindu people so well. She said, ‘I’m nearly blind, Leela. So I rely on my ears.’

  ‘Your ears become our eyes,’ I said. I was rather proud of that line but now thinking back, it seems a little inelegant. But she knew what I meant.

  She would telephone me every evening to ask how the shooting had gone. I soon discovered that she was actually quite diffident about the dialogue she had written.

  I remember telling her, but only because she asked me, ‘Your dialogues have to breathe. Your sentence constructions must follow breath.’ She took the advice to heart but she would still call to find out if the dialogue was sounding all right. I would do my best to reassure her until it occurred to me that it might help if I actually did detail any minor changes that we had made as we spoke. But Ruth’s dialogue was very rarely stilted so those were a few spontaneous inversions.

  Shashi Kapoor and his family and I were ensconced in the Swiss Hotel in Delhi. Jennifer was with him and his two sons. Kunal insisted on calling me Leelabai, the name of their ayah. Jennifer was horrified but I didn’t mind, especially since he was quite a lovely child. One morning, we were sitting on the veranda, when the make-up man arrived to do me up. My skin is thin and reflects the light so I don’t need much. My face and neck were covered in flesh-toned pan-stick, and a napkin was around my neck and shoulders. The make-up man was holding up a mirror in front of me. Kunal jumped to what he thought was the obvious conclusion: ‘Leelabai is having a shave.’

  Shashi was charming and he knew it too. Jennifer once said to him in my hearing, ‘Why don’t you act?’

  ‘I am acting, Jennifer,’ he protested

  ‘No, you were not,’ she said dryly. ‘You were fluttering your lashes.’

  And when shooting commenced in an old barsati that Ismail had found, right next to the Moti Masjid so that the mosque’s dome became part of the mise en scène, Shashi would wave to the crowds that gathered on neighbouring terraces, enjoying the adulation. This was a little disconcerting since it only encouraged more people to come up and obstruct the skyline but he was too good-tempered—and good-looking—a man for one to resent it too long.

  The family who owned the house and lived beneath did not interfere with the shooting. They did not even charge Ismail any money, something I think he was unduly proud of. In fact, they helped us in their own way. I had no idea how to make chappatis for instance and the matriarch coached me until I got them right, slapping the dough between my hands, and slowly flattening it.

  As strict vegetarians, they weren’t very happy when their old copper thalis were being filled with steaming mutton biryani (with a hovering garni of flies) for the crew’s lunch. This was in the time before Ismail discovered his talent as a chef and before he could get people to act in return for his curry feasts. I was eating my rabbit food—salad and some bread and hard cheese—so it didn’t bother me. James was already surrounded by a coterie of society ladies who kept him in asparagus and artichokes.

  But I did feel that we were taking advantage of their generosity and so I spoke to Ismail about it. He ma
de sure that the caterers brought their own utensils. The family would no doubt have preferred it if we had been vegetarian, but they simply averted their eyes and gave thanks that it was not their dishes being despoiled.

  Ismail was obsessed with the film. He couldn’t believe that it could not be completed in one long continuous shot. One day, he walked on to the set and found that we were all sitting around.

  ‘Why are you wasting my money?’ he angrily asked the cinematographer. ‘Get on with it.’ He was speaking to Subroto Mitra, the man who had shot all of Satyajit Ray’s films, on loan to Merchant and Ivory and I think, the source of much of the film’s beauty. Mitra was not unduly disturbed by Ismail’s histrionics. ‘I cannot shoot when there are clouds in the sky,’ he said.

  Ismail stared up at the clouds, fiercely. It seemed that he was trying, by force of will alone, to disperse them. Then he gave up and vanished on some errand, probably to do with the finance—or the lack of it—of the film. He was a very tense man, a tension that kept him at it, all day long.

  Subroto and I got on well. He wasn’t very happy on the set. He had worked with an auteur who knew exactly what he wanted. Ray would draw his frame, and even put in the lights, and say where he expected them to come from, what he wanted them to illuminate. James couldn’t draw and he didn’t seem to want to think his shots out either.

  ‘He is always asking me where I should put Leela, where I should put Shashi,’ said Subrotoda.

  I tried to calm him down. I tried to ignore the heat on the terrace—remember this was Delhi in April as I walked across it barefoot. I tried to ignore the blisters that developed on my feet.

  But I didn’t know what to make of Merchant–Ivory when a child died in the house in which we were shooting. The family had not disrupted shooting, not even told us that one of their little ones was ill. When I came into the house and saw her lying on a charpoy, covered in white, I went to sit with the grieving ladies. We did not talk. I held their hands. One of the men asked me if I could help organise a hearse. I got up to do so when an imperious voice called from above.

  ‘Leela, what are you doing down there? Come up here.’

  It was Ismail.

  That was what dedication meant to him, blinkers that could even blot out human tragedy around him. He knew what he wanted and he would let nothing stand in his way.

  In direct contrast was James whose indecision was almost chronic. To make matters worse, we were making a bilingual film, in English and in Hindi. I could not understand why we were making the film in Hindi. The power of The Householder lies in the way the writing looks in at a young family, looks in at it from a considerable if compassionate distance. The Hindi version was never going to achieve that, not just because Ruth wasn’t writing it but also because language matters deeply in these things. I think I was proved right when I went to the world premiere at the Rockefeller Center, New York. When I came out, a group of very elegant elderly American women came up to me and one of them said, speaking for all of them, ‘As Indu, you opened a window onto India for us.’

  James dithered about whether we should speak in singing English of the kind that foreigners assume Indians speak, or say our lines straight. But Shashi and I decided that we weren’t going to put on any accents or play to expectations. We would speak as we normally spoke.

  I wasn’t quite sure whether either James or Ismail knew how things happen on a set. There is a scene in which both Indu and her husband are invited to a tea party at the house of the college principal. Indu has developed a sweet tooth during her pregnancy and her husband is worried that she will shame him by putting her snout into the trough. But when the principal, a pompous buffoon (played by Romesh Thapar), encourages one of the ladies to sing, Indu sneaks in some Mysore pak. Just as the coy lady sitting next to Indu begins singing, Indu bites into it. The crumbly sweet does what it does best; it crumbles and leaps into the lap of the chanteuse. It was not something I had planned.

  ‘Do it again for the Hindi version,’ said Ismail.

  ‘Sheer fluke,’ I said.

  ‘Stage it then,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  I wasn’t being difficult. I couldn’t stage it because I never staged anything. Don’t ask me what I’m doing with my hands or my feet or my face. I believe that if you know what one part of your body is doing, or you’re planning what your eyebrows are going to do, you’re not acting, you’re modelling. The body is a tool but it is a tool that demands complete use. To use only a bit of it, or to focus on the bit that is visible in the camera frame, is to misuse the tool.

  One day, when we were watching the rushes, Subrotoda began to rumble as he watched a particular shot. It was the sequence in which Indu is on a hunger strike, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

  ‘Good work with the toes,’ he said.

  Toes?

  I looked at the shot again. I was supposed to be sitting there immobile as Prem, played by Shashi, tries to get me to eat. That was when I noticed that my big toe was twitching, beating time, beating out the anger Indu feels in that scene.

  I learnt all this by instinct. What Renoir gave me was a basic understanding of the way in which a text was only a framework and how each interpretation brought something new to that framework. What working with James Ivory did was to throw me back on to my own resources because he said almost nothing.

  NINE

  ‘SHE HAS NO BAD ANGLES’

  I think too much has been made of my being listed by Vogue as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. My friends tell me that there has been some misguided attempt to quantify feminine beauty and that they have even tried to devise a unit to measure it. I believe it is called a Helen and each female face is measured in milli-Helens or in the number of ships that face might launch. One thousand milli-Helens make one Helen and so one thousand ships would go out to war. That sounds ridiculous because beauty is one of the most subjective of the abstractions and standards change. In Vatsyayana’s time, it was a compliment to say of a woman that she walked like an elephant. Today, the same might be used as a putdown. Finally, it does boil down to the luck of the draw. This little strand of DNA brings you eyes of a certain colour; that one decides your hair; another, the shape of your jaw or the proportion of your collarbone to your neck. There’s not much achievement in that.

  But it did happen.

  It was in New York after the premiere of The Householder. There I was, minding my own business, dressed in a natier-blue Chanel suit to appear on the Johnny Carson Show, and in my bag there were my Mughal earrings, when I was told that my agent was calling.

  It was indeed Marvin Minoff and he was in a hurry. ‘Get to this address,’ he said. ‘As soon as the show is over, go there.’

  ‘For what?’

  He sputtered incoherently. ‘It’s starting to snow. If you can’t get a taxi, just walk. Better still run. But get there.’

  Then he hung up. I finished the interview and went out into the snow. It was falling steadily, not enough to turn the city white, not enough to be romantic, but enough to panic New Yorkers into taxis. So I walked eight blocks in my pumps until I got to the address. I read the name plate and felt a little shock of recognition. I had just walked all the way to Bert Stern’s studio. For those who have forgotten, this was the man who had been granted the last photography session with Marilyn Monroe, six weeks before her death. Although all the 2,571 pictures had not then been released to the public, he was still riding high on that and here I was in a damp Chanel suit and snowflakes, panting and windblown.

  His studio was this enormous hangar-like thing and he took one look at me and said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t shoot you in that suit, and you aren’t wearing make-up.’

  I had no idea what that meant. He had an awful tutti-frutti Kanjeevaram sari among his props.

  ‘Where is the blouse?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t have one,’ he said.

  ‘So am I supposed to be an Indian widow, then?’ I asked.<
br />
  He arched an eyebrow at me.

  ‘Only widows in India go around without blouses,’ I said.

  He roared with laughter and then looked at me again with the eye of a horse-dealer examining a filly.

  ‘We can do without the blouse,’ he said, ‘because your collarbones are straight.’

  My hair was draped in front of me, along the sari border. No make-up, just lipstick and a pencil line on my eyelids. I sat down on a seat that looked like a toadstool in the middle of the hangar, hung with klieg lights. His sixteen, I counted, his sixteen glorious ephebes danced about me, shooting Polaroids to capture my best angles before their master got down to work. That was when he shouted at them, ‘Can’t you see she has no wrong angles?’

  Later I discovered how this had all fallen into place. Jules Stein, one of the owners of the Musical Corporation of America (MCA), had invited me to his Manhattan apartment for a party. I took up my position, found a vantage point from which I could watch without being watched. Then I settled down.

  After a while, an elderly man came up to me. ‘You remind me,’ he said, ‘of the young Greta Garbo.’

  I was rather startled. For me, Garbo would always be the nordic Goddess standing at the prow of her ship in the last scene of Queen Christina. her face is an endless enigma simply because the director had told her to hold it still and think of nothing at all. That Garbo and me?

  ‘No, not in your appearance,’ he said, ‘but in the way you study the people in a room. She did not care much for parties but when she did go for one, it was only to watch people.’

  As we talked, he told me that he was Garbo’s ‘major Domo’ and was looking after her. It was at this party that Consuela Crespi, the editor of Vogue, had seen me and set the whole thing in motion. In the end when the pictures were shot, it was decided that I would feature in the list of the five most beautiful women in the world. As they say in the Big Apple, that and fifty cents would have bought me a cup of coffee. Perhaps I didn’t let my head get turned because at home I was never made to feel I was anything special because of the way I looked.