May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (34 page)

Back on the set in Bombay, however, the
Mr. India
star had been in a bad mood, annoyed with her director for keeping her until eight at night when she had been up since dawn. But when I asked Sridevi about her rival Rekha, the irritation gave way to a little-girl innocence. “We don’t have any problems between us,” she told me with a wide-eyed look. She was collapsed on the bed in her dressing room, a dusty refuge filled with costumes and half-eaten sandwiches, and up close had none of the seductive magic she projected on-screen. She was merely a young girl, pretty and plump, who had become an object of fantasy for her fans in the south who liked her that way. “I hate being a fatty,” she sighed. “But if I were skinny, my fans in the south would kick me out.” Most Indian actresses were equally fleshy, and even those viewed as slender were twenty pounds overweight by Hollywood standards. Only Rekha worked out at a health club. The others spent lots of time telling film magazines about the exercise programs they followed at home, but I had my doubts. The desired look for an actress in the film industry was soft and luscious, which implied leisure and wealth, and separated her from the lower classes in the villages, where the women were muscular and thin.

Sridevi began acting when she was five and had appeared in more than one hundred films. She routinely worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, and insisted she never tired of it. “I love this profession,” she told me sweetly. “It’s such a beautiful thing. Sometimes I feel I should take a day off, but by the afternoon, I get restless.” It was only in recent years that she had learned English and gained some independence. “Now I talk to the press without my mummy,” she informed me. Clearly she had picked up a few tricks since then, because when I asked her again about Rekha, Sridevi was as evasive as a Congress party politician. “She’s very interested in her work,” she said of Rekha. “She has a very lovely face.”

In order to find out what was really going on between the two women, I made an appointment back in Delhi to see Amitabh Bachchan, the star who was at that time also a member of Parliament. At forty-four, he remained the single biggest phenomenon in the history of Indian film. I found him in his subtly decorated beige-and-cream office, all six feet of him folded into an expensively upholstered chair. He had bedroom eyes and a gentle manner and in person turned out to be nothing like the Rambo he played on-screen. He had grown up
in cultivated surroundings as the son of a well-known poet and scholar in Allahabad and was a close childhood friend of Rajiv Gandhi. Despite his privileged background, he had risen to stardom as the quintessential cinematic “angry young man,” whose swaggering manner and contempt for social niceties made him a symbol for an alienated generation of moviegoers who had left the villages and struggled to find work in the cities. “My fan is the man on the street who’s looking to make it in life,” Bachchan said. “I’ve always played the underdog who has single-handedly risen above all obstacles.”

At the height of his success, Bachchan was making so many movies at the same time that he had had to “die” three times in one day—shot twice and stabbed once. (“It was deadly,” he said.) Several years before, when he really almost died performing a stunt on a set, the nation went into mourning. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi paid her respects at the hospital, and All India Radio broadcast bulletins on Bachchan’s vital signs as people fasted and prayed nationwide. “It’s something I can never forget,” he said. When he recovered, he found he was a bigger star than ever. In 1984, his friend Rajiv asked him to run for a Parliament seat against a particularly powerful and entrenched incumbent. Bachchan won easily, but after the election he never had the political impact that people expected, and by 1988 he had resigned amid allegations, never proven, that he was evading taxes by using his brother, a resident of Switzerland, to funnel his fortune out of the country. His health had also suffered, and he was undergoing treatment for myasthenia gravis, a muscular disease. But throughout it all, he had continued his acting career, for fees that were estimated as high as $1 million per film. (Sridevi, the highest-paid actress, made only about $150,000 per film.)

I talked with Bachchan in his office for an hour, and he seemed happy to hold forth on the subject of films, Rekha and Sridevi, rather than discuss his political headaches. For years, Rekha and Bachchan were the unbeatable couple of Indian films, and the gossip magazines continued to write that the on-screen electricity between them was crackling offscreen as well. Bachchan was said to have exerted a sophisticating influence on Rekha, helping to polish her to her present sheen. Bachchan, who was married, casually denied any relationship with her. “Why only Rekha?” he asked me. “Why not the rest of them?”

Rekha had rather unconvincingly denied the relationship too, although she did say, “I wish I were” involved with Bachchan. She had
never married. She also spoke very passionately about the married man who had been in her life for years, but whom she never named. “It’s a lot of pain, no matter how independent you are,” she said. “It’s all very nice to live in a dream sequence and say, ‘Oh, you are the mistress and you’re having the best, you’re more enticing and desirable to your man.’ No, no, no. You’re giving up a lot.”

That summer, Rekha was no longer making movies with Bachchan. Sridevi was. “She has a lot of talent as an actress,” Bachchan said enthusiastically of his new costar. “There’s something that excites people when she comes on-screen. There is much more to her than just legs and body.” Somewhat incredibly, when Sridevi did not have the time to do the dubbing for one of her recent films with Bachchan, Rekha offered to do it for her. Afterward, the gossip press quoted Rekha as saying that now “he” has “my voice and her body.”

IN THE END, BACHCHAN OFFERED NO REAL CLUES TO HIS PERSONAL IN
volvements. The fact was that any actress, and not just Rekha and Sridevi, knew that appearing in a film with Bachchan offered a possible ticket to stardom. One of those hoping for such a break was Neelam, an eighteen-year-old ingenue. Her prayers were answered one day when she was cast in a film with Bachchan, although as his daughter, not his costar. But since Bachchan was old enough to be her father, Neelam was, as she put it, “thrilled” about the part. I met Neelam before she was to start the Bachchan film, on the set of
Mud and Gold
, a standard Hindi love-triangle in which she was cast opposite Chunky Pandey, a slim, long-legged teen idol in black leather pants. The details of the plot were, as usual, obscure. “I’m in love with the hero, Chunky,” Neelam explained, “whereas he’s in love with another girl. She’s a prostitute, and I’m a prostitute’s daughter, but I don’t know it. The other girl dies, but I don’t know how. I haven’t heard the whole story, actually.”

Neelam interested me because she was a darling among the new crop of teenage stars who might or might not make it to the superstardom of Rekha, Dimple and Sridevi. Neelam was also a nice girl from a prosperous family who refused to “reveal,” which was the film industry verb for appearing in bathing suits and wet, see-through saris. “I feel that once I start revealing,” Neelam told me in her dressing room, “there will be no end to it.” Neelam had been born and raised in Hong Kong as the daughter of an Indian diamond exporter and had acquired
an English accent from the British schools she attended there. She had good manners, a lovely face and a healthy complexion. She might have grown up to marry an international financier had she not been discovered at the age of thirteen. During one of her summer visits to her grandparents in Bombay, the father of one of her playmates, a successful director, was so struck by her fresh beauty that he insisted she appear in his next film. Neelam’s parents were appropriately appalled and said no, but they eventually gave in under pressure. “We were never for it,” sighed Neelam’s mother, Parveen Kothari. “Neelam said, ‘Let me try one.’ Well, it’s never one, really. You get stuck.” Neelam, too, had at first been horrified by the film world. “I was like, oh, these people are so uncouth, so ill-mannered,” she said. “I couldn’t adjust. But after two or three films, I started getting used to it. Now it’s become a part of my life. It’s something totally different. It’s hard work, but it’s nice.”

Neelam appeared to have adjusted quite well the day I watched her work on the
Mud and Gold
set. We were at the decrepit Natraj Studios, and the scene was a big dance number in a disco. Neelam and Chunky were leading fifty other dancers through bumps, grinds and a Bombay version of the shimmy. Rock music throbbed over the set, which was sweltering and crowded with technicians, hangers-on and little men serving tea. Neelam’s mother, who accompanied her starlet to all her shootings, sat on the sidelines in a tasteful salwar kameez, as unhappily as if she had suddenly found herself in the middle of a malodorous village bazaar in Punjab, yet determined to be a stoic chaperone for a daughter who was having the time of her life. Neelam threw herself into her dance steps with great enthusiasm, wiggling and shaking in take after take. In between she talked with Chunky, who responded by whispering in her ear. The two then shared a secret giggle. Chunky had told me in his dressing room that he had a “crush” on Neelam, and love did seem to be blooming. The fan magazines were of course on the case, although previously they had linked Neelam with another of her costars. “But now it’s starting with Chunky,” Neelam complained about the gossip in the magazines. She seemed amazed at how the press could jump to such conclusions.

ONE OF THE CHIEF PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR MONITORING THE JOYS AND
torments in the love lives of the stars was Bhawna Somaya, a kind of walking all-news radio station who edited
Movie
, a popular and entertaining
film magazine. She was as crucial an element in the film industry as the stars themselves and in many ways was even more amusing to watch. I was waiting for Somaya in her office when she arrived one morning shortly before ten, an hour that passed for dawn to Bombay’s stars, who normally slept until lunch. Unlike the people she covered, Somaya, thirty, was dressed in a subtle, conservative sari and wore her long hair in a braid down her back. She greeted me warmly, then set aside the lunch that her mother had packed for her at home. She did not seem the gossipmonger I had expected, but that impression changed a few moments later when she sprang into action. In an authoritative staccato, she dispatched a staff member to a studio with strict instructions to bring back fresh news, consulted another about a design problem in the magazine’s next issue, then turned her attention to her real area of expertise, the phone. For the rest of the morning, I listened as she coddled, coaxed and bulldozed the stars into interviews and information.

“Yes, I was deeply moved by your film,” she purred to an up-and-comer.

“We want to talk to you because you are
the most
important actress today,” she said a short time later, then hung up and sighed. “You have to tell everybody that they are
the most
important,” she complained. “At the end of the month I get exhausted.”

Later she took another call, this one from her coeditor. “Oh, God,” said Somaya. She put her hand over the phone and explained: “She’s just thrown me a bomb.” It appeared that the new wife of a well-known actor had just walked out on him, baggage in hand. “So much happens,” said Somaya. “Somebody is always breaking up, somebody has a miscarriage, somebody snatches somebody else’s boyfriend. We try to get in as much as possible.” But space was always tight. That summer, Somaya had had a terrible time trying to fit in a crucial late-breaking development just as she was closing an issue. “My coeditor called me up and told me about some star who was having an affair,” she told me, “and I said, ‘Oh,
please
, can’t he do his cradle-snatching next month?”

Fan magazines, I came to realize, were a pervasive subculture of India, with a large number of readers who never even went to the films. Collectively they served as a combination of
People
magazine and the
National Enquirer
and were the staple of secretaries, office clerks and shopkeepers across India. I bought them on newsstands all the time, and while I could tell myself that I did so for “research,” the
truth was I loved them. After my trip to Bombay, it was impossible to resist
Cine Blitz
’s cover story, headlined
SPITFIRE SRIDEVI ON HER AFFAIRS, HER “SEX FILM” AND JEALOUS RIVAL
or
Movie
’s enticing story on the reunion, in a film, at least, of Dimple and her former husband, Rajesh Khanna. It was through the film magazines that I followed the pregnancy of the actress Zeenat Aman, and learned that Sunjay Dutt, the former bad boy of the industry, had settled down to marry a nice girl, the actress Richa Sharma, who promised to leave her career to be a full-time wife and mother. The stars complained about the magazines, but they needed them for publicity and were fascinated by something that so powerfully defined their world. The magazines, for example, never had any trouble enlisting starlets to play journalists for a day. When
Movie
magazine asked Khushboo, a sixteen-year-old starlet, to interview her colleagues, she eagerly set off with pen in hand. Her questions, however, revealed some confusion on her part about who was supposed to be the subject of her interviews.