Helen , livre ebook
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2006
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166
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English
Ebook
2006
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Publié par
Date de parution
01 mars 2006
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789352140862
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
01 mars 2006
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789352140862
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Jerry Pinto
HELEN
The Life and Times of an H-Bomb
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
The Making of an H-Bomb—I
The Making of an H-Bomb—II
The Woman Who could not Care
Main Gud ki Dali
Good Girls, Bad Girls
The Cure of All the Sorrows of the World
She was Dying to Become a Good Girl
The Comic Comes Courting
Rolled Gold Versus Gold
Fade Out, Fade In
The Making of a Legend
The Cult of Helen
List of Photographs
Filmography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
HELEN
Jerry Pinto is a poet and journalist based in Mumbai. His published works include Surviving Women (2000) and a collection of poetry, Asylum (2004). He has also co-edited Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai with Naresh Fernandes and Confronting Love: Poems with Arundhathi Subramaniam.
Introduction
A Book on Helen, the Dancer?
Congratulations on 5th-century score! Hazel-Eyed-Chic-Sleek- Gorgeously glamorous twinkle-toed Charmer of the Silver Screen has finished the 500th film of her career in Dil Daulat Duniya ... a record all over the world for any film artiste.
—Publicity material for Dil Daulat Duniya (1972), quoted in James Ivory s film Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls
T he first indication of trouble is a pair of stocking-clad legs, rubbing languorously against each other.
The camera travels up a svelte body dressed in red and black for a rousing flamenco. It stops to linger on a pretty, dark head slumped against a bar, a half-filled wine glass next to it. The woman raises her head, in slow motion, and looks into the camera, her eyes filled with frank longing, her mouth a moue of challenge. It is a beautiful face, even if the eyes have been picked out with huge quantities of blue eyeshadow, and the orange crescents in her ears rest almost on her shoulders.
The camera draws back to show us a cityscape. Couples dance in a dimly-lit outdoor cafe, men in suits, women in dresses—an evocation of a public square somewhere in Europe— if there is a square in Europe equipped with plastic flamingos in military formation and a life-sized golden birdcage, from which, tongue-like, a slide emerges.
The clock strikes twelve, and the couples leave, middle-class Cinderellas all. Alone now, a creature of the night at its darkest, the woman drains her glass and begins to sing, softly:
Piya tu...ab to aa ja...
(At least come to me now, my love.)
A voice answers her offstage in a musical shout: Monica!
She snaps out of her languor, speaks: Woh aa gaya. Dekho, woh aa gaya! (He s here; look, he s here!) She begins to pant, her torso heaving in our faces. The drunkenness, the apathy of the betrayed, falls away.
The call comes again: Monica, Monica !
Now she is electrified. She whirls and runs, arms outstretched, pushing at imaginary obstacles, towards the golden cage. She races up the steps to the cage, slides down the other side, and resumes her song, faster this time:
Piya tu, ab to aa ja/ Shola-sa man deheke/ Aake bhujaja/ Tan ki jwala thandi ho jaaye/ Aise gale laga ja/ Aa-aa-aa-aha.
(Come to me now, my love. Come, put out these fires. Come hold me, cool this volcano within me.)
However, she must still wait for her lover, for another verse and a refrain, during which she has offered her body to the camera in a frenzy of longing, squirming and thrashing about on the floor and the tables. The absence of any audience in the sequence, of the lover even, implicates us as the real audience. This is a soliloquy, a declaration of the character s innermost thoughts. And since it is about love, we know that this is a woman who lives in her senses.
Dressed as a matador, the lover comes running up over the edge of the square and into the golden cage. As she runs to him, her skirt gets caught in a metal strip on the bar and in her impatience she rips it off. Halfway to him, she divests herself of the rest of the flamenco costume, using her hands and teeth, so that she is left in a gold half-skirt and halter blouse. When they finally make it into each other s arms, the bartender puts off the lights and the lovers slump to the floor in a series of syncopated jerks.
Ladies and Gentlemen: the queen of the nautch girls , the Bollywood sensation, the H-bomb—Helen Richardson, now Helen Khan, but always, Helen.
When Penguin asked me who could write a book about Helen, I said, Me. I said it instinctively, without thought. But the more I considered it later, the more the idea worked for me. First, I was pretty sure that Helen would not cooperate. Others before me had come up against a wall of perfectly civil non-cooperation. But that was not important. In fact, it would be liberating: I had read interviews and suspected that Helen had no idea what she meant to Hindi cinema, and that with age, she might be keen to put the past behind her. My greatest high is spirituality now, she had said to a journalist some years ago.
Second, I was convinced that Helen is important. Although she is technically of Franco-Burmese descent, she was perceived as a white woman. She entered a world dominated by North Indian men who had very definite notions about how women should look and behave on-screen and she managed to redefine those requirements.
Third, she was no ordinary phenomenon, no flash in the pan of male lust. As a dancer, she should have had a short shelf life. Younger women with firmer flesh and deeper cleavages should have usurped her position. It isn t as if they didn t try. Without thinking too much, I can name Padma Khanna, Aruna Irani, Komilla Wirk, Jayshree T., Meena T. and Bindu. They came, they were seen in hot pants and bikinis and without body stockings, and time conquered them all. But from Shabistan (1951) to Bulundi (1981), Helen was dancing. She was there while the studio mastodons were shivering in the Ice Age; she was there when the triumvirate of Raj Kapoor-Dev Anand-Dilip Kumar dominated the box office; she sashayed through much of the Bachchan era.
This means that she defied the rules of gender. It is a truism that Hindi commercial cinema has no place for the mature woman. Women must either excite the front-benchers with their youth or bring tears to their eyes portraying suffering maternity. Men play by other rules. Jeetendra, for instance, has danced his way through four generations of heroines. Amitabh Bachchan played Raakhee s younger brother-in-law (Reshma aur Shera), then her lover (Bemisaal, Jurmaana, Kabhi Kabhi, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Barsaat Ki Ek Raat), before turning into her cinematic son (Shakti). And Helen? She vamped three generations of men—Prithviraj Kapoor (Harishchandra Taramati), Raj Kapoor (Anari) and Rishi Kapoor (Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan). That s a sublime feat of gender reversal, even if by the end of it her admirers wanted to avert their eyes from the ageing coquette.
And then, when it should have been curtains, a final bedraggled last bouquet: another Helen was born. She resurfaced as a star mother and grandmother, performing only when her stepson Salman Khan or the son of an old friend (Amitabh Bachchan s son Abhishek) needed her presence to lend a special something to the cast.
And it was a special something. Suddenly, the notion of Helen as a mother, the notion of Helen as granny, was laced with charm. No one grudged her the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Every reviewer had something nice to say about her cameo in Khamoshi—The Musical (1996). When she launched into a quick recap of one of her item numbers in Mohabbatein (2000), we were enchanted by the sudden po-mo break from the realist narrative into a history of one of the actors. Helen was back and we loved her more than ever. She had achieved what few manage: she had become an icon.
If we take her word for it, she managed these awesome feats through her discipline. Friends often ask me how I manage to stay slim, she told Filmfare in 1958. The magic formula is strict dieting and I advocate it for every woman, more so if she happens to be a dancer. The grace and appeal of a dance can be ruined by a heavy figure. To stay trim , she would skip for half an hour every morning and avoid breakfast, unless she required energy for a particularly vigorous dance, in which case she would swallow a raw egg and drink half a cup of milk. Once in two months she allowed herself the luxury of eating Chinese food, which I love .
She added that her passion for dancing came out of the French and Spanish blood in her. I have quite a mixed pedigree! Father was French and mother half Burmese and half Spanish. My great grandfather was a Spanish pirate!
I think there s more to it than diet, discipline and a great genetic cocktail.
I also said I would write the book because I like Helen. Does that mean Helen the person? I don t know that Helen at all. I m not sure I want to. In the course of my career as a journalist, I have met enough stars to know that even the most perfunctory interview can mean the death of a dearly held image. I like Helen, the projection. She did not haunt my dreams in the way Waheeda Rehman and Nutan did. She was not the object of a pubescent infatuation as Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi were. Helen was different. She created a feeling that you might like to get to know her better. Her mouth and eyes were warm and friendly.
It wasn t quite lust that Helen aroused, although her dance numbers were chiefly about the pleasure men derive from the female form in motion. Helen was the desire that you need not be embarrassed about feeling. You could forgive yourself that feeling because there was something about her that transcended the tawdry clothes, the bizarre make-up, the invasive camera angles, the inane lyrics and the repetitive choreography and suggestive movements. These days she is often spoken of as the original item girl . Like all journalistic short-forms, this one has its elements of truth, but Helen was not just an item girl . As we ll see in later chapters, she ha
