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Leela: A Patchwork Life
Leela’s beauty, therefore, extended much deeper than just style and looks. She wore many hats with perfect panache. Leela, the film actress, was Anuradha in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film with the same name, where she plays a popular radio singer and daughter of a rich man, falls in love with an idealistic doctor, Balraj Sahni, who serves the poor in a remote village. She also starred in Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder and Shyam Benegal’s Trikaal. She had no problem in shunning the stardom offered by Raj Kapoor, whose films she refused four times. She wanted to read and approve the script, you see, and why not? After all, she learned acting from Jean Renoir and no less an artist than Salvador Dali used her as a model for Madonna. Born to Dr Ramaiah Naidu, a scientist, and a French mother, Marthe Mange, who had been a journalist, Leela’s influences were cosmopolitan and global. No wonder that she was investigational enough to try many streams of work. "I’m between two stools, but I’m not falling. I can understand the Europeans and I am at home in India. I can grow roots anywhere". Leela’s parents always encouraged her to follow her own drummer, never insisting that she should do what they had done. She made her own documentaries, dubbed Hong Kong action movies, was Ramnath Goenka’s communication manager, editor of Society and managing editor of Keynotes. Whew! She was married to Tilak Raj Oberoi, the eldest son of M. S. Oberoi, at the young age of 17 and had twin daughters, Maya and Priya. But the marriage didn’t work out and she was divorced before she was 20. Later, she was Dom Mores’ wife for many years, and she was his "unpaid secretary, making endless notes and translating his mumbling questions to puzzled people across the globe." They were married for over 20 years before the marriage ended in a second divorce. After that, and the death of her daughter, Leela, the enigma, became reclusive and passed away in 2009, a few months before the journal on her life was released. In the memoirs that she has written with poet, journalist and award-winning author Jerry Pinto, in the last five years of her life, Leela’s energy just leaps out of the pages. Pinto is obviously a "devotee" and acolyte of Leela, who seemed to have completely captivated him. When he would tell people that he was writing on Naidu, "Everyone, it seemed, had a Leela Naidu story". Quietly and poignantly, at the end of the foreword, Pinto says, "There’s a Leela-shaped hole in my life." A fitting epitaph for the woman who chose her own religion—Sufism—at the age of 8. The book is correctly sub-titled A Patchwork Life. It offers peeks into a life charming and chequered, with people who most of us have only read about, casually popping in and out. The episode where Sarojini Naidu asks young Leela to meet Micky Mouse, who turns out to be Mahatma Gandhi, is as sweet as it is fascinating. There are some pictures with famous men and women included in the book—Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, R. K. Nayyar, Ferdinand Marcos, Sashi Kapoor, and then references of Ismail Merchant, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Renoir, J.R.D. Tata, Ramnath Goenka, Peter Ustinov, Louis Malle, Mother Teresa, Eug`E8ne Ionesco, Indira Gandhi, and J. Krishnamurti, to list some. The book’s picture section is enthralling to see. It’s the pictorial chronicle of the lovely Leela Naidu’s life. Her beauty, her vivacity just leaps out at you. There’s a picture of Leela resplendent in a bikini that would put the pin-up girls of today to shame, her doing ballet when she was a little girl, a reproduction of a letter she wrote to her father and her poising with the top stars of the day—fascinating! The chronicler of Leela’s life has done a fine job. The book is written with immense love, and probably with as much veracity as Leela spoke of her life. The moods and the moments are nicely captured and the reader is left with a feeling of regret at the passing of diva, who says in her thank you note, "all of you I say adieu".
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HOW lovely Leela Naidu
was! What a fine-boned beauty, with the haunting smile and style
quotient that would put any style diva of today to shame. No wonder
that she was listed as one of the five most beautiful women in the
world by the Vogue magazine. Just like Maharani Gayatri Devi
and Nayantara Sehgal, Leela was a many splendored woman, fearlessly
living life, breaking shackles, and experimenting with whatever took
her fancy. This woman cocked a snook at the establishment, and the
establishment loved her for it. She "recognised the role that
(she) was meant to play in a civilisation rather than a society",
wrote Art critic, curator and poet, Ranjit Hoskote.