The Hindu Business Line : Less sugar, more spice

She never succeeded as a heroine; but as a vamp she was a blast... literally. Helen the Bollywood super-vamp of yesteryear has finally had a comprehensive book done on her, Helen — The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, by Jerry Pinto.

The author raises the question several passionate Helen fans of the 1960-70s kept asking. "Here is the conundrum; a competent actress with a pretty face and a pin-up body never manages to get into the A-list of heroines. Several explanations have been offered for this: she looked foreign; her accent was funny; she had already appeared as a dancer and could not make the transition as she was seen as a fallen woman and heroines had to be presumptive virgins."

Ah, the fallen woman and Bollywood of yesteryear. A great progress of the Hindi film industry over the decades has been to move away from the white-as-milk and pure-as-heaven sati-savitri type of heroines. Pinto goes on to rubbish all these reasons and says that while actresses like Mumtaz could move from B-grade films to huge hits with Rajesh Khanna, Helen would have graduated to the heroine stage but for the kind of films she accepted "either out of economic necessity (she was after all a refugee from Burma) or because of poor judgement."

On the role of the vamp, here is an insight given by Helen herself in an interview quoted in this book: "The dancer had to be a vamp in those days. The public would take to the vamp because she related to the real world. A woman is not only sugar, she has to be spice too. The heroine was too goody-goody, too wishy-washy for my liking." She adds how her umpteen roles showing her with whiskey in one hand and cigarette in the other, resulted in her inability to "walk in the streets. I had to wear a burqa. They used to go berserk when they saw me."

As the back cover of the book puts it, Pinto attempts to answer pertinent questions on the mystique of Helen. "Why did a refugee of French-Burmese patronage succeed as wildly as she did in mainstream Indian cinema?" How could `conservative families' sit through, and even enjoy her `cabarets', and what made Helen so desirable?

But, at the end of the book, the one line that haunts you is Helen's description of her tough childhood and the dance lessons she had to take as a child. "Whenever I wanted to play with the other kids, mum would beat me up with a cane. She wanted me to make something of myself."

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