Decoding Queenie: The secret life of an Indian Hollywood star

Her life was a chamber of secrets. The secrets were serious and made her vulnerable. To hide them, her mentor invented her biography. One lie, and a few more, led to a thousand retellings until they were accepted as truths. But Merle Oberon, the gorgeous star of Hollywood’s black and white era, needed those fibs and fictions as badly as a castaway needs a raft. For the actor, who was born in Bombay and grew up in Calcutta, the untruths served as a protective shield in the 1930s’ US where race bias against South Asians was sanctioned by law and embedded in the working conditions of Hollywood.Even when she passed away after a career spanning over four decades, the obituary in the New York Times said that she had been born in Tasmania, Australia. The American cinema public also didn’t know that she was the first South Asian to be nominated for an Oscar — that too in the best actress category for The Dark Angel (1935).It was a life lived ‘Queen-ie’-size, much larger than 70mm, more tiered than a layer cake. Merle matched histrionics with Lawrence Olivier in the definitive celluloid version of the Emile Bronte classic, Wuthering Heights (1939), wore a necklace that French queen Marie Antoinette had once lent her neck to, and lived in a villa that one of her lovers described as the “Taj Mahal of Mexico”. In his memoir, The Moon’s A Balloon, actor David Niven describes her as an “unbeatable beauty”.Her story was alluring enough to become the subject of biographies, novel and television mini-series. Yet nothing fully captured her drive, spirit and audacity. But now a farm-fresh biography, Love, Queenie by Mayukh Sen, locates, contextualises and explains Merle Oberon like none before.After talking to her surviving family members, trawling archives and immigration records, along with all that was published on her, Sen guides us through every bend of her life, seeing her with a sympathetic lens. “Certain myths about Merle have held sway over the years… I sought to correct that. I would like to think the world is finally ready to accept the complications of her story,” Sen told TOI in an email interview.Merle was conceived after her 14-year-old mother was raped by her stepfather, a British mechanical engineer, the book says. She was born in Bombay at St George’s Hospital on February 18, 1911, as Estelle Merle Thompson. “To avoid a scandal, her grandmother scooped up her daughter’s child and raised her as her own, all the while telling Queenie that her mother was her half-sister,” Sen writes. Queenie, part of the book title, was her pet name and ‘Oberon’ her screen surname adopted from a character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.When she was six, Merle’s family shifted to Calcutta. The scandal had been avoided, but not the barbs hurled at her for being both poor and Anglo-Indian. She was enrolled at the reputed La Martiniere School as a “charity” student. “Paying students reminded her of that every day, constantly mocking her,” the book says. medium119744679How Anglo-Indian was she?Britannica.com defines Anglo-Indian as “a citizen of mixed Indian and, through the paternal line, European ancestry”. Merle’s grandmother, Charlotte, was Sinhalese. Her mother, Constance, half-Sinhalese and half-white, spent most of her life in India. Merle was five feet, two inches tall with “amber” skin that turned “brown” with age.Sen further explains, “Merle was born and raised on Indian soil, and because of that context she was very much subsumed within the broader racial category of ‘Anglo-Indian’. She identified, and was seen, as part of that community, which I think is important to honour when looking at the past.” Anglo-Indians then had to often encounter the worst of both worlds. For the colonialists, they were “breathing evidence of Britain’s imperial malfeasance”; for others, they were “pathetic patsies who bowed in subservience to British aristocrats”.England, EnglandBut Merle was undeterred by the unkindest cuts, including a pre-17 ‘sterilisation’ to avoid unwanted pregnancy. She worked first as a receptionist, later as a telephone switchboard operator. Always looking for a sliver of an opening, she forged an unlikely friendship with a touring white singer, Phyllis Beaumont. The bonding earned her access to British society, got her beauty noticed.However, Merle was convinced her future lay abroad. She entered a relationship of convenience with a race jockey, Ike Edwards. And, in a daring and desperately creative move, she made Edwards agree to them playing husband and wife — with grandmother Charlotte enacting servant — to ease her immigration woes as they sailed for England in 1929.Life only got tougher. Sen writes Merle initially “possibly relied on sex work to survive”, then laboured as a waitress earning £2 per week. Auditions and casting calls were difficult. On one occasion, her screen test drew laughter. Another ended in tears. She worked as an extra in A Warm Laughter (1930).The book says it was a travelling Black singer, the great Ethel Waters, who told her, “Go to America. Take the chance.” But destiny would first smile on her in the form of Hungary-born producer-director Alexander Korda, the man who lorded over British cinema in the 1930s and 40s. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/V6DFXceqt8o?si=TWQoGVMXEMaYa3JrThe first breakStrongly recommended by his ex-wife, actress Maria Corda, Korda, scouting for the small but vital part of Anne Boleyn for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), told Merle, “I want to see if there’s anything behind that face of yours.” It was a life-changing sentence. Merle was uncut, Korda polished her. He also created the fiction of her place of birth and ancestry. Now, she was born in Tasmania to “British and French/Dutch parents” making her an all-white woman, free to work in the white-ruled world. It was a white lie — literally. But who says lies can’t be sold, especially by the rich and the influential? The film was a success. Other films followed. Bigger horizons beckoned with bigger challenges. In late 1934, Merle sailed for the US.Made in USAAmerica wasn’t ‘the big easy’, either. The laws were against her. A famous gossip columnist even described her as a “ruthless vamp”. But Merle found a new mentor: Poland-born producer Samuel Goldwyn. Like Korda, Goldwyn took a shine to her. In The Dark Angel (1935), whose plotline could have inspired parts of Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964), she earned rave reviews and an Oscar nomination. Ironically, for someone whose colour was so much the subject of questioning, she was now endorsing fairness soaps.And, yet, the past continued to haunt her. The book says Goldwyn paid off a blackmailer who threatened to unmask her origins. The present, too, had its share of shocks. She survived a major car accident in London in 1937, when she was thrown out of a Rolls-Royce and landed in a hospital emergency ward. A decade later, Merle would suffer a nervous breakdown. But, each time, she emerged determined, stronger.In 1939, Merle married Korda, 18 years her senior. “This may have been due to the absence of a father figure as she was growing up,” says Sen.The same year, director William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, probably her most remembered movie, was released. Merle got a higher billing than both the male leads, Olivier and Niven. Though Olivier’s brooding Heathcliff remains etched in popular memory, an NYT review of the time said, “Merle Oberon as Cathy matched the brilliance of his characterisation with hers.” Contrary to popular perception, the movie wasn’t the box-office smash that rocketed her to the ‘A’ league. It didn’t.The next six were World War II years. Merle knitted socks for soldiers, the book says. Probably she wanted to be the perfect immigrant. In 1945, the year World War II ended, she won both critical acclaim and commercial success with A Song to Remember (1945), where she played writer George Sand, the famous woman writer who dressed as a man to overcome gender bias. medium119744737Mistress of reinventionMerle, who acted in at least 45 films, married four times. In her second marriage, to noted cinematographer Lucien Ballard (The Wild Bunch, True Grit), she endured “domestic violence”, says the book.Her third marriage, to Italy-born and Mexico-based tycoon Bruno Pagliai, who once gifted her a diamond ring so heavy that she wore it as a necklace around her neck, marked her transition to Merle Oberon 2.0: the socialite-cum-homemaker who threw ritzy dinner parties for the globe’s upper crust.The money she made from Hotel (1967), her second last film, was donated to an orphanage, underlining the expanse and magnitude of her journey from a rundown apartment in Calcutta to forgetting sable coats in New York restaurants.India hovered on the margins of her emotional memory. As the US reversed its anti-immigration laws in 1946, Sen says, “Merle felt a stronger desire to revisit her birth country.” In 1974, she docked in Bombay with her fourth husband, Dutch actor Robert Wolders, on a round-the-world cruise, and bought a sari.Sen says the film star spent “the last decade of her life walking a tightrope between self-acceptance of her roots and rejection of them, which had become second nature to her by that point”.The truth about Merle Oberon’s exact parentage and place of origin emerged several years after she died in 1979. She was 68. True, her life was stranger than fiction. But at a time when racism was institutionalised in the cultural arena in the US, her triumph is utterly compelling. medium119747232 medium119744341Four Merle short stories in TOIMadhubala no Merle: “Madhubala has a long way to make before she catches up with the much-accomplished Merle,” said a TOI review of the 1950 Hindi film Madhubala, comparing its beauteous and eponymous Indian lead actress to Oscar-nominated Merle Oberon. Author Ranjit Chowdhary, who is credited with the story of Madhubala, apparently drew his inspiration from the John Cromwell production, Night Song, which starred Merle and Dana Andrews.The Chinese fiction: When Australian filmmaker Maree Delofski travelled to India seeking lost pieces of Merle’s story in 2001 for a documentary, she told TOI that people in Tasmania believed Merle to be the illegitimate daughter of a Chinese woman, adopted by an Indian silk merchant who took her to India when she was seven.Lady Korda: In 1939, sometime before Bombay’s single-screen Excelsior showed Wuthering Heights, Merle became ‘Lady Korda’ after marrying influential British film producer and director (Sir) Alexander Korda in France.Recordograph revolution: A 1936 TOI article mentioned Merle as having carried the first recordograph — a revolutionary portable sound reproducing instrument that changed the method of rehearsal in the American film industry — from England to Hollywood.Compiled by Sharmila Ganesan