‘I loved playing the white baddie: Bob Christo

After three hours of chatting with Bob Christo, I was sure of one thing about him: He wasn’t interested in ‘sticking to the point’. In fact, if you gently tried to bring him back from a digression, he got flustered, only to forget the peeve immediately. He thoroughly enjoyed telling his life story in a non-linear manner. In the midst of some Hindi film-related trivia, for instance, he switched to talking about how he missed out on the lead role in Apocalypse Now because Francis Ford Coppola asked him to build Cambodian-style temples for the set when he found out that Christo was qualified as a civil engineer. Every time Christo was pressed for specific details, he wondered why I couldn’t bother to read his autobiography Flashback: My Life And Times In Bollywood And Beyond — releasing in June — instead. 

“You realise the significance of the title, I hope? I know people know me as the ‘white baddie’ of Hindi cinema. But this book isn’t just about my film career. It’s about my life before and beyond that. The term ‘beyond’ in the title is important to me,” he explained earnestly. Christo’s life beyond films had enough drama, love and adventure to be a blockbuster. Lost loves, missions involving sunken spyships and the romance of a nomadic life — Christo had experienced it all. 

In 1950, when he was 12 years old, Christo moved from Australia to Germany and studied theatre after school. He met his first wife, Helga, during the making of their first film and had a son and two daughters. “Helga died in a nasty car accident. I gave up my children to an American couple and went to Vietnam on an army assignment where I helped soldiers identify and get rid of hidden mines,” he said.

Nothing tied down Christo after that; not even a call from his Filipino lover who told him she was pregnant and wanted to marry. “But I couldn’t,” he said. “I was on my way to investigate a sunken CIA spyship near Libya, so I phoned her childhood sweetheart and got them married instead,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing to do. Christo then travelled to Hong Kong, Seychelles, Oman on military, construction and odd acting jobs.

It was a Parveen Babi photograph on a magazine cover in South Africa that made him stop in his tracks and come to Bombay.

“She was so beautiful, how could I not want to come all the way to meet her?” he said, in that bemused tone again. Christo left a construction job in Oman midway, came to Bombay and headed straight to Juhu beach “to make sure the sea was okay for swimming and water sports. And who would imagine that I’d bump into a film crew shooting? I chatted with them over tea at Tea Centre at Churchgate where the cameraman told me he was meeting Parveen Babi on the sets of The Burning Train the next day,” he said. 

Christo turned up there the day after, and soon heard Babi’s voice behind him. “There she was. In what was an attempt to be funny, I ended up saying, ‘You are not Parveen Babi, this lady on the magazine cover is Parveen Babi!’ She laughed and said, ‘Oh, I don’t use make-up off the set. Do I look that bad without it?’” At that point, Christo admitted how he had dreamt of meeting her for six months. Babi and he worked in five films, including Ashanti and became good friends and neighbours. “Parveen led a very sad life,” said Christo slowly. “I think she committed suicide…” 

After a few moments of silence, Christo shifted the topic back to his book, and to Tom Alter’s touching foreword. “Robert, you always complained you never got romantic roles in Bollywood. But the truth, my friend, is that your life is the most romantic of all,” Christo read out.

He said he was amused at how none of the films that were supposed to have him playing a positive character worked out. A foreigner who planned to make a Hindi film asked Christo to play a good priest. But the film ran into trouble even before shooting began and the crew left the country. Next, Feroz Khan approached Christo to play a man who befriends a child in his film, and saves him from a tiger (Christo mumbled, suddenly confused, that he wasn’t sure whether it was the child he was supposed to save or the tiger, and that he also played a guitar in the film). 

“Don’t go thinking that I regret playing the bad guy, though. I didn’t mind going to any length to make people believe that a puny hero had me at his mercy.” As if on cue, Christo raised his voice to his menacing best to recite the dialogue, “Yeh tabela nahin sheron ka pinjara hai!” from Qurbani. 

It was Sanjay Khan who gave Christo his first break in Abdullah and later an important role in the TV series, The Sword Of Tipu Sultan. Christo seemed reluctant to speak about his famed friendship with Khan before relenting. “Well, we were close but I couldn’t help feeling that my illness irritated him. (Christo suffered from spinal stenosis, which made him limp.) I worked at his spa but we had very different ideas, and I felt sidelined.”

Christo sounded stung as he remembered the day he had to resign from Khan’s spa. Khan was with a friend when he noticed Christo limping along the swimming pool. The friend asked Khan about Christo’s health. “Khan looked at me and told him I shouldn’t be at the spa anymore,” recalled Christo.  

Christo didn’t dwell on it anymore, and went on to speak about his book, as he usually did when an uncomfortable subject came up. “This book is just 400 pages long. I’ll write at least two more books. And they’ll be fatter than this one,” he said.