Shashi Kapoor: A chip off the old block

He played an irresistibly gorgeous <i>nawab</i>, and he lived as an impossibly charming gentleman. The writer remembers Shashi Kapoor, a true son of a famous father

Shashi Kapoor: 18 March 1938 – 4 December 2017

If there was one figure who overwhelmingly dominated the lives of the Kapoor brothers – Raj, Shammi and Shashi – it was their father, Prithviraj, universally known to family, friends and co-workers as “Papaji”. Hero worship doesn’t come close to describing it. He was their role model, moral compass, friend, philosopher and guide, all rolled into one.

When not about films, conversations with Shashi Kapoor (the last of his generation of Indian cinema’s greatest performance dynasty who died, aged 79, on December 4) sooner or later turned to Papaji. “Papaji did this,” “Papaji kehte the… (Papaji used to say…).”

From this fountainhead, the sons inherited their appetites for food, drink and alluring women, grand passion for defying convention and reputation as risk-takers. Often comparing him to “a Greek god”, Shashi, by inference, did not think he or his brothers were a patch on Prithviraj’s looks or talent. The 23-year-old Pathan from Peshawar who landed penniless in Bombay in 1928, joined silent movies, and acted in Alam Ara, the first talkie; then, in 1944, turning his back on his matinee idol status, he poured his film earnings into establishing Prithvi Theatres, a touring repertory, carting a crew of 160 in third-class compartments to far corners of the land. This was where the brothers served their gruelling apprenticeship. Shashi, aged six, appeared on stage in Shakuntala, later graduating to painting props, loading trucks, lighting sets and becoming a stage manager.

Years later, peeping through the stage curtain at the Empire Theatre in Calcutta, he spotted a beautiful, blue-eyed blonde in the audience on several nights. “I thought she was Russian!” he said. This was Jennifer Kendal, herself the scion of an eccentric British travelling company, Shakespeareana, run by her parents Geoffrey and Laura. With characteristic Kapoor ardour, he pursued; with typical English reserve, she received his advances coolly. In her memoir, White Cargo, Jennifer’s younger sister Felicity Kendal – later to blaze a triumphant career on the British stage and television – records her dismay at her adored sibling succumbing to the Indian charmer. Nevertheless, the couple married in 1958, Shashi having thrown in his lot with the English troupe.

When the children came along, acute financial hardship stared the couple in the face. From jobs as assistant director on potboilers, Shashi tried his hand at leading parts; he was an abject failure. During an out-of-work phase in 1971, his wife and he began to sell their tape-recorders and pieces of furniture – even their son's electric toy train. Doing the studio rounds, he recalled being told that did he think he was going to make it because he was Prithviraj Kapoor's son or Raj Kapoor's brother? He shared a bench with Dharmendra and Manoj Kumar, all waiting to be cast as the lead in a film called Picnic. Manoj got the part, and both Shashi and Dharmendra came out miserable. “I would go to Papaji and rail, ‘Why are these terrible things happening to me?’ And he would say, ‘Koi gal nahi yaar, himmat rakh, sab theek ho jayega (Never mind my friend, keep your courage, it will turn out all right)’,” he told me during his last one-on-one interview on NDTV’s Talking Heads series in November 2004 ().

Papaji may have been the Kapoors’ eternal security blanket, but it was their wives who supplied plain-spoken reality checks. In The Kapoors, Madhu Jain (Penguin, 2005) recounts that Prithviraj’s wife, confronted with his theatrical schemes, caustically remarked in Punjabi, “Thuk naal pakoray nahin tal dey (You can’t fry pakoras with spit).” And Jennifer, when I sought her opinion of her father and father-in-law’s acting skills, said, “There was a lot of swashbuckling swagger on stage. They were terrific hams.”

It was India Today’s Aroon Purie who introduced me to the Kapoors. His father, V V Purie, had been a close associate and financier of Raj Kapoor from early days. “We need a sexy cover, a great film story,” he announced at an edit meeting in the late summer of 1982. “How about the Kapoors? Let’s call it ‘Filmdom’s First Family’.” Raghu Rai, who shot the cover, and I had an exuberant entry into Bollywood’s higher echelons. Taken into the fold  of “Bhabijis” and “Bhaisahibs” we got a taste of lavish Kapoor hospitality and copious libations of scotch as Raj Kapoor lolled on his mattress in Chembur. Everyone had an opinion, from Bina Ramani, an old family friend, to Devyani Chaubal, Bollywood’s unsparing gossip queen, who said: “The Kapoors are not mere superstars, they are passionate lovers of the medium. If Raj Kapoor comes to his ruin, the industry will lose its biggest lover. In comparison, people like Amitabh Bachchan and Jeetendra are traders ('Filmdom's First Family', India Today, August 15, 1982)."

Shashi, after the massive success of Deewar (1975), was hardest to pin down, though he posed for the cover. It was Jennifer who took us in hand. From her elegantly appointed, sea-facing penthouse, she was intensely pursuing her husband’s dream, a permanent Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. “I forced her, bullied her into doing it,” said Shashi. “It was the debt I had to repay Papaji.”

It was certainly at her instigation, after the story appeared, that Ismail Merchant invited me to the filming of Heat and Dust in Hyderabad. Ruth Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel had so often been rejected that one Hollywood studio returned her screenplay saying, “Thank you for sending Eat My Dust.” With financiers pulling out, the shoot, with an assembled cast including Julie Christie, Greta Scacchi and Zakir Hussain, was on the verge of going bust. As Merchant describes it in his memoir, My Passage from India (Roli Books, 2002), the hotels “impounded our cameras and equipment…to pay the bills.”

Despite their old friendship since The Householder (1961), Shashi was furious at the hold-ups and clamouring creditors. It was Jennifer who helped in bailing out Merchant-Ivory by secretly siphoning her husband’s commercial earnings. Ismail literally had to pay Shashi in his own coin to calm him down.

The film, an international blockbuster, catapulted Merchant-Ivory into the global league. Ismail Merchant bought a flat behind Oxford Street from the proceeds. From playing schoolteachers, shikarawallahs and chocolate box heroes at home, Shashi’s image overseas – on par with Omar Sharif’s – was sealed as the irresistibly gorgeous nawab who kissed the girls and made them cry.

Jennifer died of cancer in 1984, and Shashi entered a dark phase of decline. On one occasion, when I happened to be staying in the same Parsi-run family hotel in Mahabaleshwar as him, I sent across a note asking if I could say hello. For a man deeply observant of gentlemanly courtesies, he failed to respond. Instead, his sister, Urmi, who accompanied him, apologised on his behalf.

It was his extraordinary family, especially his brave, radiant daughter Sanjna, and her efficient management of Prithvi Theatre, that pulled him out of the tunnel. After she married my friend Valmik Thapar, the naturalist and authority on tigers, Shashi’s visits to Delhi became regular. With his bulk, mane of white hair, simple cotton kurta-pyjamas and homespun woollen shawl, he came to look more and more like his father, continuing to abide by Prithviraj’s principles. Requested by my television channel, I went to see him in his hotel room to ask if he would consider voicing (for a fee, of course) the channel’s promos. He gently explained why he wouldn’t. Papaji considered it unethical, he said, to advertise products. “We are actors, not advertisers. Our performance is our product. We must be judged by that alone.”

When Deepa Gahlot’s handsome pictorial biography, The Prithviwallahs (Roli, 2004), came out, he promptly agreed to a TV recording. It was a wonderful encounter in Valmik Thapar’s garden. I asked what his greatest joy was in his long, fulfilled life. “To go and see plays at Prithvi,” he said. “I sit there and feel Papaji’s and Jennifer’s spirits hovering above the footlights. It gives me great happiness.”

Only some future film historian will add up the number of films four generations of the Kapoors, down to Kareena and Ranbir, have acted in. All those years ago, Shammi Kapoor had summed up the Kapoor ethos, saying, “Politicians are only judged at election time, but public opinion judges us at every release.”

Performance was not ephemeral, it was everlasting, Shashi Kapoor said. It was a dharma that outlasted death. “In our family the show never stops, it goes on. Did it stop after Papaji, Raj Kapoor, Jennifer or Shammi went? Why should it stop after me?”