Flashback

Book Title: Flashback: My Life and Times in Bollywood and Beyond
Author: Bob Christo
Publisher: Penguin Books
No. of pages: 263 pages
Language: English
Price: Rs 399

ISBN 978-0-143-43462-9

    Bob Christo, the ubiquitous firang henchman of the villain of many a Hindi potboiler of the 1980s and 1990s, was an integral part of the Mumbai movie scene. In a long acting career in India, the Sydney-born man of many parts appeared in 230 films in multiple languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada – as well as 15 television serials, including The Sword of Tipu Sultan, during the making of which actor-director-producer Sanjay Khan nearly lost his life in a major studio fire in Mysore that left 54 people dead.


Eventful as Christo’s stint was in Indian showbiz, there was much more to him than the three and a half decades that he spent in India, eventually retiring to a quiet of life meditation in Bangalore. This book, completed months before the actor passed away aged 72, is a lively account of the diverse people, cultures and challenges that Christo encountered in the first four decades of his life, which seem to be far more exciting than anything he did after he landed in Mumbai – the city was still very much Bombay – in 1977 with the sole desire of meeting Parveen Babi, whose photograph on the cover of Time magazine had caught his fancy.


This was the year that Elvis Presley died and the internal Emergency clamped on India was on its last legs. Within days of arriving in Mumbai, Christo was introduced to Parveen Babi during the filming of The Burning Train. Christo went on to work not only with her but an entire panoply of Indian movie stars, including Raj Kapoor, Prem Nazir, Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan, NT Rama Rao, Mithun Chakraborty, Feroz Khan and, of course, Sanjay Khan, to whom he was a trusted friend, steadfast professional associate and an expert masseur.


Born in 1938 in Sydney to an Australian father of German descent, Robert John Christo led a full life. It was packed with action, drama, torrid relationships and a whole lot of colour: the very stuff of a high-octane Bollywood extravaganza. Much of what he lived through might appear too far-fetched, even implausible, to those that have had placid lives.


But it all actually did happen to Christo in the span of a single lifetime and this candid autobiography is, if nothing else, a testimony to the man’s ability to vividly recall every important detail of his life. Christo was a tall, well-built and strikingly agile individual who could fill up the screen with his frame. But he obviously also possessed a particularly sturdy memory.


Christo went to school in Dusseldorf, then debuted as an actor in a German movie after serving as an extra at the Dusseldorf National Theatre. He returned to Australia to acquire a degree in civil engineering from East Sydney College before working to keep the military supply lines open for the South Vietnamese army during its war with North Vietnam. He picked up the ropes of the soft Japanese martial art of Goju-kai from Oshiro, Bruce Lee’s kung-fu guru. As Tom Alter writes in the foreword, “For Roberto, nothing could be average.”


Indeed. Christo worked with Marlon Brando, no less. And that was one of the highest points of his life. He was hired as the construction supervisor for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was being shot in the Philippines. He had initially been offered a walk-on part in the film as a CIA agent who briefs Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) about his mission early in the narrative. Christo turned down the role, opting instead to lead the production team that would lay the foundations and build the structure of the compound from which Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) operated.


The on-screen role that Christo passed over went to a carpenter and wannabe actor called Harrison Ford. The fleeting appearance in Apocalypse Now turned out to be just the opening that Ford needed. He hit paydirt with films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and never looked back, becoming the highest paid Hollywood actor of his era.


The peripatetic Christo sought action wherever he went and got loads of it, both in the personal sphere – he had a girl in every city that he laid anchor in – and professionally. Besides working for various construction firms, he had a successful stint as a fashion model in Hong Kong with Indian photographer Dinshaw Balsara.


If that were not all, Christo survived a devastating earthquake in Zamboanga in Mindanao, chased an American spy ship lost somewhere off the coast of Africa, participated in armed combat in Rhodesia for a Special Air Service (SAS) regiment, ran an escort service in Cape Town, and secretly ferried a huge stash of cash in a luxury Range Rover for American tycoon Paul Getty II. The last mentioned assignment fell on his lap after Getty and his men saw him and an Iranian pal Berooz Nejad, who ran a martial arts school in Cape Town, make short work of the entire South African soccer team in a pub brawl.


There you are. There was either never a dull moment in Christo’s life or he was simply a jolly good raconteur. No matter what the truth is, Flashback reads like a full-on thriller.