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The legend of Merle

August 21 2002

Merle Oberon

She was one of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s and '40s. A screen siren with smouldering looks, exotic features and almond-shaped eyes. Merle Oberon was described as graceful and hauntingly beautiful.

On her ascent, in 1939, she captivated the world in the box office Hollywood hit, Wuthering Heights, playing Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff.

From the other side of the globe, Tasmanians glowed with pride. Oberon, according to a biography that read like a Hollywood film script, had been born in Hobart, the daughter of an upper-class white colonial family. She left Tasmania for India after her distinguished father died in a hunting accident, and was raised there by aristocratic godparents.

If Errol Flynn was the island state's favourite son, Merle Oberon was its treasured daughter. In 1978, the Hobart Town Hall hosted a function attended by well-known local identities to welcome her back. Decades later, Tasmanians proudly recount stories and anecdotes about the hometown girl who blazed her way to Hollywood. Only Oberon wasn't born in Tasmania. She was Anglo-Indian.

Documentary maker Maree Delofksi, grew up in the 1950s admiring the actress as "kind of wild, beautiful -- and Tasmanian". By the early '80s, Delofksi was aware that Oberon was born in India. A biography, Princess Merle, co-written by British author Charles Higham, revealed that she was Anglo-Indian and that her Tasmanian provenance had been fabricated by the studios of British film producer Alexander Korda.

Korda, the first of her four husbands, launched Oberon's career by casting her as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII. But he was aware that actresses of mixed-race were not acceptable at the time, so re-wrote her past, choosing Tasmania because of its links to England and because it was so far away.

Delofski was intrigued at Oberon's much-vaunted homecoming in 1978. From Hollywood to the Hobart Town Hall -- why go if you weren't born there?

In 1999, the Sydney-based film maker started a search that would take her from Tasmania to India, Los Angeles then Canada. The trail to find Oberon's origins had more twists and turns than the Ganges River. Smoke and mirrors, dead-ends and discoveries. The documentary The Trouble with Merle is revelationary, revealing, controversial and fascinating viewing.

And, it has a final, tragic twist.

Delofski starts out in Tasmania, a wry investigator travelling around "Merle country" in a red VW, looking for clues to support what had become local legend.

She finds that despite Higham's biography and a complete lack of documentary evidence, some Tasmanians are still convinced Oberon was born there. But they have different versions to the one propagated by Korda.

To them, Oberon was the illegitimate daughter of a Chinese hotel worker, Lottie Chintock, who lived in the north-east and gave birth to her in Hobart. Lottie was forced to relinquish her daughter, who was taken to India by Indian silk merchants or, says another version, by a travelling troupe of actors called O'Brien (hence Oberon). Another story has her taken to India by the cousin of her mother's employer.

Delofski is shown the doctor's rooms where Oberon was (supposedly) born, and photos of the midwife and of Chintock, who had similar facial features. (An old newspaper refers to Oberon as having "intriguingly slanted eyes".)

A former journalist turned dog-breeder is sure that Oberon's features proved she was of Chinese descent. She says she has done a lot of judging at dog shows, and at the Miss Tasmania contest, and that you learn to distinguish features. Chintock's nephew tells Delofski that Lottie longed for her lost daughter and travelled to Hobart to watch her movies.

"People had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about Merle," says Delofski. "I had Merle stories coming out of my ears - with no real proof." And much confusion. "I got caught up in the stories; I loved them, they were so mysterious. I think part of me wanted to believe them."

But she presses on to India. Delofski visits a school in Calcutta that Oberon attended and finds that the headmistress remembers her - unfortunately from the movies. The school has no record of her.

Then Delofski's luck changes - she encounters people who do remember Oberon from her girlhood, including a priest in Mumbai whose mother babysat her. The priest directs her to his former schoolmate, Harold Selby. Selby is noted in Higham's biography as Oberon's nephew and the man who proved she was Anglo-Indian.

Estelle Merle Thompson, nicknamed "Queenie Thompson", was born in Mumbai on February 19, 1911. She acted in amateur theatre as a girl and went to London with her mother in 1929. She starred in more than 30 British and Hollywood films until the 1950s, when the roles all but dried up.

The most memorable of her movie titles include The Divorce of Lady X, The Cowboy and the Lady, The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Song to Remember and Berlin Express. (They're now screened mostly on late-night television or cable TV.) Oberon acted in her last film in 1973.

It wasn't until after she stopped acting that Oberon's family began to talk publicly about her past. Selby had found her birth certificate in the Indian government records office - hard evidence that eluded Delofski. She journeys to Toronto to see it and to talk with Selby, and is shocked at what she finds - Selby is not Oberon's nephew as he told Higham, but her brother.

Oberon's mother, like Chintock, had given birth as a teenager, relinquishing the baby to her own mother to bring up.

"I was gobsmacked," says Delofski. "At the time I thought 'Should this go in the film?' I wasn't going to do an expose of Merle. I was just interested in the power of her story.

"Maybe Merle didn't even know who her mother was. The studio reconstructed her history and she had to live that life story and keep living that life story. It had huge repercussions for her later on."

The burden eventually became too much for Oberon. When she visited Hobart in '78, she refused to talk to the local media and bunkered down at the Wrest Point Casino with her fourth husband, Robert Wolders. Wolders, a much younger man whom she adored, had wanted to see her "birthplace" when the couple travelled to Sydney on other business.

Whatever her intentions, the Hobart visit was a disaster. At the town hall reception, Oberon agitatedly admitted she wasn't born in Tasmania, to much rue, and collapsed. She died of a heart-attack at her home in California the following year, aged 68.

Delofski is aware her documentary, to be screened on the ABC next week, will disappoint true believers, but she doesn't think it will be the last word on Oberon. "I'm sure that people who firmly believed she was born there when I was filming will continue to believe. It seems to be such a big part of Tasmanian mythology of that generation."

Oberon, as Tasmania writer Cassandra Pybus points out, represented a connection, a "mooring" to Hollywood and the rest of the world. She was glamorous and beautiful, and proved you could leave Tasmania and become "very, very famous".

Delofski says that news of her findings has met with an early mixed reaction. Some Tasmanians who've got wind of it are already saying the ABC has got it wrong. The documentary leaves much unanswered. What for example, happened to the little girl that Chintock gave up as a baby.

Many questions remain about the mystery that is Merle.

The Trouble with Merle will be shown on ABC television on True Stories, on August 29, at 10pm.


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