‘Elephant Boy’ Walked His Pet in Valley

They didn’t call him the “elephant boy” for nothing.

Sabu Dastagir, made famous in high adventure films in London and Hollywood, was infamous in the San Fernando Valley for walking his pet elephant down Winnetka Avenue in Chatsworth.

This sent indignant neighbors to City Hall, where they demanded zoning changes to prohibit large animals, including pachyderms, on residential property.

Long before Sting, Madonna and Fabio, Sabu Dastagir was widely known by his first name only. Born in 1924 in Karapur, Mysore, India, Sabu was discovered by the British documentarian Robert Flaherty when he was an 11-year-old stable boy at the court of a maharajah. Flaherty promptly cast the sinewy, dark-eyed Sabu in the lead of his 1937 film, “Elephant Boy.”

That role led to such other British classics as “Drums” in 1938 and the Oscar-winning Technicolor film “The Thief of Baghdad” in 1940.

In 1942, Sabu ascended to what many consider the premature pinnacle of his career with “Jungle Book” and “Arabian Nights.” Sabu went on to make several other films before he died in 1963 of a heart attack, but none was as accomplished as any of his early successes.

A victim of rigid typecasting, Sabu acted in a series of outlandish, exotic jungle and desert adventures toward the end of his career, which some critics characterized as colonialist and Eurocentric.

Here in the Valley, walking his elephant wasn’t the last of Sabu’s problems. In 1950, he was sued by two insurance companies for hiring two men to burn down his house for the insurance money. A jury ruled that he had not caused the fire.