Another Life
Authors: Michael Korda
PRAISE FOR
ANOTHER LIFE
“[An] engaging memoir.”
—
The New York Times
“This is a memoir about the publishing business and the people who swirl through it. For writers or serious readers or frivolous readers who just love books, this is a delicious find. [Korda] knows how to tell a wonderful story.”
—
The Washington Post Book World
“A triumph … so diverting, so lively, and so well-intentioned (even in its wickedest characterizations) that it calls for a new classification: a Book of Fabulous Beasts. What makes his book not only amusing and instructive but appealing is that his close and canny observations are conveyed with a writer’s glee, never with sour resentment or envy.”
—
New York Observer
“Interesting, readable, and truly informative … reading
Another Life
… is like taking a walk through a gallery of portraits of the eccentric and famous with a guide who got to see them at their best and worst and remembers with precision what those encounters were like.”
—
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Gloriously funny, charming, and ultra-readable … A more candid, engaging and warmly knowledgeable survey of the past 40 years of publishing cannot be imagined. Nobody who loves the book business with Korda’s hopeless and enduring passion can fail to be delighted and touched by this endearing saga.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A wry, lively, informative, and wonderfully written chronicle that puts to the lie any idea that publishing is a stodgy business.”
—George Plimpton
“A page-turner … a good read … [Korda] has an impressive memory, a good eye for telling moments, and surely knows how to pen a story. His instinct for what keeps pages turning has kept him in business all these years and serves him well here. As Korda might put it, this book
works
.”
—
The Seattle Times
“Full of delicious gossip … full of such vivid recollections, written with zest and intelligence … a good read.”
—
Daily News
(Los Angeles)
“Once—before the telephone, television, and Internet—the village elder gathered people round the fire and told mesmerizing stories. None told stories better than Michael Korda does in this enthralling memoir about publishing and squeezing the most out of life. Your jaw will drop listening to this village elder tell wise and comical tales about the great and nongreat, about a publishing industry convulsed by change, about his own vivid, and admirable, career.”
—Ken Auletta
“Charming and compulsively readable.”
—
Detroit Free Press
“Korda describes the people in his life in vivid and delightful detail … a relaxing, enjoyable book loaded with funny and quirky stories.”
—
The Denver Post
“A witty, pithy, and sometimes caustic look at some of the best-known names in the world of publishing and the movies.”
—
Houston Chronicle
A Delta Book
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 2000 Success Research Corporation
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Random House, New York, New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-80835-6
Reprinted by arrangement with Random House
v3.1
I always had the idea that when I was old I’d get frightfully clever. I’d get awfully learned, I’d get jolly sage. People would come to me for advice. But nobody ever comes to me for anything, and I don’t know a bloody thing
.
— RALPH RICHARDSON
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
PART THREE
Nice Guys Finish Last
PART FIVE
Jesus Wants You to Be Rich!
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
I
was twenty-three before it occurred to me that my future might not lie in the movie business.
Until then, I had always taken it for granted that I would follow in my family’s footsteps sooner or later. Admittedly, I did not seem to have those gifts that had made my father, Vincent, a world-famous art director, nor did I flatter myself that I had the monumental self-confidence that had made my Uncle Alex a successful film director at the age of twenty-one and a legendary producer and film entrepreneur before he was thirty. As for my Uncle Zoltan, the middle of the three Korda brothers, the steely determination to have his own way that was at the very heart of his genius as a film director had not, I had guessed even as a child, been granted me in my cot. The brothers were, in any case, each unique and inimitable, with their strange accents, their many eccentricities, and their uncompromising (and unself-conscious) foreignness.
Still, throughout my childhood and youth I clung to the notion, without much in the way of encouragement, that I would eventually make my living in the film business, if only because it was the only adult world about which I knew anything. It was not just that my father and his brothers were in it; my mother and my Aunt Joan (Zoli’s wife), as well as my Auntie Merle (Oberon, Alex’s wife), not to speak of Alex’s ex-wife, Maria (a great star until talkies put an inglorious end to her career), all were actresses. It could not have been more the family business had we been shopkeepers living above the shop, and in fact all this often seemed just like that, except on a grander scale.
I was not unrealistic enough to suppose that “all this”—the mansion
at 144/146 Piccadilly (once the residence of King George VI when he was Duke of York, now the headquarters of London Films), the sprawling film studio at Shepperton, the London Films offices in New York, Paris, Hamburg, and Rome—would one day be mine, but I anticipated, more modestly, a place for me somewhere there, doing
something
, though exactly what was never clear to me.
I learned French and Russian because Alex had remarked casually that his command of many languages had proven useful to him in the movie business. I took up photography because my father always carried a Leica in his pocket and believed taking photographs improved his eye for a scene or a detail. I labored at learning to write because Zoli believed that no movie was ever better than its script, and until you got it right it wasn’t worth thinking about anything else. He himself labored for seven years on the script for a movie of Daphne du Maurier’s
The King’s General
without ever bringing it to the point where it satisfied him, or, more important, Alex. As a schoolboy on holiday, I cut my teeth as a writer trying to make the dialogue of this Restoration drama read more like English than Hungarian, at half a crown a page.
Even history, my first love at school, I studied largely because it seemed likely to be useful in the movie business, at least as it was practiced by the Korda brothers. Alex’s favorite subjects for movies tended to be drawn from history and biography—
The Private Life of Henry VIII; I, Claudius; That Hamilton Woman; The Scarlet Pimpernel
, for example—while most of Zoli’s great successes were drawn (improbably for a Hungarian) from British colonial history:
Elephant Boy, The Four Feathers, Drums, Sanders of the River
. My father mostly read history and art history, rather than fiction, and could produce depictions of a Roman bedroom, the drawing room of the king of Naples, or Henry VIII’s throne room on demand, mostly from memory, and pretty much overnight when required, without getting a single detail wrong.
If the Korda brothers believed deeply in anything, it was the value of education. The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have been a ramshackle house of cards, but it had had a remarkably efficient educational system, with perhaps the highest standards in Europe. Even though they were Jewish, Alex, Zoli, and Vincent had had mathematics, ancient and modern history, foreign languages, and Latin beaten into them, like every other boy who attended the Gymnasium. These lessons were not forgotten, if only because of the blows that accompanied them. Nothing one learned was ever truly useless, my father liked to say—however
nonsensical it seemed when one was young, it would sooner or later come in handy.
I clung to this belief throughout my school days, and even through university, though it went against the evidence of my eyes. I could see no way in which studying the poetry of the French Symbolists, for example, was likely to prove useful to me, still less the early roots of the Russian language—a suspicion that subsequent life has proven to be only too well founded. Increasingly, I came to feel that I was being educated to no purpose at all, that three years as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, were just an expensive way of putting off the day of reckoning when I would finally have to make a choice and
do
something—but what?
I had spent two years in the Royal Air Force doing intelligence work in Germany before going up to Oxford and had enjoyed it as a kind of enforced pause in which nothing very much was expected of me except to keep my boots and buttons shiny and to not destroy any expensive pieces of radio equipment. If there was one thing to be said for the RAF, it was that in it I could be sure of being kept busy every hour of every day, without a moment’s leisure to worry about my plans for the future—or the lack of them.
Since I was due to be graduated in the summer of 1957, the new year of 1956 provoked much thought: the future was closing in fast; all my friends already knew
exactly
what they were going to do after graduation, while I was still waiting fecklessly for the family summons to the motion-picture industry. As it turned out, the summons was never to arrive. On January 23, Alex died, and it was very shortly apparent that his film “empire,” however solid it looked on the outside, was not going to survive him—indeed, that he had never intended it to.
P
ERHAPS AS
a reaction to this dose of reality, perhaps because I felt a desperate need to join in
something
, however exotic, or perhaps simply because I needed, if nothing else, an escape from having to make up my mind about a profession or a job, I left Oxford in the late autumn of 1956. With three companions, I set off for Budapest at the first news of the outbreak of the revolution there, carrying medical supplies and helping out in the besieged city’s hospitals. Like so many others throughout modern history, I thought better a uniform or the barricades
than a lifetime of boredom as a clerk—a sentiment which to this day provides the French Foreign Legion with more recruits than it needs. In something of the same spirit, my friends and I drove a decrepit, borrowed Volkswagen convertible to Vienna, ready to do battle.
I did not speak a word of Hungarian, I did not feel myself to be in any way Hungarian, and the little I knew of Hungarian history and politics filled me with dismay rather than with any pride or sympathy. I went because I was looking for adventure, because it seemed like a good opportunity to be a part of history in the making (as so many of my father’s friends had done in Spain, not to speak of in World War Two), and perhaps because it looked fairly clear which side was the right one. It was David and Goliath, with the Hungarian Communist Party and the Red Army playing the role of Goliath.