Michael Korda - Another Life: A Memoir of Other People

[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 writers 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 Kordas 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)

Oncebefore the telephone, television, and Internetthe 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

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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 Id get frightfully clever. Id get awfully learned, Id get jolly sage. People would come to me for advice. But nobody ever comes to me for anything, and I dont know a bloody thing.

RALPH RICHARDSON

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 familys 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 (Zolis wife), as well as my Auntie Merle (Oberon, Alexs wife), not to speak of Alexs 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 thisthe 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 Romewould 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 wasnt worth thinking about anything else. He himself labored for seven years on the script for a movie of Daphne du Mauriers The Kings 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.