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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780385335072
From world leaders to Mafia dons, from Hollywood stars to the
literary world’s most eccentric writers, the notable and notorious
alike have entrusted their life’s work to Simon & Schuster’s
preeminent editor, Michael Korda. In this masterful memoir, Korda
reveals the unforgettable cast of characters and outrageous
anecdotes behind four decades of blockbuster publishing, bringing
us face-to-face with dozens of larger-than-life figures: Richard
Nixon, who maintained his “presidential” persona long after his
public life was over; Joan Crawford, whose autobiography reflected
a life she would have liked to have lived but did not; Joseph
Bonanno, the retired Mafia don who’d do anything to keep from being
killed by the reviewers.
And in a revelatory account that reads as compulsively as
fiction, Another Life paints a vivid picture of publishing’s
glitterati, including Jacqueline Susann, who liberated women’s
fiction–and terrorized a publishing house, and Tennessee Williams,
who nourished his genius on four-course vodka lunches. A veritable
Who’s Who of stage, screen, and letters, Another Life is the deft
interweaving of publishing at it most fascinating–and storytelling
at its finest.
PART ONE
The Creative Juices
PART TWO
File Under Grief
PART THREE
Nice Guys Finish Last
PART FOUR
Isn’t She Great?
PART FIVE
Jesus Wants You to Be Rich
PART SIX
Comme Ci, Comme Ca
PART SEVEN
MOney for Jam
Acknowledgments
Index
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.
Perhaps 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 somethg
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.
My years of RAF service, plus my obligatory annual summer stint
in the RAF Reserve, were enough to give me the illusion that I
might prove useful to the insurgents. I knew a lot about radios,
there was hardly a weapon in the British arsenal that I could not
strip and reassemble blindfolded, I was a good shot, I knew
Russian. I saw myself perhaps playing the role in the streets of
Budapest that the hero of The Four Feathers had played in the
Sudan, or that T. E. Lawrence had played in Arabia. I would then, I
thought, even more improbably, return home to woo Alexa, my Uncle
Alex’s young widow, with whom I had been hopelessly in love for
years, to the annoyance of my family.
My decision to go to Hungary brought tears to the eyes of Alexa
(who had agreed to buy the medical supplies) and to those of my
father, who, having survived two earlier Hungarian revolutions by
the skin of his teeth, had a good idea of exactly what we were
getting ourselves into. Except for Alexa, the only adult who seemed
enthusiastic about this adventure was the writer Graham Greene, an
old friend of my father’s and something of a mentor to me, who
believed that young men had the right, if not the obligation, to
seek danger anywhere, however remote. The cause, as such, did not
seem to him important–the main thing was to be “in the thick of
things,” with the heady sound of bullets whistling past one’s
ears.
In the spirit of his later spoof of the British Secret
Intelligence Service, Our Man in Havana, Greene introduced me to a
member of MI6 over drinks at the Ritz Hotel bar, on Piccadilly.
Greene himself had been a wartime spy for SIS, as well as one of
Kim Philby’s oldest (and most loyal) friends. Intrigue was second
nature to him, and he reveled in mystery, so it was not surprising
that I never learned the name of his companion, a military-looking
gentleman with a Brigade of Guards tie who urged me to photograph
the unit markings on any Soviet vehicles I saw, as well as the
collar and shoulder flashes of the troops.
What, I asked, should I do with the exposed film? “Place the film
cartridges in a French letter and insert it into your rectum,” the
gentleman from SIS whispered. “Vaseline helps,” he added
delicately, sipping at his pink gin.
He also told me the telephone number of a man in Budapest who
might be able to help me in case of need, although, he warned, I
was to use it only in the direst of emergencies. I must memorize
the number, right then and there, since it was far too secret to
write down.
”You’ll see,” Greene said contentedly, as we watched the SIS man
stroll down Piccadilly, merging into the evening crowd with his
neatly furled umbrella and his bowler hat–no doubt on his way back
to the SIS building on Shaftesbury Avenue, which was supposed to be
top secret, but was in fact so well known that London taxi drivers
pointed it out to tourists–“they always look after their
own.”
More sensibly, my father gave me the telephone number of Zoltán
Kodály, the famed composer–who would be respected, he said, by any
regime–and promised to call the new prime minister, Imre Nagy, on
my behalf, if necessary. Resigned to the inevitable, he advised me
that the important things in a revolution were to wear plenty of
warm clothes, to carry a street map, and to take as much food with
me as possible. Alexa worried about my keeping warm too and gave me
the heavy fur-lined jacket that Alex had used during the war to
keep him warm on his journeys back and forth across the Atlantic in
unheated bombers. I was going back to the city in which he had
first become famous, wearing his coat. I wondered if there was any
symbolism to this, and, if so, what it was.
I followed my father’s advice, loading up the car in Munich with
as much delicatessen as could be crammed into what little space
remained, and very good advice it turned out to be. Most roadblocks
and barricades were manned by Hungarians who carried bottles of
baracs, a peach brandy with a faint aftertaste of turpentine and
the kick of jet fuel, in one coat pocket and spare ammunition or a
grenade in the other. Cans of sardines and salamis were useful in
calming tempers.
Driving around Budapest at night was to experience all the
thrills of danger, even during the brief truce when the Russians
weren’t shelling the city. At every street corner, armed civilians
stuck their heads–and more important, their guns–into the car,
punctuating their questions with clicks of their safety catches. On
the discovery that my friends and I were British, we were usually
offered a drink and often needed it. The empty bottles were
gathered neatly beside the barricades to be made into Molotov
cocktails. In that sense, drinking could be seen as yet another way
of supplying the revolution with additional firepower, as well as
keeping everybody’s spirits high, but the result was a high level
of nervous anxiety and a lot of unnecessary shooting.
The Hungarians had won the first round of the revolution. The
departing Russian troops looked even shabbier than the Hungarian
civilians, at least by the spit-and-polish traditions of the
British armed services. But what the Russians lacked in spit and
polish they made up for in numbers and sheer ferocity. The first
time I tried to photograph a column of tanks, an officer shouted a
warning at me from the open cupola of his tank’s turret, and when I
didn’t put the camera away fast enough, his machine gunner pointed
his weapon straight at my head for emphasis. The expression on his
face–he had the thickest, blackest eyebrows I had ever seen on a
man, and was a dead ringer for Leonid Brezhnev–made it plain that
nothing would give him more pleasure than putting a burst right
into my chest. I decided then and there that SIS would have to do
without any photographs from me.
The few days after the Hungarian insurgents appeared to have
fought the Red Army to a standstill were at once euphoric and
unsettling. We felt we were living in the calm before the storm, as
the new Hungarian government struggled for international diplomatic
and military support, neither of which was forthcoming. There were
ominous rumors that the Russians were gathering reinforcements from
the Ukraine to retake the city. In the meantime, the bodies in the
streets were being picked up at last. They lay there, Russian and
Hungarian, sprinkled with lime to mask the odor of death, faces
covered with brown wrapping paper or old newspapers, sometimes with
a few fading flowers at their feet. Many of the dead Russian
soldiers lay on their backs, their hands frozen in positions of
supplication or anger, their heavy greatcoats spread around them on
the pavement; most of the Hungarian corpses were laid out with more
care, the arms folded neatly across the chest, one hand over the
other. Not a few had a piece of shirt cardboard tucked under the
hands with a name written on it in big block capitals.
The Russians announced their return in force early on November 4,
with a massive artillery barrage that began at three in the
morning, lighting up the sky all around the city. There had been
plenty of signs that they were coming, but nobody had wanted to
believe them. Long-distance calls produced no reply or were
answered in Russian, while radio stations all over the country
closed down one by one, and trains that left Budapest failed to
return. In the streets, the feeling was one of fatalism, a
Hungarian national character trait even under the best of
circumstances. The only optimism to be found was among the American
correspondents lined up at the bars of the major hotels.
My own spirits were not exactly buoyed by the sight of barricades
of cars, street-lamp poles, trams, and tram rails going up in the
streets. I did not think they would hold back the Russians for very
long, which shortly proved to be the case. The constant rolling
thunder of the big guns, the scream of incoming shells, and the
deafening crash as they hit some apartment building or monument
seemed exciting at first but soon began to oppress. The cold, gray,
cheerless sky of Mitteleuropa in late autumn was obscured by a
low-hanging pall of greasy black smoke from fires and explosions,
and the air smelled of cordite, burning gasoline, diesel fumes,
clogged drains, and death. Clouds of gritty plaster and cement dust
rose from each hit. Shards of broken glass, chunks of masonry, and
pieces of white-hot shrapnel hissed and whizzed past my ears. All
too soon, however, noises began that made the artillery barrage
seem comforting by comparison: the sharp hammering of machine guns,
the high-pitched crack of rifles, the thud of an occasional hand
grenade, the rapid pop-pop-pop of automatic small arms, and worst
of all the ominous roar of diesel engines and the squeal of metal
treads on cobblestones that indicated the approach of tanks. The
rumor was that the Russians were not taking prisoners.
As the city burned and shook around me–the old streets seemed to
heave with each detonation, as if rocked by earthquakes–I began to
think about my future, if there was one, in clearer terms. A number
of my illusions faded during the siege and fall of Budapest, some
of them having to do with fear and courage, others to do with the
future. It became clear to me in the harsh, cold, grubby, and
dangerous reality of Budapest–the city to which Alex had come as
an impoverished enfant terrible in 1908, and where he had directed
his first movie in 1914–that Alex’s death had in fact meant the
end of any easy way for me to enter the movie business. For the
first time, I thought about that with relief. Why, after all, enter
a business in which Alex and his brothers had succeeded beyond
their wildest imaginations?
Given my interest in history, my father had hoped that I would
teach it eventually, but having seen history in the making, I
didn’t think that trying to make tidy sense of it would be the
profession for me. In any case, I couldn’t see myself settling into
a comfortable life as an Oxford don, even assuming I could improve
my academic record enough to make such a career possible.
Had I nurtured any fantasies about working for the British
intelligence services, they would have evaporated when I saw the
Red Army in action. This particular fantasy was not as far-fetched
as it sounds. This, after all, was in the years before an endless
number of Oxford- or Cambridge-educated traitors were exposed,
discrediting the idea of recruiting young men over a glass of
sherry during tutorial sessions. Many an Oxford or Cambridge don
was a talent scout for the spymasters, and those undergraduates
who, like myself, were fluent in Russian and seemed to be on the
right side of the class barrier were likely to receive a carefully
phrased offer from one of them–I certainly had. (Oddly enough, an
attempt had also been made to recruit me for the other side while I
was in the RAF.)
I had no interest in the more traditional “professions”–law,
medicine, et cetera–and recognized that I was not at all the type
for a career in the British diplomatic services, nor for the stock
market or banking–like my father and my uncles, I was interested
in spending money, not in dealing with other people’s. There was
always journalism, of course, but I had tried that during a brief
spell with the Financial Times the summer before and hadn’t liked
Fleet Street much. Besides, the British journalists in Budapest
were for the most part a poor advertisement for their craft, hard
drinking, given to reporting even the wildest and most short-lived
of rumors as truth. They seemed to me straight out of the pages of
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. “This is a second-rate profession,” one of
them said to me glumly, as we sat drinking in a bar, surrounded by
bits of broken glass and pieces of the chandelier, which an
explosion had brought down from the ceiling. “I mean, what can you
say in five hundred words or less about all this? Anyway, what they
want back in London is human-interest stories. And who wants to go
out into the bloody streets and risk getting shot just to find some
poor sod of a freedom fighter who understands English well enough
to ask him how it feels to be shot at?”
Who indeed? I said sympathetically. Still, it was a big story,
surely, exactly the kind of thing people wanted to read
about?
”Don’t you believe it. They want to read about pools winners and
American film stars. This is foreign politics, that’s all. The
moment these people have lost, they’ll be off the front
page.”
Truer words, I was very soon to learn, were never spoken.
The fact was, as it was gradually beginning to dawn on me while I
sleepwalked through the last few days of the revolution, I didn’t
really seem to fit in anywhere in England. I didn’t belong there
any more than I belonged in Budapest. I was “mid-Atlantic”–as much
a product of America, where I had lived as a child from 1941 to
1946, as of England; more at home in Switzerland, where I had gone
to school at Le Rosey, or in France, where my father spent most of
his time, than anywhere in the United Kingdom. During my service in
the RAF, people had assumed that I was on some kind of
Anglo-Canadian exchange program, while most people at Oxford
mistook me for a Rhodes or a Fulbright scholar. I had lost most of
my English accent while I was in America and made no effort to
regain it once I was back in England. As a result, hardly anybody
believed I was English–starting, unfortunately, with myself.
Not being thought of as English gave me a great advantage in that
it removed me altogether from the British class system, in which
the most obvious identifier is accent. But since the class system
is central to life in the United Kingdom, it also left me adrift. I
had none of the cozy companionship with my peers or the sense of
belonging that constitute the real advantages of a class system. I
had always felt myself to be an outsider except when at school in
Switzerland, where everybody had been an outsider, except the
Swiss.
So the problem wasn’t what kind of a career I should pursue, it
was where I was going to live, which was much easier to resolve. I
felt a great sense of relief at reaching this conclusion, one that
sustained me through many days of unpleasantness as the Russians
“mopped up” after their victory, restoring the Hungarian Communist
Party to power with a brutality that was to keep it there for more
than thirty years. The streets were empty now of everything but
burned-out tanks, smoldering barricades, corpses, and the
omnipresent, expressionless Soviet soldiers. The enforced calm of
defeat, oppression, and terror descended on the city.
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