Word: korda
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...FAMILY ROMANCE by Michael Korda Random House; 498 pages; $15 ''Always go to the best hotel and eat at the best restaurants-and sooner or later someone will appear who will give you money.'' -Alexander Korda...
Ultimately, however, Alex Korda became a figure to be reckoned with there too, as a major stockholder in United Artists and, in the years after World War II, as a pioneer of international coproduction, with such distinguished directors as David Lean and Carol Reed. Korda's knighthood-obtained in part for secret services to the British during the war-did not hurt him socially on the West Coast either. They were used to tinny titles out there, but as Sam Goldwyn said, Korda's was ''100% kosher...
...younger brothers along with him on his journey. Zoltan, saturnine and hypochondriacal, never left home without his oxygen inhaler and his health foods ("Vair is my kelp?" he once demanded of a bewildered porter), but was a first-class action-film director (The Jungle Book, Sahara). Vincent, Author Michael Korda's father, was an art director who could do the spectacular on a shoestring but never abandoned his bohemian ways. At the height of his career he sometimes wore Alex's hand-me-down suits without bothering to get them altered...
...neither his father nor Uncle Zoli exerted the claim on Author Korda's youthful imagination that the Imperial Alex did. Hence, Charmed Lives is both informal biography and personal memoir, taking on emotional urgency as Nephew Korda recounts his efforts not to imitate his inimitable uncle. Eventually Michael did find his own style and substance as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and writer of the bestselling pop studies Power! and Success...
Maybe Alexander Korda was careless about ordering his affairs because he had witnessed so many of the century's upheavals. Maybe it was the strong under current of melancholy in his temperament that caused him to regard all permanencies as delusions. Whatever. Michael Korda 's title is apt, and he has fashioned from his uncle's life, and from his own struggle not to become a pale copy of him, a book that is rather like one of his uncle's historical films-warm, well structured, humorous, a little larger and more roman tic than life...