CHARMED LIVES: A Family Romance

by Michael Korda ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 1979

In the decades before and after World War II, producer-director Sir Alexander Korda virtually was Britain's film industry--but the film-by-film trackings of his career, already fully laid down in Kulik's Alexander Korda (1976), are the least of this big, unshapely book by Korda's nephew Michael; in fact, they're the only dull stretches in a generally irresistible, flashback-and-forward memoir of three loving-hating brothers, their feuding wives, their wary offspring, their conflicting tastes for glamor and peasanty bohemianism. The Korda boys came from Hungary, of course (they were really Kellners, and Jewish) smooth Big Brother Alex, dispenser of funds and jobs and gifts; shambling artist Vincent (Michael's dad), content to live in Alex's London shadow as film art director; and ""poor Zoli,"" an ambitious director (Four Feathers) who stayed in L.A. to escape Alex's loving grasp, his bitter dreams and envies festering. True, this always remains Alex's story: his marriages to stormy European star Maria and prot‚g‚e Merle Oberon (Michael's icy ""Auntie Merle,"" whose pet parrot screeched Merle's favorite phrase, ""Don't touch it!""); his best-of-everything-but-simple lifestyle (Strasbourg pat‚ on earthenware, roughing it with Baccarat); his financial finaglings; his parties and houses and boats and devotion to ever-distraught Vivien Leigh. But father Vincent is the real charmer here--refusing to drive to the studio in a Rolls, raging over next-door neighbor Sir Oswald Moseley, quaking with fear of being late for dinner with Alex. And young Michael himself, though ""a bystander in the Korda drama,"" has his share of glitter and conflict when he leaves his divorced mum in the U.S. to live with remarried Vincent. Dressed and driven by Alex's staff, he foolishly worships his grand but distant uncle. He is dispatched, along with Vincent, to find Orson Welles in Italy and bring him back alive (a magical, merry chase). But, as an adolescent--and the confidant of Alex's much-younger third wife Alexa--he sees the Korda empire crumbling, finds himself in the middle of nasty crossfire, and (after Alex's death) watches as the family feuding sinks into endless litigation. An affectionate, sadder-but-wiser, character-rich family portrait, then--rather unfocused and never as deep as it would like to be, perhaps, but sprawling with color, comedy, and vicarious high life.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION