Charmed Lives: A Family Romance

My father was very proud of his Hungarian heritage and proud of all other Hungarians of note.  One of the people he admired was Alexander Korda who made films in Hungary, Germany, the UK, and the USA, where he helped build the movie industry in each and every country.

Alexander Korda brought his two brothers along with him, Zoltan, who became a fine director, and Vincent, a painter who became a noted art director.  Michael Korda was Vincent's son, Alexander's nephew, and became an author and very successful publisher.

Here in what is shaping up to be a disastrous 21st century, these stories from the disastrous 20th century display a kind of life that we will not see again.

Charmed Lives:  A Family Romance by Michael Korda

NY:  Random House, 1979

ISBN  0-394-41954-5

(14)  [England in the late forties] The national spirit was that of the Blitz, without the excitement of the war or the hope of victory.

(32)  Once you have lived long enough in Southern California it always seems like the rest world when you return.  From Sunset Boulevard and South Rodeo Drive, New York, London, Venice - indeed anywhere east of Palm Springs and west of Malibu - appear insubstantial and unreal.  It has always  seemed to me natural to feel lonely in Los Angeles.  In New York I get desperate when I’m alone, and seek out strangers in bars, or begin telephoning friends at odd hours of the night, but I _expect_ to be lonely in L.A., and don’t mind it, since everybody appears to be as well.

(37)  … Habsburg bureaucracy (once accurately described as "despotism humanized by stupidity”).

(66)  As Zoli was later to say, “If people want to kill you for political reasons it can happen or not happen, but if they want to kill you for money, you are already dead.”

(92)  There is a wise Gypsy saying:  “Never steal two chickens in the same village.”

(93)  He [Alex] did not believe in self-justification.  When people were angry at him, he simply agreed with then, thus disarming them completely.

(157)  There is no cruelty like that of small children, and rich children are more cruel than most.

(163)  When Zoli nearly drowned shooting a scene with the mechanical Kaa on the set of “The Jungle Book”:  Coughing and spluttering, Zoli stood up on the bank, wringing out his hat.  “Vy didn’t you bloody help?” He asked.

Alex stared at his muddy shoes.  “You should have shouted in Hungarian,” he said.  “A cry for help should always be in your native language.  Only your own understand."

(164)  Vincent:  Remember:  The people who do the work are more important than the people who give the orders, and don’t ever forget it.

(191)  … at worst a Jaguar sedan (known among chauffeurs as “the Jew’s Bentley”)…

(195)  Alex:  “It’s an old custom.  If you give somebody a knife as a gift, he will become an enemy.  If he gives you a coin, he has bought the knife from you, you see, and you remain friends.  I want us to be friends, so I am taking your penny…."

(205)  Alex:  “Get used to the best,” he would say, “and you will then have a good incentive to succeed - and anyway what’s the point in getting used to second-rate things?”

(225)  Getting Orson Welles to play Harry Lime, chasing him from Rome to Naples to Venice to Capri to Nice, just after WWII when fresh fruit was still unavailable in the UK:  Once we were airborne, my father fell asleep, and gradually Orson, having finished the Nice-Matin and yesterday's Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune, began to eye the fruit. Sleepy myself, I noticed him pick up a piece of fruit and fondle it, but when I woke up an hour or so later, I realized to my horror that he had systematically taken a single bite out of each piece of fruit, even the ones whose rinds made this a difficult proposition. Having effectively destroyed Vincent's fruit basket, he was now at peace with himself, and slept soundly, his immaculate appearance marred only by a few spots of juice on shirt front.

I thought there was nothing to be gained by telling my father about Orson's revenge, and when we landed and he saw his devastated fruit basket, he merely sighed and asked the chauffeur to deliver it to Mr. Welles's suite at Claridge's. Not a vindictive man, Vincent was always surprised that others were, he made a allowance for talent.  "I give you a word of advice," he said, as we turned into Wilton Place –" never trust an actor!"

(231)  [Sonny] Tufts had been the victim of a terrible remark, perhaps the only actor in the history of motion pictures whose career was ended by a single line.  When Cary Grant had fallen ill before giving a speech, the organizing committee had replaced him at the last minute with Sonny Tufts, and the master of ceremonies, who had not been informed of the switch, announced to the audience of motion picture celebrities, “And now I present you with one of the truly great actors of the industry, a man who has been a star for many years, a distinguished actor and a great gentleman” - he glanced down at his program notes -  “Sonny _Tufts_?”  The roars of laughter echoed for many minutes, and Tufts never recovered.  Now he was attempting to make a comeback in England, preseumably in the hope that nobody had heard about the joke there, and Alex listened to him with growing impatience.

(241)  In one interview Alex was quoted as saying, “Poverty brings out the best and worst in a man, and it brought out both in me;  money, on the other hand, promises everything and gives nothing - but you first have to have it in order to despise it.”

(270)  Brendan Bracken on Alex buying a Chagall from Chagall’s wife:  “‘Not at all Brendan,’ he [Alex] said, 'Sometimes you have to let yourself be cheated like a gentleman.’  I daresay he’s right, but the truth of the matter is that he’s easily charmed.  I worry about that.  One should be very much on one’s guard against being charmed past the age of fifty.  It’s very dangerous, very dangerous indeed, to be a romantic at that age.”

(295-297)  At the hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo:  Shortly after we had made ourselves comfortable for dinner, a strange apparition presented itself to us in the dining room. A very old man, possibly the oldest man I had ever seen, appeared pushed in a wheelchair by a buxom woman in her mid-thirties….

Lonsdale, who's attention had been diverted from Alexa's bosom to the mysterious and unlikely couple, informed us that they were the old Baron de Rothschild and his nurse.  

“He's lived here since the year one," Lonsdale said. "He moved here from the hotel in Nice after quite a fuss. It seems that for years he had the same waiter, and every morning this waiter brought him his breakfast tea. Then one day the waiter died, and the baron complained that his tea didn't taste the same;  in fact it was dreadful, no taste all. The management rushed about trying to find out what had gone wrong. It happens that old Baron de Rothschild was a miserable tipper. He hated parting with money. In revenge the old floor waiter used to piss in his teapot every morning, starting I suppose with just a few drops, until old Rothschild gradually got used to it. When the waiter died, the new one was bringing Rothschild perfectly good tea, of course, but it just didn't taste the same because he'd gotten used to piss. There was a terrible row when the whole thing came out, and he moved here.”

As our own meal drew to a close, I noticed that the old man was becoming increasingly animated, as if, finally, his evening was about to reach its climax. I wondered if he had a taste for dessert, and was expecting to see something lavish and extraordinary after his frugal meal, but I was surprised to see that maitre d'hotel arrive with a single orange on a silver plate. Deftly, he stuck a fork in the orange and showed it to Rothschild, who nodded in approval. Taking a knife the maitre d'hotel skillfully cut the rind of the orange in one long loop, and placed the fruit in front of the Baron with the flourish.  Rothschild, by now quivering slightly in anticipation, tore the orange into segments with his palsied fingers. It seemed to me improbable that an orange could cause so much pleasure in any man, but who can tell what a man who likes piss in his tea will be excited by. I watched him place one segment of the orange in his mouth, roll it around, chew at it and swallow.  Then, to my astonishment, he very precisely spat the pips straight out across the table, where they landed between his companions breasts.  She took no notice and continued to smile. He snuffled with pleasure, wiped his mouth and took up another orange segment, and proceeded once more to spit the pips out into her cleavage. She looked around the room as if nothing were happening. I squeezed Alexis hand and pointed, and we sat breathlessly as he disposed of the whole orange and its pips, never once missing his target. Then, when he had finished, his companion rose, took away his napkin, checked his rug and wheeled him out of the dining room, bowing majestically to the staff, while the baron sunk back into a comatose lethargy. Clearly it had been the high point of his day….

I explained, as best I could, what what we had seen, and for a moment I thought Alex was not going to believe me. But Freddie Lonsdale gave one of his cackles. "Quite true," he said, "quite true. I heard he does that, but I've never seen it, and I'm sorry I missed it. They say that he also likes to go down to the kitchens and shape all the ice cream and parfaits into perfect little spirals by licking them. I've never been able to eat a parfait since.”

“Well," Alex reflected," I suppose we shall all have to find new pleasures at a certain age, God knows. In a way one can envy him."

(305)  She [Vivien Leigh] was, as Alex said, “the only person in the world who could be charming while she was throwing up,”…

(333)  I was making the same mistake that everybody made about my father;  because he liked company, people assumed he liked conversation.  The worst thing he could say about a man (and most women) was that they talked too much.

(334)  Like Winston Churchill, who always turned off his hearing aid in the House of Commons (and at home) on the grounds that he could hear what he himself was saying perfectly well without it, and didn’t much care what other people were saying, Vincent was quite capable of ignoring a conversation until he felt it was time to join it, or put an end to it.

(340)  Alex:  "Years ago, I remember that Lawrence of Arabia was coming to see me to talk about a movie of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and he was killed on the way in a motorbike accident.  I still own the rights.”

(358)  Alex leaned over and gave me a searching look, “Remember,” he said, “all girls are different.  Unfortunately, all wives are the same.”

(380)  “Retirement,” he [Alex] said, “is a very difficult thing, much more difficult than people think.  The end is much harder than the beginning.  In the beginning, one is driven by hope and ambition, but at the end it’s just a question of how comfortably you can go out, and between the damned tax people at Somerset House and the bloody doctors, you can’t even count on much in the way of comfort.  Even the greatness of the past doesn’t help all that much.  In Churchill’s case, it just makes it that much harder to go.  Once one has climbed the ladder, it’s hard to step down - and very easy to fall!"

(387)   Movie people are seldom aware of the awe in which they are regarded, partly because they're too busy to notice where they’re working, and because it’s a way of life.  When a camera and lights are set up, it attracts a crowd - much as accidents and crimes do.

(394)  Leila, Vincent’s second wife:  People with ordinary family lives are much happier than people who want to be special.  I learned that.  You may learn it - I hope so, for your sake.

(420)  He [Alex] had once said that in every love affair there is one secret thing which each person knows about the other and which can never be spoken because it will immediately destroy the relationship, a kind of secret weapon in everybody’s heart.

(427)  Zoli:  You haven’t been close because she’s an old woman who once did you a favor.  I understand that.  We always want to turn away from the people who did favors for us, no?  It’s natural, even if it’s not very nice.

(434)  Alex:  Entertainment counts and it is the most difficult thing of all.  You can affect an audience three ways - you can make them laugh, make them cry, and make them sit forward in their seats with excitement.  You should never degrade them…

(449)  Photographer Milton Greene on Alexa [Alexander's third and much younger wife]:  “Nobody’s going to solve her problems.  She has to learn, like everybody else.”

”Learn what?”

“Learn that being tough doesn’t help.  Being rich doesn’t help much either.  What matters is feeling good about what you’re doing.  I don’t think she does.”

(478)  Alex had always boasted that he could learn any language by going to a new country and buying the newspapers, reading them every day until he understood the headlines, then the stories, then the reviews and features.  “When you can do the crosswords,” he would say, “it is time to move on to another country, and learn a new language."