CHARMED LIVES

by Korda, Michael

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NY: Random House, 1979 Hardcover with dust jacket. x, 498, (2) pp. Elegantly bound in publisher's burgundy cloth with gilt titles on red label on spine, colophon on spine, gilt, and author's initials on red label on upper cover, gilt. Illustrated with 32 pages of B&W photographs. This is a new, unopened copy, in perfect condition other than very minor chipping of dust jacket. AS NEW/FINE. Surrounded by the rich, the famous and the beautiful, Alexander Korda lived a life other men only dream about. Churchill (who secretly wrote film scripts for him) , H. G. Wells, Lord Beaverbrook and Robert Sherwood were among his lifelong friends; Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson, Marlene Dietrich, Vivien Leigh and Merle Oberon (whom he married) among those he brought to stardom. As he rose to power, wealth and fame to become Sir Alexander Korda, one of the most legendary and flamboyant of all film tycoons - making and losing fortunes, engaging in vast and costly enterprises, charming all around him and living in boundless luxury - his two brothers, often unwillingly and quarrelsomely accepting his dominant role, rose with him: Zoltan, mercurial and eccentric, a director of genius whose The Four Feathers and Cry the Beloved Country are film classics; and Vincent, whom Alex shanghaied from a career as a painter to be artistic director of his new motion picture empire. And while Charmed Lives is a family romance, it is Alex who stands at the center of it, as he did in his lifetime. It was Alex who led his brothers from a remote Hungarian peasant village into the early silent-film world of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin and Paris, and to the great studios of Hollywood and London as talking pictures swept the globe. And it is Alex's story, a story more poignant than those around him could have guessed or his most gifted screenwriters could have imagined, that dominated all their lives. For Alex, along with an incredible flair for success, had an equally powerful impulse toward destruction. In the end, it was this impulse that prevailed. Sir Alexander Korda's nephew, Michael Korda, writes with fascination, nostalgia and total recall about the enchanted, giant figures of his childhood, and with increasing apprehension and, finally, detached sadness, of his struggle to break loose from the Kordas and lead a life of his own - a struggle made more poignant by the darkness of Alexander Korda's final days and by a love story both bizarre and complex. Charmed Lives will take its place beside Moss Hart's Act One as one of the great show business stories of all time. . Hardcover. As New/Fine. Royal 8vo (6.5 x 9.5").

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