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Isn’t She Great?

PART FIVE

Jesus Wants You to Be Rich!

PART SIX

Comme Ci, Comme Ça

PART SEVEN

Money for Jam

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

CHAPTER 1

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,