Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [257]
Queenie had used up one of her markers to get into the studio, hoping for a screen test, but her luck was better than that. Alex happened to enter the room, with his soon-to-be-divorced wife beside him, the Hungarian silent screen star Maria Corda (the former Maria Farkas, she had substituted a C for the K in Alex’s family name, since it looked more Christian), whose career and marriage both had fizzled in Hollywood, and Maria, catching sight of Queenie’s face, dug her nails into Alex’s arm and cried out, in her inimitable Hungarian accent, “There she is, you fool! Look at that face! It’s worth a million pounds! There is your damned Anne Boleyn.”
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IT WAS ironic that the girl in the tea line was not only to play Anne Boleyn opposite Charles Laughton (in the first British film ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, and for which Laughton won Best Actor) but was to supplant poor Maria in Alex’s life and eventually become the first Lady Korda, when he was knighted—though not before he had shrewdly changed her name from Queenie Thompson to Merle Oberon.
Merle’s real background was not by any means a well-kept secret, and the more famous she became, the more it leaked out, and the harder she strove to suppress it. Merle spent most of her life refining the story of her origins, but from time to time the truth slipped out. Merle herself sometimes slipped up—once, when asked what her favorite food was on a celebrity cooking program, she answered “Curry”—and when she was tired or stressed her singsong accent became unmistakably chee-chee, as Charles Laughton unkindly pointed out when she made I, Claudius with him.
When I wrote Charmed Lives, I had been more than usually circumspect on the subject of Merle, but despite kid-glove treatment, her lawyer, a gravel-voiced Hollywood heavyweight, called me less than twenty-four hours after Merle had received the bound galleys I sent her. Faced with the threat of a time-consuming and expensive lawsuit, I wrote Merle virtually out of the book altogether, which didn’t please her much either, and we received no further invitations to dinner at Malibu—not necessarily a punishment. Merle’s dinner parties were stately, rather than amusing, and her home, in which almost everything was white, was so perfect and spotless that her husband hovered beside you as you helped yourself to caviar, just in case you dropped an egg on the carpet. Rod Steiger, who was Merle’s next-door neighbor, once complained to me that the guest bathroom was so obsessively clean he was unable to urinate into the toilet bowl.
In any event, once Merle died, I became interested in telling the real story of her life, not out of malice, for I liked and admired her, but because I thought the truth was more interesting (as is so often the case) than the fiction she had concocted. You couldn’t help admiring the pluck of the little chee-chee girl who had managed to break out of the narrow, constrained little world into which she had been born and go on to become wealthy, famous, and admired. Queenie had been a survivor, a strong, passionate young woman determined to make it in the great world with the weapons that were available to her. I decided that the only way to re-create her was to do the research as if I were going to write a biography, then write the