Korda, was born with and which he changed when he moved to biewd past as a University Student because it sounded deeply jewish. At first he spelled it corda, then he changed it to korda because it looks hungarian that way. Host what did he do . Guest he was, perhaps, the prototypical film producer, film czar, also film director. He directed his first film at a teenage age in 1914 and directed at least a hundred and perhaps twice that many movies during the course of his life and produced i dont know how many. Many, many, many. Europe, United Kingdom where he eventually settled and, of course, in hollywood in periods when he was there. He was an affable genius, and being his nephew was a fulltime excitement. Host what was his influence on you . He, your father and your other uncle . Guest well, you know, first of all, an enormous respect for talent of any kind. By definition, people who were good at making films are good at recognizing all sorts of talent even if they dont share it themselves. And secondly, although they were intense, intense on making the best possible film and intense on making profitable films, they also had a great capacity for insuring what they were doing, for having fun and for the friendships that came along with their business relationships. They were enormously influential in my life. Host so what was your childhood like . Guest well, barring that great unforeseeable episode of the Second World War which my father and myself and my mother led us to, first, canada and then the United States in the late autumn of 1940 because alex found himself unable to complete three films in england. One was the jungle book and the third was that hamilton woman with vivian leigh, and the only way to get them done was to go to california. So we all went off to california, and that was a huge upset in my life. Before that i thought of myself as english, and those thoughts occurred at 6, 7 years old in children, i dont think they do, and i suddenly found myself plunged into a new world and not going back again until after the war was over. So my childhood was in no way difficult, but was a constant succession of ups and downs and changes and moves that were very unsettling. Which is probably why i stick close to home now. Host in your book charmed lives a family romance, you write that like my father, alex went to immense trouble to see that the korda children were spared the grim deprivations of his own youth while at the same time believing that an unhappy childhood was essential to suck. Paradoxically, because we had not suffered, he was unable to take us seriously. Guest i think thats true. Alex had gone through so much being born in hungary in an age of fierce antifeminism, being poor, unimaginably poor by any standards that we can draw today when the father of the three children die at a quite young age for them and then becoming in his teens the mainstay of his family, making enough money to support his two brothers and his mother. And alex was, in any case, by instinct a survivor no matter what happened; first world war, Second World War. Alex kept on going and kept surviving. He loved us very much, but he didnt take seriously people who had not had that experience of having to scrabble and fight for survival. Host why did you not go into the movie business . Guest well, i thought there were enough kordas in the movie business to begin with, and the second thing is i could not see myself as having a real talent for the movie business. It struck me that the only thing that i knew how to do was play with words and so it became associated with words, and eventually i became a book publisher, and then i became a book writer. I think that that was actually quite satisfactory. I dont think the world needs another korda in the movie business. Host you fell into publishing accidentally. Guest quite accidentally. I never thought of it as a serious profession, in fact, i didnt think of it as a profession as all. I was a consumer, it never occurred to me how theyre produced or why they were produced or any of those things. And i came over here after completing my education at oxford to work with my cousin on a book in which i participated. When that failed, i went to cbs as a script writer which is really hard to imagine how grubby that is. It was like the shape up for a long shoreman. You went every morning to cbs and waited until they provided you with a book or script or not. And once they did, you read it and brought it back the next day with a report and got paid. So for me, when a job opened up in Book Publishing, it was like this huge change in my life because you got a weekly paycheck. You had a desk. You had a place to work. And i think that because that was such a huge change in my life, my relationship in the place i worked, Simon Schuster, became an absurdly fixed one. I spent 48 years working at Simon Schuster. And thats because it was, in some sense, home. Host when did you become editorinchief . Guest i cant remember. I was, certainly, it was for a long part of that 48 years. I think i became editorinchief maybe four or five years after i went to Simon Schuster in 1958. Host when did you leave Simon Schuster . What year . Guest i dont remember exactly what year. It would have been perhaps ten years ago, Something Like that. I was halfway tempted to try for 50 because its a round number and seemed a serious episode in life. But my beloved wife margaret felt and i felt too that eating out the last two years merely for the satisfaction of being able to say 50 as opposed to 48 really didnt make much sense. So i left really with no regrets and have never looked back. I have the greatest fondness for Simon Schuster and for all those who work there, and Good Relationships with them too. But it became a moment when i no longer wanted to do it. Host what does an editorinchief do . Guest well, its like being a company commander, which is to say that you do what all the other soldiers do, except that supposedly you do it better and with more experience. Its not a direct order job. You dovetail other editors what the buy, what not to buy. Though you may try to influence them to do those things, but essentially, you are first among equals. Host what was it like to work with max schuster and dick simon . Guest it was fascinating. First of all, max schuster was a deep eccentric. And secondly, because they went back to the very beginning of Book Publishing when they had been young people together going into the Book Business in an age when the Book Business did not, to be frank, have a lot of juice. And they were among the first to confront that. Knopf came before them, and i believe dick worked for horace who was the alcoholic, ubergenius of Book Publishing in his age. And so they connected themselves to a whole world of Book Publishing that was utterly fascinating, and they were, as i say, in different ways hugely eccentrically interesting people. Host how often is an editor also a writer . Which you became . Guest well, most editors take a stab at writing a book. Its rather like eating out in restaurants and decided that you ought to be able to cook. I dont think very many editors have become fulltime writers or written as many books as i have which i think now amount to 24 or 23. That, i think, is probably unique. Most people retire from their Book Publishing careers before they take up a writing career. I did not. I put a toe in the water writing books, and to everybodys surprise above all, to my own the first of those books was a sensation, and the second of those books was a number one bestseller which is not to say that i would want to go back and read them again now. And that did have a marked effect on my life both in producing much more money than i had made before in Book Publishing, but also in carving out for myself a kind of parallel universe; one side of it going towards Book Publishing and editing, and the other side of it going towards writing. And bring those two into focus was, if more, for many, many years, a balancing act. Host male chauvinism, your second book was power how to get it, how to use it. And in that book, power, you write all life is a game of power. The object of the game is simple enough, to know what you want and get it. Guest yes, i think thats true. I think that was true then, i think its true now, and i think its probably always true. By the way, in knowing what you want, there should be some moral basis to it. If what you want is entirely immoral and wrong, then, of course, your life is going to pursue a very difficult can pattern. Difficult pattern. But assuming that that is the case, yes, of course. What we want is not to have power for its own sake, but power to do the job we want to do as we think it should be done and to live the life we want to live as we have always wanted to live it. Host 1972, writing about male chauvinism. That was pretty cutting edge, wasnt it . Guest well, it was. I didnt think it would be. I owe to nan taliz, the fact that book was purchased, and we were all astonished at how trendy it came. Thats largely due to clay felger who put a piece on it on the cover of new York Magazine which was then the hot magazine in town, a hilarious picture of a woman taking dictation, and in front of her seated at the desk is a pig in an absolutely beautifullycut suit, shirt and tie. And it just clicked in the publics mind as something that they absolutely understood, and it worked in a way which astonished us all. Host Michael Korda, in your book another life, first of all, whered you get the title for that book . Guest well, i got the title by accident because i wanted to call it sacred beasts. And then i thought, no, i cant really do that to these people. [laughter] even though its true. And so i changed the title to another life because it was, for me, beginning to become another life and because it had been at the beginning another life than the one that was represented by being a korda growing up in shadow of film business, moving from los angeles back to london and growing up not knowing what direction i wanted to go. It was this choice of another life that was Book Publishing and editing. Host and who were the sacred beasts . Guest well, jack and suzanne, irvin wallace, Harold Robbins, my friend, Graham Greene, Ronald Reagan, richard nixon, henry kissinger, the people that i published. Some of them very sympathetic beasts, by the way. Others not so sympathetic. Host a lot of your personal life, and tell me if im wrong about this, but reads like a nonfunction mad men. Guest im not a huge watcher of mad men, but i know what you mean. And, of course, thats true. Of course, that dovetails with the whole thing geographically. And partly because any office drama will resemble mad men, of course. All office dramas resemble other office drama. Host lot of drinking, lot of smoking, extramarital affairs. Guest lot of drinking and lot of smoking, at any rate. But, yes. You know, its not the advertising business. I dont remember in my time at Simon Schuster anybody being a heavy drinker, certainly not drinking while working. I remember a level of drinking when i first came into publishing that was astonishing, but that was the age of two martini lunch. I have never done that myself, many of my elders in the Book Publishing business were that kind of steady habituated lunchtime drinker. Everybody, of course, smokes except bob donnelly, and everybody had an overflowing ashtray, and nobody ever thought nick about it. It was, in essence, a very different world. Host we have an email from a viewer. His name is brian, and he asks i enjoyed reading about Richard Schneider when i read another life. Very well drawn figure in the book. Could you dredge up a few of your favorite memories of his steamroller tactics in his rapid rise through the ranks of Simon Schuster . Guest well, he was extremely confrontational and aggressive. I must say he was never confrontational and aggressive with me. And could be very, very difficult. He was apt to say wherever anybody said they liked a particular manuscript very much and wanted to publish it, how would you sell it to the Simon Schuster sales force . And if you couldnt answer that question, held say, then dont buy it. He made instant judgments half of time, half of the time he was wrong, but the other half he was right, and 50 50 is a very good average for Book Publishing. Host what do you mean . Guest if youre right 50 percent of the time in Book Publishing, youre doing astonishingly well. Host how has Book Publishing changed since the late 50s . Guest well, now its unrecognizable because its become an electronic business. Its in the process of transforming itself from the book, that object of which were all familiar, into a business that concentrates itself around the electronic purchase of a book in a nonpaper and nonsolid form, e eliminating, thereby, the bookstore, a familiar institution. So its very hard for those who are outside it, even for those who are inside it, to keep track of what is happening. But i would say that behind all the technological changes, the Book Publishing business is still the same old business its always been, which is that you have to find books that people want to read and that they will buy in large quantity. Host is it insular . Guest no, id never say that Book Publishing was insular. I think Book Publishing is probably, of all industries if it can be called an industry the most open to other peoples ideas, to radical eyes to radical ideas. Book publishers have always been open to new ideas and to new ways of writing in a way, for example, that the movie business has mostly not. Host good afternoon and welcome to booktv on cspan2. This is our monthly in depth program. This month its author, book publisher Michael Korda, and were going to put the numbers up on the screen if youd like to participate in our conversation. 202 is the area code, 5853880 for those in the east and central time zones, 5853881 if you live in the mountain or pacific time zones. You can also ask a question, make a comment via social media. booktv is our twitter handle, facebook. Com booktv, you can make a comment there as well, and finally, you can send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Mr. Korda is the author of many books both nonfiction and function. And, of course, here on booktv well cons taut on the non concentrate on the nonfiction. Just to give you an idea of some of the topics he has written about, heres a list of his Nonfiction Books including male chauvinism that we discussed a little bit, power how to get it, how to use it. Charmed lives came out in 1979. Man to man surviving Prostate Cancer, another life a memoir of other people, came out in 1999. Country matters the pleasures and tribulations of moving from a big city to an old country farm. Ulysses s. Grant the unlikely hero, came out in 04. Journey to a revolution about the hungarian revolution in 06. Ike an American Hero in 2008, with wings like eagles, the untold story of the battle of britain, 2009. Hero the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, and clouds of glory, the life and legend of robert e. Lee is his recent book. Who was t. E. Lawrence . Guest lawrence of arabia . T. E. Lawrence was perhaps the only hero whose name anybody remembers of the second of the first world war. Lawrence of arabia was bigger than life even before david lee put him on the screen in what was probably the greatest single epic Motion Picture ever made. And lawrence was an extraordinarily charismatic figure. I was taken by lawrence at a very early age when i read my fathers copy of seven pillars of wisdom and followed in some degree cans lawrences degrees lawrences path. Not in all of them, of course. I loved motorcycles, i joined the Royal Air Force when i did my military service. I felt that in some respect lawrence was my guide. Thats the impulse under which i went from oxford to the hungarian revolution following Winston Churchills famous remark that it is very pleasant to be shot at and survive it. [laughter] and i felt that was an experience that one should have at some point in ones life. Much of that comes from a childhood misspent in reading lawrence or reading ab lawrence. About lawrence. Host and in that book, the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, this book is about the creation of a legend, a mythic figure and about a man who became a hero not by accident or even by a single act of heroism, but who made himself a hero by design and did it so successfully that he became the victim of his own fame. Guest yes. I think lawrence was probably the first modern victim of his own celebrity. Thats become a familiar, familiar thing. Thats the basis on which all gossip magazines and all trash Television Reality shows are based, is that people reach a level of fame that not only cuts them off from the rest of the world, but at the same time makes them illuminated even when they dont want to be. So lawrence became somebody who could not step out the door to pick up his bottle of milk without flash mobs going off in his shape. For an essentially shy person, it became more than he could bear. Hence, he joined the Royal Air Force under an assumed name, then the army,