Guest alex kellner was the name that my uncle, alexander 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 toor host who was sir alex korda . Guest he was perhaps at the prototypical Film Producer also film director. Directed hit first film at a teenage age in 1914, and directed at least 100 and perhaps twice as many movies during the course of his life and produced i dont know how many, many, many, many. Europe, United Kingdom, and of course in hollywood, when he was there. He was an affable genius, and being his nephew was a fulltime excitement. Host what was his influence on you . Guest 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 were good at making films, got at recognizing talent, even though 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 having fun and enjoying what they were doing and friendships that came along with their business relationships. They were enormously influential in my life. Host what was your kool like . Guest well, barring that great unforeseeable episode, the second world war, which sent my father and myself and my mother first to 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 jungle book, the other was bad guy, and the third was hamilton, and the only way to get them done was to go to hollywood and do them. We all went off to california, and that was a huge upset in my life. Before that i had grown up in england, thought of myself as english. At six or seven years old. And i suddenly found myself plunged into a new world, which was america, and now to go back to it again from 1945 when i hit 46 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 probable my why i stick close to home now. Host in your book, charmed lives, a family row monday you rite write that, like my father, alec went to great double to spare the children of his youth while at the same time believing an unhappy childhood was essential to success. Paradox sickly, bus we had not suffered he was not able to take us seriously. Guest thats true. Alec has gone through so much, being borne in hungary in a stage of antisemitism. And the father of the three children die at a quite a young age for them. And then becoming, in his teens, the mainstay of his family, having none of you could have to make 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 going and kept surviving. He loved us very much but didnt take seriously people who had not had the experience of having to scrabble and fight for survival. Host why did you not go into the movie business . Guest i thought there were not kordas in the movie business to begin with, and the second thing is i could not see myself as having a real talent for movies. Struck me the only thing i knew how to do was play with words, and so i became associated with became a book publisher and then a book writer. I think 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. Never thought of it as a serious profession, in fact not a profession at all. I was a book consumer. Never occurred to me how books are produced or why or any of those things. And i came over here after completing my education at oxford to work for my cousin, sidney kingsley, on a book about the hungarian revolution which i par participated in a play about it. Then i went to cbs as a scriptwriter, which is hard to imagine how grubby that is as a word. Like the shape of the longshoreman. You went every morning to cbs, sat in this big room, and waited until you were presented with a book or script or not. And then once they did, you brought it back the next day and then got paid. For me when a job open up in Book Publishing, it was a huge change in my life because you had a weekly paycheck, a desk, a place to work. Because that was such a huge change in my life, my relationship in the place i worked became an absurdly i spent 48 years working at Simon Schuster, and thats because it was in some sense home. Host when did you becomed become editor in chief. Guest i cant remember. Certainly a long part of the 48 years. Maybe four or five years after went to simon in schuster in 1958. Host when did you leave Simon Schuster . Guest i dont remember exactly what year. Would have been perhaps ten years agoSomething Like that. I was halfway tempted to try for 50 because its a round number, and seems 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 gone back. I have the greatest fond necessary for Simon Schuster and all who work there and good real estates with them, but became something i no longer wanted to do. Host what does an editor in chief 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 dont tell other editors what to buy or what not to buy, though you may try to influence them to do those things. But essentially you are first of all what was like to work with max schuster and nick simon. Guest a deep eccentric and secondly, because they went back to the very beginning of Book Publishing when they had been at serf, or young people going into the Book Business in an age when the Book Business did not, to be frank, have a lot of jews, and they were among the first to confront that. Horace wright came slight by before them, and i think dick simon worked for who was the alcoholic, uber genius 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 eccentric and interesting people. Host how often is an editor also a writer . Which you became. Guest well, most editors past a certain age took a stab at writing a book. Its rather like eating out in restaurants and deciding 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 i mark at 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 number one best seller, which is not say i wouldnt want to go back and read them again now. And that did have marked effect on my life, both in producing much more money than i had made before in Book Publishing, and 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 going towards writing. And bringing those into focus was took many, many years, and difficult balancing act. Host your first book came out in 1972. Money shove system. How it works at home and in the office. The second book, power, how to use and it get it and 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 i think thats true. That was true then and its true by the lpvf÷ way in knowing whau 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 pattern. But assuming that is the case, e 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 i largely due to clay felker, who put a piece of it on the cover of new York Magazine the hot magazine in town. Hilarious cover of a young woman taking dictation and in front of her southeasted at the desk is a big in an absolutely beautiful beautifully cut suit and 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 mike what cord da, in your book another life where did you get the title . Guest i got the title by accident because i wanted to call it, sacred beast. And then i thought, no. I cant really do that to these people. Though its true. And so i changed it to the tight the title to another because it was from the 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 the film business, moving to london and growing up not knowing what direct i wanted to go. It was this choice of another life. It was Book Publishing and editing. Host who are the sacred beasts. Guest the sacred beasts were jacqueline suzanne, Harold Robbins, my friend, graham green. Ronald reagan, richard nixon, henry kissinger, the people i published. Some only them very sympathetic beasts, others not so sympathetic. Host a lot of your personal life tell me if im wrong reads like a nonfiction mad men. Guest im not a huge watcher of mad men but i know what you mean but its try. And that take place in Rockefeller Center, and that dovetails geographically, and partly because any office drama will resemble mad men. All office dramas resemble other office dramas. Host a lot of dripping, smoking, extramarital affairs. Guest a lot of drinking and smoking, anyway. But, you know, its not the advertising business. I dont remember in all my time anybody being a very heavy drinker. Certainly not drinking while working. I remember a level of drinking when i fir came into Book Publishing that was astonishing but that was the age of the two martini lunch. I never never done that myself but many of my elders in the Book Publishing business were that kind of steady, habit waited, lunchtime drinker. The smoking, of course, everybody smoked, and everybody had an overflowing ash tray, and nobody erv thought anything about it. It was a very different world. Host we have an email from a viewer and he asks i enjoyed reading about richard snyder, very welldrawn figure in the book. Could you dredge of a few of your favorite memories of his tactics during his rise in sly mon and excusester. Guest he was extremely confrontation alaggressive. Never confrontational and aggressive with me. And could be very, very difficult. He was apt to say, whenever anybody said they liked their particular manuscript very much and wanted to publish it, how would you sell it to the Simon Schuster sales force, and if you cant once that question, wouldnt buy it. He made instant judgments half of the time less than half of the time he was wrong, and other half he was absolutely right, and 5050 is very good average for book publish can. Host what do you mean. Guest if youre wright 50 of the time youre doing astonishingly well. Host during your career in publishing then and today, how has it changed. Guest now its unrecognizable bias its an electronic business. Its in the process of transforming itself. The book that object with which were all familiar, into a business that concentrates itself around electronic purchase of a book in a nonpaper and nonsolid form, eliminating thereby the book store, that familiar institution. So its very hard for those who are outside it, even for those inside it to keep track of what is happening. I would say that behind all the technological changes, the Book Publishing business is still the same old business its always been, which i you have to find books that people will read and buy a lot of them. Host is it insular . Guest no, id never say that Book Publishing is insula. I think Book Publishing is probably, of all industries, itself can be quoted as an industry the most open to other peoples ideas, to radical ideas and to ideas which one might not ones self want to live. 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 monthlily in depth program. This month its author, book publisher, Michael Korda, and well put the numbers on the screen if you want to participate. Host mr. Korda is the author of many books, both nonfiction and fiction. Of course, here on booktv, well concentrate on the nonfiction, and just to give you an idea of the topics he has wherein about, heres a list of some of his knock fiction books, including mail shove system, his first one, power, how to get it, how to use it, charged lives, Family Romance about the code cord da family. Man to man, surviving Prostate Cancer. Another life, memoir of other people, came out in 1999, country matters. The mess sures and tribulations of moving from a big city to an old country farmhouse. You his seeings s grant, the Unlikely Hero issue came out in 04. Journey to a revolution. Ike an American Hero in 2008, with wings like eagle, the up told story of the battle of britain, 2009, hero, the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, and clouds glory, life and legend of robert e. Lee is his most recent book. Who is t. E. Lawrence . Guest lawrence of arabia. Perhaps the only hero that anybody remembers of the first world war. Lawrence of arabia was bigger than life even before david lean put it on the screen in what was probably the greatest single epic Motion Picture ever made. And lawrence was a an extraordinarily charismatic figure. I was taken by lawrence at a very early age when i read my fathers copy, seven words of wisdom, and followed in some degrees lawrences path. Not all of them, of course. I loved motorcycles. I joined the Royal Air Force when i went in military service. I felt that in some respect, lawrence was my guy. That is the impulse under which i went from oxford to the hungarian revolution, following Winston Churchills famous remark that is it very pleasant to be shot at and survive it. I thought that was an experience that one should have at some point. Much of that comes from a childhood misspent in reading lawrence or reading about lawrence. Host in that book, the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, this book is about the creation of a legend, myth thick figure and man who became a hero not by accident or even bay 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 fate. His own fame. Guest the fir modern victim of his celebrity. Thats a familiar thing. The basis of 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 daytona to be. Lawrence became somebody who could not step out the door to pick up his bottle of milk without flash bulbs going off in his face. He was essentially shy person and became more than he could bear and joined the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. When he was found us back again under a different assumed name. Taking George Bernard shaws name very aptly because shaw was a friend and supporter, and attempted on the one hand to escape from it which was undoable. He was, period, the most famous person in the world. Lowle tomlo owell created a show, lawrence of arabia, which contained Motion Pictures and photographs and lawrences write examination music, and played to million around the englishspeaking world. So the more famous lawrence became, the more he tried avoid and escape that fame, and the more he tried to avoid and escape it, the more curious the journalists were to find him and dig him out its a difficult combination of factors in which to live. Host you also say he created his own fame. Guest he created it in the sense that all heroes do. That is what achilles did, what ajax did, what hector did. What robert e. Lee did. They know, even if unconsciously, will build their fame. They know the image that will be useful for them in the extreme circumstances that heroism calls for. It isnt necessarily that every aspect is thought out and certainly not that every aspect is that not the case, but the hero knows how, as it were to make the camera focus on him. For example in lees battles. If you read about them, you realize that most people who write about these enormous battles in the american civil war, place at the center of it the vision of lee on his horse, even though they may not have seen him. Host how do you pick your topics . You have quite variety of topics here. Guest i like to write about people who overcome their difficulties, succeed at a very large way, and to somehow balance as best they can the fame and the discuss which they have won. The two things are very, very difficult. Its difficult to become enormously successful or enormously famous. Its dif