Alex kellner . 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 St as a University Student, because it sounded jewish. At first he spelled the new name crda, then changed it to korda because it looks hungarian that way. Host who was sir alex korda . Guest he was the prototypical film producer, also film director. He directed his first film at a teenage age in 1914 and directed at least 100 or twice that many movies during the course of his life and produced i dont know how many. Europe, the United Kingdom, hollywood when he was fair, he was an affable genius and being his nephew was a fulltime excitement. Host what was his influence on you . He and your father and your other uncle . Guest and enormous respect for talent of any kind. He was that making films and recognizing all sorts of talent even if they dont share it themselves. Secondly although they were in tense at making the best possible film and the best possible film, they also had a great capacity for in forming what they were doing, having fun and the friendships that came along with business relationships. They were enormously influential. Host what was your childhood like . Guest barring the great and foreseeable episode of the Second World War first through canada and the United States in 1940, because alex found himself unable to complete three films in england, one was the thief of baghdad and the hamilton woman. The only way to get them done was to go to hollywood and do them. So we all went to california and that was a huge upset in my life. Of myself as english. Those thoughts occurred at 6 or 7 years old. I suddenly found myself plunged into america and not brought back until 1945 or 1946. My childhood was in no way difficult but was a constant successions of ups and downs and changes in mood. I stick close to home now. Host in your book charmed lives a Family Romance you write like my father, ours went to immense struggle to see that the children were scared the grim deprivations of his own use while at the same time believing an unhappy childhood was essentials to success. Paradoxically because we had not suffered, he was unable to take seriously. I think that is true. Alex had gone through so much, fears antisemitism, being unimaginably for by any standards we can draw today when the father of three children die. Bent then becoming the mainstay of his family in his teens, making enough money to support is two brothers and his mother and alex was in any case by instinct survivor no matter what happened. First world war, Second World War, he kept surviving. He loved us very much but he didnt take seriously people who had not had that experience of having to scramble and fight for survival. Guest why did you not going to the movie business . Guest i could not see myself as having a real talent in the movie business. It struck me the only thing i knew how to do was play with words and so i became a book publisher, a book writer. I think that was quite satisfactory. I dont think the words need another quarter in the movie. Host you fell into publishing. Guest i never thought of it as a serious protection. I was a book consumer, it never occurred to me how books are produced or why they are produced for 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 wrote a play about. Next i went to cbs as a scriptwriter which is really hard to imagine how grubby that is. It was like the shape of the longshoremen, you went in every morning to cbs, said in a big room and waited, they presented you with a book or script and once they did, you go back for the report and got paid. One job opened up in Book Publishing it was a huge change in my life because you got a weekly paycheck, you have a desk, a place to work and because it was such a huge change in my life, my relationship became a fixed one. I spent 48 years working on assignment and that is because in some sense host when did you become editor and chief . I cant remember. Certainly it was back 40 years, maybe four or five years after i went there in 1968. Host when did you leave simon and schuster . What year . I dont remember exactly what year. It would be perhaps ten years ago or Something Like that. I was halfway tempted to try for 50 because it is a round number. Seemed like a serious episode in life but i felt that eking out the last two years, being able to save 50 as opposed to 48 didnt make much sense of a left no regrets. And for all those who work there, had Good Relationships with them too but there came a moment when i no longer wanted to do it. Host what does an editorinchief do . Guest it is like being company commander. You do all the older soldiers do except that supposedly you do it better and with more experience. It is not in direct order job, you dont tell other editors what to buy or what not to buy. You may try to influence them to do those things that he sensually not. Host what was it like to work with Mack Schuster and dick simon . Guest was fascinating. He was a deep eccentric and because they went back to the very beginning of Book Publishing when they brought young people together going into the Book Business, in an age when the Book Business did not have a lot of juice. They were among the first to confront that. I believe dick simon actually worked for a horse, who was the alcoholic 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 interesting people. Host how often is an editor also a writer, which he became . Most editors take a stab at writing a book. It is rather like eating out in restaurants and deciding to be a coke. I dont think very many editors have become fulltime writers or written as many books as i have, 42 or 43. That i think is probably unique. Most people retire from their Book Publishing careers before they pick up a writing career. I did not. I put a toe in the water writing books. To everybody at surprise, above all to my own, the first of those books was a sensation. It was the number1 bestseller, i want to go back and read them again now and that did have a marked effect on my life goes in producing much more money than i had made before in Book Publishing but also in carving half 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. Bringing those two into focus, a difficult balancing act. Host your first book and l 1972, male chauvinism how it works, your second book was that good will and in that will befall 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 it was true then and what is known, there should be some moral basis to it. If what you want is entirely immoral and wrong than your life is going to pursue a difficult pattern, but assuming that is the case, if of course what we want is not to have power but its own sake, but power to do the job when one wants 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. Host ready about male chauvinism in 1972 is pretty cutting edge. Guest i didnt realize it would be. We were all astonished at how trendy it became. That is largely due to a piece of it on the cover of new york magazine, hilarious cover of a young woman taking dictation and in front of her seated at the desk is a pig in an absolutely beautiful cuts suit and shirt and tie and it just clicked in the publics mind as something they absolutely understood and worked in a way which astonished us all. Guest host in your book another life, where did you get that title . Guest that wanted to call it secret beast, but i decided i cant really do that to these people. Even though it was true so i changed the title to another life because it was from the beginning another life and because it had been at the beginning of another life to the one that was represented by being over the film business, moving to london and growing up not knowing where the rich wanted to go but it was this choice of another life. Was about Book Publishing and getting. Host who are the sacred piece . Guest Jacqueline Suzanne, harold robbins. Ronald reagan, richard nixon, henry kissinger, the people that i published. Some of comparison pathetic piece by the way. Host a lot of your personal life reads like a nonfiction madmen. Guest im not a huge watcher of mad men, but that is true. That dovetails with the whole thing geographically and partly because in the office grammar will resemble mad men of course. All office dramas resemble other office dramas. Host a lot of drinking, smoking, Extramarital Affairs . Host yes. Is not the advertising business. I dont remember in all my time at simon and schuster anyone being a really heavy drinker, certainly not while working. I remember a level of drinking when i first came into Book Publishing that was astonishing that that was the age of the two month and lunge so i had never done that myself. Many of my elders in the Book Publishing business word that kind of steady, habituated drinker. The smoking, everybody smoked and everybody had an overflowing ashtray and nobody ever said anything about it so wasnt necessarily a very different world. Key link in we have an email from a viewer named brian. I enjoyed reading about Richard Snyder 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 to the rank of simon and schuster. Use extremely confrontational and aggressive. He was never confrontational and aggressive with me. And could be very difficult. He was apt to say whenever anybody said they liked a particular manuscript and wanted to publish it, how would you sell it to the sales force and if you couldnt answer the question he wouldnt buy it. He made instant judgment host has Book Publishing she . Guest it is in the process of transforming itself from the book, the object of which is familiar in to a business that concentrates itself around electronic purchase of a book in a non paper form, eliminating the bookstore which is a bigger institution so it is very hard for those who are outside and even those who are inside to keep track of what is happening but and say that behind all the technological changes the Book Publishing business is the same old business which is you have to find books people want to read and will host is insular . Host i would never citizens of their. I would say of all industries if it can be called an industry, the most open to other peoples ideas, to radical ideas and ideas that you might not want to Book Publishers have always been open to new ideas and new ways of writing, in a way for example like the movie business. Host welcome to booktv on cspan2. This is our monthly index program. This month it is author, book publisher Michael Korda. We are going to put the numbers on the screen. If you would like to conversation, 585388 zero. Five 853881. In a mountain or Pacific Times and you can also ask a question, make a comment in social media. booktv is our twitter handle, facebook. Com booktv, you can make your kind there as well and you can send email to booktv cspan. Org. Michael korda is the author of many books, both nonfiction and fiction on booktv. We will concentrate on the nonfiction. To give you an idea of the topics that he has written about heres a list of some of his nonFiction Books including a and 11, his first win the discuss a little bit, power how to get it, how to use it, charmed lives a Family Romance came out in 1979, mantoman, surviving Prostate Cancer, another life, a memoir of other people can out in 1999, country matters, pleasures and tribulations of moving from a big ci country hamas, the untold story of the battle of britain, hero the life and times of laurence of arabia, clouds of glory, the life and legend of robert e. Lee is his most recent book. Who was t. E. Lawrence . Guest perhaps the only hero anybody remembers of the first world war. Lawrence of arabia was bigger than life even before being put on screen in the greatest single epic Motion Picture ever made. Lawrence was an extraordinarily charismatic figure. I was taken by lawrence had a very early age when i read my fathers copy and followed in some degree lawrences half. I loved motorcycles, joined the Royal Air Force, when i did my military service, i felt that in some respects lawrence was my guide. That is the impulse under which i worked for the hungarian revolution following Winston Churchill less famous remark that it is pleasant to be shot at and survive it. That was an experience one should have at some point in ones life. Much of that comes from a childhood misspent in reading about lawrence. Host in net books this book is about the creation of a legend, a mythic figure and 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. Yes. Lawrence is the first modern victim of his own celebrity. That has become familiar, that is the basis of which all gossip magazines and reality shows are based, that people reach a level of fame that not only cuts them off from the rest of the world that at the same time makes them eliminated even when they dont want to be so that lawrence became somebody who could not step out the door to pick up his bottle of milk without flashbulbs going off in his face. Something for an essentially shy person became more than he could bear his he joined the Royal Air Force under an assumed name. And taking George Bernard shaws name very aptly because shaw was a friend. And attempted on the one hand to escape which was undoable. It was the most famous person in the world. Lowell thomas created in a show that contained lawrences music and played to millions around the englishspeaking world so that the more famous lawrence became tried to avoid an escape that fate and the more he tried to escape the fate of the more curious journalists where to dig him out. It is a difficult combination of factors in which to live. Host you said he created his own fame. Cspan2 in the sense that all heroes do. It is what robert e. Lee did. Even unconsciously, what will build their faith. They know the image that will be useful for them in extreme circumstances that heroism calls for. They didnt necessarily every aspect is thought out and not that every aspect, that is not the case but the hero knows how to make the camera focused on him. For example if you read about them you realize most people who write about these enormous battles of the American Civil War place at the center of is 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 a variety of topics. Guest i like to write about people who overcome their difficulties. Succeed in a very large way and somehow balance as best they can seek fame and success which they have won. The two things are very difficult. It is difficult to become enormously successful or enormously famous. Is difficult to balance that with some kind of a lifeanddeath like to write about people who have gone from a relatively humble position to a position of the enormous fame and success and had to cope with that difficulty. Host ebook published by simon and schuster . Guest yes, a huge best seller about the actress which was in a into a television miniseries, and a novel about Nelson Rockefeller and his death and several other novels including one about Marilyn Monroe called the immortal cent during that period i was published by various houses of simon and schuster happy to be published by them. Is probably a little uncomfortable to be published by your own house and have to deal with your own colleagues about your own books so i was not totally unhappy when i left to go to harpercollins. Host from your most recent and distant, lee had developed his skill at reconnaissance his courage without which no military virtue has meaning and his ability to keep his head when all about and the bruising there is to pare phrase kipling. All in all he was the perfect warrior. Guest had thought of calling my biography the perfect warrior. And yet i felt cloudsso much better described because despite his defeat, despite our doubts today to put it mildly about the wisdom of forming the confederacy, despite the question of whether we should continued fighting after failing at gettysburg, as that lee had nevertheless, in a magic quality of self conviction, courage and ability to see exactly how to get there. He was the perfect warrior. He was gentle and manner cant yet he was impeccable and aggressive and bold on the battlefield is altogether very remarkable figure. Host this deal, mr. Korda was general be truly a great virginia gentleman to give grant, sherman and mcclellan had never come on the scene and the southern blockade had failed, with the u. S. Aid be as divided today as a nation . Guest a wonder if he means that the confederacy survived, in what form with the United States h