Korda, Michael 1933–

(Michael Vincent Korda)

PERSONAL:

Born October 8, 1933, in London, England; son of Vincent (an artist and art director) and Gertrude (an actress) Korda; married Carolyn Keese, April 16, 1958 (divorced); married Margaret Mogford; children: (first marriage) Christopher Vincent. Education: Magdalene College, Cambridge, B.A., 1958.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Duchess County, NY.

CAREER:

Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. (CBSTV), New York, NY, script reader, 1957; Simon & Schuster, Inc. (publishers), New York, 1958-2005, began as editorial assistant, became editor-in-chief. Military service: Royal Air Force, 1952-54.

MEMBER:

American Horse Shows Association, National Society of Film Critics.

WRITINGS:

Male Chauvinism! How It Works, Random House (New York, NY), 1973.

Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

Success! How Every Man and Woman Can Achieve It, Random House (New York, NY), 1977.

Charmed Lives: A Family Romance, Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

Worldly Goods (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

Queenie (biographical novel), Linden Press/Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1985.

The Fortune (novel), Summit (New York, NY), 1988.

Curtain (novel), Summit (New York, NY), 1991.

The Immortals: A Novel, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving from a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 2001.

Horse People: Scenes from the Riding Life, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2003.

Marking Time: Collecting Watches and Thinking about Time, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 2004.

Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely Hero, Atlas/HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.

(With wife, Margaret Korda) Horse Housekeeping: Everything You Need to Know to Keep a Horse at Home, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

(With Margaret Korda) Cat People, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

Ike: An American Hero, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of articles to magazines, including Popular Photography, Vogue, Self, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour.

ADAPTATIONS:

Queenie was optioned for television; Curtain was adapted to audio by Simon & Schuster, 1991.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a former editor-in-chief of the book-publishing firm Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda proved time and again his ability to recognize, edit, and successfully market best-sellers. In addition, Korda has demonstrated his own creative talents by writing several best-selling books himself.

Korda began his career at Simon & Schuster in 1958 as an editorial assistant. While performing the "donkeywork" associated with his entry-level position, Korda told New York magazine, he discovered that hard work, longevity, and a knowledge of the reading public's desires were vital to success in the publishing industry. A penchant for controversy and self-promotion also helped thrust Korda into the spotlight during the 1960s and 1970s, when he took the initiative to publish books other editors declined because of their questionable subject matter.

Korda embarked on a writing career in 1973 with the publication of Male Chauvinism! How It Works. The book, which analyzes male chauvinism and suggests ways women might cope with the phenomenon, was not well-received by reviewers. "If American men are as sniveling and insecure as Korda says they are," noted Newsweek critic Maureen Orth, "maybe women ought to forget logic and proceed with karate." Korda's next book, Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, fared no better with critics but quickly topped the best-seller lists. Describing office behavior as carefully as an anthropologist, Korda offered advice on ways to maximize one's power position through judicious arrangement of office furniture, proper placement of a handkerchief, and adherence to a Machiavellian code of ethics. Calling it a "sad book," Richard Reeves, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described Power! as a "guidebook for the upwardly mobile and the numb-lipped amoral … Talent? Work? Kindness? There is no place for them in the ‘Power!’ strategy."

Breaking away from the self-help format, Korda turned to the details of his own family history to produce Charmed Lives: A Family Romance. A well-regarded biography, the book focuses on Korda's father, Vincent, and his uncles, Zoltan and Alexander Korda. As a youth, Korda idolized Alexander, who became a legendary figure in the motion picture industries of England and the United States. Critics praised Korda's account of his famous family but the book sold only moderately well. Lauding Korda's "vivid sense of detail and characterization," Washington Post Book World critic Peter Bogdanovich found that the book demonstrated the author's "poetic understanding of what the world is like and what really matters in it." Time critic Richard Schickel compared Korda's memoir to one of Alexander Korda's renowned films, calling it "warm, well-structured, humorous, a little larger and more romantic than life, but underneath it all, shrewdly observed." Praising Korda's style in the New York Times Book Review, Anatole Broyard observed that the writer "has found a tone that is wryly loving and tenderly ironical. He is warm without being sentimental; admiring, but with just the right degree of irreverence."

Korda chronicled the life of another famous relative—actress Merle Oberon, wife of Alexander Korda—in the fictionalized biography Queenie. Full of scandalous details and thinly veiled references to famous Hollywood personalities, the book quickly became a best-seller, and was sold to television for mini-serialization. Critical reception was typical of the sort usually bestowed upon the genre. Calling the novel "derivative and predictable," Christopher Schemering characterized it in the Washington Post Book World as "part Harlequin, part gothic, and part Carol Burnett movie skit." Lamenting the publication of "yet another novel about an impossibly beautiful woman whose overwhelming ambition propels her to the summit of an ineffably empty world littered with the carcasses of the unfortunate men she has left behind," Joy Fielding, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail conceded that "perhaps one cannot escape the cliches of a Hollywood novel because Hollywood itself is such a cliche." Critiquing the book in the New York Times Book Review, Marcelle Thiebaux found that "the glitz, the flesh, [and] the treachery," set against glamorous international settings supplied "crisp entertainment and enough action for weeks of prime-time viewing."

Adding to his canon of fictionalized accounts of the lives of the rich and famous with novels such as Worldly Goods, The Fortune, and Curtain, Korda continued to find success and popularity. Anthony Holden, writing in Spectator, called Korda "one of the established modern masters of ‘faction’ … he is brilliantly adept at adding fictional flesh to biographical bones." Korda raised the celebrity stakes even higher with The Immortals: A Novel, a fictionalized account of the relationship and mysterious deaths of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Critics responded to the controversial book with mixed reviews. Diana McLellan praised the novel in the Washington Post Book World, referring to it as "a new kind of mythic reality: part history, part speculation, part old but tasty gossip, part complete fiction, all woven into a seamlessly inventive whole." Joe Queenan, on the other hand, described the book's numerous faults in the New York Times Book Review. Queenan wrote that it is "a structural mess" with "hopeless dialogue" and "a seemingly pointless subplot about the mob." He concluded: "This is the single greatest failing of Mr. Korda's book—not that it makes its subjects seem wretched, but that it makes them seem drab."

After working for forty-seven years as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Korda retired in 2005. In an interview with the Washington Post he stated: "I felt it was time to get off the stage, or at least into the wings." Shortly thereafter, he wrote Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a book described by a Publishers Weekly contributor as "part hard-nosed history lesson, part affectionate celebration of Hungary and Hungarian culture, and part sepia-tinged memoir." The book chronicles the twelve-day revolution against Communist authorities in Hungary side-by-side with Korda's own account of his idealistic road trip to provide aid to the ultimately failed struggle. While noting that the historical portion of the book offered little new insight into the context of the revolution, reviewers found Korda's personal reflections to be compelling. An Economist critic noted that Korda's "lively eyewitness account recalls the chaos and excitement of revolutionary Budapest," and Allison Block wrote in Booklist that "Hungarians have long been revered for their charisma and charm, qualities Korda displays in this compelling account."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Popular Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Korda, Michael, Charmed Lives: A Family Romance, Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

Korda, Michael, Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Korda, Michael, Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving from a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

Korda, Michael, Journey to a Revolution: A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August 1, 2006, Allison Block, review of Journey to a Revolution, p. 32.

Economist, October 21, 2006, "Hands up for Freedom: The Hungarian Uprising has Inspired a New Generation of Books," review of Journey to a Revolution, p. 95.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 20, 1985, Joy Fielding, review of Queenie.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2006, review of Journey to a Revolution, p. 665.

Library Journal, September 15, 2006, Maria C. Bagshaw, "Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt," review of Journey to a Revolution, p. 71.

Newsweek, September 15, 1975, Maureen Orth, review of Male Chauvinism! How It Works.

New York, April 1, 1985, author profile and interview.

New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1975, Richard Reeves, review of Power! How to Get It, How to Use It; November 4, 1979, Anatole Broyard, review of Charmed Lives, p. 7; April 28, 1985, Marcelle Thiebaux, review of Queenie; September 13, 1992, Joe Queenan, review of The Immortals: A Novel, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2006, review of Journey to a Revolution, p. 63.

Spectator, May 11, 1991, Anthony Holden, review of Curtain.

Time, November 5, 1979, Richard Schickel, review of Charmed Lives, p. 106.

Washington Post, November 3, 2005, Hillel Italie, "Longtime Simon & Schuster Editor to Step Down," p. C03.

Washington Post Book World, October 28, 1979, Peter Bogdanovich, review of Charmed Lives; April 28, 1985, Christopher Schemering, review of Queenie, p. 4; September 28, 1992, Diana McLellan, review of The Immortals, p. B4.