Imperial Alex

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CHARMED LIVES:

A FAMILY ROMANCE by Michael Korda Random House; 498 pages; $15 ''Always go to the best hotel and eat at the best restaurants--and sooner or later someone will appear who will give you money.'' --Alexander Korda

It worked for him in Budapest, in Vienna, in Berlin--each of which he was forced to leave because of either politics or economic conditions just as he was establishing his film career. It worked for him most spectacularly hi London, where, with films like The Private Life of Henry VIII and The Four Feathers, he singlehanded, and almost overnight, turned the moribund British movie industry--and his company, London Films--into an international force in the 1930s. Indeed, about the only place it did not work for him, at least initially, was Hollywood. But that really was not his fault: the place had no hotels or restaurants that met his exacting standards.

Ultimately, however, Alex Korda became a figure to be reckoned with there too, as a major stockholder in United Artists and, in the years after World War II, as a pioneer of international coproduction, with such distinguished directors as David Lean and Carol Reed. Korda's knighthood--obtained in part for secret services to the British during the war--did not hurt him socially on the West Coast either. They were used to tinny titles out there, but as Sam Goldwyn said, Korda's was ''100% kosher.''

He was too--but only by birth. From the time he left his home on Hungary's central plains, his only known belief was that summed up by the aphorism ''Living well is the best revenge.'' It was something he had obviously read up on in the books he devoured as a child, feeding the fantasy life that he turned into elegant reality. He took his two talented younger brothers along with him on his journey. Zoltan, saturnine and hypochondriacal, never left home without his oxygen inhaler and his health foods ("Vair is my kelp?" he once demanded of a bewildered porter), but was a first-class action-film director (The Jungle Book, Sahara). Vincent, Author Michael Korda's father, was an art director who could do the spectacular on a shoestring but never abandoned his bohemian ways. At the height of his career he sometimes wore Alex's hand-me-down suits without bothering to get them altered.

But neither his father nor Uncle Zoli exerted the claim on Author Korda's youthful imagination that the Imperial Alex did. Hence, Charmed Lives is both informal biography and personal memoir, taking on emotional urgency as Nephew Korda recounts his efforts not to imitate his inimitable uncle. Eventually Michael did find his own style and substance as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and writer of the bestselling pop studies Power! and Success!

Like almost everyone else who came into contact with Alex, his nephew found the power of his legend and his charm irresistible. How could it be otherwise with a man who had begun his career directing short films in a disused trolley barn in Budapest and ended up occupying the penthouse floor of Claridge's in London, where Churchill and Beaverbrook lingered over brandy and where a supply of fresh toothbrushes, still in their cellophane wrappers, was kept to accommodate women who decided to spend the night. Some of them, it was said, were seduced by a sad and spurious tale of impotence that had resisted the best ministrations of international medicine. Their competitive instincts aroused, they invariably discovered to their delight that they could succeed where science had failed.

That was the way of it with Alex, who was a sort of instinctive existentialist. He would probably be surprised that so many of the movies he brought into being linger so pleasantly in memory and still find new audiences in revival nouses and on TV. He made them tastefully, with strong narratives and characters, because he happened to be an elegant and literate entrepreneur. But their function was not to secure him immortality but to provide something entertaining and profitable to do with his life.

Alex's most notable failures were at tempts to establish a permanent studio of his own and to mastermind British Lion, a major, state-subsidized effort to stabilize the British film industry after the war.

Even his own business was constructed so that it would self-destruct when he died.

In 1956 he left behind a residue of chaos, with a former wife challenging his will and a son challenging his brothers even about the disposal of Alex's ashes.

Maybe Alexander Korda was careless about ordering his affairs because he had witnessed so many of the century's upheavals. Maybe it was the strong under current of melancholy in his temperament that caused him to regard all permanencies as delusions. Whatever. Michael Korda 's title is apt, and he has fashioned from his uncle's life, and from his own struggle not to become a pale copy of him, a book that is rather like one of his uncle's historical films--warm, well structured, humorous, a little larger and more roman tic than life, but underneath it all, shrewdly observed.

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