Another Life (72 page)

D
ICK AND
Joni had found it, perhaps not surprisingly, increasingly hard to work together now that they were married. Joni had risen to become publisher of S&S, and Dick was finding it difficult to defuse charges of nepotism. The press might ooh and aah over a marriage that seemed to prove that two ambitious people could make a good team at work and still be a romantic couple at home, but no doubt at Gulf + Western it didn’t look that way. Nor, given the personalities of the two people involved, can it have been easy for Joni to be Dick’s subordinate at S&S while being his wife at home. It was natural for those who were jealous of Joni to suppose that she benefited somehow from going home every night with the boss, though in practice it was rather the reverse, since Dick went out of his way to avoid showing favoritism.

Still, the relationship between the two of them had already led to a certain amount of unhappiness among the rest of the S&S executives. Phyllis Grann moved downstairs reluctantly to take charge of Pocket Books, reporting directly to Snyder. She had resented Joni’s role and was not noticeably more pleased when Joni later traded her somewhat ambivalent position for that of wife. In effect, Phyllis went into exile on the floor below, and took on a host of problems that were not of her own making. This eventually led her to resign and move to Putnam, where her dazzling success as both an editor and a businesswoman was to serve as a permanent reminder to Dick that he had lost one of the brightest stars in publishing and made her a competitor. His boss at Gulf + Western, the caustic and sharp-tongued Martin Davis, who took Bluhdorn’s place after the latter’s untimely death, seldom failed to bring this to his attention.

Davis, whom a major magazine had named one of the hundred meanest bosses in American business, had once been in charge of publicity at Paramount. He was now Dick’s boss and nemesis. Bluhdorn’s
demise had been followed by a brief but bloody struggle for power. The leading contender was Jim Judelson, an affable engineer-businessman, whom Dick had cultivated assiduously, and whose chief pride was a remarkable desk lamp designed like a giant articulated, stainless steel crane, on a marble base. Judelson had been, to outward appearances, though for no very obvious reason, Bluhdorn’s designated heir, and on Bluhdorn’s death, Dick had confidently declared his loyalty to him. Unfortunately for all of us, Judelson came out the loser to Davis.

Dick had made the mistake of a lifetime, the kind that, like the curse of the Fates in Greek tragedy, cannot be repaired or expiated. Davis took a certain grim pleasure in giving Dick orders that he knew would be difficult and personally painful to carry out. (This reached its apotheosis when Davis ordered him to change the name of Simon and Schuster to Paramount Publishing, a humiliation on a grand scale that involved chipping the company’s name off the stone of its own building in Rockefeller Center, as well as reprinting all the company stationery.) It is very possible that the decision to move Joni from her job as publisher of S&S to an imprint of her own was in part inspired from above. Dick told those close to him that it was a move intended to save his marriage—in effect, to take Joni out of the chain of command and give her a place of her own—and he may have been right about that too. After all, he had reached the age when he wanted to sit back and enjoy his success, whereas Joni was still immensely ambitious and anxious to succeed. In any event, for all these and many other reasons, Joni’s new imprint, Linden Press (named after the trees that bordered the drive of the Snyders’ new country house in Westchester County), was announced and soon off to a rousing start with best-sellers by Mario Puzo, Jeffrey Archer, and Joseph Heller.

A
GAIN SEARCHING
for a new subject for a book, I had been drawn back to one of the major figures in
Charmed Lives
, whom I had been obliged to skimp on at that time. Merle Oberon had been my Uncle Alex’s second wife, and her presence had loomed large in my childhood. The other Korda wives, all actresses—my mother; my Aunt Joan, Zoli’s wife; and the dreadful Maria, Alex’s first wife—nurtured something of a resentment against Merle, whom Alex had made an international star
by giving her the part of Anne Boleyn in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
in 1933.

Her subsequent rise—despite many other contenders who pursued her, some of them successfully—to become first Alex’s main romantic interest and then his wife aroused even stronger resentment among Alex’s brothers—though, to be fair, they would have disliked any woman who deflected Alex’s attention away from them. It did not help matters that Merle, a great beauty, developed a somewhat haughty attitude toward Alex’s brothers and their wives or that her tastes were fabulously expensive. In the mid-thirties Alex had Cartier in London design for Merle a necklace of twenty-nine massive uncut emeralds suspended from a diamond and platinum
collier
, which became the most photographed Cartier necklace of all time and was to become the centerpiece of the Cartier show in 1997, this among many other gifts; while Alex’s brothers didn’t mind a bit when Alex spent a fortune on
himself
, they took a dim view of his spending money on Merle, particularly since Merle, in the mid-thirties, was keeping her options open and still accepting bids from a number of other men, as well as carrying on an affair with a handsome young actor named David Niven.

Perhaps as a result of this, I heard, even as a child, a great deal about Merle, much of it in the form of whispers that adults fondly suppose children will not overhear. It was thus that I learned that Merle had in fact been born not in Tasmania, the child of a dashing English jockey and his colonial bride, as Merle’s official biography had it, but in Bombay as Estelle “Queenie” Thompson, a “chee-chee” (or Anglo-European or half-caste) girl of mixed parentage.

The Anglo-Europeans in British India were a breed apart, descendants of English soldiers or Welsh railway laborers who had married native women. Anglo-Europeans were “protected” subjects in the Raj, but had no right to a British passport or to residence in the United Kingdom. Ridiculed and looked down upon with undisguised contempt by the British, whom they imitated insofar as they were able to, despised as casteless by Hindus and as infidels by Muslims, theirs was a small, separate, and embattled community, entirely Christian (because of the Welsh railway workers, the Anglo-Europeans were mostly “Chapel”), in which social prominence, such as it was, depended almost entirely on skin color. The lighter the skin, the more chance a pretty chee-chee girl had to pass. (There was almost no chance for the boys to pass, of course.)

Queenie had passed so successfully that she became a feature of Bombay nightlife while still in her early teens and eventually made her way to England as the girlfriend of a wealthy young Englishman. She went on to become an “exotic” dancer in London’s West End, eventually becoming the star attraction at the glamorous Café de Paris and the girlfriend of the expatriate black American jazz musician Hutch.

Her beauty was extraordinary and much admired by everybody from the Prince of Wales down. She had a heart-shaped face, dark, almond-shaped eyes—“bedroom eyes,” as they were then called—gleaming black hair, a long, swanlike neck, wonderfully graceful, long-fingered hands, “like those of a temple dancer,” as one admirer, stumbling rather too close to the truth for comfort, wrote in describing her, and full, perfectly shaped lips that curled up at the corners so that she always seemed to be giving a knowing, erotic smile. It was a face that promised a certain lush sensuality, too exotic to be English, despite the pale, ever so slightly olive complexion.

Already the toast of London, Queenie’s beauty was her ticket to better things. Rather like Eva Perón, Queenie was good at getting men to give her an introduction she needed, a mention in the papers, her picture in the magazines, the next step up. It was not just her beauty, which was astonishing, but her manners and charm—for along the way, Queenie had learned how to please, without giving up a bit of her fierce desire to succeed or her equally fiery temper, an inheritance, most likely, of her Welsh blood. Each small step brought her wealthier and more suitable friends, with more influence—one of which was to lead her, eventually, to the tea line in the commissary at the studio where Alex, newly arrived in England himself, was about to start shooting
The Private Life of Henry VIII
in 1932.

Queenie had used up one of her markers to get into the studio, hoping for a screen test, but her luck was better than that. Alex happened to enter the room, with his soon-to-be-divorced wife beside him, the Hungarian silent screen star Maria Corda (the former Maria Farkas, she had substituted a
C
for the
K
in Alex’s family name, since it looked more Christian), whose career and marriage both had fizzled in Hollywood, and Maria, catching sight of Queenie’s face, dug her nails into Alex’s arm and cried out, in her inimitable Hungarian accent, “There she is, you fool! Look at that face! It’s worth a million pounds!
There
is your damned Anne Boleyn.”

•  •  •

I
T WAS
ironic that the girl in the tea line was not only to play Anne Boleyn opposite Charles Laughton (in the first British film ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, and for which Laughton won Best Actor) but was to supplant poor Maria in Alex’s life and eventually become the first Lady Korda, when he was knighted—though not before he had shrewdly changed her name from Queenie Thompson to Merle Oberon.

Merle’s real background was not by any means a well-kept secret, and the more famous she became, the more it leaked out, and the harder she strove to suppress it. Merle spent most of her life refining the story of her origins, but from time to time the truth slipped out. Merle herself sometimes slipped up—once, when asked what her favorite food was on a celebrity cooking program, she answered “Curry”—and when she was tired or stressed her singsong accent became unmistakably chee-chee, as Charles Laughton unkindly pointed out when she made
I, Claudius
with him.

When I wrote
Charmed Lives
, I had been more than usually circumspect on the subject of Merle, but despite kid-glove treatment, her lawyer, a gravel-voiced Hollywood heavyweight, called me less than twenty-four hours after Merle had received the bound galleys I sent her. Faced with the threat of a time-consuming and expensive lawsuit, I wrote Merle virtually out of the book altogether, which didn’t please her much either, and we received no further invitations to dinner at Malibu—not necessarily a punishment. Merle’s dinner parties were stately, rather than amusing, and her home, in which almost everything was white, was so perfect and spotless that her husband hovered beside you as you helped yourself to caviar, just in case you dropped an egg on the carpet. Rod Steiger, who was Merle’s next-door neighbor, once complained to me that the guest bathroom was so obsessively clean he was unable to urinate into the toilet bowl.

In any event, once Merle died, I became interested in telling the
real
story of her life, not out of malice, for I liked and admired her, but because I thought the truth was more interesting (as is so often the case) than the fiction she had concocted. You couldn’t help admiring the pluck of the little chee-chee girl who had managed to break out of the narrow,
constrained little world into which she had been born and go on to become wealthy, famous, and admired. Queenie had been a survivor, a strong, passionate young woman determined to make it in the great world with the weapons that were available to her. I decided that the only way to re-create her was to do the research as if I were going to write a biography, then write the book as a novel, trying to get inside her head.

I knew that I was going to call the novel
Queenie
before I’d written a page, and unlike anything else that I’d written, I knew from the start that it was going to work—Queenie herself was simply too strong a character for the book
not
to work. Before that, of course, it needed an enthusiastic publisher. This was complicated by the fact that Dick now wanted me to be published by S&S, in order to put an end to the complaints he had been receiving from Gulf + Western. I had resisted the idea, but the announcement of Linden Press resolved that difficulty—Joni was her own publisher, and I could not have asked for a shrewder, more skillful, or more enthusiastic editor. She shared my affection for Queenie, and much as I regretted leaving Random House, nobody could have worked harder for a book than Joni did for
Queenie
. Joni was determined to make the book a best-seller and made the whole process seem fun—no easy task.

In the end,
Queenie
succeeded even beyond our wildest expectations. It became an international best-seller, went high up the best-seller list (and reached number one in paperback), and was eventually made into a seven-hour television miniseries, with Mia Sara as Queenie, Claire Bloom as her long-suffering mother, Kirk Douglas as my Uncle Alex, and Joel Grey as the Irving Lazar character—an experience made odder by the fact that Kirk Douglas had looked after me when I was ten years old and used to spend the evenings in my mother’s dressing room on Broadway during the long run of
The Three Sisters
, in which she appeared as Irina, the youngest of the sisters, together with Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and Ruth Gordon. Douglas, who had only just changed his name from Issur Demsky, had one small scene in which he appeared in a white tunic to bring in the samovar for tea and therefore plenty of time to teach me to play chess. It was with some dismay that I saw him play Alex, almost forty years later, with a vigor that would have surprised poor Alex, always the most languid of men. Still, even on the small screen, Douglas captured something of Alex’s spirit—a combination of charm and shrewdness that would have done
justice to a Renaissance cardinal, together with a certain indefinable melancholy, which was hugely attractive to women.