I fell hook, line and sinker for Michael Korda's new book, just like he said I would. Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, Korda's resumé-in-book-form about editing some of the biggest bestsellers of the past four decades, details the many changes publishing has undergone during his tenure. One key change is the effect television had on bookselling. While many cried that the idiot box would be the death knell for "all things lit'rary," a few wise men (in focus are Bennet Cerf, Max Schuster, Henry & Dick Simon, Dick Snyder, Leon Shimkin and Bob Gottleib, in addition to Korda himself) recognized that the proliferation of television shows meant a need for inexpensive programming. And what costs less than an author talking about his book? However, it was Korda who changed the image of an author from the uncomfortable, betweeded Cambridge insulate to that of an extravagant personality-product, the book in question being just one tangible part of the package, when he took up the job of "managing the merch" of Jacqueline Susann. This last bit is being made into a studio movie, Isn't She Great?

My interest in Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, was slim to nil just a few weeks ago. I'd heard of him, but I had as much interest in reading a 500+ page autobiography of his as I did of, say, Roy Scheider's. That all changed the day I saw him on Charlie Rose, with his bushy eyebrows, salt-and-pepper beard, high-velocity motor mouth, and thick, thick, New York-semitic dialect. This guy can tell stories. He kept Charlie and me in stiches, doing impressions of Graham Greene, Henry Kissinger, Nixon, Jacqueline Susann and her nebbish husband, Reagan, Claus von Bulow, various mobsters he'd published including Salvatore Bonanno (on whom it is said Don Vito Corleone is based), Irving "Swifty" Lazar, Harold Robbins, Tennessee Williams, Joan Crawford, S. J. Perelman, Jesse Jackson . . . all the folks a frequent Charlie Rose viewer wants to hear dish about. During his visit he was warm and friendly and inviting, and scarcely 12 hours later did I plunk down twenty-five bones for a copy of his book. Only when I got to the chapter of how he virtually created the modern "booktour" did I feel slightly used.

I'm still glad, though, that I got to see Korda "face to face", as it were, as his voice in print is not quite as chummy as it is in an interview program. Speaking abou his patrician childhood, Korda overdoes it a bit with the repetitious descriptions of late-night dinners on the Korda family yacht (the Jewish-Hungarian Korda brothers, Alexander, Zoltan and Vincent, ostensibly ran the British film industry in the '30s and '40s.) In his rebellious years, young Michael had some ideological scrapes with a handful of Oxford dons (though he never went so far as to steal any jam) and then strapped on his Hemingway boots to "take part" in the Hungarian Revolution. It's all very silly and, if you keep a distanced frame of mind, highly entertaining, much like an old Spencer Tracy performance, if you know what I mean.

Another issue I have with the book is that Michael Korda fails to really explain his private and professional philosophies. Is he an old-fashioned, oak-room publisher like the godlike Alfred A. Knopf, or a calculating bean-counter like Leon Shimkin? Is he an artist like Bob Gottlieb, staying up all night with Joseph Heller, pasting index cards with tiny lettering on them all over the walls to create Catch-22, or is he a buy-short-and-sell-long businessman like Gulf + Western chair Charlie Bluhdorn? Even more importantly, is he a blue-blood British aristocrat, all hale and hearty taking pre-dawn swims as he presents with P.G. Wodehouse, or is he a New York Intellectual (read: Jew) as he sells himself to Nixon? I wouldn't mind the ambiguity, but Korda's Leonard Zelig act does less to impress his versatility at cocktail parties and mainly makes me wonder if he remembers what he said two chapters ago.

The big kicker for me is a minor factual error. I normally don't go apeshit over factual errors (Lord knows, I've printed my own over the years,) but considering the great pride Korda takes in his early years as Henry Simon's personal line editor, still claiming that no one did it better, I show no quarter. Korda introduces a co-worker as the son-in-law of Edward L. Bernays, who, in turn, was the son-in-law of Sigmund Freud. Korda was so keen on cramming that little link into his book that he forgot to check his facts. It is well-documented that Bernays was Freud's nephew. Larry Tye's biography of Bernays has a full chapter called "Uncle Sigi!" Then again, Tye's book isn't an S&S title.

"Another Life" is still a terrific read, and if you want to check out a great anecdote about Reagan, I can recommend nothing better. To think, the future of the world once rested in the hands of Mrs. Fields!!