I ventured into the wilds of lower Hastings (or perhaps it was uper Yonkers) to attend the latest version of Spoken Interludes, the series of readings organized and hosted by my friend, the novelist DeLaune Michel. Last night’s readers were Jennifer Coady Epstein, author of the novel The Painter from Shanghai (almost all the guests at my table were members of a reading group from Ossining who had turned out to hear her; Alexandra Styron, the daughter of that literary lion, the novelist William Styron, who read from her new memoir Reading My Father: A Memoir, and who spoke quite movingly about her tangled relationship with a complicated man; and the great Michael Korda, reading from his new biography Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Korda has to be one of the most entertaining men on earth, something which I began believing more than a dozen years ago when I read Charmed Lives, his memoir of his father Vincent and uncles Alexander and Zoltan Korda, the Hungarian filmmakers, and interviewed him for Entertainment Weekly. Korda told the most amazing story last night. Apparently his uncle Alexander Korda, the film producer, was friend with T.E. Lawrence, and had secured the film rights to Revolt in the Desert, the condensed version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Alexander Korda was going to make the film in the 1930s; his brother Zoltan would direct, and his other brother Vincent would do the art direction. They had commissioned a screenplay by Miles Mander that had been heavily rewritten by Winston Churchill(!), and had signed Leslie Howard to star. The British government, however, persuaded Korda that making the film might inflame the Turks and the Arabs, and with another war lurking on the horizon, it would be better for everyone to do nothing that would arouse those peoples. Korda shelved the project. Years later, Korda was approached by the producer Sam Spiegel, who wanted to make the film that would eventually become the great Lawrence of Arabia, but who needed the rights to Revolt in the Desert to do so. The agreeable Korda offered no obstacle, and instead sold Spiegel not only the rights to the book, but the Mander-Churchill screenplay, and Vincent Korda’s sketches for costumes and sets, for what Michael Korda described as “a substantial sum, plus a piece of the picture.” In the deal, Michael Korda laments, his customarily shrewd uncle threw in the film rights to a C.S. Forester novel. “An old man and an old woman go down a river in an old boat! Sam, you’ll go broke!” The novel, of course, was The African Queen. What a great story.
