Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (101 page)

The release in 1962 of David Lean’s monumental epic film
Lawrence of Arabia
as good as washed away Aldington’s attempt to tarnish Lawrence’s legend. One of the longest, most beautiful, most ambitious, and most honored films ever made,
Lawrence of Arabia
introduced a new generation to Lawrence the man and Lawrence the legend, and returned Lawrence to the kind of celebrity he had enjoyed (or endured) when Lowell Thomas first brought him to the screen in 1921.

The real hero of
Lawrence of Arabia
is neither Lawrence nor its director, David Lean, but its producer, Sam Spiegel, who not only persuaded Columbia Pictures to finance one of the most expensive films ever made, but who put it in the hands of a director notoriously resistant to the wishes of a studio, and quite as determined as Lawrence had been to have his own way.

The genesis of
Lawrence of Arabia
went back a long way, with many false starts and disappointments—enough to discourage anyone less resilient than Spiegel. When Lawrence died in 1935, Alexander Korda still owned the rights to
Revolt in the Desert.
He had agreed not to make a film so long as Lawrence was alive, but with Lawrence’s death he was free to proceed. He had a star in mind to play Lawrence, the English actor Leslie Howard,
*
who had been a big success in Korda’s
The Scarlet Pimpernel
; and he spent a good deal of time and money developing a script, written by Miles Malleson, who would go on to become a beloved English character actor, and edited by none other than Winston Churchill, then still in the political wilderness.

Korda’s film was never made. Financing was difficult; more important, Korda, who was always sensitive to the opinions of those in government and in “the City,” soon discovered that nobody wanted it made. A big film about Lawrence was bound to offend the Turks, who did not want to be reminded of their defeat; it would also anger the Arabs, who would not be pleased by the portrayal of the Arab Revolt as being led by a young English officer. Since it was hoped that the Turks might fight on the Allied side if there was another war, or at least stay neutral, and that the Arabs would stay quiet, it was discreetly suggested to Korda that it might be better to put the film aside for the moment. Nobody wanted to see angry Arab mobs burning down cinemas in Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, or burning Lawrence in effigy again. Korda took the setback philosophically, and stepped neatly from one desert film to another, sending his brother Zoltan off to make
The Four Feathers,
a film that could offend nobody but the Sudanese, about whose feelings few people cared in those days, and that turned out to be a huge hit.

Once World War II began, the film about Lawrence went to the bottom of Korda’s large pile of optioned and purchased books; and after the war, events in the Middle East—anti-British rioting, assassinations, and the Arab-Isreali war—made the project seem even less appealing. Occasionally Korda floated rumors that he was planning to make it, now with Laurence Olivier as Lawrence, but that was only in the hope of interesting somebody who would take it off his hands. That person eventually turned up in the larger-than-life form of Sam Spiegel, a producer whose taste for the grand film was equal to Korda’s, and who bought the screen rights to
Revolt in the Desert
over luncheon at Anabelle’s, the chic club next door to Korda’s offices at 144-146 Piccadilly. Spiegel bought the whole package: the book, the existing screenplay, all the preliminary sketches. (Over coffee, brandy, and cigars, he also bought the film rights to
The African Queen,
which prompted Korda, in a rare burst of poor judgment, to say, “My dear Sam, an old man and an old woman go down an African river in an old boat—you will go bankrupt.”)

Perhaps the only person who could have brought
Lawrence of Arabia
to the screen was the indefatigable Spiegel, who made the impossible happen by sheer willpower and chutzpah on an epic scale. To begin with, because of the numerous Arab wars against Israel, the cause of Arab freedom and independence was not a popular one in Hollywood. Then too, Spiegel began by hiring Michael Wilson, an experienced screenwriter who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, to rewrite the original script—Spiegel hired blacklisted talent because it was cheaper, not out of political sympathy. Then, when Wilson’s screenplay turned out to have an antiwar tone inappropriate to Lawrence, he hired Robert Bolt, an Englishman, to make it more triumphant. His first choice for Lawrence was Marlon Brando, whom he had hired for the lead in
On the Waterfront;
and on this assumption he was able to persuade Columbia Pictures to finance the film, which, from the beginning, was planned as an epic that would appeal to both an American and an international audience. Spiegel managed to keep Columbia on the hook even after Brando turned down the role, as did Albert Finney, a British actor who was in any case hardly the big international star Columbia had been counting on. Finally, Spiegel got Columbia to accept Peter O’Toole, a comparative unknown, in the title role, as well as a British director, David Lean, known for his grandiose (and expensive) ideas and his determination not to be bullied by studio executives. Spiegel also hired a supporting cast of predominantly British actors, including Alec Guinness to play Feisal, and an Egyptian unknown, Omar Sharif. Nobody but Spiegel could have persuaded Columbia to finance this package, or to sit still through the interminable problems of filming on three continents, let alone to accept a film that was 227 minutes long, with a musical prelude and an intermission.

The result was a masterpiece. Nominated for ten Academy Awards, it won seven, including Best Picture and Best Director; it made (and continues to make) a fortune; and it appears constantly on lists drawn up by various bodies of the best movies of all time, and as number one on lists of the best epic pictures of all time. The director Steven Spielberg called it “a miracle,” and so it is.

It is
not,
however, either the full story of Lawrence’s life or a completely accurate account of the two years he spent fighting with the Arabs. Arnold Lawrence remarked, “I should not have recognized my own brother,” when he saw the picture, and most people who had known Lawrence were horrified by it, even Lowell Thomas, which in his case was a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Lawrence scholars feel even more strongly about it, and there exists a Web site on which each key scene of the film is compared with the reality of what happened. Still, even if this is a worthy endeavor, it misses the point. What Spiegel and Lean set out to do, after all, was to produce
entertainment,
as well as a film that would make money worldwide for Columbia—hence Spiegel’s original choice of Brando for the role of Lawrence. As with George C. Scott’s portrayal of General George Patton, the object was to produce, not a faithful docudrama that would educate the audience, but a hit picture. O’Toole, like Charles Laughton as Henry VIII or Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, was an actor playing a role, not any more like the real Lawrence than Shakespeare’s Henry V necessarily resembles the historical soldier-king.
Lawrence of Arabia
can be enjoyed for itself—criticizing it for its inaccuracy is like arguing that
Gone with the Wind
does not provide the depth of information and historical objectivity of Ken Burns’s television documentary on the Civil War: each has its merits, but the one is not a substitute for the other.

Other portrayals of Lawrence on the stage or screen have not added much. The respected British playwright Terence Rattigan wrote
Ross,
for which John Mills was cast in the title role, but it tended to explore Lawrence’s alleged homosexuality, to such a degree that Sam Spiegel attempted to have it suppressed. (Knowing Spiegel, though, one could guess that he was probably trying to appease Columbia Pictures and get publicity for his own film, rather than expressing outrage.) A made-for-television film about Lawrence at the Paris Peace Conference starred Ralph Fiennes, but was a rather wooden docudrama about how the Arabs were treated by the Allies—just the kind of issue Spiegel and Lean were determined to avoid—though it has to be said that Fiennes at least
looked
more like Lawrence than Peter O’Toole did.

Perhaps the one thing that Richard Aldington’s book and David Lean’s film have in common is that they have raised the level of scholarship on the subject of Lawrence, as Lawrence’s admirers pored over his letters and manuscripts in search of ways to refute Aldington’s unflattering portrait and Peter O’Toole’s heroic portrayal. The release of British government documents in the 1960s and 1970s has, in the skillful and determined hands of Jeremy Wilson, the authorized biographer of Lawrence and certainly the leading scholar of the subject, provided a much clearer view of just how great Lawrence’s accomplishments were in the war, and how meticulous he was in describing all of it. The publication by Jeremy Wilson of four expertly edited volumes of Lawrence’s correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw has also dramatically enriched our knowledge of what Lawrence was thinking and doing from 1922 to 1935, and also arouses, in any objective reader, considerable sympathy for him. Lawrence’s account to Charlotte of what happened to him at Deraa, for example, makes it hard to accept the view that he invented the episode.

There are probably more people who know
of
Lawrence today than ever. At least two major biographies have appeared: one by Jeremy Wilson (1989), which is authoritative and formidably documented; and a psychological study by John E. Mack, MD
*
(1976), who was a professor at Harvard Medical School and a psychoanalyst. But people seldom know all that much
about
Lawrence, and many still see him, in their mind’s eye, as Peter O’Toole, much the way people still think of Captain Bligh as Charles Laughton. Mack’s book, whatever its merits, demonstrates the dangers of psychoanalyzing the dead, who after all cannot speak for themselves, and also the fact that Lawrence has, since his death, been taken over by numerous groups and turned into a gay hero, an anti-imperialist hero, or, even more improbably, a hero who betrayed the Arabs and encouraged increased Jewish immigration in Palestine. The fact is that Lawrence defies simplification and refuses to be pigeonholed, in death as he did in life. It is his complexity—his curious mixture of shyness and vainglory, of heroism on the grand scale and self-doubt about his own feats, of political sophistication and occasional naïveté—that makes him special. He was a hero, a scholar, a diplomat, a brilliant writer, endowed with enormous courage and capable of reckless self-sacrifice, and behind the facade that Lowell Thomas and the newspapers built up around him, also the kindest, gentlest, and most loyal of friends, and that rare Englishman with no class prejudices of any kind, as at ease in a barracks as he was in Buckingham Palace, in the desert, or at Versailles.

The difficulty with books about Lawrence is that most of them start with a definite thesis or fixed idea, or are aimed, whether consciously or unconsciously, either at correcting the wilder misstatements in Lowell Thomas’s book (in the case of the earlier biographies like those of Graves and Liddell Hart), or at expunging the misleading portraits of Lawrence produced by David Lean and Aldington. The result is that while every fact, however minor, has now been examined, and psychoanalytical explanations have been provided for every facet of his character, the real Lawrence—and those qualities which made him a hero, a military genius, a gifted diplomat, the friend of so many people, and the author of one of the best and most ambitious great books ever written about war—has tended to disappear under the weighty accumulation of facts and the biographical disputes. Clearly, Lawrence had, throughout his life, an amazing capacity to inspire devotion, passionate friendship, fierce loyalty, and intense admiration, even from those who saw his faults as clearly as he himself did; and this is the Lawrence that needs to be re-created if we are to understand him and his remarkable hold on the imagination of people even three-quarters of a century after his death.

Then too, history has brought Lawrence back into the minds of those who are concerned with events in the Middle East. Not only did Lawrence introduce the Arabs to a new kind of warfare; his determination to “give them,” as he saw it, an Arab state and his definition (and vision) of what that state should be are still at the center of every diplomatic dispute, war, insurrection, and political revolution throughout this vast area. Lawrence cannot be held responsible for the mess in the Middle East, any more than he was solely responsible for the Arab Revolt, which had already broken out before he arrived in Jidda, but everybody from Allenby down seems to agree that the revolt would never have succeeded to the extent it did without his vision and energy, and certainly he did his best throughout 1917-1918 and from 1919 to 1922 to give the Arabs the state they wanted. This, after all (despite lengthy Freudian explanations for his behavior), rather than his illegitimacy or the incident at Deraa,was the great moral crisis of his lifetime, which drove him to give up his name, his rank, and his decorations and join the RAF as a recruit under an assumed name.

Lawrence was at least partly responsible for the creation of present-day Iraq (with all its ethnic and religious contradictions) and Jordan, and he played a substantial role in the creation of Palestine as a separate entity. The British and French division of the immense Turkish empire that extended north and south from Syria to Yemen and east and west from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf—an area from which Lawrence had played a major, and admittedly flamboyant, role in driving out the Turks—was the primary guilt that Lawrence bore, and that explains much of his life from 1922 to his death in 1935.

He was partly instrumental in the creation of not one but
three
Middle Eastern kingdoms. Only one of these, Jordan, survives today in its original form; but much of the map of the Middle East was drawn by Lawrence, quite literally, as we have seen; and if he could not give the Arabs what they most wanted—a “greater Syria"—he at any rate helped to give them the states that now exist there, and, for better or worse, the dream of a larger, united Arab nation, which for a brief time led to the union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic, and which is still the motivating force behind much of the unrest and violence of Arab nationalism. Lawrence himself foresaw only too clearly what the price would be if the Allies failed to give the Arabs what they wanted—and had been promised—and the long-term consequences of letting the French take Lebanon and Syria as mandates—in effect, colonies—and letting the British take Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. He did his best to persuade a reluctant Feisal to accept the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, but he understood that this acceptance was dependent on the Arabs’ getting a meaningful state, and was unlikely to be achieved in the long run if the Middle East was carved up into small and mutually hostile units, under French or British colonial administration.