Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (72 page)

Taking advantage of the fact that the Royal Air Force (upgraded from the Royal Flying Corps into a new and independent service in 1918) was about to send fifty big Handley-Page bombers to Egypt—the first sign that Britain was going to back up its occupation of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and what is now Jordan—Lawrence sought permission to fly out with one of the first squadrons. He left Paris on May 18 for what was intended to be a week’s leave. Airplanes and the air force had always interested him, and he must have relished the opportunity of a long flight in the RAF’s biggest bomber. He must also have welcomed the chance of getting away from Paris, where the French press had been running a series of hostile articles about him, accusing him of turning Feisal’s head with notions of a united, independent Arab state; of being willing to do “a disservice” to his own country for his “sacred mission"; and of becoming “a second Gordon"
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—all this carefully orchestrated by the French government.

On March 9, 1919, almost a year after his visit to Aqaba, Lowell Thomas opened his lecture—illustrated with motion pictures and tinted slides—in the Century Theater in New York. He played to packed houses. The lecture was originally titled
With Allenby in Palestine, Including the Capture of Jerusalem and the Liberation of Holy Arabia,
but it would shortly be changed to
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia,
once Thomas realized that what the audience wanted most was Lawrence. The demand for tickets was so great that the lectures had to be moved to Madison Square Garden. Thomas promoted them with artful newspaper articles, and an advertising campaign that included giant photographs of Lawrence, in his robes and headdress, in the windows of the major department stores on Fifth Avenue, as well as a vivid full-color poster showing Lawrence charging on horseback, robes flowing, surrounded by “his” Arabs, curved sabers drawn and gleaming, against a background of the desert.

Lowell Thomas was a born publicist, huckster, and promoter, as well as one of the most successful lecturers in American history, with a phenomenal gift of gab and a naturally intimate relationship with his audience, however large, which equaled that of Mark Twain at the height of his career. Funny, folksy, and inspirational by turns, Thomas could keep people on the edge of their seats with suspense, bring tears to their eyes with sentiment, and make them hold their breath with drama. On the subject of Lawrence he not only did himself proud but had Harry Chase’s photographs and films to back him up. It is hard for us to understand the impact of his show (which changed, and was more ambitiously staged,with every performance), but at its center was something people had never seen before: a real-life drama captured on film, in which the central figure was not an actor, but a real hero: T. E. Lawrence. Thomas enthusiastically proclaimed him “Lawrence of Arabia … a young man whose name will go down in history beside those of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Clive, Charles Gordon, and all the other famous heroes of Great Britain’s glorious past.” Even today, reading the typescript of Thomas’s lecture, which accompanied the film and slides, is an extraordinary and thrilling experience, so sweeping were his eloquence and his enthusiasm for his subject.

While Lawrence watched Feisal’s hopes begin to fade at the Paris Peace Conference, across the Atlantic he was about to become famous on a scale beyond anything he, or anyone else, could have imagined.
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia
would be seen by more than 2 million people in the United States, and by even more in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, when Thomas eventually took his lecture and “picture show” on a world tour.
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The London theatrical impresario Percy Burton saw the show in New York and was so overcome that he immediately offered to bring it to London; and after spirited bargaining Thomas, who insisted on opening it at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where no film had ever been played before, agreed to postpone his tour of American cities in favor of Great Britain. By then, it was already clear that the show was going to be a phenomenal success. In the end it would make Lowell Thomas a millionaire (he made a profit of $1.5 million on the show, the equivalent of at least $16 million in today’s money), and set him on the first steps of the path that took the former cub reporter from Cripple Creek, Colorado, to a motion picture, radio, and television career that would last for more than sixty years. It also transformed T. E. Lawrence permanently into “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Lowell Thomas’s show is hard to recapture accurately, since it was continually being changed. He modified it for different audiences; in Great Britain he frequently referred to Lawrence as “the prince of Mecca” (a nonexistent title conferred on him by Thomas) and “the uncrowned king of Arabia"; in the United States he described Lawrence more democratically as “the George Washington of Arabia"; in Australia he took special care to praise the role of the Australian Light Horse in the capture of Damascus. Thomas himself was not just a bold and talented producer but also a gifted narrator, with a sonorous delivery, relieved by the occasional joke, that would make him a star—indeed an institution—for the rest of his life. The show included not only the film that Chase had shot of Lawrence and the Arab army at Aqaba, as well as hand-tinted slides of Lawrence, but eventually exotically dressed young women dancing in front of a backdrop of color slides of the Pyramids to “eastern” music, braziers in which incense burned, and, for the London performance, the sixty-piece band of the Welsh Guards, as well as the “Moonlight on the Nile” scenery borrowed from Sir Thomas Beecham’s production of Handel’s opera
Joseph and His Brethren.

Thomas, who had grown up in the time of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, had a natural tendency to turn Lawrence into a figure like Billy the Kid or Wild Bill Hickok, but wearing an Arab headdress instead of a Stetson and mounted on a camel instead of a horse. Thomas was a pitchman—subtlety (like irony) was unknown to him—but still, the core of it all was the documentary film footage he and Chase shot of the Arab army advancing across the desert, its men mounted on camels and its banners flying. Audiences were fascinated by the glimpses Thomas offered of the apparently shy, slight, modest hero in a white robe—"He had a genius for backing into the limelight,” Thomas would later say of Lawrence, as their relationship cooled, and Lawrence began to feel that he was being exploited and vulgarized, and to resent the fact that he could not appear on the street without being recognized and mobbed.

Lawrence’s charisma (a concept cheapened by overuse today, but apparently only too appropriate for Lawrence) was never in doubt. In London,
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia
would open, just as Percy Burton had promised Thomas, at the august Royal Opera House, in August 1919. It was later moved, at the suggestion of the king, to the Royal Albert Hall, which could accommodate a much larger audience, and then to the Queen’s Hall—its run in the United Kingdon alone was extended to six months, instead of the two weeks that Percy Burton had planned. Thomas also toured it in the provinces, including such cities as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, and Edinburgh; and everywhere it played to packed houses. Audiences listened breathlessly as Thomas told them, for example, that he had watched while Lawrence blew up a Turkish train, and that “a number of Turkish soldiers who were about attempted to capture Lawrence, but he sat still until they were a few yards from him, then whipped out his Colt revolver, and shot six of them in turn, after which he jumped on his camel and went off across the country.” Lawrence, Thomas revealed to his audience on a lighter note, was now “in hiding, but he had received 27 offers of marriage in all.”

A command performance was held for the king; and the queen saw it twice, the second time with Princess Mary, the duchess of Albany, and the earl and countess of Athlone as her guests. At the end of the performance the queen “summoned Mr. and Mrs. Thomas … to her box … and congratulated Mr. Thomas on his eloquent descriptions and his wonderful pictorial record of the campaign.” The king of Spain saw it and “expressed himself as delighted,” and Prime Minister David Lloyd George saw it twice. Winston Churchill saw it, and sent Thomas a warm letter of congratulations on his “illustrated lecture,” as did General Sir Edmund and Lady Allenby. A handbill for the London production of what eventually came to be called
With
Lawrence in Arabia and Allenby in Palestine
shows a photograph of Lawrence in full Arab regalia brooding over the desert, above the caption: “$250,000
REWARD! DEAD OR ALIVE! FOR THE CAPTURE OF THE MYSTERY MAN OF THE EAST.”
Below that is a boldface headline:
“THE MOST AMAZING REVELATION OF A PERSONALITY SINCE STANLEY FOUND LIVINGSTONE.”
At the bottom of the page is a boxed quote from no less a fan than Prime Minister Lloyd George: “Everything that Mr. Lowell

Thomas tell us about Colonel Lawrence is true. In my opinion, Lawrence is one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times.” Thomas, who compared Lawrence to such legendary heroes as “Achilles, Siegfried, and El Cid,” as well as to a changing list of real ones (depending on which country he was lecturing in), invented the illustrated travelogue. However, this was not a word he thought did justice to his show, which was as much a circus as a documentary—a fact that perhaps explains its enormous success.

Unaware of the approaching tidal wave of publicity, Lawrence himself had been on his way to Cairo to collect his war diaries when the Handley-Page bomber he was in crashed on landing at Rome. The pilot had committed the grievous (and elementary) error of landing
with
the wind, rather than against it. Unsure whether he could stop before the end of the runway, he attempted to take off again for another try. The wing clipped a tree and the aircraft crashed, killing the pilot and copilot. Lawrence and two air force mechanics survived, though Lawrence fractured either a collarbone or a shoulder blade—the British air attaché reported first the one, then the other. He was kept in a hospital for a few days, then moved to the British embassy. The ambassador, Lord Rennell (one of whose sons would marry Nancy Mitford and appear gloriously caricatured in several of Evelyn Waugh’s novels as the scapegrace “Basil Seal”), tried but failed to keep Lawrence in Rome for a few weeks of recuperation. This attempt was, of course, a waste of time. A few days later Lawrence resumed his journey to Cairo in another Handley-Page bomber. The journey amply demonstrated the limitations of air travel in 1919, as well as the dashing, cheerful amateurishness of the infant Royal Air Force. The aircraft made emergency landings in Taranto, Valona (Albania), Athens, Crete, and Libya because of various mechanical and navigational failures. Lawrence did not reach Cairo until late in June. The crew members were awed by Lawrence’s sangfroid as they crossed the Mediterranean—a first for the Royal Air Force—and given the primitive navigational aids and undependable engines of the time, this awe was well deserved. Once they were out of sight of land, Lawrence slipped a note in the pilot’s hand: “Wouldn’t it be fun if we came down? I don’t think so!”

He managed to keep writing his manuscript even in flight—later he would claim that one chapter of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
was written while he was flying to Marseille, and that the rhythm of the prose was set by the beat of the Rolls-Royce engines. The frequent landings at primitive airfields put him out of touch with anybody who wanted to reach him, so it was not until he reached Crete that St. John Philby told him open warfare had broken out between ibn Saud and King Hussein. “Jack” Philby (who was, as noted earlier, the father of Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet double agent at the heart of MI6) played much the same role relative to ibn Saud that Lawrence played relative to Feisal, though for a longer time. Indeed Philby, who had attended Trinity College, Cambridge, with Jawaharlal Nehru and was a cousin of Field Marshal Montgomery, eventually converted to Islam and took an Arab woman as his second wife. He was also the man chiefly responsible for opening up Saudi Arabia to the American oil companies. It was a singular embarrassment to Philby that Britain was financing both sides of the war—the government of India was backing ibn Saud, while the British Foreign Office was backing Hussein. In fact the Foreign Office had been trying to reach Lawrence to ask him to mediate between Hussein and ibn Saud, but by the time he arrived in Cairo it was too late. Ibn Saud’s tribes, fanatical followers of the puritanical Wahhabi sect, had caught Hussein’s army (literally) sleeping, still in their tents, and had all but destroyed them.

Among Hussein’s mistakes was giving command of his army, such as it was, to his second son, Abdulla, a skillful diplomat but not much of a soldier. It is interesting to speculate how different the future of Arabia might have been had Feisal and Lawrence been in command of the sharifian forces—but the immediate effect was to increase the British sense of obligation toward Feisal. After all, the Hashemites would shortly become a royal family without a country or a capital, in part because the Indian government’s candidate for control of the peninsula had defeated London’s. Lawrence, when he learned about Abdulla’s defeat, did not appear to be all that surprised or upset. King Hussein had always seemed to him vain and obdurate, and Hussein had never tried hard to conceal his dislike of Lawrence; also, Abdulla had always seemed to Lawrence a reluctant, ineffective warrior. In any case Lawrence’s interest was in a modern Arab state in Syria and Lebanon, not a feudal state in the Hejaz, still less a Wahhabi state in Riyadh. Let ibn Saud rule over the vast, empty space of Arabia, so long as Feisal ruled in Damascus—this was Lawrence’s point of view. That wealth beyond any calculation lay buried beneath the sand had not yet occurred to anyone. Ibn Saud still kept the gold sovereigns he received from Delhi via Philby in an ironbound wooden chest closed with a big padlock, in his tent, guarded by one of his slaves. The notion that only twenty-six years later President Franklin D. Roosevelt would interrupt his journey home from Yalta solely to pay his respects to ibn Saud would have seemed far-fetched in 1919.