Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (98 page)

He worried about the possibility that
Revolt in the Desert
might be made into a film; this had concerned him since 1928, when the trustees (of which he was not one) sold an option on the film rights. Lawrence was concerned not only about the publicity and the question of who would play him, but about the possibility of a ham-handed attempt to build a “sex interest” into the story, by creating a role for a female star. By now the rights had passed into the hands of Alexander Korda,
*
the Hungarian-born producer who had made Britain’s first internationally successful film,
The Private Life of Henry VIII,
in 1933. This was the first British film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and its star, Charles Laughton, became the first British actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. Lawrence rightly feared that Korda was much more likely to actually make the picture than the previous owners of the rights. He went down to London to have it out with Korda, but found to his surprise that the film producer listened to him patiently and sympathetically, and appeared to agree. “I lunched with Alexander Korda, the film king,” Lawrence reported to Charlotte Shaw: “He was quite unexpectedly sensitive, for a king: seemed to understand at once the inconveniences his proposed film would set in my path … and ended the discussion by agreeing that it should not be attempted without my consent.He will not announce its abandonment, because while he has it on his list other producers will avoid thought of it. But it will not be done. You can imagine how this gladdens me.”

Korda would later speak with great fondness of Lawrence, and described him as “the nicest man I ever failed to do business with.” What he had actually agreed to—a fine, but significant, point—was that the film would not be made without Lawrence’s consent
until after his death.
Far from wanting to include a “sex interest,” Korda had planned to base the script very closely on
Revolt in the Desert
and to have Leslie Howard play Lawrence. He wanted to have his brother Zoltan, who was about to make
Sanders of the River
(with Paul Robeson), direct the desert sequences; and to have his brother Vincent do the art direction. Korda liked Lawrence from the start (finding him
“très sympathique”),
and he also realized that making a film against Lawrence’s wishes would bring down on him a host of protests from just the kind of Englishmen whose respect and friendship he wanted. In any case, Korda regarded the ownership of the film rights of important books as a kind of savings account. He was buying the goodwill of the authors—everybody likes to receive an unexpected check, hence Korda’s purchase of the screen rights to Winston Churchill’s two-volume biography of Marlborough. Also, if he was patient, sooner or later somebody else might eventually want to make a film of even the most improbable book, and he could then sell the rights at a profit. It was a form of saving for his old age, for a man who preferred gambling to saving. In any case, the more options he took on books, the more friends he made. Lawrence understood this intuitively; he wrote to Robert Graves, “Korda is like an oil-company which has drilled often and found two or three gushers, and has prudently invested some of its proceeds in buying options over more sites. Some he may develop and others not.”

Lawrence enjoyed Bridlington, despite its melancholy ambience of an unfashionable summer resort in midwinter, and was comfortable at the Ozone Hotel, where he had a tower room looking out over the harbor wall to the sea. Officers seldom put in an appearance—one who did recalled him wearing a blue pullover, a scarf, an old sports jacket, and a pair of gray flannels. Lawrence ordered the few NCOs around with consummate tact, while they responded by calling him “Mr. Shaw,” as did his formidable landlady. The equipment officer at RAF Catfoss, Flight Lieutenant R. G. Sims, had known Lawrence in Iraq, and Lawrence became a close friend of Sims and his wife, once more crossing what would have been for anyone else the rigid class barrier that separates other ranks from officers in the British armed forces. The Simses took Lawrence to concerts in Hull, and he became a frequent dinner guest in their cottage. Reggie Sims, as so many other people had, occasionally spotted the undiminished presence of Colonel Lawrence in AC1 Shaw, as on the day he came into a room where Lawrence was absorbed in studying a blueprint. For a moment Lawrence ignored his presence, then his head rose, and “his eyes blazed forth for a moment or two in what Sims took to be scorn or hate. Then there was a sudden half-smile of recognition. ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Sir.’ A. C. Shaw murmured apologetically, ‘but for a moment I took you for a reporter.’ ”

His capacity for extracting awe and respect from his superiors was also undiminished. When a senior officer inspecting the boatyard had a question and was told he should ask Aircraftman Shaw, he snapped back, “When I want the advice of an A.C.1 I will ask for it!” The following night Lawrence and the senior officer—who in the meantime had agreed to an entire list of requests for tools and equipment Lawrence had requested—were seen dining together amiably. Nor had his habit of dining with the great and famous changed. He applied for weekend leave to accept an invitation to Lympne, the country house of Sir Philip Sassoon, where he dined in his airman’s uniform, seated next to Lady Louis Mountbatten, whom he enlisted to persuade the undersecretary of state for air to take some hats out to Singapore, for Clare Smith, whose husband had been posted there, and who apparently had not been prepared for the elaborateness required of ladies at official functions in the colonies.
*
His past was always catching up to him, sometimes in improbable ways: he was obliged to interview an imposter who had been arrested for pretending to be Lawrence of Arabia; a woman wrote to the local police complaining that he was her husband who had abandoned her; the amateur theatrical society of Bridlington put on, with great fanfare, a performance of Shaw’s
Too True to Be Good,
which Lawrence at first elected not to attend on the grounds that too many people in Bridlington already knew that “Mr. Shaw” was “Lawrence of Arabia” and would recognize him as “Private Meek.” “They would have cheered, or jeered, probably: cheered, I’m afraid, so I funked it,” he wrote to Charlotte, but then he changed his mind and went to see it with a party of RAF officers and their wives, laughed through the whole performance, and stood around afterward signing people’s pro-grams—again the dichotomy between avoiding fame and relishing it that makes Lawrence such a puzzle. He applied for another weekend leave to spend two days being painted by Augustus John in his airman’s uniform and peaked cap—a startlingly ambiguous portrait in which Lawrence’s face and pose are those of a tough-minded general, while his uniform is that of a simple airman. Unlike most portraits of Lawrence in Arab dress, this one has a certain specific gravity; instead of looking weightless, here he looks solidly rooted, massive, more like a monument than a man. John, despite his famously blustery, aggressive nature, had a sixth sense as an artist, and may have already concluded that Lawrence’s future was unlikely to be a quiet retirement in his Dorsetshire cottage, translating French novels and tinkering with his motorcycle.

The Simses gave a dinner party for Eric Kennington, one of Lawrence’s favorite artists, when Kennington visited Lawrence at Bridlington. By this time it no longer seemed to matter to anyone that Lawrence was merely an AC1—and Lawrence, preparing himself for the inevitable, made a friend of Pilot Officer A. J. Manning, in command of the “armament school” at Catfoss. He confided to Manning that he wanted to steer a middle course between being a pauper and having more money than he felt comfortable with. “He wanted to establish a balance, ensuring his independence,” recalled Manning, who went on to become an air commodore.

To Robert Graves, who had written to say that the
Times
had asked him to update its obituary of Lawrence—not a premonition on anybody’s part, but merely something that was done regularly for famous people—he replied cheerfully and at great length, urging that his work with Churchill in the Middle East after the war, and particularly his part in developing high-speed motor launches for the RAF, should not be put in the shadow of what he had done in Arabia during the war. “The conquest of the last element, the air,” he wrote, “seems to me the only major task of our generation; and I have convinced myself that progress to-day is made not by the single genius, but by the common effort.”

On Monday, February 25, 1935, dressed for once in uniform, Lawrence presented himself more formally to Pilot Officer Manning. “Aircraftman Shaw, sir, interview before discharge,” said the flight sergeant as Lawrence came smartly to attention. After a brief chat, Manning signed the discharge form, ending Lawrence’s career in the RAF.

Leaving behind the Brough motorcycle, Lawrence set off on a bicycle tour, dressed in his sport jacket and gray flannels and wearing a thick scarf, hoping thereby to avoid the press. He intended to reach Clouds Hill in stages, counting on the fact that few journalists would notice a middle-aged man in civilian clothes riding a bicycle on country roads—though it has to be said that not many men Lawrence’s age would have attempted a bicycle trip of more than 200 miles in February. One of his gunners from the Arabian campaign, with whom he had been in correspondence for several years, had leaked the story that he was leaving the RAF, and
The Daily Express
ran a long article about it on February 17, thus alerting all the other newspapers to the story. Lawrence had had a few days of leave coming to him, and had taken his discharge early, hoping to avoid publicity, but a photographer still managed to get a picture of him on his bike, leaving Bridlington, with his hair still trimmed short on the sides, RAF-style, but, as usual, unruly.

Once on the road he was free. He had intended to ride south and visit Frederic Manning, the author of
Her Privates We,
one of the best novels written in the English language about the horror of life and death in the trenches. It could be published only in expurgated form during Manning’s own lifetime (and under his serial number rather than his name), but even in that diminished form it had deeply impressed not only Lawrence, but Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound as well. Lawrence had come to like Manning—a lonely Australian who, like Lawrence, never married, led a withdrawn and solitary life, and was haunted by the war. Unfortunately, two days into his journey, Lawrence learned that Manning had died. “How I wish he hadn’t slipped away in this fashion; but how like him,” Lawrence remarked. “He was too shy to let anyone tell him how good he was.”

Lawrence changed course for Cambridge to see his brother Arnold, who was at that time reader in classical archaeology at Cambridge University. From there he went by stages toward Clouds Hill, where, when he arrived, he found his way blocked by an unruly mass of reporters and photographers.

Horrified—he needed and had anticipated peace and quiet—he bicycled to London. Sir Herbert Baker had given up his offices on Barton Street, so Lawrence no longer had access to his old attic room; instead, he stayed in lodgings under (yet another) assumed name, while taking out membership in the Youth Hostels Association, since he vaguely intended to tour around the country by bicycle until interest in him had died down. He must have been aware that this was unlikely, for he wrote a letter complaining about the behavior of the press to the Hon. Esmond Harmsworth, who was chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors Association and the son of that most shameless of press lords Lord Rothermere. Stranded away from his only home, he missed the RAF enormously, and complained to Kennington that he felt like “a fallen leaf.” He must have been given some reason to believe that the siege of his cottage had been called off, for he went back there and found it deserted, to his relief.

The relief was short-lived. Within a few days the press was back in force: reporters were hammering on his door and demanding that he appear and make a statement, and photographers were climbing to his roof and breaking the tiles in order to get a picture of him through the window. Infuriated, he made his escape through the garden, so fiercely hounded by the reporters that he gave one of them a black eye—the only record of any violence on Lawrence’s part toward anyone since he reached Damascus in 1918.

Lawrence wrote a heartfelt letter to “Dear Winston,” imploring him to intercede with Harmsworth, and bicycled over to see Churchill at Chartwell, his country house. Perhaps Churchill managed to deal with Harmsworth—he had, from long experience, a way with press lords—or perhaps the press had published enough about Lawrence’s leaving the RAF to satisfy readers—but in either case, by the third week of March the siege ended, and Lawrence was left in undisputed possession of his own home. His nerves were badly shaken by the intensity of the press, and he was still undecided about what to do with himself now that he was a civilian again. For the moment, he collected his few belongings and the motorcycle he was no longer sure he could afford, and settled back into Clouds Hill, like a man waiting for the next act but in no hurry for it to arrive.

The Shaws had set out on a world tour, and his mother and his brother Bob had returned to China, but Lawrence kept up his industrious correspondence, both with the great world and with those who had served with him in the ranks. He tinkered with his house, feeling the slight bewilderment and loss of a familiar routine that comes over many people when they retire. He had expressed a wish to have a “porthole” in the bedroom of his cottage, and T. B. Marson, Trenchard’s former private secretary, found him exactly what he was looking for in a ship breaker’s yard, and sent it off to Lawrence by rail. Lawrence spent a good deal of time and effort cleaning it up and installing it in the wall, and scratched Marson’s initials in the polished brass rim “in memory.” Thanking Marson, he added: “All here is very quiet, but I am still calling the RAF ‘we’ in my talk. That is very sad.” He had any number of pet projects he wanted to carry out in the cottage, and therefore may not have taken Nancy Astor seriously when she wrote to him, “I believe when the Government re-organizes you will be asked to re-organize the Defence forces. I will tell you what I have done already about it.” She invited him to lunch at Cliveden, to meet Stanley Baldwin, who would shortly replace Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister in the coalition national government, but Lawrence gracefully refused both the invitation and any such job. “Wild mares would not take me away from Clouds Hill,” he wrote to her, “… so do not commit yourself to advocating me.”