NOTES ON GETTING HOOKED ON MYTH

Lawrence of Arabia is all about amplifying myth. Director David Lean, with structual anchorage from first writer Michael Wilson and sadomasochistic cravings from replacement writer Robert Bolt, condenses the saga of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom into a quixotic romance of guerrilla exploits of an enigmatic, educated archeologist misfit whose private life remains one of history’s continuing mysteries still shadowing a distinguished military career. Lawrence seemed to have willfully helped shape the quandary facing the fact-checkers and biographers trying to validate details in the book, to which George Bernard Shaw gave his imprimatur, by allowing speculation that the most famous incident he penned—the Turkish bey and his sadists’ sexual assault of him while a captive—might not have happened as described. Numbers of historians, psychologists and armchair skeptics believe Lawrence manufactured the violation as a fabrication of sexual fantasy or excuse for his alleged aberrant behavior—turning his asexuality or closeted sexuality or fear of sex into bloodthirst on the sands. Lawrence would later offer subsequent accounts substantially different from his original text, most damningly having allowed his captors to sodomize him. During his recall of the incident in Seven Pillars, a reader’s defense mechanism triggers caveat of masterly literary embellishment; if one hears this recording at 5:36 in, it’s a riveting radio play supplying clocked-in horrors. (Elsewhere in the tome the brief anecdotes on intimacy among young tribal men read as voyeurism and a tinge of blissful memories.) Turks, as well as Arabs, have always made handy perverts-villains and Lean, usually the prophylactic gentleman, incautiously if not slimily offered up the following to Jonathan Yardley for his Washington Post interview published in 1989: “I’ll never forget standing there in the desert once, with some of these tough Arab buggers, some of the toughest we had, and I suddenly thought, ‘He’s making eyes at me!’ And he was!’” Hmm, and more hmm to follow in a bit.

In the first half of the epic, we’re reasonably assured Lawrence’s crusade, based on his considerable and acknowledged-by-others expertise on Arab cultural and political matters, is to coalesce the divided Arab tribes into a united front against the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The second half moves into psychosexual murkiness, into carnage and, at 3 hours and 5 minutes in, the very smug geopolitical games related to the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement plotting a defacto takeover of Arab territory. (Didn’t stay secret: after the Tsar was executed, the Bolshevik government published Russia’s clandestine treaties, the “agreement” the prominent shocker embarrassing Britain and France.) Though Lawrence was ceremonially pivotal to the Arabs appearing to be conquerors of Damascus, the chaos in liberating the city from the Turks and Germans, about which there are stacks of conflicting accounts, is generally viewed to have climaxed this way: Australian forces under the command of Major General William Hodgson were first to enter the city, and British forces of General Edmund Allenby moved in very shortly after. By military command protocols, Allenby, who personally arrived in the city a few days later, as did Prince Faisal, had the unenviable task to assuage Faisal and Lawrence as pictorial yet counterfeit victors to be heralded by the world press. Lawrence was bitterly disappointed in not being able to fulfill his promise of Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, one of history’s most consequentially ongoing débâcles, the subject of a decent thiry-years-later companion piece/followup to Lawrence of Arabia entitled A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia starring Ralph Fiennes, whose nuances, in tandem with Alexander Siddig’s as Faisal, present another load of innuendo. Two years apart in age, Faisal, ensconced by Britain as King of Iraq after being exiled from Syria by the French, would die from a heart attack in Berne, Switzerland in 1933 and Lawrence succumbed after sustaining severe head injuries in the motorcycle accident in England in 1935, which, inevitably, spawned and still do conspiracy theories, the more recent gathered together in three manipulative Mark J.T. Griffin projects: the 2021 movie Lawrence: After Arabia, the book Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia? and in 2024 the Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia? documentary.

Lean’s sandcastle is likewise pictorially built on the shifts of political expediency and treacherous dignitaries using Lawrence’s dream of Arab self-destiny to do the dirty work while publicly denying any shared responsibility for the supposed wus-turned-legend rampaging against the Turks with slaughterhouse butchery. Lean sets up the desert early on as primal purification: though the real T.E. in Seven Pillars wrote that the “abstraction of the desert landscape cleansed me,” Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence will later perceive it in one word—“clean.” Visually arresting and elegant and its eloquence unspoken, he stretches in repose to take in the twilight, with the Super Panavision 70 camera virtually painting the sand orange and the brush silver; with Maurice Jarre’s score adding the touch of exotic, he sinkingly walks the dunes; with Anne Coates’s match cuts and her selective heaps of breathtaking pannings by Freddie Young (with Ernest Day at the camera), Nicholas Roeg, Skeets Kelly and Peter Newbrook, he’s overtaken by the purity in the endless aridity and barrenness, soon supplying solace as cover for barbarous actions which would flash back when returning to England. Notwithstanding directorial designs to use the forbidden to eclipse disputed chronologies, this panoramic apotheosis, birthing at least fifty biographies on T.E. and countless addendum, is also a return to Lean’s childhood discovery of the joys received from his first Brownie box camera changing the course of his life.

In the Washington Post interview, Lean confirmed what he intended for O’Toole’s Lawrence and Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali—that they be sexual intimates. Introduced on camel, riding toward a well while bulls-eyeing a shot to the head of a water thief, whose streaming blood steals around 60 seconds of celluloid, Ali quickly establishes antagonism and appeal, the beginning of a same-sex attraction cursorily based on Selim Ahmed who, guessing from few surviving pictures, was 15 to 17 at some point in a three-year friendship with the 22 year-old Brit starting in 1911 and whose initials pronouncedly obvious in the dedication of Seven Pillars. (Never seeing one another again after being asked to assist in gathering the Arabs to fight against the Turks in 1914, Lawrence was informed Ahmed died from typhus in 1918.) To Yardley, and bucking paucity of proof other than hearsay and circumstantial deduction, Lean said emphatically, “Certainly Lawrence was very if not entirely homosexual. We thought we were being very daring at the time: Lawrence and Ali, Lawrence and the Arab boys.” Absent in Wilson’s script, but penciled in at the margins by Lean, the hook of homo vibes between two warrior friends becomes elusively Bolted and slyly accepted by O’Toole and Sharif, the latter calling it a “love story.” (An apropos stretch: Ali burning Lawrence’s British military clothes and helping to dress him in all white thawb, both practical and as if a spouse.) When Yardley asked whether he agreed with those who think the movie is “pervasively homoerotic,” Lean said, “Yes. Of course it is. Throughout.” Hmm II: With Brobdingnagian ears absorbing the sounds of desert beasts and fusing them to what he sees in their horny eyes would seem the long-existing acceptance for needed release, which in this scenario is passive submission to aggressors spilling. Glimpsed is Lawrence’s established haphephobia, usually a hindrance in sexual contact, employed to strike the bey, then channeled into vengeance and later, according to friends in England, when his assumed post traumatic shock syndrome conjoined with his clean freak routines and guilt-ridden longings, turned into punishment by floggings. This is the opposite of mutual heat rising in homoeroticism, which is what he might have experienced if his phobia went into remission upon entering or being entered by a purportedly “beautifully built and handsome” find at the archeological site in Carchemish.

Naturally eccentric, sheathed as a sun-bleached blonde with fulgent blue eyes, O’Toole at 6' 2" is plentifully perplexing; with depiction of 5'5" Lawrence’s sexual practices factually unknowable, the convulsion inside the actor is what’s afire and spreads to his character, able to glow through neuroses in ways so few actors achieve and probably this facet about him more than anything else permits savvy viewers to trek through the torment. What we’ve accepted since: O’Toole believed destiny played its part in getting the coveted and showy whackjobs—Henry II in Becket another example and The Stunt Man, too—telling TCM’s Robert Osborne the characters in effect “chose me.” Some of the thespians aren’t as lastingly impressive, edging close to fractured caricature. The amusing Alec Guinness as lookalike Faisal (17 years older than the real king), the bizarrely-nosed Anthony Quinn (doing his own makeup based on the real Auda Abu Tayi), the hacking José Ferrer, the pompous Donald Wolfit embroider for effects; they’re Lean’s stereotypes to enhance his star’s complexity. Arthur Kennedy’s mundane Jackson Bentley subs for opportunist and aggrandiser Lowell Thomas whose world-wide syndicated photos of and articles and popular traveling stage presentations about Lawrence made both of them international public figures. (Reportedly Lawrence saw Thomas’s presentation several times and never fact-checked him; being silent on theatricality enhances the curiosity factor.) Among his last roles in a long career, Claude Rains as natty-dressed Dryden is modulated sardonic suavity as a composite of British politick, using a cane as adjunct, gaming Lawrence into protégé.

Jack Hawkins’s career was and continues to be studied as a years-long masterclass of conventionality in military uniform; his bearing and voice personify dignity, authority and steadfast strength, with an imposing no-nonsense aura to be left unchallenged. Not to claim we couldn’t do without him, as in The Bridge on the River Kwai, however, in Lawrence, there’s a bit of a crack in the facade: he’s alternately flummoxed and intrigued and intriguing to the audience as General Allenby, angling every which way to avoid being played by a presumed keffiyeh-wearing weakling to whom he’s stern at first; then in shock & awe over the insubordinate defying orders to take it onto himself daring provocations against the Turks; then giving the upstart carte blanche to conduct his own war; surprised how bold and perceptive is this lone Brit among camel-riding buggers predicting an Allenby move into Jerusalem; being startled yet relieved by a confession about liking the act of killing people; making promises impossible to keep in order to retain a pain in the ass in the desert. We really enjoy watching Hawkins being ping-ponged by a Homer-esque dramatist. Lawrence recounted in Seven Pillars: “Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and I left him unhelped to solve it.”

As usual with screenwriter Michael Wilson, there’s this preface used by him, against him and used by directors of his scripts to protect themselves: during the McCarthy era he became a blacklisted writer because he was a “commie” who wouldn’t recant or snitch on others. Wilson was denied screen credit for 1956’s Friendly Persuasion helmed by William Wyler who, professing to be anti-HUAC, hit a moral low in robbing Wilson his due: pressured by draft dodger John Wayne and gossip queen Hedda Hopper and their ilk, he fabricated that his own brother Robert Wyler wrote some of the script. (Usually listed as an associate producer, Robert was married to actress Cathy O’Donnell, alumna of Oscar-winning Wyler films The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur.) Wilson was refused credit and not permitted to receive the Academy Award for adapting Pierre Boullé’s Bridge on River Kwai for Lean and producer Sam Spiegel. Regardless of any personal animosity toward the latter, caused by having stripped Lean of a co-producer credit and additional monies, the success of River Kwai meant a reteaming of the three for a bio on Gandhi; while getting together to discuss the feasibility of coalescing a thoughtful dedication—his expansive, twisty history, what to include and, more troubling, exclude—the moviemakers felt a mounting preclusion and agreed to seek another subject. Lean mentioned T.E Lawrence, as he was a boyhood hero. Spiegel concurred, soon off to get the rights of every bio he could, including Lawrence’s truncated version of Seven Pillars entitled Revolt in the Desert and Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia, which Spiegel wanted Wilson to use as major source material. Diligent in research and creating outline and treatment, Wilson understood Thomas’s work to be insufficient of fact and detail and asked for a legal opinion on the limits of copyright infringement regarding Lawrence’s complete Seven Pillars, its movie rights not yet available. In the meantime Wilson offered up a treatment not quite camouflaging his stealing from the preferred source and, ever the fox, Spiegel used it to convince T.E.’s brother A.W. Lawrence to agree to sell him the exclusive rights. Fearing the term “actionable,” Spiegel and Wilson were bouyed and genuinely surprised by A.W.’s positive reactions, with Wilson sending the collected materials to Lean who, scouting locations on the Arabian sandscape, initially praised the fait accompli. By the time the three got together to work on drafts, Lean’s stances were changing from favorable to fault-finding. Finishing the third draft, Wilson knew Lean would never be satisfied. There were two problems: the explicit one over Lean’s insistence on developing T.E.’s supposed psychosexual wreckage and the implicit one—and never dealt with—was Lean, already embittered by losing a lucrative co-producer credit, feeling cut out of the collaborative relationship with Wilson, which had been successful with River Kwai. Lean had already known about and likely saw Terence Rattigan’s play Ross, with good friend Alec Guiness as T.E., opening in May, 1960, and wanted something at least as baiting, about which Wilson, counter-wanting both evidence and relevancy about the alleged sexual assault, strongly objected. What he seemed not to have addressed publicly yet very likely knew about was Lean and replacing writer Robert Bolt, whose A Man for All Seasons opened in the West End in early July, 1960, were also well aware of the explosive 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry by Richard Aldington sparking loud verbal fisticuffs for unsparingly denting Britain’s favorite WWI hero as pervert and pathological liar. The book—which T.E. loyalists failed to stop from being published due to Aldington’s otherwise honorable literary résumé—cemented the director and Bolt’s near-certainty of their hero’s poofdom.

Bolt’s major contribution is his refined stuffiness of language packed with ephemeral wit, back-end peek-a-boo and escape clauses, dialogue even Wilson admired. Shaped by his and Lean’s worries about getting too entangled in the various aberrances lest they cause censorship and political fulminations, they were proven right to feel anxious: London’s entrenched editorial prigs roared disapproval over the lavish “adventure,” cavalier interpretations of events, blatant inaccuracies, insulting insinuations. Until winning those Oscars, some conservative cities were reluctant to book; Turkey banned the film outright; Jordan, after granting Lean access to its desert and the use of Jordanian military to be extras, banned any showings to keep peace between neighboring countries but later lifted; with Omar Sharif as Lean envoy sent to charm Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt was allowed to view the film, though the Turkish bey sequence was further abridged. Resolutions sketchy, Columbia faced legal complaints and lawsuits from the families of General Allenby and Auda Abu Tayi over their concerns of slanted if unfactual impressions. Brother A. E. added the complaint he didn’t recognize his older sibling in the screen portrayal, primarily because he had read Wilson’s script absent the sexual overtones. Perhaps explaining in part the movie’s popularity in England, and winning BAFTA awards including best film, actor and dramatic screenplay (but not nominated for best director), A.E. succinctly capsulized its drawing card: “A psychological recipe. Take an ounce of narcissism, a pound of exhibitionism, a pint of sadism, a gallon of blood-lust and a sprinkle of other aberrations and stir well.”

When Wilson was notified he wouldn’t be getting credit for any contribution he made to L of A, his internal writer’s warrior mode fired off a strong missive to Spiegel, citing extensive examples of the shooting script containing lifts from his script(s), challenging a “mere coincidence” defense. (Paying him $100,000 plus 2.5% of net profits, Spiegel had Wilson sign his writer’s contract specifying he’d get screen credit in the Eastern hemisphere but would only get the credit for Western audiences if—but not clearly delineated by printed word—he recanted; he never did. With Wilson’s voluntary departure, he forfeited the % but received the full $100.000.) Following studio and lawyer advice, Lean and Bolt uniformly denied they ever “used” any of Wilson’s material, in some instances giving the impression Bolt never even read his scripts. After filing the grievance to the British Screen Writers Guild with supporting documentation, especially his structure and political machinations and writer inventions overtly remaining in the shooting script, the Guild determined in December, 1963 that Wilson was entitled to a screenplay co-credit, promptly issuing an identical Guild award for best British dramatic screenplay Bolt received as sole writer. (He wasn’t pleased.) The decision greased the way for the years-long battle to convince the American Writers Guild to follow suit. What was and remains clear: Lean and Bolt, deferred to as honorable craftsmen, well-nigh lied to cover up their avoidance of Wilson’s contributions; they stayed steadily haughty and evasive for years, creating the myth Wilson simply didn’t matter. By 1988 the arbitration process was at a standstill; given Wilson’s death in 1978, Bolt’s heart attack and stroke in 1979 and on the eve of the national release of an expensively restored L of A, the Writers Guild decision on credit was again postponed. This greenlighted Columbia to issue prints maintaining the single Bolt designation, as the studio was making every effort to avoid upsetting Lean on a promotional tour, as he remained adamantly against Wilson’s demand for credit. The American Film Institute announcing Lean as the 1990 recipient of its prestigious Lifetime achievement honor and his impending start of his ambitious Nostromo, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, further delayed a Guild verdict; in April, 1991, just weeks before filming was said to commence, Lean died. Then, in 1994, Cinéaste published Joel Hodson’s muckraker exposing the deliberate Lean/Bolt coverup. (See left column bottom on this page for the Cineaste article.) Respectfully waiting seven months after Bolt’s passing, Wilson’s co-credit would be granted in September, 1995. Columbia forthwith restored Wilson to the movie’s credits in subsequent showings and new releases. The Guild had already reinstated his nomination for River Kwai in 1984, and would reinstate his credit and award as best written American drama for 1956’s Friendly Persuasion in 2002. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences also restored his nominations and provided his family an Oscar statue for his co-writing win for River Kwai. There isn’t any public record of BAFTA reinstating Wilson as co-writer and winner of best dramatic screenplay for L of A.

The more famous of the biographical studies of Lawrence would be the psychological plumbing of depths in A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence by Harvard’s Dr. John Mack who brings a “compassionate” perspective to the subject: perhaps asexual or homosexual but likely “homosocial,” preferring the company of men but without sexual entanglement, the lack of which is deeply grounded in Victorian morality and its condemned-to-Hell proscriptions. And, wrapped in Freudian qualifiers, one of them the deep rootage of moral and social displacement when discovering he and his four brothers were born out of wedlock, Mack heedfully acquiesces to the manifestation of T.E. as a masochist hiring a flogger to periodically whip him, ostensibly as punishment to allay his guilt for not achieving his dream of Arab independence and, primarily, for fantasizing over the “delicious warmth” he felt when claiming rape by the bey and his thugs. Whatever his sex life remained cloistered after Seven Pillars was first published in a private edition in 1926, but then gradually speculated about when subsequent unexpurgated editions were commercially published after his death in 1935 and hysterically regenerated twenty years later by London’s scandal sheets when Aldington’s book hit the stalls. The Pulitzer-Prize winning A Prince of Our Disorder is renowned for its thorough research as well as having not only its own escape hatch—Mack born six years before T.E. died—but would also have a delayed time-fuse to ironic tragedy, as he was killed in 2004 by a drunk driver while in London to lecture at a T.E. Lawrence Society conference. Obviously not the basis of any inclusions in L of A, its scholarly strength offers foundational reasoning for some of them and, like the success of the film as genuine coruscation about the desert’s affectives, revivifies Lawrence the Anglo hero, going from intellectual loner to mythical effigy, from nerdy (a few associates called him “feminine”) archeologist to military mapmaker and tactician, from self-ashamed rape victim to avenging angel, from Britain’s “go to” placator of Arabs to his “it-was-written” end on a Brough Superior SS100. He becomes a 20th Century Percival as a not-yet-coined incel in quest for masculinity.

Despite the millions of words poured into print, the Lawrence legacy is sullied not just by the on-going debates of his sexuality or lack thereof, but also by his motherland’s inability to cope with some highly lauded British military apparently seeming to be sexually suppressed or dysfunctional, id est General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the life-long bachelor who followed Christ, dedicated himself to sexual abstention in order to “subdue the flesh,” using his extreme commitment to military assignments to counter ceaseless “sexual temptation.” Killing in lieu of cuming: as with Lawrence, and respected as leader and self-directed accomplisher, Gordon was plagued by indoctrination of religious and social prohibitions. He was killed in 1885 during the battle of Khartoum (against expressed orders by the Mahdi not to harm him), three years before the birth of Lawrence, who, with similar adventurous excursions and a like for foreign costuming, mentioned Gordon as a source of inspiration in Seven Pillars. They shared as authors a penchant to create adoxographical guessing games about themselves, their writerly flourishes leaving open the irresistible in their own exaggerations and the damnation from the critics who deemed them repressives whose sins weren’t so much their assumed guilt over possible hardons for men but for the greater sin of leaving no juicy details. With Alan Turing, a prodigious mathematician and logician and cryptologist central to breaking the Germans’ Enigma code during WWII, as another supplemental in Britain’s long history of reverse shaming, this duality remains a repeatable confession absorbed by West End culture in the title of the farce No Sex Please, We’re British.

For all the difficulties in scripting, long-suffering hardships throughout a year and a half of filming, the post-production rush demanded by Columbia Pictures to get the spectacle out as holiday attraction and for Oscar competition, Sam Spiegel then insisted on cutting twenty minutes from the original London version before its premiere in New York, ostensibly to accommodate exhibitor wish to have 3 showings per day but more likely fears of length and reaction to the subject matter, though it just so happened the infamous N.Y. newspaper strike was already in progress, going on from December 8, 1962 to March 31, 1963, which cancelled the publishing of reviews and the awarding of the N.Y. Film Critics Circle prizes. Conflicting stories have Lean agreeing to assist in the last minute edits, since he was always both mental and overseeing editor, or not agreeing to any cuts, invoking his hatred for producers. His diligence as director and editor convinces us he couldn’t bear any one other than himself to do the slicing. Coates, who helped with the edits, said another fifteen to twenty minutes were cut for the first TV showing. Fully restored at 227 minutes, Lawrence of Arabia endures as the stellar accomplishment in Lean’s career of roadshow movie making—in spite of his and Bolt’s warped prevarications—and is a testament to the symbiotic kinship of Brownie Boxer and widescreen Freddie Young. Experiencing the sensuous essence in Lawrence’s wanderlust as a bonkers word wizard entrancing readers by a stratagem so controlling they become hooked on the potency of geographic mysticism, Lean and Young amass the power derived from immersive Super Panavision 70 to unleash and embrace the fabulist’s arousals. (Opening 1/16/1963 at the Cinestage, running 36 weeks.)

Oscars for best picture, director, musical score, film editing, sound, color cinematography and art direction/set decoration. Nominated for best actor (O’Toole), best supporting actor (Sharif).

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