It was Aldington’s misfortune, however, to have unearthed proof that Lawrence and his four brothers were illegitimate, and to reveal it while Lawrence’s mother was still alive. This struck most people, even those who were not admirers of Lawrence, as tactless and cruel.

Aldington was also the victim of an idйe fixe: he believed that his whole case rested on whether or not Lawrence had told the truth in saying that he had been offered the post of British high commissioner in Egypt in 1922, when Field Marshal Lord Allenby seemed about to give it up in disgust. This dispute, into which Winston Churchill, then in his last year as prime minister, was drawn most reluctantly, sputtered on for ages, though it is obvious to anybody reading about the episode today that Churchill, then colonial secretary, in fact didsuggest this appointment to Lawrence, though perhaps not altogether seriously, and that Lawrence, who never wanted the post, which was not in any case for Churchill to offer, later came to the conclusion that it had been offered to him genuinely. This was a reasonable belief, since Churchill was given to just that kind of impulsive gesture; and Lloyd George, then the prime minister, and himself notoriously impulsive about offering people high government positions without informing his colleagues in the cabinet, seems to have brought the subject up with Lawrence as well.

In any event, Aldington’s book, when it was eventually published in 1955 after years of bitter quarrels with his own publisher, his long-suffering editor, and innumerable lawyers, brought down on him a landslide of abuse and criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. He succeeded in tarnishing Lawrence’s image for a time, but at the cost of his own reputation and career—a sad object lesson in the perils of obsessive self-righteousness.

Aldington might have known better had he written a biography of Nelson instead of Wellington, for Nelson, despite character flaws that in some ways mirrored those of Lawrence, won a permanent place in the hearts of the British, while the victor of Waterloo, a cold and haughty aristocrat, never did. Nelson, like Lawrence, was a man who desperately craved attention and sought fame, who artfully cloaked vanity and ambition with humility, whose private life was something between a muddle and a disgrace, and who constantly appeared in the limelight without ever appearing to seek it. Like Lawrence he was small, physically brave to an extraordinary degree, able to endure great pain and hardship without complaint, and indifferent to food, drink, and comfort. Unlike Lawrence, he not only avidly sought honors, medals, titles, and decorations, but insisted on wearing them all even when doing so put his life at risk. However, both of them were cast from the same mold, heroes whose human weaknesses and flaws merely made them loved all the more, both by those who knew them and by those who admired them from afar. From time to time, in the more than two centuries since Nelson’s death, people have written books attempting to put his myth in perspective, but to no avail—he remains as popular as ever, and hardly a decade goes by without the launching of a biography, a film, or a novel* (for example, there was a novel by Susan Sontag), adding yet another layer to his fame. So it is with Lawrence.

The release in 1962 of David Lean’s monumental epic film Lawrence of Arabiaas 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 Arabiaintroduced 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 Arabiais 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 Arabiawent 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 Desertover 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 Arabiato 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.