With Lawrence in Arabia

xviii, 408 pp. "Lowell Jackson Thomas (April 6, 1892 – August 29, 1981) was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best remembered for publicising T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). He was also involved in promoting the Cinerama widescreen system." "Thomas and cameraman Harry Chase first went to the Western Front, but the trenches had little to inspire the American public. They then went to Italy, where he heard of General Allenby's campaign against the Ottoman Empire in Palestine. Thomas traveled to Palestine as an accredited war correspondent with the permission of the British Foreign Office, where he met T. E. Lawrence, a captain in the British Army in Jerusalem. Lawrence was spending £200,000 a month encouraging the inhabitants of Palestine to rebel against the Turks. Thomas and Chase spent several weeks with Lawrence in the desert, though Lawrence said "several days." Lawrence agreed to provide Thomas with material on the condition that Thomas also photograph and interview Arab leaders such as Emir Feisal.[citation needed] [Lowel Thomas] went to Jerusalem where he met Lawrence, whose enigmatic figure in Arab uniform fired his imagination. With Allenby's permission he linked up with Lawrence for a brief couple of weeks ... Returning to America, Thomas, early in 1919, started his lectures, supported by moving pictures of veiled women, Arabs in their picturesque robes, camels and dashing Bedouin cavalry, which took the nation by storm, after running at Madison Square Gardens in New York. On being asked to come to England, he made the condition he would do so if asked by the King and given Drury Lane or Covent Garden ... He opened at Covent Garden on 14 August 1919 ... And so followed a series of some hundreds of lecture–film shows, attended by the highest in the land ..."[2] Thomas shot dramatic footage of Lawrence and, after the war, toured the world, narrating his film With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia and making Lawrence—and himself—household names. The performances were highly dramatic. At the opening of Thomas's six-month London run, there were incense braziers, exotically dressed women dancing before images of the Pyramids, and the band of the Welsh Guards playing to provide the accompaniment. Lawrence saw the show several times; he later claimed to dislike it, but it generated valuable publicity for his own book. To strengthen the emphasis on Lawrence in the show, Thomas needed more photographs of him than Chase had taken in 1918. Lawrence claimed to be shy of publicity, but he agreed to a series of posed portraits in Arab dress in London. Thomas later said of Lawrence, "He had a genius for backing into the limelight." Thomas and Lawrence's initially friendly relations became more prickly as Thomas's film grew in popularity and as Thomas ignored several alleged requests from Lawrence to end it. In fact, the film gave Lawrence a degree of publicity that he had never previously experienced. Newspapers were keen to print his attacks on government policy, and politicians began to pay attention to his views. At the end of 1920, he was invited to join the British Colonial Office under Winston Churchill as an adviser on Arab affairs. Lawrence said that he never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, and called him a "vulgar man." For his part, Thomas genuinely admired Lawrence and continued to defend him against attacks on his reputation.[3] Lawrence's brother Arnold extended Thomas an olive branch and allowed him to contribute to T.E. Lawrence by his Friends (1937), a collection of essays and reminiscences published after Lawrence's death.[4] About four million people saw the Thomas film around the world, and it made Thomas $1.5 million. He later wrote the book With Lawrence in Arabia (1924) about his time in the desert and Lawrence's exploits during the war. It was the first of fifty-six volumes."