Through the Lion Gate - How a Hollywood Spirit Discovered Saudi Arabia
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Author: Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah
Released 1 July 2004
Eleanor Nicholson
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
Eleanor Nicholson brought a Hollywood spirit to Saudi Arabia when she flew into Dhahran with her husband Russ in 1950. Now in her 90s, the British-born American is at home in Rancho Palos Verdes on the California coast. But a big piece of her heart remains in the Eastern Province, where she lived—and wrote and photographed for many years.
In her book In the Footsteps of the Camel (Stacey International, 1983), Nicholson blended black-and-white photos and words to share trips she took with her husband and their two daughters into the sandy wilderness. In her new publication, Through the Lion Gate, she delves deeper into the lives of her Saudi counterparts.
The Lion Gate to Bait Amir
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
The book documents a real-life adventure that turned into an epiphany about Saudi society. It began with a chance meeting in Hofuf in 1962 between her daughters Linda and Cynthia, ages 12 and 10, and the children of the governing family of the Eastern Province that drew the two girls and her through the Lion Gate and into the amir’s palace.
The Nicholsons with Local Resident
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
Before coming to Saudi Arabia, she worked at Paramount Pictures with actors like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. She met Russ, a War Manpower Commission employee, at a set in 1944. When Aramco offered him a job in 1949, she promised to join him as soon as family housing became available.
When a telex arrived in 1950 saying, “Meet me in Rome,” she was ready to go. “I’d already been on movie sets with Crosby and Hope down the roads to Singapore, Zanzibar and Morocco, so Saudi Arabia didn’t seem that far away,” she quips. “It was like going out on another set.”
The Nicholsons
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
Nicholson spent much of her first dozen years in the kingdom in an expatriate’s cloak. She took up photography with a Hasselblad camera she purchased in al-Khobar and became unofficial portraitist in Ras Tanura, where she and Russ moved with their daughters in 1956.
Cyndy and Linda Nicholson
With Bedouin Woman and Child
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
But even with the Hasselblad, her life had a hole in it. “I’d spent 10 or 12 years living there and I didn’t know the country,” she recalls. “I really tried to make an effort to meet the women … to put myself in a position so something would happen.” That included crawling onto a neighbor’s roof to take pictures when King Sa'ud and his retinue visited Ras Tanura in 1962, and then driving down a back road to watch the royal hareem picnic on the beach.
In the first part of Through the Lion Gate, Nicholson focuses on the frustrations of trying to fit the profile of an “Aramco housewife,” while longing to pierce the barriers between expatriate and Saudi societies. The second part highlights the breakthroughs she makes by befriending a member of the governor’s family.
In fact, the book opens on April 20, 1988, with a phone call from Princess Latifa (not her real name: Nicholson gives the Saudis pseudonyms to protect their privacy), with whom she still maintains a deep friendship. The princess’s ensuing support for a book about the women of Saudi Arabia helped the writing project take off.
Linda with Bedouin Friend
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
“Tell your American friends about us,” Nicholson recalls Latifa saying when they met that day in Beverly Hills. “Tell them we’re not like what they read in the newspapers. Let them hear the truth about us. Let the people know what’s going on.”
“She wanted American women to know that Saudi women are not hidden and not inhibited, that Saudi women are educated … that they have their own identity,” the author explains.
Cyndy Displays Book Cover
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
The book is based on diaries and manuscripts Nicholson compiled during her time in the Kingdom – 21 years in Dhahran and Ras Tanura with Aramco and then eight more in Dammam and Jubail. It is laced with information about the company, as well as personal perspectives.
“I liked every moment of my life in Saudi Arabia,” says the author. “I wanted everybody to understand the laws of the desert, to hear the beauty of the language, to accept the generosity of the people and to feel there is someone—some entity—greater than yourself who will help you survive.”
"The men are gone from the square... and a woman opens the door and smiles at us,"
Qaryat al-Ulya, 1964. In the Footsteps of the Camel
Photograph Contributed by Eleanor Nicholson
“We have a lot of skepticism over here” about Saudi Arabia, Nicholson notes. She hopes her new book can “help build a picture of a [Saudi] family” whose members have “hopes and dreams like yours or mine.”
As she wrote after her daughters’ first meeting with the amir’s children: “Today we had breached something else, a moment … real not imagined, a touch of human hands that might span the differences.”