The bare faced lies behind The King and I
As a West End revival wins critical acclaim, a tale more riveting than anything you’ll see on stage . . .
H e was the glowering, tyrant — all imperious stares, jabbing fingers and bare, muscled torso as he strode masterfully around his domain.
She was the beautiful but indomitable english governess who tamed and shamed him, sashaying around the sumptuous Siamese court in her giant crinolines.
Did they finally succumb to a love to which neither could admit?
Never has the clash between east and West been so charmingly — or grandly — portrayed as in The King And I. It’s no wonder Hollywood returns to the story so often — three film versions so far, the most memorable being the 1956 musical starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr.
Now a new production has arrived in the West end from Broadway and is soaking up acclaim from the critics, including the Mail’s Quentin Letts.
Some note gleefully that its plot about Western civility trumping Oriental barbarism in Siam [now Thailand] would hardly pass muster today.
But despite its non-PC and fairytale elements, the story is popularly assumed to have been more or less true — based on the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, a British Army officer’s widow who swapped London Society for the fleshpots of Bangkok.
But while Leonowens was a governess to the Siamese court, teaching english for nearly six years in the 1860s to the King of Siam’s 82 children, she was also a serial fabricator who — to quote a recent biography — was ‘mendacious to the bone’.
But Leonowens didn’t just lie shamelessly about the court and fabled harem of King Mongkut — still revered in Thailand for modernising the country while protecting its independence, she also ruthlessly reinvented her own origins.
Leonowens became a publishing sensation in the 1870s with two memoirs — The english Governess At The Siamese Court and its sequel, Romance Of The Harem.
Her salacious and barbaric revelations about Siamese slaves and concubines shocked and titillated readers in Britain and in North America.
She also claimed she became the king’s personal secretary, discussing foreign policy and how to deal with the european powers threatening Siam’s independence.
When Mongkut died in 1868, his son and heir (her pupil) demanded an end to slavery and the humiliating tradition that subjects prostrate themselves before him — both aspects of Siamese culture that Leonowens had railed against.
In her books she revealed that the king’s harem of 32 wives and concubines lived in an ‘inner palace’ guarded by 9,000 female slaves, officials and soldiers.
BuT
she claimed the harem wasn’t sufficient for the king’s prodigious sexual appetites — he annually purchased ‘ choice’ Chinese and Indian girls for his harem.
Leonowens described a ‘charnel house of quick corruption’ which was also home to ‘ hiding vice of every vileness and crime of every enormity — at once the most disgusting, the most appalling and the most unnatural that the heart of man has conceived’.
Those claims were roundly disputed by Alfred Habegger, author of an authoritative 2014 biography of Leonowens. He insisted life in the palace was not nearly so cruel or depraved as she made out.
He says slaves were more like Western servants, even if they were tattooed with their owner’s name. As for the harem, he believes Leonowens was regurgitating exaggerated travellers’ tales and palace gossip.
Besides, he added, skinny King Mongkut was hardly a macho Yul Brynner figure. In his late 50s by the time he met Leonowens, the king had lived most of his adult life as a celibate Buddhist monk — and is unlikely to have been the sex addict she describes.
So why did Leonowens create such extravagant lies about the Siamese court? Aside from the obvious answer that it was good for sales, her biographer suggests clues lie in Leonowens’ own unhappy story, in which, having sacrificed her own financial security for love, she came to despise any system where women were sexual chattels with children arriving as if on a production line.
Perhaps she hated the privileged king, her biographer speculated, because his life was so different to hers — she’d had to fight for everything, even to the extent of ‘inventing herself from scratch’.
Far from being the upper-crust, boarding-school educated english woman that she claimed, Leonowens came from the wrong side of the British empire’s tracks.
A poor, mixed-race Anglo-Indian, Leonowens had never been to england. Raised in Bombay, she was considered a second- class citizen because of her colour.
Reinventing herself, Leonowens eventually convinced everyone (including her grandchildren) that she had been born in Caernavon in Wales in 1834 to a Capt Thomas Crawford who died in the Sikh Wars, leaving his family in India.
In fact, she was born three years earlier to a mother who was the offspring of a British army lieutenant and his Indian mistress.
Her father was a London-born Indian Army private who died before her birth, and Leonowens was sent to a charity school for mixed-raced children in Bombay.
Despite her lowly status, Leonowens could still have wed above her station as women were in short supply in India. Instead, she defied her family and married for love. Her husband, Thomas Leon Owens, was an army clerk with idealistic views and no money.
After he left the army, the couple eked out a straitened existence, first in Western Australia, then on the Malayan Peninsula. They had five children, three of whom died, and Owens died in 1859. It was a very different tale to the one Anna Leonowens, as she later called herself, claimed about her husband.
An army major, she said they lived in well-heeled St James’s, London, before moving to the east where he died in a tiger hunt.
Rather than remarry, strongwilled Leonowens decided to open a kindergarten in Singapore, but life was still hard.
Salvation came when she learned King Mongkut of Siam was looking for a qualified english teacher. This privileged position offered Leonowens the perfect chance to make her mark very publicly as an english lady — claiming her skin colour was the result of many years exposed to the tropical sun.
Sending her older child to a London boarding school, Leonowens set sail for Bangkok in 1862 with her six-year-old son, Louis.
Much of the grittier details of her life there were missing from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical for which Brynner won an Oscar.
It was based on Anna And The King Of Siam, a 1944 book about Leonowens by Margaret Landon.
THAILAND
— as Siam became in 1939 — was outraged by the mockery of its revered king as an autocratic buffoon, and to this day the musical and a 1999 nonmusical version are banned there.
Thai officials claim Leonowens probably never even met the king. But Habegger found correspondence showing the pair had heatedly discussed Thai slavery and Western free market principles.
In the musical, Mongkut dies with Leonowens kissing his lifeless hand. But she left Thailand a year before the King’s death in 1868. However, at their final meeting, according to a witness, Mongkut acknowledged their fiery relationship and hoped she would come back. She never returned.
Was there ever anything more between them? Considering how unpleasant Leonowens was about him in her memoirs, it’s unlikely she harboured romantic feelings.
But years later — when she was living in Montreal and active in improving women’s education and getting them the vote — she told a friend the King had once given her a large diamond ring to symbolise his readiness to raise her ‘even to royal dignities’. True or false? Probably the latter.
It’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for Anna Leonowens, who died, aged 83, in Canada, still insisting she was an english lady.
A dogged survivor who managed to break through the repugnant racial barriers of the British empire, she created a legend that will continue to delight audiences for years to come.