Richard Harris, who died from Hodgkin’s disease on October 25th 2002, is still too often depicted as a two-fisted, womanising drunk. He did all these things, but that’s not all he was. Besides, having interviewed Harris for 50 hours between 1987-2001 – in part for a biography we never wrote, but that his son Jared and I are now pitching to publishers – questions such as why Harris was thus inclined and who he was, at a core level, fascinate me more than details of his hellraising life.
Let's look at Harris, singer, songwriter and life long poet. He was born in Limerick on October 1st 1930, the fifth child of Mildred and Ivan Harris, and began writing poems, such as, My Young Brother, when he was nine. "My young brother/was in his pram/I walked along beside him/he looked so white and /peaceful/he also looked so warm/I wonder if I'll ever /be that small again".
During our first interview, in 1987, Harris said this poem was meant to depict, "a moment of sublime innocence and sense of purity that may never be recaptured." Two other poems, written when he was 15, Limerick 245, about his mother, Limerick 245 (Reverse Charge), about his father, make it clear that even from an early age Harris developed the observational powers of a poet, and hypersensitivity that would define his skills as an actor and singer. Each poem also stems from a sense of alienation and sets him at a distance somewhat removed from his parents. In that space was born his desire to become an actor, he once told me. "I was lost in the middle of the Harris brigade, but this makes you fight for the affection of your parents, fight for their attention. You don't get it for free. You get it from the age of one day to two years; then have to fight for it. You had to put up a flag and say, 'Hey, I'm here, too, don't miss me' and you were passed over.
“I didn’t realise I wanted to be an actor until I had TB in my late teens. But now I think much of it had to do with saying, ‘I may be just number five in the family, but I must assert an identity over and above all that’. I wanted my parents to recognise who I was. That probably is what, ultimately, gave me my energy.”
Harris's sexuality was similarly influenced by his Catholicism. In his poem, My Blood Reflects Nothing of Me, written when he was 22, he says:
“My blood/reflects nothing of me/It reflects/beer/whiskey/guinness/lack of passion/or/passion held by catholic beads”.
I asked Harris in 1987 how tightly his passion had been corralled by rosary beads.
“I always was a horny bastard,” he responded, laughing. “But in Limerick, there was a tremendous amount of guilt associated with sex. Also, women were not as sexually liberated as now. Growing up in Limerick during the 1930, 1940s, had an inhibiting effect, was dominated by a Catholic influence, but when I went to London, a sense of sexual liberation was there, even in the 1950s. It was less oppressive.”
After moving to London to become an actor Harris “took advantage of every opportunity to indulge”. He also met fellow student actor Elizabeth Rees-Williams and they fell in love. After his death, Rees-Williams recalled that he read poems to her even on their first date and was always writing poetry, often on cigarette boxes, which Harris told her to keep, so they could be published after he became famous.
In 1973, his book, I, In the Membership of My Days, was published. One poem, Honeymoon on Sixpence, includes these lines.
“Before/the walks across january park/before/the birds sang in nightingales square/before/the black world ran mad/horses over our desire/and/let loose our/reins in full/Before/the/before/before I said/I loved in knowing you/You were gone.”
Within two years the marriage was "going downhill rapidly", Rees-Williams has said. But they became locked in a make-up-or-break-up pattern that lasted until 1967, when Harris moved to Hollywood to make Camelot. Rees-Williams remained in London, raising their three young sons, Jamie, Daman and Jared, and filed for a divorce. She blamed his "serial infidelities", said he drank to excess, was prone to black moods, violent eruptions, smashing furniture and punching faces. I asked Harris if violence was a factor during his first marriage.
“Elizabeth says in her book that I beat her, once or twice. I probably f**king did give her a smack across the face. I remember once I did. This was unjustified. It was horrendous. I once asked Elizabeth, ‘What was I really like to be married to?’ She said, ‘It was absolute magic, a magic carpet ride, but then one day you’d get that look in your eyes, one drink too many, and in the end. I couldn’t take it, the good moments weren’t balancing out the bad’.”
All of this fed into Harris's role as King Arthur, in Camelot, particularly his bittersweet reading of the song, How to Handle a Woman.
The same is true of every track on his 1968 solo album, A Tramp Shining, which was composed by Jim Webb, and included Macarthur Park. When Harris said, "Those songs were absolutely me" he was speaking a truth. He may not have written them, and some songs, such as Macarthur Park, were not written for him – "Didn't We was" he said – but Harris had a way of absorbing a song so deeply into his psyche that when it re-emerged it was virtually rewritten as a slice of musical autobiography.
Harris did write the lyric for Why Did You Leave Me, and both the words and music for All the Broken Children, two tracks on his 1971 My Boy LP. The LP tells, in a remarkably revealing manner, the tale of Harris's marriage break up.
All the Broken Children focuses on the damage that can be done when parents are involved in protracted divorce proceedings. He and Rees-Williams fought a three-year court battle for custody of their sons and finally got joint custody. The song contains this verse:
“Children from broken homes/Crying all the night/Guardians and nursery schools/Can’t put things right/Playpens in wards of court/Some kind of adult sport/Law letters daily used as toys.”
That track is followed by My Boy, with a lyric which Harris claimed "Phil Coulter wrote after I told him about all those nights I stood, heartbroken, beside my sleeping son, knowing I had to leave him, and home." That poignant image always reminded me of a similar scene that occurred in Harris's life a few years earlier, and which he wrote about in On the One-Day-Dead Face of My Father.
In 1987 I asked Harris to trace the genesis of that poem.
"I was doing Mutiny on the Bounty and my father called and said, 'When are you coming back to see me, come on, now, the next one might take me'. I said to my brother, 'What does that mean?' He told me, 'He's had a couple of heart attacks since you left'. Then I got the call telling me he had died."
The poem ends with Harris pleading to his dead father for acceptance. "I think he probably died without [granting me] that recognition," Harris told me, sadly, in 1987. But just how deep this rupture was, I didn't realise until our final interview, less than a year before Harris died. Part of that interview was being recorded for my RTÉ Radio 1 series, Under the Influence, and I asked him to read On the One-Day-Dead Face of My Father. This time he furrowed deeper into the memory of his father's death, recalled "Going back to Limerick and seeing his body laid out," and the shock of kissing his cold corpse. The poem ends with this plea."Guide me/now/in your silence/Cough up one silent prayer and stare/at me again/and see the woven fabric/of your doing/bend his knee/and plea in the tired optic of your stare/a prayer/of acceptance."
As Harris finished reading that poem, he wept uncontrollably and suddenly looked like a man of 71, going on two, or three. It was then I realised that when I asked him in 1990, “Where in your work, acting, singing or poetry, do you present your purest, most truthful self” and he said, “The poetry”, this was not hyperbole, or a lie.
Of course, in 2001, I couldn't have known that Harris and I were meeting for the last time, but something told me we might be, so I ended our interview by talking about death. In 1987, he said that, "A constant awareness of impending death can make for a more voluptuous form of living," and said over-indulgence in alcohol, drugs can be a way of "spitting in the face of death". This time round I took my cues from Time is My Bonfire, a poem in his book. Phrases such as "Time reeks of wreck" and a reference to someone who was, "from the beginning born dead" are nihilistic perceptions, I suggested to Harris. "But that is exactly how I felt when I wrote that poem and it is, ultimately how I feel."
Yet, there was one major difference between Harris in 1987, and 2001. The first time, I asked if he believed in God. Harris said, "I'm clinging to a final hope that there might be." Three years later he recommitted to Catholicism, kept beside his bed a rosary beads – "and 10 women, if needs be why can't you have both?" By 2001, was at peace with God. "Do I believe in Jesus of Nazareth? Absolutely. Do I think he was the son of God? Yes. And I am very spiritual. I have to believe that the love I have for music, poetry, comes from some great spirituality up there and that gives me great pleasure to play Faure's Requiem and feel, 'God, this is beautiful.' Or when I play some Delius and think, 'this is f**king heaven.' All that didn't come from nowhere, or from some uneducated, animal species walking around in the jungle. In the end, I choose to believe it came from God."
And all of that didn't come from just a two-fisted, womanising drunk.
See Joe Jackson's articles on Richard Harris at joejacksonjournalist.com
