On a mild December afternoon in 1898, two men sat beneath a large umbrella on the terrace of L’Hôtel des Bains, high on a pine-clad hill above the sleepy fishing port of La Napoule, 8km west of Cannes. Their lunch – red mullet, steak and potatoes, cheese and a sweet omelette – was satisfactory, though “there was no champagne on the list fit to drink”, complained the Irish-born editor and writer Frank Harris to his companion, who had signed the hotel register under the pseudonym he adopted after prison, “Sebastian Melmoth”.
They made an unlikely pair: Harris – 42, flamboyantly dressed, small in stature and lifted by his Cuban heels, his voice booming – beside Oscar Wilde, 44, visibly weakened, greying and heavier now, “unshaven and slovenly”, as Harris later put it.
Much to the proprietor’s surprise, the two Irishmen had swept in and taken the three best rooms on the top floor of this bains-de-mer hideaway for an indeterminate stay in the winter off-season. Wilde, broke and adrift, had not needed much convincing. Harris had brought him south from the “awful rooms” of grey Paris, offering, with real generosity, the chance to work again in quiet coastal air, all expenses paid.
Call it a shimmering fantasy, or perhaps a scatterbrained scheme. Despite Harris’s reputation as something of a rogue, Wilde trusted him – he was a friend – and a man of letters, acting as Oscar’s self-appointed benefactor and impresario, who would later write Wilde’s first biography.
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Meanwhile, Wilde, physically worn down after two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol, initially clung to the idea that in Mediterranean light he might write “just as naturally as a bird sings”. At La Napoule, he was immediately struck by the “sapphire blue sea” and the red porphyry of the Estérel. “I am on the Riviera, with blue-and-gold weather, under a sun warm as wine and apricot-coloured…,” he wrote to a friend. To André Gide on December 14th he confided: “Perhaps here I will be able to find my soul again.”
But according to Harris’s Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1916), nothing could coax him into writing a single line. Wilde simply “loafed delightfully”: rising late, lingering over breakfast, then wandering down to speak with fishermen on the beach. Afternoons were filled with slow walks through the pines, occasional recitations from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, or with a mildly bored Wilde dozing in the sun.
Life, however, was not entirely without distractions. Wilde would occasionally head to Cannes, sipping absinthe in a roadside cafe and gazing across the bay towards the imagined outline of Capri. “The fishing population of the Riviera have the same freedom from morals as the Neapolitans,” he told Robert Ross. To another friend he wrote: “Even at Napoule there is romance: it comes in boats and takes the form of fisher-lads, who draw great nets, and are bare-limbed: they are strangely perfect.”
As Wilde lay dying in Paris, he pleaded with his friend Robert Ross: ‘Look out for some little cup in the hills near Nice where I can go when I am better … ' The Riviera dream never quite left him
Harris had soon gone off, leaving Wilde with an ample supply of good champagne, absinthe and coffee, but inadequate funds to remain at the hotel. Presumably the editor was pursuing speculative ventures in Monaco and Èze, though there were other unnamed, urgent matters as well. When Harris returned to L’Hôtel des Bains on February 2nd, 1899, he and Wilde spent two weeks shut in their rooms in loud, alcohol-fuelled “work sessions”. Their projected collaboration on the play Mr and Mrs Daventry, meanwhile, never progressed beyond a handful of rough scenes.
[ ‘I’m an artist, not a reporter’: Ray Burke on journalist and writer Frank HarrisOpens in new window ]
Harris, absorbed in plans for a book of his own, was often “upstairs thinking about Shakespeare at the top of his voice”. Alternately bemused and exhausted, Wilde wrote to Reginald Turner: “After our literary talk in the evening I stagger to my room, bathed in perspiration.”
The situation deteriorated when the ever-restless Harris departed again. Finding La Napoule too isolated, Wilde moved to the overpriced Hôtel Terminus in Nice, near the station, with instructions from Harris to find him a villa – an unlikely request, plus Harris had also failed to produce the money promised for the final month. Wilde pawned a ring to pay the ten-franc fare to Monte Carlo, where he told Harris he could not pay his bill; the “repugnant” proprietor of the Terminus had asked him to leave after English tourists recognised him and objected.
Public situations played out in similar ways. At the Café de la Régence in Nice, when an Englishman and his wife sat beside them and insulted Wilde, Harris claims in My Life and Loves that he nearly struck the man with a glass pitcher before persuading the manager to remove the couple. He also chronicles Wilde’s distress: “Good God, Frank, how dreadful; why do they hate me so; what harm have I ever done them?” Similarly, Harris describes a lunch at the seaside La Réserve in Beaulieu that ended abruptly after English visitors displayed their hostility.
By this point, Wilde had moved to a modest pension on the rue d’Angleterre in Nice for three francs a night. No longer able to rely on Harris, he accepted an invitation to Switzerland, via Italy, from Harold Mellor, a young acquaintance he had met – “a charming fellow”, Wilde first wrote, though his enthusiasm cooled within weeks.
The Riviera chapter was effectively over. Wilde left without rancour toward Harris – their quarrel in Paris still lay ahead (a brief, bitter falling-out over money and promises neither man quite kept). From Switzerland on March 1st, he even asked whether he might dedicate An Ideal Husband to him: “To Frank Harris – a slight tribute to his power and distinction as an artist, his chivalry and nobility as a friend.”
To be perfectly Frank
But who, after all, was Frank Harris?
Born James Thomas Harris in Galway in 1856, he later claimed he ran away at 14 with scholarship prize money and never returned – the first of many reinventions. In America he worked odd jobs, tried university, then moved on to ranches in Kansas and, as he later said, Texas, enlarging those years into My Reminiscences as a Cowboy, the memoir behind the 1958 Hollywood film Cowboy. Fact and flourish were fused from the start.
By the 1880s he resurfaced in London as Frank Harris, editor, critic and social operator, whose brilliance mixed uneasily with volatility. At The Fortnightly Review and The Saturday Review he promoted young writers, including HG Wells, and cultivated a circle he claimed included Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. He was chronically late, a habitual borrower of money and an extraordinary talker. Admirers forgave him; detractors called him a liar. Max Beerbohm joked that Harris told the truth only “when his invention flagged”.
Yet he wrote with genuine force. The Man Shakespeare was eccentric but serious; his biography of GB Shaw was sharp and opinionated. His notorious erotic memoir, My Life and Loves – half confession, half theatre – was so explicit that it was banned in Britain and the US for decades, circulating privately abroad.
[ Oscar Wilde’s talk inspired his rise and led to his downfallOpens in new window ]
Harris’s private life in the 1890s matched the turbulence. He moved between London, Paris, the Riviera and Monte-Carlo, juggling a household with May Congden and their gravely ill daughter while pursuing an intense attachment to the younger Nellie O’Hara. Harris’s abrupt absences were later inflated into wilder tales. His secretary, Thomas Bell, later challenged Harris’s version of events – among them the claim that he had slipped away for a week of orgies in a villa at San Remo during the time Wilde was left alone in La Napoule.
In Monaco he cut an unforgettable figure – fur-lined overcoat, gold-headed cane, too much jewellery – and briefly won the confidence of Princess Alice until her husband, Prince Albert, intervened after Harris’s mismanaged hotel venture.
His boldest gamble came at Èze. There, Harris envisioned not just a business but a kind of personal stage – a place where he might gather writers, wandering aristocrats, gamblers, muses, all suspended for an evening above the glittering Mediterranean. On a rocky peninsula, he built Césari Reserve, imagining a restaurant and luxury retreat with champagne-soaked literary gatherings around a pool on the edge of the sea. He poured what would now be about €3 million into the venture and went bankrupt anyway. News this summer that Bernard Arnault bought Cap Estel – currently a palace-hotel – for about €200 million would have doubtlessly amused him. Harris always believed he had been ahead of the curve.
Recent scholarship has softened caricatures. In After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal, Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, notes that his father, Vyvyan, admired Harris’s writing and kept inscribed copies of his books, even while members of Wilde’s circle, such as his close friend Robert Ross, dismissed Harris’s biography of Wilde as unreliable or sensational.
As Wilde lay dying in Paris, he pleaded with Ross: “Look out for some little cup in the hills near Nice where I can go when I am better … ” The Riviera dream never quite left him – and Harris had once been part of it. He died on November 30th, 1900.
Harris eventually settled in Nice with Nellie O’Hara, 31 years his junior, whom he married in 1927 at 71. Visitors found his flat surprisingly simple, a contrast to the extravagance of his stories, yet Harris remained determinedly himself – argumentative, theatrical, and still convinced a last great project might rescue his reputation. He wrote steadily despite illness, dwindling means and failed publishing schemes. Richard Grant recalled that “to hear Harris talk was to be enthralled, seduced and violated”.
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Living in relative obscurity and largely forgotten, Harris died in 1931 and was buried at the Cimetière de Caucade. A plaque on his final residence identifies him simply as “Frank Harris, Irish journalist and writer and faithful guest of the Côte d’Azur”. It’s not the tribute he might have imagined for himself, but it’s the one that stands.
Lanie Goodman is a freelance arts and travel writer
