2 A Rugby Dream Dies; an Actor is Born

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for my biography. I don’t want it told in a linear fashion!’ In reply, the other said, ‘Let’s talk about that when you get better.’ But he never got better. Richard St John Harris never got better. He died on 25 October 2002. But near the end, he was, as always, reaching. And not just for that notepad, I believe.

Joe Jackson, Dublin, May 2022

CHAPTER ONE

Angela’s Ashes versus Richard’s Ashes

‘I want to find out what made me so angry in life and so angry at life from the start.’

Richard Harris to the author, 1993

IT WAS FEBRUARY 1946. THE fifteen-year-old ‘Dickie Harris’, as he was called in Limerick and by his family, sat in a car that was part of the cortege taking the body of his beloved sister, Audrey, to the family tomb in the Saint Mount Lawrence Cemetery. The boy couldn’t stop crying. But then he noticed something that almost brought a smile. ‘I realised that 90 per cent of the people lining the streets to pay their respects to my sister were shawlies, many of whom Audrey had helped by organising jumble sales for them, giving them her clothes and so on.’

When Richard Harris told me that story in August 2001, the word ‘shawlies’ was a disparaging reference to working-class women. But that’s not how Harris saw it. To him, it meant ‘poor people’. And that memory came back into his mind while he, a member of the Harris clan, whose motto is ‘I will defend’, was living up to that motto by defending himself and his family name against attacks from, ‘sadly, certain people in Limerick’. It all went back to the fact that when Frank McCourt’s misery memoir, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996, Richard ripped it

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to shreds in public and probably even physically in private. Harris hated the book. He said, for example, that it was ‘full of historical inaccuracies’. This prompted some McCourt supporters in the tribal city of Limerick to take his side. I once heard a Limerick woman say, for example, ‘The Harrises were the Limerick elite. What would they know about poverty? They didn’t give a fiddler’s fuck about the poor.’ The latter accusation, in particular, made Richard livid. If only because, decoded, it suggests that the Harrises stood looking down from their ivory tower as the ‘peasants’ below died en masse from poverty and starvation.

‘That is exactly what angers me because it is so fucking untrue,’ he said in 2001. Richard also suspected that the public stances he took against Angela’s Ashes, the book and the film, had left him ‘loved and loathed in equal measure in Limerick’. And that this might be how things would remain after he was reduced to ashes. That’s why he wanted to ‘put on the record’ with me his ‘final statement’ on the subject.

But first, let me add a mental health warning about a word about the storytelling skills of Richard Harris. He described the following story as ‘amazing’. Other times, Richard would preface a similar tale by saying it was ‘fantastic’. Both were much the same thing to Harris and must be seen in the context of his previously quoted assertion that ‘truth can be dull’. Put another way, one could say that the man who played The Bull McCabe in The Field could be full of bull. He certainly had a flexible attitude toward facts. His stories could be true, false, or fall somewhere in between, like a drunk miscalculating the space between two stools in a pub. Some say that’s where he learned his trade as a storyteller – in Limerick pubs, at a bar, or flat on his arse, laughing after falling between two stools. Or he can be seen as a seanchaí.

‘I’ll tell you an amazing story about my family,’ Harris said, telling this tale, not in a pub but in his suite at London’s Savoy Hotel. Thankfully, RH brought Ireland wherever he went and could make even a location as ‘posh’ as the Savoy seem like a pub in Limerick.

‘My family was Protestant, originally, right? They came from Wales in 1774 and settled in Waterford. Then, my great-great-grandfather, James Harris, moved to Limerick. And he not only started our family business

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as millers, but he also gave to the Jesuits, free, the building that is Crescent College! We gave the Jesuits the building that is now Crescent College. Yet, once, when an American journalist went there to research an article about me, he was told, “We’d prefer if you didn’t mention Mr Harris in relation to this school.” They wanted nothing to do with me because of my reputation! Can you believe it? And we gave them the fucking building! But there is more! The Harrises were, as I say, Protestant. And they retained their religion up to the time of James Harris, who married Mary O’Meehan, a diehard Catholic. And even though James Harris remained Protestant, his three children, including Richard Harris, after whom I am named, became Catholics. Then Richard Harris married a Protestant called Anderson from Edinburgh, and she refused to convert to Catholicism! The Bishop of Limerick [Bishop John Ryan] didn’t want Richard Harris to marry a Protestant, so he cut him off from his social set! And in penance, my grandfather gave Crescent College to the Jesuits. Not only that, for further penance, he put a church inside his house, in which the Bishop, after they became friends again, celebrated mass every Sunday at 12 o’clock. Then, of course, he stayed for a good lunch! And my mother, when the family moved to Overdale, gave the entire contents of that chapel to the Jesuits!’

Overdale is the nineteenth-century, nine-bedroom, red-brick house on Ennis Road, in one of the most sought-after areas of Limerick, where Richard St John Harris was raised as the son of Mildred and Ivan Harris. He was born on 1 October 1930. His siblings were two sisters, Harmay and Audrey, and five brothers, Jimmy (James), Ivan, Noel, Dermot and Billy (William).

‘But my point in telling this story is to highlight the fact that my great-great-grandparents were very wealthy people. There is no question about that. They were huge millers until Ranks [Ranks Flour Mills, a UK company] set their sights on Ireland, moved in, and killed the businesses of the little millers. So, the family wealth started to disappear during my early years. I remember great wealth and opulence when I was small and still in short trousers. But I also noticed it disappearing. And I know it was disappearing because I saw my mother, who once had servants coming out of her ears, down on her knees and scrubbing the floor.’

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This version of that part of the Harris family history ties in with the fact that their Limerick bakery closed within a year of Richard’s birth, and a battle began to save the family flour mill. However, Richard’s brother Noel told me in 2022 that the story about a scarcity of servants leading to their mother scrubbing floors is ‘bullshit’. He said, ‘Richard was right to say the family business slowly fell apart, but my mother always had servants, and my father always had a chauffeur-driven car. I never understood why Richard seemed to find it necessary to tell lies so often about our family being poorer than we were. But he did.’

I contacted Noel Harris, eighty-nine, because his daughter Sonia told me he was ‘really hurt down through the years’ by the ‘lies Richard told about his family. Particularly the claim that his parents didn’t love each other because their marriage was matchmade.’ Noel’s counterviews and clarifications will feature in this book as often as is necessary to get nearer the truth about Richard’s birth family. But let’s get back to 2001, tilt on this tale.

‘That was during the 1930s, yet our reputation as monied people persisted, and I have no doubt that it still does in Limerick. Although people who could be said to have known us best will tell you that even though we had money, dwindling or otherwise, we never lost the run of ourselves. That certainly would be my memory of it. So, let me address this accusation that we were elitist. Yes, we were elitist – but with no money in the end!’

Noel Harris denies this. ‘We were always relatively well off and never broke,’ he says.

‘Besides, even if we came from a large, sprawling elitist family with great riches at the start, let’s not forget that James Harris gave that Crescent College building to the Jesuits, and land, for free, to build St Flannans – the most famous school in the county Clare. And my grandfather, Richard Harris, fed starving people in Limerick. I won’t say it broke him, but they used to queue up outside our place, and he gave them free bread and flour because he was painfully aware of the poverty. In other words, we did our bit. But I never once challenged McCourt’s book in terms of the poverty in Limerick at the time. I’d be a fool to deny it. There was wicked poverty

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in Limerick. There was wicked poverty in every county in Ireland. All our people suffered from poverty. Yet, now they accuse us; they say we were the elite and that, as such, we could not have known anything about poverty. Of course, we fucking knew. Even Audrey, carrying on a family tradition, helped the poor. That’s why so many turned up at her funeral. Anyway, my argument about Frank McCourt’s fucking book was its untruthfulness. McCourt’s stories about Limerick people, some of whom are still alive, were proven to be untrue. He admits it. And when you think some Americans said Angela’s Ashes was as good as James Joyce, you want to go –’ Richard Harris, the Oscar-nominated actor, then mimicked to perfection the act of puking.

‘There wasn’t a line of poetry in the whole fucking book, Angela’s Ashes – and we Irish love words!’

I rest his case.

As for Richard’s assertion concerning our book that he wanted to ‘go back’ and discover what made him so angry in life and so angry at life from the start, the truth is that he wasn’t angry at the beginning. He didn’t become aware of anger until he was roughly three years old. That period may even have been the time in his life to which he longed to return, his Edenic Age. In 1987, we talked for the first time about his birth and his memories of his earliest years.

‘Here’s something fascinating about my birth,’ Harris said before disclosing something that was news to me and even news to his brother Noel in 2022. ‘I was the only child in our family not born at home. I wasn’t born at home because my sister had scarlet fever and my mother had to leave the house and live with my aunt, who was, mark you, only eight houses down the road. But that’s where I was born and spent the first six months of my life. Also, I had a great connection with that aunt, who must have taken care of me most of the time during those months because my mother, obviously, had to go back to the family as soon as she could. I’ve got a great restlessness and a need to keep moving on. I buy houses, and I don’t live in them. Or I buy them for a brief period, sell them, and move on. At one point, I owned four houses and lived in the Savoy Hotel! Of course, one can never be sure if all this has anything

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to do with the fact that it was half a year before I was brought home. But I often wonder what kind of psychological effect that had on my early development, if it did.’

After we connected, Richard told me that story to kick off the second session for our 1987 interview. We sat at an oak table in his suite at the Berkeley Court Hotel, and Harris showed no reluctance to talk about his past. Bathed in soft autumnal light, he was happy to do so.

J: On your poetry album [I, in the Membership of My Days], as a counterpoint to the nihilism of its final poem, ‘Time is My Bonfire’, you had one of your sons read a poem you wrote at nine – ‘My Young Brother’.

My young brother

Was in his pram

I walked beside him

He looked so white and peaceful

He also looked so warm

I wonder if I’ll ever

Be that small again.

Do you see that poem as signifying a moment of innocence that can never be recaptured?

R: Probably, but I have never stood back and analysed my poems. I just write them. And amazingly, I can go back to the time of that memory. It is one of my earliest memories. My brother, Noel, who is two years younger than me, was with me while we were being taken for a walk by our nanny. Noel was in his pram, and I was told by my mother, ‘Do not take your hand off the pram.’ The nanny obviously couldn’t look after both of us. What mother actually said was, ‘Once you get outside the gate onto the Ennis Road, do not take your hand off the side of the pram.’ She was warning me about the traffic. And my brother must have only been born, so that made me maybe two or three years old. And, as I say in the poem, that was the sense I got, looking into my brother’s quiet, pale, peaceful face. So, I looked up and said to the nanny, ‘Will I ever be that young again?’ She said, ‘No, you never will be.’

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J: In the poem, you say, ‘small’, not ‘young’. ‘Young’ would have been better. R: It would have been, yeah. I should have written that instead. J: And in the poem, you don’t say she told you, ‘No, you never will be.’ R: That’s right. Maybe I should have included that, too. J: Linking many poems on that album is that Irish song, ‘The Old

House’, with its lines, ‘lonely I wandered through scenes of my childhood/They bring back to memory those happy days gone by.’

Is loneliness the dominant feeling evoked when you look back at childhood? R: No. Warmth is. But there is a tremendous psychological danger in being part of families that are absolutely united. It is as dangerous to be closeted with too much love as it is to be without. But in a sense, I was lucky to be situated in the no-man’s-land of my family. As I wrote in another poem [‘Our Green House’], I had my brother’s hand-me-downs. Everything was handed down to me from Ivan or Jimmy. I never remember getting a new suit, bike, or anything new. Although, Noel did. J: Did that make you angry? R: No. It makes you feel, ‘Why can’t I have new?’ But it doesn’t make you angry. One wasn’t aware of what anger was at that stage. But being in that no-man’s-land in the family was, as I say, good, in a way. There were two sisters and two brothers older than me. The two sisters got all the attention, obviously. Then, naturally, the first son, James, got all the attention. And after that, Ivan was everybody’s favourite, for some reason. Then, I was born. I was the ‘new baby’. I became the ‘fave’ for maybe two or three years. Then there was another child born, in my case,

Noel, and suddenly you were dropped out of favour. But looking back now, I feel that maybe this was a good thing because you had to learn to fight for yourself among a batch of kids. You had to learn to fight for the affection of your parents and to fight for their attention. You didn’t get it for free. You got it free from

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maybe the age of one day to two or three years, but after that, you had to fight for it.

And so, at an early age, Richard Harris became a fighter. Plus, perhaps, a performer. What he had said reminded me of a Dory Previn song, ‘I Dance and Dance and Smile and Smile’. It tells of how Dory, as a child, literally tap danced to please her father, to get ‘one glance’ and ‘one sign of his approval’. And ‘smiled and smiled’ to make her mother proud of her.

J: To paraphrase a Dory Previn song, you tap danced for your parents from a young age? R: Exactly, you had to tap dance to be recognised. You had to put up your little flag and say, ‘Hey, I am here, too. Don’t miss me.’

And you were missed. You were passed over; there is no question about that. J: Maybe, but psychologists say that the earliest years are the most important in a child’s development. You seem to have gotten the necessary security during that period. R: I presume I did, yes, during those early years. Although, as I said earlier, I don’t know what effect, psychologically, not living at home for the first half-year of my life had on me. J: But looking back, you say the overarching feeling you get is one of warmth? R: Yes. And the overarching feeling was one of security, of being part of a large family, as distinct from being either an individual in that family who was sought out for affection or an only child.

My feeling was that there was terrific security about being in a family often. For example, we went to Kilkee for three months every year when I was a child, and I remember the security of eight of us having breakfast, dinner, and tea with mother and father on holiday. I loved Kilkee. I still do. But on the other hand,

I can’t remember the parental stroke, the touch from the mother or affection from the father. And I did a lot of ‘tap-dancing’ from a very young age. I was very rebellious. I remember once, maybe

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coming back from Kilkee. We were miles outside Limerick, and my father stopped the car and told me to get out. J: Why? R: There was some altercation, and I was singled out in that sense!

So, I wandered through the fields and valleys on my own. J: You are still wandering, Richard! R: That I am! But that day, I ended up in Ennis. They had come back to find me because my mother was worried about me, but I’d gone.

I was found the next day. But I always seemed to be at odds with my mother and father. I don’t know why. I often heard my father say, ‘I don’t know what to do with him.’ And I’d think, ‘What does he mean by that? I’ve done nothing wrong. I keep to myself, but that’s about it.’ And one is forced to become one’s own playmate.

Me and my brothers were not like my three sons [Damian, Jared and Jamie]. My sons are buddies. Whereas my brothers and me, though we loved each other as brothers, or whatever, were never pals. We never broke up into twos and twos, say, Noel and me.

At least I didn’t with any brother. We lived separate existences, separate friends, separate lives.

Noel Harris, however, remembers ‘how close’ he and his siblings were. And he recalls it being said in Limerick, ‘If you hit one Harris, you hit them all.’ Noel also fondly remembers when he and Richard played rugby at Crescent College. ‘He was two years older and more likely to get physical, and I remember Richard, God rest him, having my back.’ Noel insists his mother and father, ‘both loving parents, would have made none of us feel left out’.

Then again, consequences aren’t always the result of conscious intent, and different members of the same family can have wildly different memories of the same time. Even at seventy, Richard’s abiding memory of his earliest years was that he was ‘an outsider at home and misfit in school’. However, his childhood thought, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’, although it may have been self-soothing, was absurd. Harris was a hellraiser from the age of four when he began to attend school. At

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least he raised flames. As with his older siblings, Richard attended St Philomena’s Junior Jesuit School in Limerick, a private, co-educational school two miles away from Overdale. In 1987, he recalled the trouble he caused.

R: I got into trouble from the very start. I remember once a nun hit me with a ruler, and I grabbed that ruler out of her hand and hit her back! Then, another time, I was thrown out of the class and sent to stand at the end of a hallway as punishment. But that wasn’t a punishment to me at all because I got to see more girls as they passed by! J: Was that when you discovered the delights of the opposite sex? R: Well, I certainly fell in love for the first time when I was six! I remember sitting beside Pat O’Connor in the classroom, and I was mad about her! But it was soon after that I was thrown out of that school. I remember another time that led to me being expelled. One day I was causing trouble in the class and was told to get out. But it was between classes, so there was nobody in the hallway where I was standing, and I got bored. So, I asked the caretaker for a match, and he gave me one, which he should not have done, given I was a child! But, out of total boredom, I went into the toilet, lit some paper and started a fire! I was thrown out of school. But I didn’t care. However, my mother and father were not too happy about it.

Richard telling me he didn’t care about being thrown out of school should not add to the erroneous claim often made that he didn’t care about his education. And that he was ‘just a messer’ in class and never applied himself to his studies. Equally false is the claim that he was a ‘bit of a dunce’ or ‘an idiot’. However, this is what some teachers thought after Harris moved from primary school to Crescent Comprehensive Secondary. Any boy who began to write poetry at nine was bound to be fascinated by English classes, at least. And Richard was. But RH also happened to be semi-dyslexic, which he revealed in 1987.

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R: I had a horrendous introduction to the Jesuits. Later in life, it was discovered I am semi-dyslexic, which makes it hard for me to read and put words together. They didn’t understand that about me. No one did at the time. So that made my early years with the

Jesuits very tough. Some teachers treated me as if I was a fool.

They’d clatter me across the head and say, ‘Harris, you’ll come to nothing!’ In fact, when I look back on those days, I think mostly about the punishments I got. I remember once, in Crescent, I got twelve straps [slapped with a leather] for punching a fellow on the rugby pitch. Then I went out the next week and punched another guy in front of the priest who punished me. Then I looked at the priest daringly. Not that the boy in question had done anything to me. I punched him simply because the priest was standing there. I wanted to make my point. But in terms of the punishments I got, the Jesuits, as I say, didn’t know about my dyslexia, and maybe, in time, they decided, ‘It’s cruel to keep hitting this kid; he’s going to go his own way, that’s it, so just let him be.’

Ah, but they didn’t let him be. As soon as the Jesuits realised Richard was good at rugby, ‘Everything changed,’ he said, smiling at the memory. They treated him differently, called to his home, and made him feel he had ‘a Jesuit friend at school’. Put simply, in secondary, rugby saved Richard Harris’s soul. His poem ‘Our Green House’, written the year he began to attend Crescent College, makes it clear that his ultimate dream was to play rugby for Ireland.

But also, Richard told me in 1987 that from the time he was six years old, cinema and theatre were ‘a form of fantasy escape’ to him. This, too, is obvious from that poem. It tells of the childhood games he played in the garden of Overdale. At first, all Richard’s reference points are films. He acted as if he was Beau Geste or a cowboy ambushing Wells Fargo, Tarzan, or James Cagney during the death scene in Angels with Dirty Faces. But by the end of the poem, his dream is to captain the Irish rugby team, take on the English, kick endless goals, and be carried off the field, held shoulder high and called ‘the greatest’ by his fans.