The lights flickered rhythmically, ticking off the floors as the elevator dropped. They had to use the service elevator rather than the regular one near the reception, because they were manoeuvring a stretcher.
The ambulance men brought the stretcher through the swinging double door of the kitchen, through the busy food preparation area and into the dining room. As they carefully picked their path through the tables, the frail old man on the stretcher - the inhabitant of room 758 for the past ten years - stirred. He raised his head slightly, and his blue eyes twinkled.
‘It was the food!’ he boomed, his rasping Irish brogue reaching the furthest corners of the dining room of the Savoy. ‘It was the food.’
Then he let his head fall back, and he laughed.
A few days later Richard Harris, legendary screen icon and one of the most notorious hellraisers of the 1960s and ’70s, was dead. It was 25 October 2002, and the 72-year-old actor, poet and singer had survived alcoholism, drug addiction and bar-room brawls. But a combination of Parkinson’s and Lymphoma had finally brought the curtain down. The cancer had festered in his body unnoticed, until a bout of pneumonia in August had hospitalised him and it was discovered. By then it was too late to treat.
In life he had been trouble, and even in death he caused controversy. The headline in the Sunday Times was: ‘Limerick snubbed in Harris’s final scene’.
Noel Harris, his brother, immediately announced that there would be a memorial service in Limerick, after the cremation in London. Harris, an eccentric to the end, was not laid to rest in his best suit, as Irish tradition dictates. Instead he was dressed in the pale-blue jersey of his beloved Young Munster Rugby Club. It was the common touch so typical of the man.
Harris had a huge fan base, and part of the reason was that he was a very accessible star. He had time for everyone. When he went to a rugby game – and he often did – he did not sit in the corporate box, sipping champagne and munching sardine sandwiches. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the real fans in the terraces, and sang as raucously as any of them.
Limerick loved him, and the city was plunged into mourning when he passed. A book of condolences was opened in Griffin’s Funeral Home, and people queued up to sign. Alongside the names of friends, former colleagues and city dignitaries were childish scrawls from youngsters who only knew the firebrand from his role as the affable Professor Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies. It was a role he had wanted to turn down, until his granddaughter Ella threatened not to talk to him again if he did.
The entries in the book of condolences showed how deeply fans had been touched by Dickie Harris. One tribute read: ‘From a nine year old girl who fell in love with Albus Dumbledore and her mother who fell in love with King Arthur. Thank you for that “One Brief Shining Moment”.’ Another, perhaps referring to his hellraising reputation, just wrote: ‘Rock on Richard’.
Many of the mourners spoke to reporters as they queued. Colette Simms was typical. She recalled how, on her first week working behind the bar at the Corner Flag, a city pub, she served Richard Harris her first pint of Guinness: ‘He came into the bar for a quick drink because he was supposed to be leaving at three o’clock that day. But he didn’t leave until three the following day. He was a great storyteller, a great character, he had a great presence and he was a great man.’
One of the first people to sign the book was Mayor John Cronin, who said: ‘I am delighted that the people of Limerick have got a chance to mourn this great Limerick man. I would encourage the people of Limerick to sign the book to show what Richard Harris meant to Limerick.’
And Limerick meant as much to Harris as he meant to Limerick. To understand the man, we need to travel back in time and understand the place that shaped him.
Richard Harris once described himself as an excessive compulsive. Though the phrase had yet to be hijacked by psychologists, it was a perfect description of one of cinema’s most iconic stars. Harris was compulsively excessive in everything he did. He drank to excess, and when he quit drinking, he took to drugs with such zeal they nearly killed him. He took his acting equally seriously, clashing with major star Marlon Brando in one of his first screen roles (Mutiny on the Bounty) when he should have been sitting awestruck at the feet of the master. He sported to excess, dominating on the rugby field until illness struck him down. He loved excess, and when he fell out with the current love of his life he was a voracious womaniser. ‘I should be in jail for life for sexual harassment. I would never get out of jail. I harassed every female I saw. I made passes at them. And if I didn’t they would be wondering why I didn’t,’ he joked.
Harris never did anything by halves, and cheerfully accepted the consequences – the lost years, the lack of quality roles during key portions of his career, the broken marriages, the bar-room brawls … Life was lived large and it was a constant drama.
‘I had this strange or fatalistic sort of an idea that I was going to die young,’ he told one interviewer, Patricia O’Connor, in 1993. ‘I thought I would die young, and I wanted to go out and maybe not so much encourage death, but at least in the interim between life and death I would live an exciting life.’
Even that interview, broadcast on RTÉ, the Irish national television station, was a drama. Harris was not meant to be in Dublin, but his plane touched down there while in transit from London to the Bahamas, where he had a house. During the brief stopover, Harris managed to lose his luggage – passport, credit cards, money, and the rough draft of an autobiography he was working on. He had to stay in Dublin to sort the mess out, and RTÉ took the opportunity to interview him. Eventually he got to the Bahamas, but the autobiography never saw the light of day.
Nevertheless, the stories of his life gained wide circulation. The actor used to joke that if he couldn’t remember what he had done the previous evening, all he had to do was pick up one of the tabloids and he would be able to get all the details.
He had a devil-may-care attitude that endeared him to the public, and a generosity of spirit that allowed him to make friends wherever he went. On one famous occasion he knocked on the window of a strange house late at night demanding drink, and spent the next three days there. His reputation as a hellraiser was well earned. Along with his contemporaries – Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton – he blazed a trail for British and Irish talent on the silver screen, and tore across the social pages of the newspapers in a whirl of alcohol and beautiful women. The four of them burnt bright like comets and were gone. But Harris continued making quality films into his old age. He won new legions of fans with performances in Gladiator, Harry Potter, and an Oscar nomination for his lead role in The Field.
Unlike the other hellraisers, there was more to Harris. Away from the screen he was a bit of a Renaissance man. He had a very successful career as a singer, with his albums topping the charts. He was a poet of note, and even turned his hand to directing. More important, he was shrewd. After forcing himself into the role of Arthur in Camelot (1967) – a role the producer did not want him in – Harris went one step further, and bought the stage rights to the musical. That alone ensured that he died a rich man. And at the tail end of his career he refused payment for his final role, as Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. Instead he asked for a percentage of the merchandising. The producers were aghast, but in the end had to give in to his demands. As he said at the time, that move ensured his granddaughter Ella could go to any university in the world. The funds were there.
Excess was the motif of his life. As he put it himself:
I had the most exciting life. No human being could have a more exciting life. I did everything you could think of. I just took a chance and ran with it and did it. I had the most marvellous love affairs, I met the most fantastic women, and I had the greatest experiences; the greatest drunks, the greatest hangovers, the largest vomits - the best. I have been in jail in six countries. Who else can claim that?
Maybe Oliver Reed, his good drinking buddy.
Excessive drinking is often a sign of hidden unhappiness. Psychological forces drive a person to the solace of alcohol. But there was no unhappiness in Harris’s childhood, or in his journey through life. He claimed he drank because he liked it: ‘I drank because I loved it. I absolutely adored it. I wasn’t running away. I was the happiest drunk in the world,’ he boasted.
I used to look forward to waking up the next day with a hangover, and opening the Daily Express to find out what I had done. Where did I do it? I spent two nights in jail - I have how many stitches? How did I get those? I loved it. It had nothing to do with problems. I had no problems whatsoever. I had a good family. My mother and my father, I have nothing against them. Eight of us – too many of us maybe! People look and say there is a secret demon there. No, there’s none.
However, there was a predilection for drink in the genes. His father Ivan was a heavy drinker, while his brother Dermot died a young man after living a life every bit as hard as Richard’s. Drink took its toll.
Yet, despite appearances, Harris had another side: he had intense discipline. He threw himself into roles as only method actors can. He got into world-class shape for This Sporting Life (1963), so that he could hold his own with the rough-and-tumble professional rugby players who were extras on the film. When he was told that he would die within months unless he quit drinking, he had the discipline to down one last bottle of champagne and then walk away from the booze. He might have seemed to the world to be a hopeless alcoholic, but he was in control a lot of the time.
Perhaps it is that discipline more than anything else that separated him from the other hellraisers of that golden age of cinema. However much he enjoyed the craic (a peculiarly Irish expression, meaning hedonistic fun), he knew that he had to do what was necessary to hold on to what he had earned. The wild excesses never threatened his homes around the world, or the security of his family. And he was still making quality films up to his death.
His discipline was a result of his upbringing. Many of the great actors of his age came from working-class backgrounds. Harris did not. He was born into wealth. His family were rich industrialists. He was raised in a large house, with servants to answer his every beck and call. But through his childhood he saw his parents’ empire slowly crumble. By the time he reached his teens his mother was on her knees scrubbing her own floors. His father’s flour mills had closed, the bakeries were gone, and the family had slipped in genteel poverty.
Harris was always a family man. His childhood had been happy, and he was close to his parents. He could see at first hand how easy it was to lose what had taken such a long time to build up. Whether he ever articulated it, or even acknowledged it to himself, that lesson in how easily things could fall apart was one of the forces that drove him. It gave him a steely determination. That determination could be seen first on the rugby field. It could also be seen in his acting career. When he first set his mind on a place in an acting college, or later on a role in a film, he would move mountains to achieve that aim.
One of his abiding disappointments was that both his parents were dead before that drive pushed him to the top. He never got the chance to use his growing wealth to help out the parents who had given him such a happy childhood.
To understand Harris as a person, we have to understand the forces that created him. We have to go back to Limerick, his home town.
For only out of solitude or strife are born the sons of valour and delight.
Roy Campbell, Choosing a Mast
It is a common cliché that adversity breeds greatness. But the life of actor, poet, director and singer Richard Harris showed that the opposite can also be true: a pampered life of ease and luxury can produce greatness. Harris often used to joke about that. In 1973 he told Michael Parkinson that many working-class actors and entertainers rose to the top – men such as Oliver Reed and Michael Caine. He even included Parkinson in that number. But he said that his own background was completely different, and it didn’t stop him getting to the top.
Harris was born into wealth, which had been built up over generations through hard work and diligent trade. The Harris family dominated the mill business in the city, supplying flour and grain. But as Harris reached his teen years the family were experiencing something they had not seen in seventy years: they knew want for the first time, as competition gradually squeezed the life out of their business. The servants were let go, the workers were laid off, and the house was downsized.
Harris grew to maturity through the times of change, and perhaps this is what shaped him. He was an intensely competitive man, first on the rugby field and the racquets court, later on the stage and on screen, insisting on top billing long before he had earned that right. But he was also a man who knew how to spend money like it was going out of fashion. He lived life to the full, indulging every passion to excess. Because he knew that it could all come crashing down on him, he lived in the moment, and is remembered as much for his hellraising as for his towering talent.
It all began in his childhood, but the story of Limerick begins before that …
Limerick is Ireland’s third city, behind Dublin and Cork. Sitting on the broad estuary of the Shannon, the largest river in the British Isles, it dominates the western seaboard. The city has a long history. Humans settled in the area over 5,000 years ago, as the Stone Age remains at nearby Lough Gur demonstrate. But the city itself is a lot more recent.
Around the ninth century, the Vikings stopped raiding and started settling, establishing permanent trading posts in key locations such as Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. The western settlement was on the Shannon, at the point where the river broadens out to an estuary. The initial buildings were constructed around the last fordable section of the river, and that is still the heart of the old city to this day; King John’s Castle and the Curraghgower Falls, an area of rapids on the shallow river.
Within a generation the Vikings were mingling with the local population and intermarrying. They established fortifications and settlements away from the main trading centre, and commerce became as important to them as warfare. One of their settlements was at Killaloe, at the end of Lough Derg, 10 miles inland from Limerick.
Eventually, a powerful chieftain arose at Killaloe and became king of all Ireland; Brian Boru was the most powerful man in the country, and all the other tribes and minor kings acknowledged his supremacy. Historians now accept that Brian was at least half Viking, and not a pure Celt. Perhaps it was because he was not a true Viking that the other Vikings did not accept his authority as easily as the native Irish. In 916 Brian and his army marched east across the country to subdue the Norsemen of the Dublin settlement. Brian won the Battle of Clontarf decisively, but lost his life in the struggle. He was the last great High King of Ireland. His descendants still live locally, in Newmarket-on-Fergus, just 10 miles north of Limerick.
Limerick continued to thrive, despite the setback. The Normans built a large castle on the river. King John stayed there on an inspection of Ireland, and the castle still bears his name. But by the time Richard Harris arrived, the castle had fallen into decay, and the courtyard and some of the outbuildings had been converted into council housing for the poor.
The city had its own mayor and corporation by the twelfth century, and was always considered an important asset. The British and the Irish fought over it a number of times, including two key sieges in the 1690s.
The first recorded reference to milling comes in 1485, when a poet, Davis, wrote:
A mighty murrain, numbers of cattle died.
This year for four pence is cow’s raw hide.
All other things were cheap, a plenty great,
For twelve pence bought four pecks of finest wheat.
Grain was always vital to the prosperity of the city. The Golden Vale is the rich lowlands around the Shannon, in east Limerick, north Tipperary and Offaly. Grain would be transported down the majestic Shannon to the grain mills of Limerick. The Civil Survey of 1654 records four water-worked mills in the city, as well as several large horse-powered mills. Some of these mills did not survive, but a few flourished, including one at Curraghgower Falls, a small rapid on the river close to the castle. The mill was built by William Joynt, a member of the city corporation, and was still going two centuries later, when Larry Quinlivan presided over a concern described in 1840 as a ‘splendid mill with great water-power’. Quinlivan obviously did well from the trade, because he ran successfully for mayor. But the mill was destroyed in a fire in 1850 and never rebuilt.
Several of the riverside mills went out of business in the nineteenth century because the river levels were too low to allow consistent use. Then the famine struck, closing more. Those that thrived did so by supplying the workhouses.
It is not known exactly when the Harris family first came to Ireland. They were outsiders who arrived with the planters (English settlers) in the seventeenth century. Harris may be a Norman name, a corruption of the French Henri. It may also be Welsh, from Ris or Rhys. In any case, the family came from the United Kingdom, and were staunchly Protestant when they settled along the east coast. They gradually spread, arriving in Limerick in the early nineteenth century.
The first Harris to make it to Limerick was James, Richard’s great grandfather. He was born in Wexford, from farming stock. When he arrived in Limerick he turned to trade, setting up a flour and milling business. He was a good businessman who turned mercantile ambitions into a thriving concern. He also married – and broke with family tradition by marrying outside his faith. He met and fell for Anne Meehan, and converted to Catholicism to be with her. By 1864 he owned Limerick’s largest flour mill, as well as a company dock and warehouse at Steamboat Quay, in the docks area. He also owned a bakery on Henry Street. This runs parallel to the river, and is one of the three main streets in Limerick, alongside O’Connell Street and William Street.
By that time, Limerick had become one of the great Georgian cities. The old quarter – known as Irish Town - was based around the castle and the original settlement. It was a maze of little streets and lanes, lying higgledy-piggledy close to the river. The new quarter – known as English Town, or Newtown – was west of that settlement, and south of the river. It was laid out in an elegant grid of wide streets with little lanes linking them. The houses were three- and four-storey, built of red brick with large windows and imposing doorways, often with a flight of steps up from the pavement. The people who lived on Pery Square, Hartstonge Street and The Crescent were the elite of Limerick.
Sometime in the 1860s James Harris acquired a very desirable property on Hartstonge Street, at the end nearest Pery Square. Hartstonge House, which still stands, is a tall, narrow, detached town house. It is four storeys high and has imposing steps leading to the front door, a red-brick structure that looks like it should be part of an imposing terrace. Although there was no garden (it fronts onto the road, and the rear was for access and stables) it was still the best house on one of the best streets. The Harris family remained there for about twenty years, before moving out to a mansion on Ennis Road. The house was subsequently bought by Stephen O’Mara, and the famous opera singer James O’Mara lived there before the family moved out in 1909. The Society of St Vincent de Paul now occupies the building, which has been renamed Ozaman House.
A description from that time from Pat Lavelle mentions: ‘What I saw, the comfort and well-being of Hartstonge House, the crowds of relations, the stables with carriages and horses, had all been achieved by the work and energy of two men, my grandfather Stephen and his father James.’ The richly furnished home even had its own private chapel, Littleark, which James built to mark his change in faith.
While James Harris was still in Hartstonge House, in 1868, he achieved some local fame when he provided a base for a French balloonist, Monsieur Chevalier. The French aeronaut had spent two days aloft and covered 700 miles in the balloon, which earned him the Légion d’Honneur. Now he was in Ireland trying to drum up funds by offering pleasure flights in his balloon, which was still very much a novelty.
Harris gave Chevalier the use of the yard at Steamboat Quay, and the aeronaut charged people a shilling to watch the construction of the balloon. The assembly took longer than expected; during an early test flight it was badly damaged and had to undergo extensive repairs, which James Harris patiently endured. Finally, in mid-May, it was ready for flight. Chevalier announced the fact in a letter to the local paper, the Limerick Chronicle:
Allow me to inform the gentry and public of Limerick that the injury sustained during the last inflation is completely repaired, and I intend to perform my promise, weather permitting, by ascending in my balloon on Thursday next, May 21, at three o’clock, from Mr Harris’ premises, Steamboat Quay, who was kind enough to give me the use of it, free of any charge.
In this voyage I will be accompanied by a lady and a gentleman. Hoping to be still favoured with the patronage of the gentry and public of Limerick, who have expressed so much sympathy for my unavoidable accident, and returning them my sincere thanks, I remain, your obedient servant, A Chevalier.
The second attempt was a success, with the balloon sailing east and disappearing over the horizon in the direction of the village of Castleconnell.
That was the lifestyle that the Harris family had achieved – servants, a stable full of horses and luxury carriages, and the elegant ease of the gentry. Their move from Hartstonge Street after less than a decade was not a downsizing; their new house was one of the best in Limerick. It was a mansion in its own small estate, on the North Circular Road. There were extensive grounds and enough rooms to get lost in, as well as outhouses and stables. There were butlers, maids and gardeners, as well as their own carriages, with grazing for the horses.
James Harris was a bit of an anomaly among the merchant rulers of Limerick in that, like many converts, he was a committed Catholic. He wasn’t the only Catholic of his class. In fact, among his rivals in the milling business was the Harty family, into which his son married. But in many respects Catholics were still second-class citizens, despite forty years of Catholic emancipation. This led to bitter business rivalries with families such as the Russells and Bannatynes, both of whom were also involved in the milling business. Despite this, James Harris’s business prospered. He died in 1895 and was buried in the family vault alongside his father, who had died fifteen years earlier. Having a vault as opposed to a standard burial plot was an announcement that – at the end of life – you had arrived. His wife died five years later.
His son Richard, then 31, continued in his footsteps, expanding the business considerably, and his wealth grew. He also invested in new businesses, including setting up a phone company. The cost of a one-minute call to Dublin was half a shilling, making it an indulgence of the rich.
The nationalist movement was gaining a foothold in the country, but the Harris family remained decidedly old school. Richard’s son, Ivan John Harris, was born in 1896. Richard’s father had helped finance the Jesuit-run Crescent College in the centre of the city (built on the best street), but when it came to his son’s education, Richard decided to board Ivan, along with his brother Billy, in a British school.
He chose Downside, a private Catholic school attached to Downside Abbey in Somerset, near Bath. Run by the Benedictine order, it was modelled on such institutions of the empire as Eton and Rugby, and provided a very solid education. But it was very much an enclave of the elite. When Ivan Harris returned to his native Limerick, he would have stood out from those about him. He was also the heir to great wealth. He was a catch.
The young Ivan Harris was a gentle, easy-going man who loved sports such as tennis and hockey. He threw himself enthusiastically into the family business, alongside his brother. While his father had a reputation for being stern and austere, Ivan was known as a gentleman, who got on with everyone. Throughout his life he was also a charitable man, and slow to anger. He is well remembered in his native city.
‘The family had plenty of money,’ said one of the patrons of Quinlan’s Bar, near the railway station. This bar, a haunt of Young Munster supporters, was a favourite watering hold of Richard Harris in the later years of his life. ‘They were supposed to be a very charitable family. They gave a lot of money to the poor. Very nice people, they were. Richard’s father, Ivan, was an out and out gentleman. They gave a lot to the poor of Limerick.’
A handsome man, with a good education, easy manners, charm and wealth, Ivan attracted the eyes of the ladies. Through his interest in sport he crossed paths with a local beauty, Mildred (Milly) Harty. Slim, with porcelain skin and wild red hair, she turned heads wherever she went. She was no shrinking violet, and knew her own mind. The two were instantly attracted to each other.
And Milly came from the right stock. Many generations ago her family had arrived from Scotland, but now they were as integrated as the Harris family, staunchly nationalist Catholic. And though the Hartys did not have the elevated social status of the Harris family, they were players in the local milling industry. However, they did not have the wealth of the Harrises. That was a serious obstacle to the match, at least in the eyes of the older generation of Harrises. But the problem evaporated when an aunt of Milly’s mother died, leaving a large inheritance.
The couple got married and appeared to be madly in love. At least, that is how most people remember it. Richard Harris had a different interpretation of the relationship between his parents. He thought the marriage had more to do with politics and money than romance.
‘With my father and mother it was an arranged marriage,’ Harris told Joe Jackson in a Hot Press interview many years after their deaths. ‘My mother was a working-class lady with a lot of money. My father had no money. It was arranged by relatives that they should marry. They had eight children, and they loved each other. They had the odd row now and then, but no more than that - tiffs.’
This is an account that the rest of the family reject. Noel Harris, the only surviving one of Richard’s siblings, said:
I was always very offended with Richard over the way he spoke about his mother and father, which was all lies, total lies.
I had it out with him many times when he was alive, and I have also made it known to his three sons. If I ever had a disagreement with their father, it was over this issue of what he said about our parents. My parents were lovely people. They were very warm and never deprived us of anything we wanted in life.
My father was a terribly quiet man. He was known as Limerick’s gentleman. You’d very rarely see him lose his temper. My mother ruled the house. She was the boss in that house. And my father adored the ground she walked on, which Dick never said properly in life. He always said it was an arranged marriage, and there was no love in the marriage between my father and mother. What rubbish. My father adored the ground my mother walked on.
Milly and Ivan were a well-matched couple, and very quickly their family began to grow. They continued to live in luxury on the North Circular Road for the first few years of their life together. Ivan ran the mill, bakery and retail business alongside his brother Billy. When their father retired in his 80s, both brothers took over, having different responsibilities. For a couple of years, the business thrived. But they did not have it all their own way. There was fierce competition. Three other major mills were looking for the same business: Russell’s and Roche’s of Limerick, and Glynn’s of Kilrush. Both brothers had to work very hard to stay on top of things.
Ivan was turning into a workaholic as the depression of the 1920s began to affect his business. The problem was made worse when a huge UK company decided to open in Limerick. Rank had the financial muscle to push the smaller operators out of business, and that is what they proceeded to do. They undercut, sold for a loss, and were able to offer suppliers better deals than the local firms. One by one the many mills in the region began to close down. The Harris family finally closed their mill in the late 1920s. They then became agents for Rank. Their wealth was being rapidly eroded.
It didn’t help that the family had established more than a dozen town bakeries in various parts of the country. Despite Ivan’s best efforts, they had become overextended. In the late 1920s they realised they had to downsize, and one of the first things to go was their mansion off the North Circular Road. The growing family moved into Overdale, a house on Ennis Road. This was a very good part of town. The houses were tall, imposing terraces from the early Victorian era, with red-brick façades and high ceilings. Overdale was three storeys high, with a long narrow front garden, a garden at the back, and a laneway at the rear giving access. It was ten minutes’ walk from the city centre, and was an enclave of the wealthy. The property had plenty of room, which was important. The family was growing at a rapid rate, as Noel Harris remembers:
We were very close as a family growing up, because there was only two years between us all. There were two years between Harmay and Audrey, there were two years between Audrey and Jimmy, there were two years between Jimmy and Ivan, there were two years between Ivan and Richard, and there were two years between Richard and myself. Dermot and Jimmy were the last two. We were close. They said that if you hit one Harris, you hit them all!
Richard St John Harris, the fifth child, was born on 1 October 1930.