As the years passed, Richard Harris looked back on his childhood with a special fondness. Nowhere was as special for him as Kilkee, County Clare, where he had passed so many happy summer days. It was his Mecca, his Eden, and the place from where he set out on his journey to conquer Hollywood. It was no surprise that he kept returning there.
He came back most summers in his early days, and when he began to do well, he decided to buy a house in the resort. He purchased a place on his beloved West End, a big old Victorian terraced house called The Billows. It was a spectacular end-of-terrace two-storey building, one of the most elegant on the seafront. The house had an unusual side-by-side pair of double bay windows, with spectacular beach and bay views. It retained many of its period features, including high ceilings, and had six rooms.
Harris made the purchase in 1969, at the peak of his fame. Money was rolling in and he could afford to splash out on his new indulgence. He refurbished the house to the highest specifications, making it one of the most desirable residences in Kilkee.
His friend Manuel Di Lucia, an auctioneer and restaurateur, remembers the purchase well: ‘He bought the house for £7,000, then spent £22,000 on doing it up.’ That was a staggering amount in the late 1960s, the equivalent today of spending perhaps half a million on renovations alone. Although Harris was in the process of divorcing his first wife, Elizabeth, she had a big say in the design of the new home. He also consulted his sister, Harmay. Little did he suspect that she would be dead within a year, and would never see the project to completion.
Much of the furniture and fittings were brought over to Ireland from London, and only the best was considered. ‘It was done up by his wife Elizabeth and his sister Harmay,’ recalled Di Lucia. ‘It was a mansion. It was the first house I ever saw with gold taps and bathroom fittings.’
Limerick man Vincent Finucane, who had played rugby with Harris at Crescent College, got the job of doing the electrical refitting of the old house. ‘I got a contract below in Kilkee to do up his house for him. He had electric storage heating before anyone else. He had all the fancy things.’ Finucane also remembers something else Harris had back then: ‘He had this fancy piece there with him.’
This would have been in 1970, as his marriage with Elizabeth finally imploded, leaving Harris a free agent. He began dating a 17-year-old actress, Linda Hayden. She was with him for the première of Bloomfield in Limerick late that year, and also visited Kilkee, where the renovation work was nearing completion.
The house was eventually finished to a very high standard, and should have proved a haven for Harris from the shallowness and falsity of Hollywood, which he rebelled against. But it didn’t turn out that way. The idea of buying the getaway had come to him near the end of his marriage. Perhaps he thought of it as a way of saving his family from the looming divorce. It would allow him and his wife and three sons to get away from everything and spend time together. But when the divorce papers were served, that dream was gone. And the other woman in his life, his beloved sister Harmay, fell ill in 1970. She underwent emergency surgery but never recovered.
It was a triple blow – his wife and family had left him, his only remaining sister had died, and his directorial début, Bloomfield, had flopped. Harris had dreamed of filming Hamlet, with himself in the title role. For a while that looked possible. Then it was unlikely. After Bloomfield, it was impossible. As blow followed blow, it was enough to throw Harris into a deep depression. He hit the bottle hard, and moved from shallow relationship to shallow relationship. Life was one long party; it was a vain attempt to block out the pain.
Perhaps this is the reason why Harris never actually occupied the house in Kilkee. The house was part of a dream, and once the dream died his interest in the house died with it. He only ever spent a single night under its roof. He continued to visit Kilkee, but chose to stay in the Hydro Hotel.
‘He actually only slept one night in the house,’ Di Lucia said. ‘That’s all. He used to give the house to a children’s orphanage in Limerick, a charity, for them to come on holidays to Kilkee.’
Harris had gone off the house. But he had not abandoned the seaside resort. He spent a few weeks in Kilkee in the summer of 1970, staying in the Hydro Hotel. This was a few months before Harmay’s death, and before Bloomfield opened, so he was still in remarkably good spirits, despite his divorce. He threw himself into life in the small town, as he had in his teens.
‘The Tivoli Cup [for racquetball] was playing at that time,’ said Di Lucia. ‘Dickie was 40 then, and I was 30. He was here for that week. I said that we wanted a bit of an attraction for the tournament, and would he enter? “Ah Jesus,” he said, “I’d never be fit enough for that.” So we worked it that he wouldn’t meet anyone too strong at the beginning. It was manipulated so that he would meet me in the quarter finals.’
That was a clash that would draw out the crowds. Di Lucia was a very popular local man, involved in everything in the small town. Harris was Hollywood royalty – and a four-time previous winner of the racquetball competition.
‘We set it up as a personality type of game,’ recalls Di Lucia who, being a bit larger than life himself, decided he would upstage Harris.
There was a pony and trap down on the beach and I got on that with a big towel around me, and a helmet with horns, and I had my racquet up in the air. Here I was, driving across the beach like a warrior coming to battle. Harris was standing by the alleys waiting for me, and he was bursting his sides laughing. He said: ‘You would make a grand entrance and upstage me.’ I said it wasn’t often people managed to do it!
The grand entrance proved to be the best part of Di Lucia’s game. Harris was paired with Mary O’Connor, while Di Lucia’s partner was a Limerick woman, Ms Kennedy. The beach was thronged for the encounter, and the crowd got what they wanted. It was a very close game, with both sides going point for point and neither managing to dominate. But eventually Hollywood won out.
‘He beat me by one point,’ grinned Di Lucia. ‘He genuinely beat me. Even at that age he was very good. But then he was beaten in the next round, the semi-final.’
It was a great run for a man of 40, who had lived such a hard life.
Victory in the bag, Harris continued to delight the crowd. He had a few A-listers with him on the holiday, but decided to celebrate with the townspeople instead of retiring to his ivory tower.
When that game was over that day he took us all up to the Hydro. He took us all there, because all these film stars who were with him were there. He had us all on the lawn in front, and he ordered tea, coffees, cakes, biscuits, minerals for the kids, drinks for the adults. There must have been two or three hundred people there. It all went on his bill.
It was typical of Harris’s generosity, the sort of big gesture he enjoyed. Only a few years previously, he had done something similar for a crowd outside the town’s cinema. ‘He came back to Kilkee a few months after he made This Sporting Life, and the film was showing in the cinema here,’ said Di Lucia. ‘There was a big crowd going to it, because it came in the summertime. I was with Dickie, walking down the street, and he saw all the people standing outside the cinema. And he shouted: “I wouldn’t go and see that film, it’s rubbish, rubbish.”
‘But what did he do then? He went into the box office and he hired out the entire cinema. He said: “Go in now everybody. It’s all on me.”’
When there was a crowd, Harris loved to play it up. But on his own, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were constantly buffeting him down.
When Harris gave up on his Kilkee home, he asked his lifelong friend Di Lucia to look after the building, as a sort of live-in caretaker.
Dickie came over with a whole lot of people, like Lulu, Maurice Gibb and Honor Blackman. There were a load of other people whom I can’t remember. He came to my apartment. Myself and my wife had one kid at the time. And he just walked straight in, opened the door, and sat down and had a cup of tea. We were having breakfast at the time. He asked what we were doing there. I said I had bought a site outside Kilkee, up the hill, and I intended building a house on it. I was waiting for planning permission.
‘I’ll show you my house and you can move in there while you’re waiting,’ he said. ‘You look after my house, and when I come over you can look after me.’
Harris paid all the bills, and Di Lucia made sure the house was well maintained. Two years later, their arrangement changed.
‘Dickie just walked in as usual. We were sitting in the kitchen having lunch, with a fellow diver from the North. We had a load of crawfish and lobsters and crab on the table that we had caught that morning. We were having a feast. “Oh Jesus,” he said, “that’s fantastic.”’
Harris was not on his own that afternoon. Di Lucia invited him and his companion to draw up chairs and dig in.
I said ‘sit down there and grab yourself a plate’. He was with a very nice lady – he was separated from Elizabeth at this stage. He was with a woman called Barbara Lord. She was a dancer with Pan’s People in London. She since married Robert Powell, the actor, and they have a couple of kids and are very happy.
What Harris said that afternoon changed Di Lucia’s life.
‘He turned around to me and he said I should open a restaurant.’
He suggested that Di Lucia should take over the bills for the house, and open his restaurant in the beautiful terraced property. For the next few years, that is exactly what Di Lucia did. Eventually, in 1975, Harris sold the house to an Englishman. Di Lucia moved his restaurant to the house he had been building and it remained a Kilkee institution for the next three decades.
Di Lucia is now an auctioneer, and he handled the subsequent sale of Harris’s Kilkee dream home. He remained close to the actor, teaching his kids how to swim and snorkel in the Pollock Holes in Kilkee. He also sponsored a trophy for an annual swimming race across the big bay, the swim he had done so often as a teenager. The race is still held every August.
Di Lucia said:
I had great times with him, and enjoyed his company. I loved when he came to Kilkee. With most film stars like that they would walk past you on the street. But if he knew you, he wouldn’t. Anybody, it didn’t matter who you were. He would stop and talk to you. That’s the kind of man he was. He had a lot of fans in Kilkee. But people never bothered him in Kilkee.
Near the end of his life, Harris made one final visit.
‘He wasn’t in great form because of the Hodgkin’s Disease. But he was never tetchy. He was over with his personal assistant, a Danish woman called Danke,’ said Di Lucia.
We were drinking down in Scott’s Bar. Then he beckoned us out and we jumped into his limousine. He said he wanted to show Danke his Kilkee. We drove around the seafront, and back to the Pollock Holes. We got out of the car there, and he looked out and said: ‘This is my favourite place in the world.’ And that is why I put up a statue to him back at the Pollock Holes.
The statue commemorating Dickie Harris in his native Limerick is an uninspired image of the actor in the robes of King Arthur. The statue in Kilkee captures the man in the fullness of his physical energy, stretching for the ball during the annual racquets tournament. To unveil it, they managed to get an actor who has inherited Harris’s hellraising mantle, his friend and fellow troublemaker Russell Crowe.
Dickie would have appreciated that.