In 1987, Richard Harris was 57 and his career was dead and nearly buried. This certainly was the view among those "money people" in Hollywood who probably suspected that Harris himself had long since died from alcohol abuse or was, at least, too much of a drunk to be employable. His last movie Martin's Day, in 1985, hadn't even made it onto video and here in Ireland he was reduced to advertising duty-free booze for Shannon Airport.
It was at this point – October 10th, 1987, to be precise – I set on tape the first of 30 hours of interviews Harris and I recorded over the next 14 years and that now form the basis for my RTÉ Radio 1 documentary, Richard Harris Revisited: The Joe Jackson Tapes.
But you’d be hard pressed to predict from the opening section of the first programme that two years later Richard would make me his official biographer. Or that in 2003 his family would ask me to speak at the Richard Harris memorial in London’s Strand Theatre on behalf of all journalists. On the contrary, at first Harris and I almost came to fisticuffs. Either way, and for reasons I’ll explain later, that was fine by me.
And it was hardly surprising given that even before the interview proper began, I kicked off proceedings with the following comment. “You once said ‘truth can be dull’, but I would prefer, today, if we could try make murky truth gleam a little rather than go for even colourful lies!”
How did Harris respond? He told me I sounded “pretentious” and then added, “But you go ahead, you direct this little ‘movie’.” So, I did. I then read the first of my pre-set questions.
“So would it be fair to say that during some interviews, as with Jonathan Ross recently, you use anecdotes as a ploy against self-revelation and often speak more for effect than in truth?”
“You cut the cloth according to the suit. Interviewers like Jonathan Ross don’t want anything in depth. But I have no particular fear of discussing my private life. Yet I don’t believe what you seem to be hinting: that because one makes one’s living from the public that they then are entitled to devour your private life. They are entitled to a good performance.”
Conflict
This was fun. But why was it fine by me that during the following 15 minutes we almost came to fisticuffs? Put bluntly, Harris got it right. I was pretentious. At least in the sense that I happened to be relatively new to journalism, rooted in the world of creative writing – at the time I was Ireland’s first writer in residence at a vocational school — and had structured the interview as if it was a play, complete with conflict at the start.
It doesn’t get more pretentious than that, right? Wrong, it does, and I did. I took from Bertolt Brecht’s “Alienation Technique” my cue for that opening question and aligned myself with “the fugitive kind”, as thus described by Tennessee Williams: “Those who continue to ask the questions that haunt the hearts of people rather than accept proscribed answers that aren’t answers at all.” That’s why I had to smile when Richard snapped at me at one point: “There are no answers! There are no answers! I hope this all goes down in print. Listen you’re a funny guy! You come in here with all your questions neatly typed out, [and you are] thinking, ‘Harris has the answers!’ Yet you’re getting, not the interview you expected, but an interview that is interesting, I think, so don’t despair! And if you do despair, go to therapy!”
However, before the interview ended, I discovered that Richard was as inclined to ask probing questions of himself as I was.
Sometimes, while attempting to answer a question I asked Harris reached so deeply inside himself that he touched upon timeless, universal truths. For example, in 1990 I interviewed him for The Irish Times to coincide with the world premiere of his comeback movie The Field and asked him to describe "as truthfully as possible, Harris at the age of 60". His reply now strikes me as capturing so accurately the kind of existential angst that tormented many of us during the post-Celtic Tiger era in Ireland.
‘Turbulent journey’
“It’s been a turbulent journey and I would hate to come to the end of my journey in life and not recognise the possibility, the very real possibility that what we are searching for is to have a sight, a feeling of God. Isn’t there something we all missed? Why are we miscalculating the entire thing? Greed? Ego? Narcissism? I’ve been through it all. I’ve had huge success, huge failures, and the truth is that neither of them were important. The important thing is how we free ourselves of the bondage of impedimenta: reviews, success, and money in the bank. For the rest of my life, I want to be at peace with myself. I’ve come to terms with God, ambition, success and failure and failure is as important as success. They are both nothing.”
This is the Richard Harris whose life, and soul, I set out to explore in my radio show.
Richard Harris Revisited: The Joe Jackson Tapes will be broadcast tonight and tomorrow night from 10pm to 11pm on RTÉ Radio 1.