At a party to ring in the New Year of 1961, Elizabeth Harris, the wife of actor Richard Harris, was introduced to film star, Marlon Brando, “an attractive, sensual man with eyes that seemed to look right into you” as she would later describe him . “Are you faithful to Richard?” Brando asked her.
Yes,” she replied.
“You can’t be,” Brando said. “You answered too quickly.”
Taken aback by the actor’s “instant intimacy”, Elizabeth cut him short. “It is a question that doesn’t require reflection,” she said.
By then Elizabeth Harris had been married to the Irish actor for three turbulent years.
But Brando, who was starring in Mutiny on the Bounty with Harris at the time, had an intuitive mind, and Elizabeth would later admit that her marriage was already going “rapidly downhill”.
Later this year, to mark the 20th anniversary of his death in 2002 at the age of 72, Sky will broadcast a new documentary, The Ghost of Richard Harris, directed by Adrian Sibley, and featuring Damian, Jared and Jamie, who will describe what it was like to be the sons of the volatile, rambunctious, talented Mr Harris.
“The idea is to try to understand who Richard Harris really is,” the director says.
If anyone did it was his first wife and the mother of those three sons, Elizabeth, who died recently. Such was the enormous interest in their marriage that, over four weeks in 1976, the Sunday Independent gave readers every tempestuous detail from Elizabeth’s new book, Love, Honour and Dismay.
Under the banner headline “My life and love with Richard Harris”, it revealed how they met, the difference in their social status at the time and how he had only £25 in his pocket after a glittering wedding in the Palace of Westminster.
“Richard never doubted his own wisdom. He never lacked the courage to follow through his chosen course, no matter how daunting the odds,” she wrote. In the first flush of love, she didn’t realise how “utterly different our worlds were”.
Richard Harris was the Catholic son of a Limerick flour merchant, while Elizabeth Rees-Williams, an aspiring actress, was the daughter of Baron Ogmore, a member of the House of Lords and his wife, Constance.
They met when she auditioned for a play Harris was directing and financing. He was still a student at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but was “anxious to get moving and try out some of my own ideas”.
He was barefoot and surprised her with his “quiet Irish brogue”.
“His eyes, red-rimmed and heavy from lack of sleep, were blue and artfully alert in his pale face. He reminded me strongly of someone: much later I realised that he looked just like Van Gogh’s Portrait of the Artist,” she recalled.
At the time she was leading a “double life”, presented to court in London as a debutante and doing the round of balls and house parties while trying to break into acting. He was living a “vagrant hand-to-mouth existence”, sometimes sleeping on park benches.
At their first seductive dinner in a friend’s bedsit, he persuaded the owners of the Troubadour to cook the meal, which he hid, hot, under the blankets in the bed, while he pretended to boil her an egg.
“It did occur to me later, on the way home, that his choice of hot plate was rather primitive — probably I concluded, it was an Irish tradition. Anyway, it made for such a lovely warm bed,” she recalled in her memoir.
She spent her “dress allowance” to acquire a rented flat for Harris. “We spent our days making love (my mother insisted I should be home by 10am, as long as I obeyed that rule, she never inquired about my days), playing Stan Kenton records, and reading,” she wrote. “He made me aware of writers like Joyce and Yeats, he taught me how to appreciate the humour of O’Casey. He read aloud from Dylan Thomas, whom he admired.”
Eventually she told him they couldn’t “go on like this” and needed a more permanent relationship.
“Get married you mean?” he replied. “Is that what you are saying?”
“He was very good about it,” she recalled. “He accepted me without my having to press the invitation.”
While her father was “commendably calm” when the mostly unemployed Irish actor asked for his daughter’s hand, her mother fled from the room “with a loud and pitiable wail” to her bedroom.
The couple were married in the Church of Notre Dame in Leicester Square on February 9, 1957, followed by a glittering reception for 300 guests in the House of Lords, Westminster. The bride wore a cream satin and lace Victorian heirloom wedding gown. Her parents’ friends, Lord and Lady Longford of Tullynally Castle, Co Westmeath, “appeared to be satisfied with the match”, the Earl even suggesting she might adopt her new husband’s Catholic faith.
“My daughter’s spiritual immortality concerns me rather less at the moment than the question of her daily bread,” countered her father, Lord Ogmore.
“My first Christmas at ‘Overdale’ (the Harris family’s Victorian home on the Ennis Road, Limerick) taught me a great deal about Richard, about the problem of being the middle son in a large family (of eight), about what made him the kind of man he was still to become,” Elizabeth wrote.
“I also learned about Dickie. Richard has never been allowed into Ireland; Dickie has never left it. His friends and family are very possessive about Dickie, Richard was a foreigner to them, a man they did not know or care about,” she said.
After roles in Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the young Irish actor was beginning to go places, although the couple’s finances remained “fragile” until Elizabeth inherited £100, which enabled them to rent a permanent flat.
She soon learned being married to an Irishman meant never being short of lodgers, specifically “other Irishmen”.
“I would never know on waking in the morning, who was in the house,” she wrote. “A bedraggled line of bleary-eyed strangers queuing up for the only bathroom every morning tended to make me very fed up.
“People loved to listen to Richard’s stories, his beguiling fictions and often unbelievable truths; there were so many arguments, so many tears, so many songs. And always the Irish talking about places and times and people I didn’t understand and didn’t know.”
By 1958, when she discovered she was pregnant with their first son, Damian, Richard was on the way to becoming a star and one of the most prolific actors of his generation.
He brought her to Los Angeles and New York, to Dublin to do Shake Hands with the Devil with James Cagney; to Hollywood to film The Wreck of the Mary Deare and back to Ireland for A Terrible Beauty with Robert Mitchum.
The night before going to the US, Richard and Peter O’Toole were invited by her father to the Welsh Ball at the Royal Festival Hall. Harris and O’Toole put on their own Irish “cabaret”, which was not appreciated and along with O’Toole’s girlfriend, Sian Phillips, they were thrown out.
“The fights which had long been a feature of our marriage were getting pretty rough,” she wrote. When Harris was performing in JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man in London, she “went home to mother”. By then she had two children, after their second son, Jared, was born in 1961. She began divorce proceedings, although her mother tried valiantly to save the marriage.
Despite their difficulties, Elizabeth joined Richard in Limerick after he learned that his mother, Mildred, was dying from cancer.
“I had grown to love her and was shocked to hear of her illness,” she wrote. “She did not know of our plans to divorce and I immediately agreed to go to Ireland in case she suspected something was wrong between us.”
After his mother’s death, Harris went to New York to do a play and cabled Elizabeth from there, suggesting a “honeymoon in Paris”, where he had booked a suite in the Ritz, with the champagne already on ice.
But when work took him back to Los Angeles she didn’t want to go and knew their marriage was over.
Besides, after a serious breakdown, she was having an affair with the actor Christopher Plummer. When Harris’s next film, Camelot, came out Elizabeth was asked to help organise the charity premiere in London. She did, and as a thank you was asked to dinner with the patron, princess Margaret.
She went with Plummer, who was asked to sit on princess Margaret’s left side. As the star of the film, Richard was asked to sit on the princess’s right-hand side.
As they sat down princess Margaret inquired: “Do you two know each other?”
After a brief silence, Harris replied: “We have something in common.”
Richard and Elizabeth Harris were divorced at 3.45 pm on July, 25, 1969, after 12 years of marriage.
Harris later told the writer Joe Jackson, who is completing a book based on their interviews, several of which appeared in the Sunday Independent, that they would have been divorced three years earlier, but he had insisted on joint custody of their children.
“’Thanks be to God you fought for it, because that’s what the children needed,” Elizabeth later conceded to Harris.
In 1971, Elizabeth married the actor Rex Harrison, who was described in her Daily Telegraph obituary as “a notoriously autocratic, pernickety man with a pronounced vein of cruelty”.
This was followed by an another unhappy marriage, to Peter Aitken, a son of Lord Beaverbrook, after which she married his cousin and her former lover, the Conservative MP and jailbird Jonathan Aitken.
Aitken announced his engagement to Elizabeth in December 2002, two months after Harris’s death. “I became very fond of Richard before he died,” he said. “He gave our romance a full and enthusiastic blessing.”
Such warmth on Harris’s part was no surprise. “You couldn’t get a stronger family unit than me and my divorced wife,” he had told Joe Jackson 15 years earlier.
“We aren’t married, we don’t live together, but by Christ we are a family. We stick together like a f***ing fortress.”
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