An Irishman’s Diary on ‘Richard Harris Revisited – A Play in the Making’

‘To me, you are the keeper of the flame when it comes to my father’s memory.” So, Richard Harris’s son, Jared, said to me during the wrap party for last year’s Richard Harris International Film Festival in Limerick. It moved me deeply.

I felt truly honoured that he would see me as such. Jared also kindly asked me to help develop a theatrical dimension for the film festival, if only to remind people that his father also was a stage actor.

Both those comments led to me adapting my 2014 RTÉ Radio 1 programme, Richard Harris Revisited: The Joe Jackson Tapes, into a one-man show, Richard Harris Revisited – A Play in the Making. It gets its first public reading – complete with previously unheard Harris audio clips and a previously unseen video I made with Richard in 2001 – at this year's festival. Jared will attend along with his brothers, Damian and Jamie, and their mother, Elizabeth.

Am I terrified? You bet – but not simply because they will be present or because I have never given a public reading.

Daunting

Even more daunting is the fact that Jared read an early draft of this work and said, “The parts that hit me hardest were the parts about your own dad and the role my dad and his music and poetry played in your lives.”

This secondary narrative, which surfaces briefly only three times during the show, also will be the hardest part for me to present in public because the tale has never been told and is at times traumatic and almost unendurably dark.

Not always, I hasten to add. One day in 1972 while I was listening for the first time to Harris's latest LP, My Boy, my father, Joe Jackson senior, walked into the room, smiled upon hearing Harris – we'd both loved his music since we heard Macarthurs Park in 1968 – then asked, "What did he just say there?" I replied, "It's a song called, Like Father, Like Son," then I read from LP sleeve these lines, "I could never count how many times in any day/You and I would turn and look and know what each would say." Dad smiled again and said, "It seems we have the same kind of relationship Harris has with his son."

Premonition

Sadly, three months later when I asked dad if he wanted to come see Harris in concert at the Gaiety Theatre, he said bluntly, “No, go f*** yourself.” Then, eerily, during the show, when Richard read a poem he’d written, called

On the One-Day Dead Face of My Father

, I had a premonition of dad’s death. When Harris then sang

Father and Son

, I cried.

How could I have known that my father’s death, in a sense, would begin within months when he had what I described in my diary as “that bastard treatment called ECT”? I soon learned that sometimes we have to embrace even the monster in a loved one.

One night after interrogating me for hours, about what I "meant exactly" when I told him I loved him, dad said, "If I had to look back over my life and see you as its end product, I'd have to say my life was a waste of time." In my soul, I seemed to hear a child scream. I punched my fist through a picture frame. Dad smiled. After I went to bed, I wrote a poem called, Cries from Broken Children. The latter is a line from Harris's song All the Broken Children.

Six years later, my premonition came true. I found my father dead, from a fall at home. He was 50. Four years later, I wrote a movie treatment titled Father and Son, included that poem, and left it at the Savoy Hotel in London, for the attention of Harris. In 1987 halfway through our first interview, which almost came to fisticuffs, I asked if he remembered it. He said, "God, I do, was that you. It was done a lot to My Boy, wasn't it?" When I told him dad had died from drink and drugs, he said, "Oh I see your thing about it then." Meaning Harris understood why I had torn into him about his own potentially lethal use of alcohol.

Dark soul

At the end of that interview, I told Richard I intended in my article to set up first his public image as a boozy hellraiser, then subvert that by focusing more on the dark soul I encountered in his poetry. Harris loved the idea. He asked me to write, using the same approach, a skeletal script for a one-man show, which never came to fruition. I used it to structur

e Richard Harris Revisited – A Play in the Making

. That would make him smile.

Richard Harris Revisited – A Play in the Making will be staged at the Belltable Arts Centre, October 29th, at 4.30pm (limetreetheatre.ie)