Son of Theater Seeks Roots Elsewhere

The first play Carey Harrison remembers seeing was one his father, Rex, starred in on Broadway: “Anne of a Thousand Days.”

The younger Harrison, a visiting professor at UC San Diego, said he was just a child when he saw that play and was not as impressed with it as were critics and paying audiences.

“I had to be taken out of the theater screaming because he slapped a woman on stage,” Harrison recalled. “I didn’t understand that it wasn’t real.”

That Harrison became a playwright himself may be the result of a later, happier experience, that of seeing his father create the classic Professor Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady.”

“He was unforgettable in ‘My Fair Lady.’ I think it had quite an impact in my life, seeing such a wonderful coincidence where a particular actor finds a particular role at the right time in his life, where he is able to work to the height of his powers. Every artist longs for that to happen.

“I have a very clear memory of standing in the wings when I was 13 on Broadway. I had to keep very quiet. When the play was over and the curtain came down, my father and Julie Andrews (his co-star) would walk off the stage arm in arm. There was a feeling of creative collaboration that is thrilling in theater. It was nice, it was happy. And it wasn’t for the audience.

“Maybe I was healing from that earlier experience.”

It is that feeling of creative collaboration that Carey Harrison said he tries to pass on to his students in dramatic writing at UCSD, where he is teaching courses this spring and fall.

“The most important thing to teach them is to find their own voice, and that may take them 20 years.”

Harrison, 44, is the only son of Rex Harrison, 80, and the late Lilli Palmer, who died two years ago at the age of 72. The younger Harrison had his first play produced at 22, and has gone on to produce 90 TV and radio plays and two PBS series, “Freud” and “Nanny.”

But Harrison, whose eyes bear a slight resemblance to his father’s, said his growing up in a theatrical world proved more of a detour for him than a career road map. It has been only five years since he began writing novels, the work he feels he was born to do. In fact, he took the job teaching at UCSD to help pay the bills as he makes the transition from script to novel.

He is now writing “To Liskeard,” a quartet of novels whose idea he conceived 20 years ago. Liskeard, a small town in Cornwall in the west of Britain, is the focus of the books, which deal with spiritual journeys and which Harrison describes as a cross between “The Canterbury Tales” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

The first novel in the quartet is finished and due out next year. None of the four, at least on the surface, will deal with the world of beautiful people in which Harrison grew up--a world of English boarding schools punctuated by holidays at his parents’ Italian villa in Portofino.

“My life was really ordinary,” he insisted. “I remember my father taking me fishing in Italy and taking me to football matches. I liked that. I remember my mother having books of paintings, and spending a lot of my childhood among those books.”

Harrison describes with far less excitement the time Greta Garbo wanted to “dandle” him on her knee; he would have preferred to play Ping-Pong. Or the time Noel Coward wanted to play Ping-Pong and Harrison groaned because he wanted to read a book.

“We always use a bit of real life in our work,” Harrison said. “But by and large, I’m happiest when I can’t see the relationship between me and the story I’m telling. I don’t think that actors are very interesting fictional material. I think, if my dad had been a druggist, I’d be writing about druggists all the time. But there’s no content to an actor’s life.

“I’ve been told that I should write about my memories of the rich and famous. I like the memories because they’re mine and they provide some jolly good dinner conversation. But, for me, it would be a terrible waste of time because I’m trying to do something else, which is produce literature.”

Harrison, who is divorced and has three children, delves into his past with puzzlement, curious that his family continues to be of lingering interest in America. He bypasses such seemingly critical junctures as his parents’ divorce (“Did it happen when I was 11? Or 12?”) and instead focuses on the two actors as examples of excellence.

“As actors, I (have enjoyed) watching them work. My father above all is never cliched, so even as well as I know him, he surprises me every time. That’s his greatest gift. I think he’s marvelous. I think I must have learned something from that, the need to be new each time.”

Part of the reason Harrison offers for his emotional distance from his parents’ lives is that he was brought up in boarding schools, which he described as his “real home.”

“I remade a family for myself out of my friends and my contemporaries. My life has just been more horizontal than vertical. I haven’t looked up so much as sideways.”

It’s a life that has resulted in what he called an “absence of roots.”

“It’s because of that absence that I’ve been drawn terribly toward roots. Although they (my parents) gave me a home, gave me Britain, they are shallow roots; I’m always trying to push them deeper. That’s what my novels are about. They’re about people going on pilgrimages, but they don’t know to where.

“I’m proud of my father, . . . and I like it when people ask about him because people would take more of an interest in me socially. Professionally, no one will hire you because of your name. But they will look twice at you.”

Harrison said that, between quarters at UCSD, he will fly to Wales, where his father is in rehearsal for J. M. Barrie’s “The Admirable Crichton,” and then follow him to London for the play’s August opening.

“It’s a lovely play, and he’s wonderful in it. It’s marvelous to have a career that’s still going strong at 80. I hope I will have the energy.”