The dark double life of Rolf Harris

FOR six decades he played the lovable larrikin but in private he was anything but funny. How did he get away with it for so long?

140712 TWAM Media surround Rolf Harris as he gets into his car after leaving Southwark crown court with his wife Alwen and daughter Bindi after being found guilty on all twelve sexual misconduct charges. Pic: Richard Pohle/The Times Picture: Captioned As

NINE years ago Andrew ­Denton, star of the ABC’s Enough Rope, flew to Britain to interview Rolf Harris, who had just turned 75 and was entering his sixth decade in show business.

Many have cringed over the years at Harris’s wide-eyed Aussie vaudevillian routines — the Jake-The-Peg clowning, the didgeridoo-blowing, the Dulux landscapes — but Denton was a fan. He saw a touch of genius in the way Harris had synthesised folk-song, painting, panto and television into his own populist art form, and was captivated by Rolf On Art, a BBC series in which the silver-haired trouper knocked out canvases in the style of the old masters while discoursing on their work. Yet events this day would take a strange turn not long after Harris arrived for the taping at a convention centre near his Berkshire home.

The interview started well enough, with Harris obligingly recounting stories he’d told a thousand times before: how he rewrote an old calypso song to create Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport; how he accidentally invented his famous wobble-board while shaking a hardboard oil painting. But a question on the death of his mother suddenly reduced him to gulping sobs, and his crying continued at other moments with an intensity that left some in the room wondering whether they were witnessing emotion or histrionics. It was as if Harris were expiating some deep self-loathing, albeit in the manner of a performance.

When the interview ended his surface geniality returned just as quickly, a transformation Denton later compared to a door being shut. Then, after shaking Denton’s hand, Harris turned to the executive producer, Anita Jacoby, and said: “I need a hug.”

“I’d never met the man before, so I was a little surprised,” recalls Jacoby, who is now the managing director of ITV Studios Australia. “Then he grabbed my arms and pulled our bodies close together until he was rubbing against me crotch-to-crotch. I instantly recoiled and said, ‘That’s not a hug — that’s a grope!’ ” Harris, she recalls, responded with the mute sheepishness of a boy being admonished and wouldn’t look at her again. Walking away, Jacoby recalls being shocked by that assaultive hug and perplexed by Harris’s strangely mutable and disconnected manner. Nothing the Enough Rope research team had uncovered suggested that

Australia’s most enduring children’s entertainer was a sexual groper with a dark side.

Even today — after Harris has been convicted of multiple sex crimes; after seven women testified that he sexually assaulted them during their childhood or mid-teens — a lot of people struggle to reconcile the Harris they knew with the sad, predatory figure who emerged in evidence before Southwark Crown Court. “You say to yourself: when, and how, and why?” says Stewart White, who handled ­Harris’s public relations in Australia for many years. “It’s not like I can string anything together and say that it makes sense, because it doesn’t. There was never any occasion where that presented itself.”

Yet some did glimpse the other side of Harris, and sound rueful today that they didn’t foresee where it might lead. “This is entrenched behaviour that’s been going on for 50 years,” says a former friend who worked and travelled with Harris early in his career. “The dark side scared me years ago. Not interfering with kids, I never saw that. But he has no boundaries at all. It’s narcissism, a total sense of entitlement, and the more famous he became, the greater the risk. It’s really, really sad that he allowed his demons to take over.”

Show business is all about illusion, and Rolf ­Harris spent a lifetime honing his image as the ­big-hearted dag of Australian variety. In his 2001 autobiography Can You Tell What It Is Yet? he portrays his younger self as a quintessential Australian naïf, a boy from the outskirts of Perth who sailed to London in 1952 and stumbled into children’s television via a gift for painting and song. Even as a bona fide celebrity in Swinging London — recording with the Beatles, hosting a hit BBC variety show, earning an MBE — he insists he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, hated parties and was a happily married father-to-be by 1963. Touring Britain that year on a rock’n’roll package tour to promote his hit song Sun Arise, he claims the rampant backstage sex left him petrified: “There were semi-clad young women in dressing rooms, shower stalls, wardrobes and on tables. I tried not to watch — or be seen watching — but it wasn’t easy.”

Not everyone remembers the ’60s Rolf that way, however. One of his friends and advisers in those years was an expatriate Australian who recalls accompanying him to a university gig in Scotland which ended at a student house party where Harris suddenly “pinned a girl to the wall”. It was the first of many ­sexual assaults this former friend says he witnessed, and for which he admonished both Harris and his management. “His attitude was that it was all a bit of innocent fun,” he recalls. “But I saw the horrified looks on those women’s faces over his shoulder, and I warned him then that it would come back and bite him on the bum. And here we are 50 years later.”

Harris was already notorious among the more ­junior women in British television by the end of the 1960s, when Two Little Boys topped the pop charts and The Rolf Harris Show won him a gong as BBC TV Personality of the Year. “He was a well-known groper,” says Veyatie MacLeod, a former BBC make-up artist who recalls being assaulted by him. “I remember one time at the BBC a number of us girls went to his dressing-room to look at his paintings and he was very genial and jovial. But there were two sides to his personality. Unfortunately, quite a few men in those days regarded the BBC make-up girls as fair game.” MacLeod encountered Harris again after moving to Australia in the 1970s, but even as head of make-up at Channel 7 in Sydney she felt her best recourse was to insist on not being left alone with him. “That’s how it played out in the ’60s and ’70s; you had no right to complain and there were no sexual harassment laws,” she says. “Stars were untouchable in those days and none of us thought anyone would take our complaints seriously.”

Harris rose to fame in an era when the old-school Carry On smut of his generation collided with the sexual libertarianism of the counter­culture; for a while he nurtured a dream of ­making a sex comedy based on the work of ­Leslie Thomas, author of The Virgin Soldiers. It was a time when a woman subjected to unwanted sexual advances rarely thought about turning to the police. At Harris’s trial one woman recalled that in 1970, when she was 18 and working at a bar on the island of Malta, he took her into a side room on the pretext of showing her some paintings, then pinned her to the wall, put his hand down her pants and tried to kiss her before suddenly apologising. “It was so quick, I didn’t think about going to the police,” she said in ­evidence. “How do you prove something like that has happened?” Afterwards, she recalled, he suggested they pose for a photograph together.

Through to the 1980s and beyond, Harris was a relentless globe-trotter whose wife Alwen and daughter Bindi lived in London while he pursued a punishing schedule of concerts, club shows, television engagements and charitable appearances. He hosted his own TV variety shows in Canada and Australia, made outback documentaries, published books, appeared in films and recorded with symphony orchestras. He popped up in British Paints commercials, radio plays, hospital telethons in Vancouver, ­cultural expos in Tokyo, Schools Spectaculars in Sydney and at Carnegie Hall in New York. His almost unbroken run of BBC shows made him Britain’s favourite Australian, performing before the Queen at the Royal Variety Performances and watched by nine million UK schoolchildren every afternoon on Cartoon Time. Christmas would find him on the pantomime circuit, performing two shows a day, six days a week as Buttons in Cinderella.

Behind the happy-go-lucky façade was a driven, intensely competitive entertainer whose insecurities alienated some colleagues. The actor Tony Porter, who worked on the short-lived ABC show Rolf! in the mid-1980s, recalls that Harris took him to task for being rather too good at making the audience laugh between takes. “He said, ‘Mate, I’ll do the funny stuff, OK?’ ” recalls Porter, who testified during the trial that he saw Harris molest a make-up artist on the show. “That’s when I realised Rolf wasn’t simply aloof or shy, that there was this totally self-­absorbed and self-interested side to him. To put it bluntly, he was an arsehole — and that’s the very word other friends and contacts have used since to describe their experiences with him.” In his autobiography, Harris confessed to being a workaholic whose hunger for applause and reaffirmation made him a neglectful father and husband. What he didn’t confess was the darker truth.

Seven of the women who testified against Harris told of similar events at different times and locations: of meeting him as teenagers or children, of their shock when he groped, kissed or fondled them, and their confusion when he quickly reverted to his avuncular self. One woman recalled an event in Portsmouth in 1968 when she was seven years old and approached Harris for an autograph after his performance at a community centre. “Out of nowhere his hand came down my back and between my legs,” she said, adding that he continued cheerfully signing autographs as she walked away. Another recalled an incident the following year when she was 11 or 12 and staying in Darwin with a ­family who knew Harris; after coming down the stairs from her bedroom she found him polishing wood with linseed oil, whereupon he asked her how old she was, grabbed her and forced a tongue-kiss on her, then returned to his polishing with the words: “Look at what I’m doing.”

An Australian woman, Tonya Lee, met Harris in a London pub in 1986 when she was a 15-year-old touring Britain in a youth theatre group. After inviting her to sit on his knee, he slid his hand under her dress and began rubbing himself against her. Later, he gave her a hug and watched the group’s final performance.

Amid these transgressions Harris had embarked on an escapade that would wreak havoc not just on his victim but his own family — he had started to have sexual contact with the close teenage friend of his daughter, Bindi. That friend, J, said she was 13 years old and accompanying the Harris family on a trip to Hawaii, Canada and Australia when it began. This was a vacation only a workaholic could have planned: Harris was lining-up engagements in Canada and had a run of club dates in Australia, a cameo in a kids’ film and a raft of appearances in Perth for the sesquicentenary of his home state in 1979. According to J, during the Hawaii stop­over Harris approached her after she emerged from the shower in their hotel room, enveloped her in a bear-hug and began fondling her. “I was shocked and panicked by it. I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled in court. “I sat on the end of the bed in a state of shock, really … He pretended as if nothing happened and told me that he would see me downstairs.”

The sexual assaults continued, she said, in Perth when they stayed at the home of Harris’s elderly parents, and escalated in London over the next two to three years, leaving her confused and frightened. When she was in her mid-teens he engaged in ­wordless oral sex with her when she visited for sleepovers with Bindi at the entertainer’s recently bought house in Bray. By then it was the early 1980s and Harris had hit upon an idea that could be seen in retrospect as either monumental self-delusion or a sign of deep, self-lacerating guilt. He became a global campaigner against the evils of paedophilia.

In August 1986, Harris flew to Australia to open the world’s largest conference on child abuse at the Sydney Opera House. More than 1600 experts had gathered for the Sixth Inter­national Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect, and Harris had been hired as master of ceremonies for the opening event in the Concert Hall, appearing alongside the teenage girls of the Ravenswood School choir. But the 56-year-old was not merely there for his star power — he had recently made his own film about the dangers of paedophilia, and it was showing as part of the three-day conference.

That film, Kids Can Say No!, was a production of Rolf Harris Video, a company Harris had established five years earlier to make educational films for children. Kids Can Say No! was its ­second film and in Harris’s telling it had been a three-year struggle to overcome the resistance of colleagues who didn’t believe children should be taught about the dangers of molestation. His motivation, he told one newspaper, had come in part from talking to a social worker in ­Canada and in part from watching a Swedish film about a “great big bear of a man” who befriends two children on a farm. Harris recalled watching that film and feeling certain the children were going to be abused, only to realise that he was jumping to con­clusions. “The film was ­completely innocent; I was not,” he said, in an oddly self-illuminating comment.

So it was that the host of Cartoon Time enlisted the help of the Tavistock Clinic and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to make his film in the London summer of 1985. In it, Harris galumphed around on Hampstead Heath with four kids aged seven and eight, instructing them how to avoid predatory adults. “You mustn’t be ashamed to tell people that you were touched where you don’t want to be touched,” he said to camera, delivering his lines as if to an imaginary child. “Some people don’t act right with kids, and they need help.” The film ends with Harris leading a roomful of schoolchildren in a singalong about the dangers of child abuse, with vocal accompaniment from two uniformed London bobbies.

Kids Can Say No! was released in Britain in October 1985 to media acclaim. The following year a leading social worker, Carolyn Okell Jones, flew to Sydney to present the film at the child abuse congress, where Harris told the illustrious Concert Hall crowd that paedophilia was finally “coming out from under its veil of secrecy”. Talking to children about the issue was a natural role for him, he said in one interview, because “my track record has made me a believable person. I have never betrayed the kids’ trust.”

Three months earlier, Harris had molested Tonya Lee in London. And only two weeks after the Opera House appearance he was at the ­Sydney studios of Channel 7 for the annual 24-hour Royal Children’s Hospital telethon. A former Channel 7 make-up artist would later tell Harris’s trial that he sexually assaulted her more than 20 times over the course of a long day at the station that year. Harris later dismissed her ­evidence as ludicrous, while his older brother Bruce, who has managed his career since 1981, said he had no recollection of Harris attending a telethon or charity event in Sydney in 1986.

Although Harris made one more film about child abuse — a teaching-aid called Beyond The Scare — his passionate campaign against paedophilia faded quickly. Many of the activists involved are reluctant to discuss it, but one of those organisations, the NSPCC, would see events come full circle nearly three decades later when it set in motion the events that led to Harris’s unmasking.

In October 2012, Britain was rocked by a ­television documentary which revealed that Jimmy Savile, a beloved children’s entertainer who had recently died, was a prolific sexual abuser of children who gained access to his victims through decades of charitable work in schools, youth homes and hospitals. Police assigned to investigate were soon widening their inquiry to look at other entertainment figures and within weeks they had a tip from the NSPCC: a 47-year-old woman had told her counsellor she was sexually abused by ­Harris in her teens.

That woman was J, Bindi Harris’s old but now estranged friend, who had been struggling to piece her life back together after starting treatment for alcoholism in the late 1990s. Her sexual encounters with Harris — a series of ­joyless trysts at his house, at Bindi’s house, in his car or backstage — had finally ended in 1994, when she was 29. Over the ensuing two years she had finally divulged it to her brother, to Bindi and to her parents, triggering massive upheaval in both families. Bindi had been so shocked she became suicidal and confronted her father in a heated row. J had summoned Harris to her home, where she struck him and told him he had ruined her life. J’s father had written to the entertainer saying he was so ­disgusted he never wanted to see him again.

Harris’s handwritten reply, in March 1997, was an outpouring of guilt wrapped in self-­justification. While admitting he was “sickened” by his behaviour and the emotional damage he had wrought, he insisted he didn’t have sex with J until she was 18. “I fondly imagined that everything that had taken place had progressed from a feeling of love and friendship — there was no rape, no physical forcing, brutality or beating that took place …” he wrote.

Not a ripple from this calamity would break the surface of Harris’s career as it blossomed through the 1990s and into the new millennium. Animal Hospital, the show that revived his BBC profile in 1994, ran for a decade. His satirical take on Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven became a hit and made him an unlikely star at several Glastonbury rock festivals. In interviews and in his autobiography he alluded to his failings as a self-absorbed parent but skated over the true grisly details; his tears on Enough Rope elicited an outpouring of sympathy. He was awarded a Centenary Medal, an Order of Australia and a CBE, and in 2006 the success of Rolf On Art culminated in a coup when the Queen agreed to sit for a portrait.

Harris was 82, silver-haired and worth $20 million when he appeared at the Queen’s ­Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham ­Palace in mid-2012, leading the crowd in an a cappella rendition of Two Little Boys. That ­lachrymose song was the final straw for J, who was watching it at home. “I thought, ‘Can’t I get away from this bloody man’, and I just burst out crying,” she said in court. “He had been on the telly quite a lot, invading my home … That’s when I decided I wasn’t going to have any more of it.”

Disbelief greeted the first leaked reports that police were interviewing Harris. “I can assure you, as his pal, he has no interest in children,” avowed music producer Steve Lima. During the pre-trial hearings Harris himself would whistle as he walked the corridors of Southwark’s unprepossessing 1970s court building, dressed in a sharp suit, accompanied by his bevy of lawyers and public-relations assistants. But the feigned insouciance was a foretaste of his incongruous behaviour to come, for by then he must have known that 10 women were ­prepared to testify he had sexually assaulted them between 1968 and 1991. Six of them were witnesses; four of them, including J and Tonya Lee, had been assaulted in ­Britain, leading to Harris’s conviction on 12 charges.

Rolf the performer misjudged the mood of the court, where the air was filled with talk of his slobbering kisses and grunting assaults on young girls. Sitting inside the glassed-in dock at the centre of the courtroom, he sketched the scene as if he were a mere observer at his own trial, earning more than one rebuke from the judge. After prosecutor Sasha Wass catalogued his ­furtive assaults on women and girls in an excruciating day-long opening address, he stepped down from the dock, hugged his wife and said audibly: “Now, that wasn’t too bad.” Called to the witness box, he insisted on ­standing as he gave a jocular imitation of the wobble-board and a jaunty rendition of Jake The Peg which jarred with J’s ­earlier account of their wordless sex backstage at a ­Cinderella pantomime.

The ritual of his morning arrival — stepping from a chauffeur-driven silver Audi to walk the media gauntlet flanked by his elderly wife, his 50-year-old daughter and his niece Jenny — seemed emptier after he admitted it was a show of support, and after Bindi acknowledged she climbed into the car 200 metres around the ­corner. And his attempt to paint his relationship with J as an affair of consenting adults was undercut by his own strangely self-incriminating admissions: that he had been sexually attracted to her when she was 13; that he was adept at hiding his dark side; and that he had barely exchanged a word with her during all their years of “love and friendship”. Even Bindi, who held his arm and smiled for the cameras every morning, depicted him as distant and self-absorbed. “Dad didn’t take much notice of me, or anybody for that matter, at home,” she said.

In the end, none of the big-name celebrities Harris worked with over the decades was prepared to speak on his behalf, and his defence against the 10 women who accused him came down to six words: “They are all making it up.” Not even a show-business veteran, it turned out, could make that line convincing.

The disbelief that preceded Harris’s case ­echoes now in the mystified tone of former ­colleagues who are still absorbing the idea that he kept hidden a deeply divided psyche. “Nobody I know who worked with Rolf would have had absolutely any idea,” says one woman who worked with Harris for years on children’s productions. Another former colleague says: “I can’t say I ever saw any behaviour that led me to nod knowingly when these accusations were made public.”

Some look at Harris’s savant-like gifts — those big paintings splashed on canvas with a house-painter’s brush, like visual riddles — and wonder whether some Aspergerish quality in him was distorted by fame and adulation. In his trial he emerged as a man aloof even from his own family, so uncomfortable in his own skin that he wore pyjamas when he swam and avoided sexual intercourse in favour of furtive, fleeting encounters. “This is a completely ­amateur diagnosis, but there is something ‘on the spectrum’ about Rolf,” says one TV industry veteran. “Clearly, he is very bad at close relation­ships; he’s got serious drives that he doesn’t know how to ­control.”

There are others who question whether the entertainment industry was entirely oblivious to his proclivities, given other recent scandals. In May, the Australian actor ­Robert Hughes was jailed for sexually assaulting children in the 1980s, ­following allegations that production staff on his show Hey Dad! had ­covered up some of his offences. UK authorities now believe Jimmy Savile abused more than 500 children, making him potentially the worst paedophile in the country’s history, while the British celebrity agent Max Clifford was sentenced to eight years’ jail in May for sexually assaulting teenage girls in the 1970s and 1980s.

“The bigger you are in any business, the more protected you are by the very fact that you’re critical to the success of that enterprise,” says Tony Porter. “In the entertainment business that’s even more obvious, because if the star of a show is fired or walks, everyone is out of a job. People instinctively know when it’s best to look the other way.”

One of the most scathing assessments of ­Harris comes from the former friend who witnessed his sexual misconduct in the 1960s. “I’ve been horrified, but not surprised,” he says. “Publicly he’s this cuddly children’s entertainer, but any notion that he is a charitable and altruistic person is unmitigated bullshit. What you’ve got is a man with a fractured mind, a man with more than one personality. He knew exactly what he was doing for his own pleasure.”

During the long days of his five-week trial, Harris often appeared hemmed in by the glass enclosure of the dock. At one pre-trial hearing he paced back and forth as if in a cage, and when the jury was absent he would sometimes step down to sit in the middle of the courtroom, alone but unrestricted. Among his many foibles it appears Harris is uncomfortable in confined spaces, an unfortunate affliction for an 84-year-old facing a punishing stretch in prison.