The Best Australian Essays 2014 (6 page)

Marriage and fatherhood came with other, built-in interdictions. In 1958 Alwen brought her pet poodle to the wedding as an honorary bridesmaid, and Rolf had difficulty dislodging it from the nuptial bed. His wife clearly needed its company and its morale-boosting devotion. Rolf much later discovered a diary she wrote in 1959 in Perth, where he was helping to set up the first local television station. Alwen, he found, felt so displaced and ignored, so nullified by the boredom of her castaway life, that she had contemplated suicide; at the time, he simply hadn't noticed. In 1964, hours after the induced birth of their daughter, he flew from London to New York to start a concert tour. When Alwen joined him shortly afterwards, bringing the baby, he failed to recognise her at the airport, and explained his distraction by pointing out that she had dyed her hair.

A subsequent episode in Rolf's autobiography, which he may now regret having made public, deals with transgressive impulses that the law warns us all to control. Bathing Bindi in their New York hotel, after having photographed Alwen as she breastfed the child, Rolf marvels at the ‘minute size of everything', and lets his eyes travel from Bindi's neck to her ‘delicate shoulders' and smooth tummy. Then he nears a border zone, trespasses across it, and backtracks: ‘I reached her genitals and skipped that part. My brain was saying, ‘Don't be ridiculous. Why are you so uptight about nudity?' I couldn't help it.' The taboo is artificial, but all the same necessary; those who defile innocence may do so because they envy it and want to share in it.

The Rolf Harris Show
featured a chorus line of girls in micro-miniskirts and hotpants, and was nicknamed The Twinkling Crotch Show. Backstage, the shy host says, he ‘tried not to watch – or be
seen
watching' the cavalcade of semi-clad young women. Throughout one season he flamboyantly flirted with ‘a tall, leggy brunette called Glor, short for Gloria', who finally chastened him when they were sitting with some colleagues in a hotel lounge. After listening to a bout of his amorous drollery, she reached across, ‘unzipped my fly, put her hand into my underpants, took a firm grip of my old fella and flipped it out for all to see'. What, she asked, did he intend to do about his supposed infatuation (which apparently hadn't extended to that flipped, floppy member)? Rolf turned ‘seven consecutive shades of red', just as he flushed scarlet when his mother slapped him; then, in an image that begs for psychoanalytical exegesis, he wished he could ‘dissolve into a grease spot and soak into the carpet'. Gloria suffered no further harassment.

A cartoon by Rolf represents grown-up sexual relations as a balance of terror, predicated on the threat of pain. In the drawing, an angry blitz of black scrawls surrounds a glaringly spotlit dental chair. A male dentist aims his drill at the gaping mouth of a prone female patient, whose teeth are as razorlike as a shark's; she defends herself by grabbing his crotch and squeezing what ought to be his testicles, though it looks as if she has fastened onto a bulbous penis. The rearing organ doesn't appear to be discouraged, but the drill is paused in midair, hesitating before it ventures into that vagina dentata. The caption to the drawing is ‘We're not going to hurt one another, are we?' Cuddles, hugs and tickles, like those to which Rolf initially treated his alleged victims, are – at least in theory – exempt from such nasty adult recriminations.

In the caricatures Rolf usually adds to his autograph, his face consists of a grinning mouth sandwiched between his goggles and his goatee. His smile is evangelical, as well as something of an artwork: he often warned sulky children who cried or frowned that they were ‘sculpting their faces for the future' and ruining their chances of looking benign in old age. Despite this amiability, his glasses and beard tell another story, because both, in Rolf's case, were disguises. Spectacles, as he commented when taking his own off to paint a self-portrait on television, reflect light and thereby deflect attention from the eyes of whoever you are painting; they interfere with your interrogation of another human being. As for whiskers, Rolf first experimented with them in 1949 when cast as a sailor in a musical at teacher's college in Perth. He grew them again on his way to England in 1952, protectively preparing a face with which to meet the new faces he would encounter there. His beard was a frame for his grin, and it also served, like a garden hedge, as a barricade to deter intruders. His wife preferred him with that cosy camouflage: when she first saw him clean-shaven, Alwen likened him to ‘an American car with all the chrome removed' – an extraordinary image, which implied that beneath the decorative trim there was only a noisy, revved-up engine and a motorised mouth that puffed out hot air through its grille.

*

Late in the 1980s, when Rolf's act began to seem antiquated, his cover version of Led Zeppelin's ‘Stairway to Heaven' updated him. ‘It was very square to say you liked Rolf Harris before that,' he complacently noted. ‘Suddenly it was very cool to say you liked Rolf Harris.' Musical performances at the Glastonbury Festival established him as a harmless, gormless figure of fun, immune to the irony of the ovations he was receiving from the muddy mobs of rock fans.

Rolf's original audience had grown up, so in 1994 he took on a more avuncular role and began a ten-year run on
Animal Hospital.
Like Christ, he had suffered the little children to come unto him in
Cartoon Time;
now, ministering to poorly quadrupeds, he turned into St Francis. In an episode featuring a euthanised Alsatian called Floss, audiences sniffled as a teary Rolf consoled the dog's sobbing master – ‘the first time,' he later announced, ‘that viewers in England had seen two adult males unashamedly crying on TV'. Once a festive, mischief-making imp, he had matured into a shrewd orchestrator of the nation's tenderest emotions. In 2001 he reverted to an earlier vocation, setting up his easel to pastiche Degas and Monet in the first series of
Rolf on Art,
a long-running show that encouraged and empowered amateur painters. As a result, the ageing Rolf joined the ranks of the Old Masters: in 2012 a Liverpool museum sold record numbers of tickets to a retrospective exhibition of his work. ‘Rembrandt, Rubens and Rolf, all in the Walker Art Gallery now,' said a fawning BBC reporter.

‘The world has learned from him,' Clive James declared at the end of the birthday poem he addressed to Rolf the moral mentor, ‘and I likewise.' Accepting his near-priestly status, the Church of England invited Rolf to write a preface to a booklet that explained the notion of bereavement to children: ‘G'day kids' was his salutation before he brought his little readers the bad news about mortality. His wife's brother suggests that Rolf may have undergone a conversion when he witnessed the healing feats of the Indian ‘godman' Sathya Sai Baba (who was himself accused of sexually abusing his young male acolytes, to whom he offered his penis as a token of blessing). Short of performing miracles, Rolf said that his purpose on earth was ‘to spread a little love and affection wherever I can' and ‘to talk to everyone and be accessible'. Accessibility, however, is a two-way street, and in several of the incidents described by the prosecution in its case against him a child's request for an autograph allegedly led almost immediately to molestation.

In 2005 his painting of the Queen conferred respectability on Rolf, but during the sessions he did his best to be unrespectable, as if still teasing his prim mother. Rolf's music is about his body's cheeky production of sound, and painting licenses him to make an almost scatological mess. Explaining his technique, he told the Queen that when he confronts a pristine canvas his first move is to ‘kill the white', dirtying it with a puddle of colour. ‘Extraordinary,' she remarked with her usual equanimity. To cover up his missteps, Rolf tends to splash turpentine around, so he asked the Queen if she disliked the smell. Unfamiliar with its resinous stink, she gave a wary reply: ‘Well, we'll tell, won't we, soon?' Later, flicking his brushes, he whispered to himself about the risk he was taking: ‘Imagine if I sloshed paint all over the Queen!' She remained unblemished, but Rolf's banter – about domestic pets relieving themselves on the carpet, and the stench of dissected horses in the studio of the eighteenth-century equine painter George Stubbs – flirted with impropriety.

By now Rolf had attained the rank of national treasure, but rumours circulated about his octopoid gropings, and detractors who resented his ineffable good humour teamed up to vilify him on a scurrilous internet forum. One anonymous poster claimed to have seen him twist a puppy's paw on camera to make it squeal, another imagined him shooting sparrows with an air rifle in his garden beside the Thames near Windsor. A conspiracy theorist, having read
The Da Vinci Code
too often, decoded ‘didgeridoos' as an anagram of ‘O did God rise' and took this as proof that Rolf belonged to the occult sect of the Knights Templar. The most demented of these fantasies sent him on tour to Cambodia, where – as an ‘unofficial roving ambassador of evil' – he allegedly played cricket with Pol Pot, using human skulls as balls.

Otherwise Rolf's audiences took him at face value; he alone dared to let the benign mask slip. He did so on one of his painting programs, while attempting a self-portrait in the style of van Gogh. After two hours of staring at his reflection in the mirror, he noted that his smile ‘starts to crack and eventually falls off with a crash!' In its absence, the man Rolf painted is an ogre, considerably more baleful than Baron Hardup, the curmudgeon he played in the Christmas pantomime
Cinderella.
Without glasses, his eyes stare hypnotically, and a brow arches in cold appraisal; his jowls, like a mastiff's, seem to reverberate with a low and menacing growl; his mouth turns down at the corners, sourly grimacing. Here, in bright acid green and bruised purple, is a glimpse of what the prosecutor at his trial referred to as his ‘dark side'. You can see why the women who testified against Rolf said they were ‘terrified' or ‘petrified' of him when, as adolescents, he had them in his grip.

*

In a letter written in 1997 to the father of one of his alleged victims, read out in court near the start of proceedings, Rolf quoted the naïve, intimidated teenager's description of him as ‘the great television star Rolf Harris'. At the time, he saw no reason to disagree with that estimation: he was irresistible because powerful, untouchable because universally popular. But the domestic screen has recently lost the authority it once conferred on its cherished performers. Media today are interactive, with online gossip challenging the impunity that figures like Rolf once enjoyed. A website that conducts a vendetta against child abusers named him as a suspect days before the police announced that he had been questioned, and the first witness at his trial decided to make her legal complaint after seeing him at the Queen's jubilee concert in 2012: it seemed, she said, that she could not ‘get away from this bloody man', who was invading her home every time she turned on the telly. She completed Rolf's humiliation by incidentally disclosing that his penis was ‘very small, very very small'. The prosecutor argued that fame was Rolf's shield, but it no longer has that protective function: in the tabloids and in courts of law, diminutive old fellas can be hauled out and used in evidence against their wincing owners.

Giving evidence, Rolf's accusers and the supplementary witnesses called by the prosecution literally de-famed him. Their accounts alleging hasty, fumbling assaults in Hawaii, Darwin, Auckland, Malta, Portsmouth and Cambridge combined into the sad tale of a primal lapse, a moment when paradise was irretrievably lost: ‘All the happiness was gone,' said a woman he allegedly molested when she was seven. In her summation, Sasha Wass called Rolf a ‘sinister pervert', who employed his charm as a form of mesmerism and relished his demonic power over his victims. No longer disseminating sunshine, he was now portrayed as the source of all evil, responsible for the post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, bulimia or aversion to tongue-kissing that had overtaken his accusers in later life. The decade he spent murmuring ‘Poor little blighter' to the internees on
Animal Hospital
counted for less when set against his interest in a brusquely canine approach to courtship, exposed by a saucy postcard he sent the first complainant. On the card, a beagle imparts its life lessons, which include a recommendation that if you want sex you should beg, with the added advice that ‘a cold nose in the crotch can be effective'. Twisting the knife, the addressee remarked that when he came to visit during her adolescence, ‘he never greeted the family dog'.

Rolf's grovelling letter to this woman's father seems genuinely anguished, but it still hankers after the sentimental simplicities and quick fixes of his television programs. In
Rolf on Art
he advises novice painters to use oils, which allows them to wipe out a mistake ‘or let it dry and paint over it'. Off the canvas, erasure is not so easy. As he tells the aggrieved parent in his letter, ‘You can't go back and change things you have done in this life – I wish to God I could.' What troubles him most, however, is the damage to his self-esteem. ‘As I do these animal programmes,' he writes, ‘I see the unconditional love that dogs give to their owners and I wish I could learn to love myself again.' It's an obtuse, coldly self-regarding formulation. Dogs do not dote on themselves; misinterpreting animal psychology, Rolf identifies both with the adoring pet and its adored owner, which makes him his own most fervent fan. His appeal to be reprieved from self-loathing so he can love himself again reveals – somewhat crassly given the context – that narcissism is the norm for him.

Arriving at court each morning, flanked by his wan, strained daughter and his stoical wife, Rolf sported a succession of ever more iridescent ties, bright reminders of the rising sun with her fluttering skirts. Perhaps this blaze of colour proclaimed that he had done nothing wrong: as he says in his confessional letter, the affair with his friend's daughter ‘progressed from a feeling of love and friendship'. He may still think, as he did when bathing Bindi, that the restrictions we impose on desire and imagination – two forces that collude inside us – are unnatural. Or there might be a more vindictive intent behind the scenarios described by the aggrieved women: were such attacks on innocence meant to console him for his own loss of it? A grey, stooped, portly Peter Pan, Rolf compulsively re-enacts a childhood that ended prematurely the first time around.