Gardner The Life And Lies Of Harry Morris

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915785-36-7
Verlag: Clink Street Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

The life of Harry Morris was a classic 'rags to riches' tale: an East End Jewish barrow boy who became a feted nightclub operator in Knightsbridge and Mayfair. But there was a price to pay - his drive to transcend humble roots and a devastating early illness came at the cost of much myth-making and a family schism. Now, in 1963, as Harry makes a swansong cruise around the world with his mistress on a 'millionaire's yacht', the Caronia, his mask starts to slip. Each port of call brings back fresh memories and challenging revelations. Taking advantage of the crumbling of Harry's facade, Daniel Gardner tries to separate fact from fiction and understand why his glamorous but enigmatic grandfather disowned his heritage. It becomes a journey that will take him all the way back to the ancestral village in Poland and a universal story of emigration and reinvention. And in the process will he be able to help put the splintered ends of the family tree back together again?

This is the first biography by Daniel Gardner.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gardner, Daniel

Leseproben

Preface

On my mantelpiece I have a square mahogany-framed photograph of my grandfather, Harry Morris, taken in the late 1950s I would guess. It is a close-up, cut off at the knee, of him sitting in a rattan wicker chair in front of what looks like a conservatory at Rowena Court, a seaside hotel in Kent. The glass building is probably the hotel’s Solarium, and the unknown photographer is standing on its lawn, the Tea Garden.

Harry had bought Rowena Court to occupy his wife Betty while he stayed in London to enjoy the perks associated with being a ‘well-known night-spot proprietor’ and ‘friend of the famous’.1 By this stage they had lived apart for over a decade but it is not surprising to me, given his entire life was built on charm and evasion, that the estrangement and his continuous philandering had proved no impediment to his relaxing in her garden.

The image is of a good-looking man in his prime: Brylcreemed steel-grey hair parted to one side, sun on his forehead, Ray-Ban Aviators obscuring his eyes. He is wearing flannel trousers and a short-sleeved shirt which is clearly hand-made as its breast pocket is monogrammed. His hand is extended in the photograph, his wrist adorned with an eye-catching Omega: the sort of watch that signals affluence.

The impresario may have been at rest but the firm set of his jaw is an indication of the fighting qualities he must have possessed to succeed in such a cutthroat business. Below his sunglasses he certainly has a fleshy boxer’s nose; he has landed and taken a few punches in his career and it has not been without stress. It is a black-and-white photograph but one can almost see the nicotine-staining on the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand.

As I look a little closer at the familiar face, however, I cannot decide whether the slightly pursed lips are a sign of toughness or simply annoyance at something or someone off-camera. It could have been his eldest daughter, Susan, with whom he had a very brittle relationship. She was studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama at the time – a career choice he might have viewed as whimsical given his whole life was an act.

In fact there is more of a riddle to the shot than appears at first glance. The initials ‘HM’ on his shirt pocket stand for ‘Harry Morris’ but that was not the name he was born with. He was already 30 by the time he legally adopted it. Like one of those convicted felons who ask a court for previous offences to be taken into consideration, in his deed poll he promised to stop using not one but two previous aliases: Harry Vigoda and Harry Cohen. Not something the judge heard every day I imagine. It is fortunate for Harry that one doesn’t have to plump for a single birth date in a deed poll as he had at least three of those as well.

I never had the opportunity to question Harry on this mutability as he died on 22nd March 1963, 17 days before I was born.

Nevertheless ‘HM’ was always a presence in my life because my mother nursed a metempsychotic belief that I was somehow his reincarnation. Harry’s immortal soul, corporally imprisoned on its never-ending journey, had been released by his death only to be almost immediately trapped again in my body. In her eyes that explained the strong familial resemblance which she invoked at whim. (Looking at the photograph I have to admit she had a point.) She also saw the juxtaposition of our anniversaries as a sort of cosmic baton-passing of Harry’s drive and business acumen. His death while she was still a teenager had robbed her of the chance of a life of ease and comfort. I would restore the family fortunes. That shaped a lot of the decisions she made on my behalf as I was growing up and some of those I have taken for myself as an adult.

That should have been enough to spark a dialogue with her about her father. Yet whenever I questioned my normally well-organised mother about him and his family, her answers were sketchy. She knew he had three siblings – Rose, Anne and Ben – and that his father may have been called Moshe but she didn’t know the name of his mother. She knew Harry had an aunt in New York called Fannie because she had stayed with her in the 1950s. When pushed, Mum could dredge up the first names of a couple of cousins – David and Michael – but suspected there were others.

I suppose a more assiduous family memoirist would have spotted that Harry was the hinge between two worlds and challenged her equivocation, but I didn’t. Neither she nor her sisters ever volunteered much about him; we were all complicit in his gradual fading from view until two things combined to shake me out of my complacency. First, my mother died, and with her, any opportunity to enlarge the record of her reminiscences. Second, I required major surgery to remove an adrenal tumour. In the course of this brush with mortality I realised that I was already older than Harry was when he punted his soul. If now wasn’t the right time to find out about my semi-mythical maternal grandfather, when would be?

A liar needs a good memory, it is often said; Harry fibbed so much that the collective memory was all but lost. He did not ‘weave a tangled web’, so much as leave no web at all. He permitted his conjugal family to fraternise with his Jewish birth family for a grand total of three times in 25 years. He separated the hemispheres of his life to such an extent that they were unable to communicate with each other once he had gone.

We lie when we intend to deceive by providing information we believe to be untrue. Does that cover the withholding of information? Absolutely, if the questioning is specific enough. I’m sure Harry justified his evasions with the age-old excuse that he was simply telling the rubes what they wanted to hear or, perhaps more accurately, not telling them what they did not want to hear. Whether they were customers, colleagues or his own children he reasoned they would always prefer his congenial flim-flam to tricky truth.

The trouble is that in doing so he treated his daughters as no more than a means to an end. Harry might have viewed his lying as venial and small-scale but how could they not feel manipulated and regarded as something less than fully human in the sense that they didn’t deserve the truth? Much of what could have enriched their experience – a family tree with hundreds of people across the planet – was withheld from them. The rupture is made all the more inexplicable because Harry carried on seeing his parents and siblings long after he had airbrushed them from his children’s history.

I started researching Harry’s biography to understand why he was so keen to ensure the two halves of his life never intersected. I wanted to see if he had any moral justification for his dissembling. He lived through an era when it was disadvantageous, even physically dangerous to be marked as a Jew. Did he worry about the safety of his wife and daughters? Was that why he was so rigid in his compartmentalising?

If I am honest I also savoured the fact-finding because, like the rest of the world, I have always enjoyed rags-to-riches tales. These models of individualism and social mobility met my need to believe that the seemingly irreversible rise in wealth inequality can be defied, if only by exceptional characters. The lowlier the beginnings, the greater the striving for wealth or power, the bigger the appeal to me. Harry was just such a self-made man.

When I started working in the City of London in the Thatcherite ‘80s, ‘barrow boy’ was a sort of lazy slur we brokers would use to describe traders; in Harry’s case the epithet was a precise description of his first job. How he overcame such humble beginnings made his journey compelling to me. Even more so because of the suspicion of amorality that accompanied his ascent. Harry often played host to both gangland players and establishment figures in his clubs in the 1950s.

Like that other master of self-presentation, Jay Gatsby, Harry had first become rich by flouting the law to sell overpriced booze to thirsty Americans – not, like Gatsby, during Prohibition but during the Second World War. Before the war Harry had built up a moderately successful chain of greengrocers in South London. He was living above one of his shops in Putney High Street. At the end of hostilities he could flaunt a nightclub in Knightsbridge, a flat in Park Lane and a Georgian country house for Betty and his three daughters, complete with nanny and cook. He had swapped his grocer’s van for a Rolls-Bentley. Sadly, and similarly to the antihero of Fitzgerald’s novel, he and others around him would pay a price for all this material success.

My challenge was how to unpick a life consciously built on misdirection and deceit, winkling out the truth embedded in the few stories that he deigned to share with his daughters over the years. By his nature Harry left more ellipses than evidence so this book could never have been one of those objective, God’s-eye-view biographies. Nor could it ever be impersonal given my proximity to the subject. The choices he made in his life, particularly with regard to his daughters, have shaped mine so I make no apologies about the personal pronoun making a repeated appearance in the book.

On my mother’s death I became the keeper...