Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Unfaithfully Yours, Rex’
Nicholas Wapshott’s caustic assessment of my father will have struck any reader who knew Rex Harrison personally as pitilessly one-sided [Oped, “Unfaithfully Yours, Rex,” March 4, 2008]. Mr. Wapshott comes well equipped with first-hand accounts of Rex’s often outrageous behavior, and many of his barbs strike home. But what Mr. Wapshott has sketched is a mythology rather than a pen-portrait of the man he calls “the old priapic bounder.”
The phrase made me smile; I think Rex might have been flattered, as would many a candidate for that title. In reality, no one (not even, say, Picasso) can be an old priapic bounder all the time.
Those who knew Rex will avouch not only to his egotism but to a capacity for tenderness and generous spiritedness as well.
I speak not merely in his defense, as a son, but because Mr. Wapshott’s vitriolic caricature manages to achieve the opposite of its apparent purpose, namely to puncture the vaingloriousness of a self-obsessed celebrity. The Wapshott account actually aggrandizes Rex and all such “larger than life” creations of journalism.
No one is larger than life; anecdotes, such as Mr. Wapshott cites, merely give that illusion. It seems odd that Mr. Wapshott should, by his own account, have “demurred” when offered the opportunity to write a biography of Rex.
“Not another!” Mr. Wapshott might reasonably have replied.
Instead Mr. Wapshott tells us that what put him off was the prospective tedium of spending the requisite amount of time with his subject.
He then proceeds to write about Rex in such cruelly salivating terms that we can only think what a poor choice Mr. Wapshott made when turning down the commission, when he himself seems much better at creating the likeness of a monster than the likeness of a man.
CAREY HARRISON
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Please address letters intended for publication to the Editor of The New York Sun. Letters may be sent by e-mail to editor@nysun.com, by facsimile to 212-571-9836, or post to 105 Chambers Street, New York City 10007. Please include a return address and daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited.
