The Don Harron Centennial

I had been a fan of filmmaker Mary Harron (b. 1953) for years before I realized (quite recently) that I had also been a fan of her father for many decades. I grew up watching her dad Don Harron (1924-2015) on Hee Haw in the ’70s. And the more I learn about him the bigger a fan I become.

On Hee Hee Harron had a regular solo bit where he played a rural radio news anchorman at station KORN (a fictional one, not the real one in South Dakota). The straw on the set is the tip-off that the station is in some old barn somewhere. And the gag of it (a pretty traditional one) is that the news is extremely provincial, about loose livestock and such like. People in the news items are referred to with familiarity, since all of the listeners presumably know them. And the copy is full of malapropisms and inappropriate folk phraseology, with the announcer cheerfully and confidentally speaking in a rustic accent. When he was done with his bit, he would look at someone off screen and draw his finger across his throat in a “cut” gesture, a hilarious signature that did double duty, mocking the seriousness of broadcast newsreading, while also self-consciously editorializing about the quality of his own jokes. It was in a very old tradition of humor, in the vein of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, George Ade, and probably several Canadians I know nothing about it. In addition to those solo bit, he also appeared in sketches and other wrap-arounds on the show.

I can’t recall if I knew at the time, or if anyone did, that the character’s name was Charlie Farquharson, and that he, and the setting were from North of the Border. Harron was from Toronto, and though he had worked for a time as an Ontario farm hand as a teenager, his background is surprising on many accounts, though it certainly makes the fact that Mary is his daughter much less of a stretch. Don Harron was a brilliant and accomplished man, across many different forms and fields, as both a writer and as an actor. He grew up in Toronto, where his father ran a dry-cleaning store. He attended vaudeville as a boy at the local Shea’s house, where he later recalled seeing such acts as Thurston the Magician, Red Skelton, Joe Jackson, Bert Wheeler, and Joe Yule. (When he was older he saw burlesque shows with Phil Silvers, Rags Ragland, and Billie “Cheese and Crackers” Hagan, et al.) Harron was only ten when (coached by his father) he began to be booked to perform “chalk talks” at private functions. Chalk talks are an old vaudeville specialty where a storyteller illustrates his own monologues with by drawing on a chalkboard as he goes). This landed him a role on CBC radio on the show Lonesome Trail when we was 11 years old (1935). As a boy actor he got to act with Edward G. Robinson, Lorne Greene, Claire Trevor, and Charles Jennings, father of Peter Jennings.

At the University of Toronto, Harron majored in philosophy and sociology (winning an academic medal in the former) even while acting in, and writing, theatrical shows at the same time. He was offered a professorship, but turned it down in order to keep performing. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War Two, and spent a couple of years in London, where he gained a wide variety of experiences. He wrote patter for Gracie Fields, and contributed to BBC radio comedy shows. He can be see as a supernumerary (a clown) in Powell-Pressburger’sThe Red Shoes (1948) and had a small role in the 1949 West End production of Streetcar.

In the ’50s, Harron appeared in some of the first productions of the brand new Stratford ShakespeareFestival in Ontario, wrote for the CBC tv show Sunshine Sketches (1952-53), and co-wrote the musical Anne of the Green Gables which premiered on television in 1956 and has received regular annual live productions since. During this period (1952) he also introduced the Farquharson character on the CBC show The Big Revue.

Meanwhile, Harron worked frequently on Broadway. He was in the original productions of Terrence Rattigan’sSeparate Tables (1956) and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man (1959), as well as the lesser known plays Home is the Hero (1954), The Dark is Light Enough (1955), The Broken Jug (1958), and Everybody Loves Opal (1961). And he did lots of American TV especially in the late ’50s and ’60s. He was on One Step Beyond, Shirley Temple’s Storybook, The Outer Limits, the Irwin Allen shows Voyage to the Bottom of the Seaand The Time Tunnel, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, The Wonderful World of Disney,and The F.B.I. He’s not in many movies, but you can see him in Chayefesky’s The Hospital(1961).

With the success of Hee Haw starting in 1969, Harron focused on the Farquharson character going forward, even writing numerous humor books as Charlie. From 1983 to 1985 he had his own talk show. There are clips of it on Youtube if you want to see him out of character!

Harron was married four times. His second wife was actress Virginia Leith, who I’ll be posting about in a few weeks — she may be best remembered as the disembodied head in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962).

As I said, I am a huge fan of the films of Harron’s daughter Mary, most of whose films deal with fame, art, and people behaving monstrously. Many of her films have women at their center. They include I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, about Andrea Solanas), American Psycho (2000), The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), The Moth Diaries (2011), The Anna Nicole Story (2013),Charlie Says (2018, about the Manson Family), and Daliland (2022, about Salvador Dali and his wife Gala). She has also directed for some of the coolest TV shows: Homicide: Life on the Street, The L Word, Six Feet Under, Big Love, and others. Unsurprisingly she was part of the punk scene in London and New York during the ’70s (at the very moment her dad was on Hee Haw), and was a music critic and a drama critic before migrating to TV production, and finally films. She wrote the screenplays for most of her films. She also went to Oxford and once dated Tony Blair.

I hope you agree that, apart from certain serial killers, the Harrons are the most interesting Canadians in history. Certainly the most interesting father-daughter combo. (in America, we have a kind of parallel development: the Arquettes are the grandchildren of Charley Weaver). Anyway, I’m willing to keep an open mind. If you manage to tell me about some even more interesting Canadians, it’ll be a win-win for all of us. But none of these please.

For more on show biz historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.