The effort failed. The financial cost — approximately two million dollars by his account — was a number that Harrelson could afford by the late 1990s, given the success of his career, in a way that very few children of convicted killers could. The ability to spend that kind of money on a legal effort is itself a product of the fame that Cheers and Natural Born Killers and The People vs. Larry Flynt had produced. The son’s success created the capacity to try to help the father, and the trying failed.
## The Proxy Wedding and the Relationship’s Shape
The 1987 proxy wedding is one of the stranger biographical details in a story that has several of them. Charles Harrelson, serving consecutive life sentences in federal prison, met a woman through correspondence or other means while incarcerated. In 1987, he arranged a proxy marriage — a marriage conducted with a legal representative standing in for an absent party — and Woody stood in for his father at the ceremony.
The proxy wedding is documented in the sources available for this article, primarily through the Snopes fact-check that verified elements of the Harrelson family story. It is noted in some sources but not in others, and the woman who married Charles through this arrangement is not a public figure and is not identified here.
The act of standing in for his father at a wedding is a specific kind of loyalty. It is also a specific kind of strange: the son, playing the father at an event the father cannot attend because the father is in prison for murder. It is not the role any son is supposed to play, and it is one that Woody evidently played because he chose to maintain the relationship with Charles rather than to treat the distance created by the prison walls as an ending.