The visits to Charles appear to have been approximately annual, at least in the period documented by the 1988 People interview. Woody described visiting once a year and engaging in a relationship that he characterized as more like friendship than like fatherhood. This is not a surprising characterization for a man whose father left when he was seven and who met the adult version of that father across a prison visiting room table. The parent-child bond is built in the early years, in proximity, through thousands of ordinary daily interactions. What Charles and Woody had was not that. What they appear to have had instead was a voluntary relationship between two adult men who shared a family name and a birthday and a considerable amount of natural charisma, and who found each other interesting in the specific way that people find others interesting when the encounter is charged with complicated history.
He has said in a 2007 Sunday Times interview that his father had a “mixed influence” on him — that it made him “think outlaw” but that he “would not want to hurt anyone.” This is a careful formulation. It acknowledges that Charles was a real presence in his imagination, that knowing his father was a hitman was not an experience without effect. It also draws the line that needed to be drawn: the influence stopped well short of endorsing violence.
In a 1988 People interview, he called his father “one of the most articulate, well-read, charming people I’ve ever known.” The description is interesting on several levels: it attributes qualities — articulateness, intellectual breadth, personal charm — that are, in different registers, qualities that Harrelson himself possesses and that have been central to his professional success. The father who could charm strangers into buying encyclopedias, the father who could run gambling operations on social intelligence, the father who could, by his own account and the accounts of those who encountered him in prison, engage in sophisticated conversation across a wide range of subjects — this was the man Woody was describing. He was also describing, in effect, himself.