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Kiri: Her Unsung Story
Garry Jenkins
Stephen d’Antal
This edition does not include photographs.The biography of Kiri Te Kanawa, one of the most well-known and well-loved personalities in music, revealing for the first time the dramatic story of her origins, career and marital life.Dame Kiri Te Kanawa exudes an exoticism, glamour and appeal unmatched by any other diva of her generation. She is the most widely recorded and most instantly recognisable female face in the world of classical music. Yet there are few among her followers who really know the amazing story behind the public figure.Kiri has brought opera’s most passionate and powerful roles to memorable life. More than any other woman she has been responsible for broadening the appeal of opera and serious music. Kiri: Her Unsung Story charts her remarkable rise from unwanted baby and raw prodigy to polished performer; from national celebrity when, at just twenty-two, she left her homeland, to international icon. Sydney, La Scala, Covent Garden, the New York Met and her scene-stealing performance at the Prince and Princess of Wales’s wedding in 1981 – Kiri has risen to the pinnacle of her profession.Born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron fifty-five years ago, the illegitimate daughter of an Irish immigrant and a Maori, Kiri was adopted when she was six months old. For many years she never knew where she came from or who her real parents were. The moving and unforgettable story that is her real life is told for the first time. The highs, and the lows – her volatile private life, the backstage fighting, her two miscarriages and her failure to have children, and the eventual break-up of her marriage to Australian mining engineer Desmond Park – are revealed together with the full details of her past.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_0a20f9ae-9723-538c-b803-1df944a613b0)
Harper Non-Fiction
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Garry Jenkins and Stephen d’Antal 1998
Garry Jenkins and Stephen d’Antal assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN 9780006530619
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219345
Version: 2016-09-08
DEDICATION (#ulink_e9f8cb75-bcd4-5e6f-8aac-a660eba97ad4)
For Eva and Gabriella
CONTENTS
COVER (#u001600ee-6248-5303-8b1b-0390718c9561)
TITLE PAGE (#u3b91ce5e-8511-51c4-8146-447ba0512eca)
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_e7fb75c0-b0c8-5f5d-a197-32bf5bd4035e)
DEDICATION (#ulink_e3428435-29f8-5650-a56a-b2eaa9b0a554)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_bef5e9d0-1e4a-5304-9272-172224bd3bc7)
PART ONE (#ulink_1422d7cd-9b23-5648-96be-a1c35c14acaa)
The Road to Gisborne (#ulink_ed803634-5a9d-515f-a059-0334a8ca11ae)
‘The Boss’ (#ulink_84f7ebd0-bb82-5431-8caf-72fb9f3a43d7)
‘The Nun’s Chorus’ (#ulink_bec71ad1-e01f-549c-b4d4-a73ead6ecb16)
Wicked Little Witch (#ulink_b2feb4af-c36d-5b02-9fb3-475d871b4aec)
A Princess in a Castle (#ulink_9db98236-17ed-5765-a3db-7fba5d493677)
Now is the Hour (#ulink_dbf5ed4f-febc-5dbd-8c60-e499f50200d5)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
Apprentice Diva (#litres_trial_promo)
Mr Ideal (#litres_trial_promo)
Tamed (#litres_trial_promo)
A Pearl of Great Price (#litres_trial_promo)
New Worlds (#litres_trial_promo)
Fallen Angel (#litres_trial_promo)
Lost Souls (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
‘250,000 Covent Gardens’ (#litres_trial_promo)
A No-win Situation (#litres_trial_promo)
Home Truths (#litres_trial_promo)
A Gift to the Nation (#litres_trial_promo)
Pop Goes the Diva (#litres_trial_promo)
Paradise Lost (#litres_trial_promo)
Out of Reach (#litres_trial_promo)
Freefall (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnote (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES AND SOURCES (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_b561553f-857b-5a7f-ac83-0d86324abba6)
Shortly before noon on Wednesday, 29 July 1981, the anxiety that had been etched on the features of Charles, Prince of Wales for most of an eventful morning finally gave way to a faraway smile.
The heir to the throne of the United Kingdom was in the midst of the most solemn moment of his thirty-two-year-old life. Dressed in the full uniform of a Commander of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy he was positioned behind a large desk in the Dean’s Aisle in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. He had, in the presence of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, just signed the wedding certificate confirming the vows he had taken moments earlier in the main hall of Sir Christopher Wren’s imperious basilica. Sitting next to him, cocooned in a sea of ivory silk, was his new wife, the twenty-year-old Lady Diana Spencer, now the Princess of Wales.
For both Charles and Diana, the intimacy and privacy of the moment had helped lift the tensions of the previous few hours. The atmosphere inside the chapel, where they were congratulated by their families and the man who had just officiated over the wedding, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, was one of joyous relief.
For all the happiness Charles was sharing with his radiant bride at that moment, however, it was another woman who was responsible for his most spontaneous smile. Some fifty metres away, back in the north transept and out of his view, her familiar voice had begun delivering the opening stanzas of one of his favourite arias, ‘Let the Bright Seraphim’ from Handel’s Samson. Suddenly, Charles admitted later, he found himself strangely disconnected from the tumultuous events unfolding around him. Instead, he said, his head was filled with nothing but the blissful sound of ‘this marvellous, disembodied voice’.
If the divine soprano of Kiri Te Kanawa was instantly recognisable to the man at the centre of the most eagerly awaited Royal Wedding in living memory, it was less so to the vast majority of the 700 million or so people watching the spectacle on television around the world. At first the unannounced sight of her striking, statuesque form, dressed in a rainbow-hued outfit, a tiny, pillbox hat fixed loosely on her lustrous, russet red hair, had been something of a puzzle. Yet the moment her gorgeous operatic phrases began climbing towards the domed ceiling of St Paul’s her right to a place in the proceedings was unmistakable.
Charles had wanted the occasion to be a festival as well as a fairytale wedding, in his own words, ‘as much a musical event as an emotional one’. His bride had entered St Paul’s to a rousing version of Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary. Sir David Willcocks, Director of the Royal College of Music, had conducted an inspired version of the National Anthem. A glorious version of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March no. 4 had been prepared to lead the newlyweds down the aisle. Yet it was the occasion’s lone soloist who was providing its unquestioned highlight.
Since she emerged, a decade earlier, as a musical star of the greatest magnitude with her performance as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House, Kiri Te Kanawa had grown accustomed to glamorous occasions on the world’s great stages, from the New York Met to La Scala. The faces she saw assembled before her today, however, made up the most glittering audience she or indeed any other singer had ever encountered. Seated on row after row of gilted, Queen Anne chairs were not just the vast majority of the British Royal Family but Presidents Reagan of America and Mitterrand of France, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, the monarchs of Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, ex-King Constantine of Greece and the giant figure of the King of Tonga. Behind them sat crowned heads, presidents and prime ministers representing almost every nation on earth.
The soprano’s emotions were, as usual, a mixture of fire and ice. Inside, she confessed later, she was a maelstrom of nerves. Yet her voice, unfaltering and flawless, betrayed none of her true feelings. It was as if she had been born for this moment and this place – as, indeed, many were sure she had been.
In the decade or so since her early stage triumphs, Kiri Te Kanawa had frequently been described as a member of aristocracy. Her father, people said, was descended from a great chief of the Maniapoto tribe, a member of the Maori nation of New Zealand. In truth, she did not know her true identity. She had no real idea whether she was a Maori princess or not. Among the hundreds of millions of people who watched her sing that day, only a tiny handful knew the truth. They sat 13,000 miles away, on the east coast of her homeland, their television sets tuned to the wedding being broadcast live at midnight Pacific time.
As the strains of Handel faded inside St Paul’s Cathedral and the television commentators paid tribute to the singer who had so charmed the assembled kings and queens, they shook their heads quietly and a little mournfully. They knew Kiri Te Kanawa’s true story was rather different from that which the world imagined. They knew, much like the wedding of Charles and Diana, it too was far from a fairytale.
PART ONE (#ulink_9570fa75-9129-5ddd-a457-c20a28fba351)
When people ask you
To recite your pedigree
You must say,
‘I am forgetful, a child,
But this is well-known,
Tainui, Te Arawa, Matatua,
Kura-haupo and Toko-maru,
Were the ancestral canoes
That crossed the great sea
Which lies here.’
Nga Moteatea, Peou’s Lament
The Road to Gisborne (#ulink_d700223d-0b8e-521d-9e33-ff6ce587a48d)
In the early months of 1944 in the remote New Zealand community of Tokomaru Bay, an auburn-haired, twenty-six-year-old woman, Noeleen Rawstron, walked out of the shabby, corrugated iron bungalow that had been her home. She loaded a few belongings into a taxi and began the fifty-mile drive south to the nearest major town, Gisborne, on the eastern Pacific coast.
The two hour journey she was about to make was an uncomfortable one at the best of times. Despite recent improvements, the road to Gisborne remained little more than a rutted dirt track. Given the fact she was heavily pregnant, however, she would have had even more reason to dread every pit and pothole that lay ahead of her.
The child she was expecting was her second. She had left her first son, James Patrick, inside the ramshackle house with her own mother, Thelma, with whose help she had raised him. Like any mother, her anguish at leaving her son ran deep. Yet, in truth she had no choice. Noeleen Rawstron had reached a crisis in her life. The child she was about to give birth to was the result of an affair that had scandalised the tight-knit community in which she had spent her entire life. She had climbed into her taxi that morning to escape.
Noeleen Rawstron had kept her condition a secret from almost all her family, no mean feat given she was one of six children, three boys and three girls, each of whom lived in the small community. Her flight from Tokomaru Bay was almost certainly precipitated by the fact that she had failed to hide the truth from the most powerful figure in that family, her mother.
Noeleen had inherited much from Thelma Rawstron. She too was copper-haired and steely-willed, fiercely independent and at times too fiery for her own good. Now she would need to emulate another of her mother’s characteristics – an instinct for survival.
Thelma’s parents, Samuel and Gertrude Wittison, had fled Ireland at the turn of the century. After a spell farming land near Hobart in Australia, where Liza Thelma had been born in 1887, the Wittisons had sailed on to Napier in New Zealand. It was here, on 12 July 1909, that Thelma married Albert James Rawstron, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a police inspector who had emigrated to New Zealand from Bamber Bridge, Lancashire.
With his new bride, Albert, a carpenter, had soon moved to begin a new life along the coast in Tokomaru Bay. Thelma recalled to her children how she watched her possessions lowered on to the harbour in a wicker basket. To the eyes of later generations, Tokomaru Bay’s setting, on one of the most brutally beautiful stretches of coastline on New Zealand’s North Island, would conjure up images from New Zealand film director Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning movie The Piano. However, to Thelma there was little or no romance to this bleak, windswept outpost. The town amounted to little more than a threadbare collection of homes and farms. In the 1930s the town had little street lighting or indeed electricity of any kind. Fifty miles of often impenetrable dirt track separated it from the nearest large community, Gisborne.
In summer, the so-called East Cape was the hottest, driest region of New Zealand. Yet in winter the cold, Pacific winds would cut into the town with a vengeance. Thelma soon discovered life itself could be no less callous.
At first her marriage was happy enough. Albert, like many of the town’s population, had found work at the giant, meat freezing works that served the district’s sheep-farming industry. Thelma had six children in rapid succession and the demands of his rapidly expanding household became an increasingly difficult burden for Albert to bear. Work at the freezing factory was seasonal. At times money was so tight, all eight of the family were forced to live in a tent near the meat works. Eventually, as the pressures of providing piled up, Albert told Thelma he had decided to leave the coast in search of better paid work in Auckland. He was never seen in Tokomaru Bay again.
Even by the standards of Tokomaru Bay, Thelma’s life and that of her family became a grim and impoverished one. The community was spread out along the edge of the Pacific; the white, European immigrants concentrated in the more affluent part of the town, known as Toko, the indigenous, dark-skinned Maori in a shanty town called Waima. The Rawstrons were among the few white families forced to live in what most regarded as the wrong side of Tokomaru Bay.
In the aftermath of Albert’s desertion, Thelma had kept a roof over the family’s head by working as a cleaner. She would leave Waima each morning at five and walk five miles to a farmhouse owned by two elderly spinsters. She used the money she scraped together to move the family into a rented, corrugated iron bungalow. The home was pitiful – its floors were earth – but in comparison to the tent it seemed positively palatial to her children.
Of all her offspring, Noeleen seems to have been the one who inherited her mother’s combination of inner strength and outgoing attractiveness. She had been born Mary Noeleen Rawstron on 15 October 1918, in Gisborne. A spirited girl, she was also blessed with striking good looks. By the time she had reached her teenage years, she had become an object of admiration for many of the area’s menfolk.
Noeleen’s first serious boyfriend was Jimmy Collier, a handsome Maori farm labourer who lived in Tokomaru Bay. The pair conducted their courtship far from the prying eyes of the local community, in the shadow of Mount Hikurangi and the parched hills overlooking the town. Their idyll was short-lived, however. Soon Noeleen had fallen pregnant. She gave birth to a son in 1938, naming him James Patrick after his father. If she had hoped the child would cement their relationship, she had been mistaken. Jimmy seemed frightened by the responsibility and the speed at which matters had progressed. Noeleen was left to raise Jimmy junior, or Ninna as he was nicknamed, at home with her mother. As Jimmy junior grew into a young boy, his father became less and less an influence in his life. By 1940 Collier had moved to Gisborne where he married another woman. Noeleen found the desertion hard to bear.
‘Noeleen couldn’t understand what Jimmy was doing with her,’ recalled a friend, Ira Haig, a schoolteacher in the town. ‘She knew she was much better looking than this girl and couldn’t accept his rejection.’
In the aftermath of Collier’s disappearance, Noeleen cast her eye around the male population for a man capable of bringing her new happiness. Three years after Collier left Tokomaru Bay, she thought she had found him.
As World War II brought Europe’s economy to a standstill, Tokomaru Bay found itself entering one of the most prosperous periods in its history. With the rest of the world in desperate need of wool and mutton, the freezing factory was at full capacity. More than 2,000 men poured into the area to work, among them a twenty-five-year-old Maori butcher, Tieki ‘Jack’ Wawatai.
Jack had travelled down to Tokomaru from the village of Rangitukia, sixty miles to the north along the Pacific coast. As a Maori he could not be conscripted into the ANZAC forces now being dispatched by the New Zealand government. Instead, with little work available on the farms in his area, he headed south to the freezing factory where his skills with a knife had brought him work in previous seasons. Not for the first time in his life, Jack Wawatai arrived in Tokomaru in need of money. Back in Rangitukia a wife and a large family were depending on him.
Jack had been born and raised in Rangitukia. His father had died there when he was just thirteen. When his mother remarried he had been taken in by the community’s Anglican minister, the Reverend Poihipi Kohere. Jack worked on the minister’s farm where he made an instant impression on his employer’s daughter, Apo. In November 1937, twenty-year-old Jack and eighteen-year-old Apo were married in the Reverend Kohere’s home. By 1943 they had four children.
Jack was a good-looking man with piercing eyes and an engaging, happy-go-lucky personality. ‘He could charm the birds from the trees,’ said his schoolteacher wife. Blessed with a fine singing voice, his renditions of traditional Maori songs and Mario Lanza arias would often drift towards the farmhouse. ‘I would hear him singing to the cows in the field in the middle of the night,’ smiled Apo. In Tokomaru Bay, Jack whiled away the long evenings singing with a group of other, mostly Maori, men in a shop near the Rawstrons’ home.
He had been introduced to the impromptu singalongs by Ira Haig, a friend of his family for years. ‘At first he told me he couldn’t go. He was married and these meetings were for single men only,’ said Ira. ‘But he loved to sing, he really did, and in the end he went. I took him there.’ By 1943 Noeleen had landed herself a job working as a waitress in the meat works’ canteen. It was there she first set her eye on the handsome newcomer. He reciprocated her interest and soon they were seeing each other discreetly. According to her sister, Donny, Noeleen may have assumed Jack was unmarried when she met him. If she had suspicions, they would have been deepened by his regular disappearance at weekends to return to Rangitukia and his family.
Whatever the truth, Noeleen felt the cut of her mother’s Irish temper when Thelma found out what her daughter was up to. ‘My mother kicked up a hell of a fuss,’ recalled Donny. ‘She didn’t like Jack. One, because he was Maori – she didn’t like the Maoris even though she lived surrounded by them – and two, because he was married.’
Disapproval may have been exactly what Thelma’s most headstrong daughter was looking for, however. ‘I saw them walking around town one Sunday afternoon and once I saw them at the pub. I spoke to Noeleen about it and I told her she should stop seeing Jack,’ said Donny. ‘But she told me it was none of my business. She had a strong will.’
