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Cole’s client list included the Governor General’s wife and her social circle. Cole was regularly asked to lend his clothes to his socialite friends but invariably refused. Few New Zealanders possessed the persuasive charm of Nell Te Kanawa, however. The designer’s manageress of the time, Terry Nash, is unsure when the friendship started but saw its results.
‘Her mother was one of those ladies, a big lady, who really pushed,’ said Nash. ‘She would come and say, “Oh, it’s for Kiri, you know, so I think you should be giving it to her.” She expected people to do things for Kiri.’
Cole found it impossible to resist her. Kiri, in return, sang for free at several of Cole’s shows. ‘I don’t think Colin ever turned her down. He was a big softie,’ said Nash. Terry Nash is unsure whether Kiri’s debutante ballgown was a Cole creation. Regardless, it was magnificent, typical of the clothes which gave Kiri an allure her rivals could not match. As Kiri took the debutantes’ ball by storm, however, only one accessory was missing – a steady boyfriend with whom to share the romance of the night.
Kiri’s first experience of dating the opposite sex had been less than successful. She had begun seeing her first serious boyfriend when she was sixteen. According to her own account of the relationship, he was ‘several years older but rather less wise’. The courtship had come to an abrupt ending during a telephone conversation in which Kiri invited him to watch her sing at the prizewinner’s concert following the Auckland Competition of 1960. The boyfriend had been utterly disinterested in her music and had never once watched her perform publicly. ‘He replied that if I went in for the concert he never wanted to see me again,’ Kiri recalled. ‘It had never entered my head that anyone was going to try and stop me, so I just said goodbye and slammed down the receiver.’
Of her other crushes, only one, on the most handsome of the Hanson brothers, Robert, had lasted for more than a few weeks. Gillian Redstone would travel to Taupo for summer holidays with Kiri and the Hansons. ‘There was a bit of rivalry, boy-wise,’ recalled Redstone. ‘Kiri was keen on Robert at one stage.’ Kiri’s hopes may have risen when Robert Hanson agreed to accompany her to the debs’ ball. His lack of interest was immediately apparent, however. She had settled on the least promising prospect of all the Hanson boys.
Her dawn shifts at the Auckland telephone exchange left Kiri exhausted and often too tired to concentrate fully on her singing with Sister Mary Leo. For a while she tried working the ‘graveyard shift’ instead, rising at 2 a.m. and working until breakfast time. Even after a morning ‘nap’, however, Kiri arrived at her weekly lessons with Sister Mary drained of all energy. ‘They were terrible, terrible hours,’ she later opined.
Soon Nell had found her a less taxing alternative, at a sheet music store in Mount Roskill, not far from Mitchell Street. As well as offering less demanding duties and more convenient working hours, Nell’s logic argued that Kiri might also learn a little more about the great composers and the great music of the world at the same time. This did not work out either. Kiri soon clashed with the two elderly women who ran the store. She later claimed that they forced her to stand on her feet all day, eventually leaving her in need of a varicose vein operation. Six months into the job she quit.
Kiri worked briefly as a stenographer. Ever the dutiful father, it was Tom who eventually found his daughter the ideal job, however. Through his connections at Caltex he got Kiri an interview for a position as a receptionist at the company’s head office in Auckland. The work was undemanding – Kiri recalled once how she would spend most of her day chatting to people and the other half ‘enjoying tea and biscuits’. Monday mornings were frittered away shopping for flowers for the office. Most importantly of all the relaxed nature of the job meant she had time to travel to St Mary’s for lunchtime singing lessons with Sister Mary Leo.
Sister Leo’s doubts about Kiri’s dedication had deepened. Like Nell she knew that Kiri’s easy-going nature posed the greatest threat to her progressing as a serious singer. In addition, her fears that, freed from the cloistered peace of St Mary’s, Kiri would be drawn to the more straightforward, ‘trivial’ music she regarded with such disdain had quickly been justified.
While at Caltex Kiri had been introduced to Auckland’s ‘dine and dance’ circuit. For a few pounds a performance, Kiri would charm nightclubs full of inebriated couples with full-blooded renditions of hits from West Side Story, My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. She would roar around Auckland in her car, accepting as many engagements as she could fit in a night. Often she would work until 1 a.m. to earn £20. At her lessons with Sister Mary Leo the legacy of her late nights in smoke-filled rooms was obvious. Eventually Nell was summoned for a council of war. Nell’s relationship with Sister Mary Leo had remained a difficult one. ‘I rather liked it, a certain aggravation going on there,’ Kiri laughed later. ‘I thought it was quite fun, rather a good floor show.’ Both women realised that Kiri had reached a crossroads, however. Sister Mary Leo suggested Nell might want to look for a scholarship that would pay for Kiri’s fees and allow her to concentrate more fully on her singing, Nell was in complete agreement. Back on the phone at Blockhouse Bay, she had soon identified a potential source of funds.
After generations of marginalisation the Maori were discovering their voice within New Zealand life. In the post-war years thousands of New Zealand’s indigenous people had moved away from their old lifestyle in the rural heartlands. Predictably the incoming population had found assimilation into the European-dominated cities a difficult process. By the 1960s the majority of Maori lived in conditions defined by poor housing, poor sanitation, poor health, poor education and a rising crime rate. The comparative life expectancy of the two communities in 1964 illustrated the point perfectly. For Europeans it was sixty-eight years, for Maori it was a mere fifty-four.
Driven to act, the New Zealand government had introduced a raft of initiatives designed to alleviate the problems. Among the most important stemmed from the Hunn Report on Maori education which in 1961 highlighted the low achievement of Maori pupils; just one in 200 of whom reached the seventh form. At the end of that year the government established the Maori Education Foundation (MEF) to provide scholarships to enable Maori secondary school pupils to continue their studies. An initial grant of £250,000 was soon attracting applications from talented young Maori. One of the first to arrive at the MEF’s Auckland offices was from Mrs T. Te Kanawa of 22 Mitchell Street, Blockhouse Bay.
Nell’s awareness of the quiet revolution under way may have been provided first by Kiri’s St Mary’s colleague Hannah Tatana. While Anna Hato from Rotorua had won great acclaim singing the pop songs of the day during the war years, Tatana had become the first female Maori singer to follow the pioneering trail into the classical field blazed by the barrel chested bass Inia Te Wiata in the 1950s.
‘The feeling then was that the Maoris were quaint, rural people,’ said Tatana. ‘Maori culture was looked on as being very “pop”, as it was, because the real culture had been suppressed.’ Tatana’s breakthrough had come that year at the 1961 Mobil Song Quest where she had come second. She had already been approached to take the lead in a new production of Carmen in Auckland the following year. ‘People were so surprised that Maori were capable of doing a little bit more than boogie woogie. It made them all the more keen to promote the traditional Maori thing,’ she recalled. Nell Te Kanawa had watched Tatana’s progress with interest. Kiri would go on to sing in a Maori group with her. ‘She was aware of the advantages I had with my Maori background,’ recalled Tatana.
Nell sensed a changing mood – and acted.
In the Gisborne of the 1940s and the Auckland of the 1950s, her daughter’s Maori heritage had remained a source of unease. Tom continued to be almost completely estranged from Maori life and from his family, to the extent that his youngest sibling, Te Waamoana, only learned that he was, like her, living in Auckland, when she saw his picture in the paper with an unusually large catch of Taupo trout. When Te Waamoana attempted to rebuild the bridges with the family Nell welcomed her and her daughter Kay, now Kay Rowbottom, to the house on Mitchell Street. According to Rowbottom, however, Nell ‘was very selective about the members of the family she liked to have at Kiri’s events’.
Suddenly, however, the pendulum had swung in a new direction. The MEF’s regional committee in the city was run by two co-chairmen, Thelma Robinson, fourth wife of the city’s Mayor, Sir Dove-Myer ‘Robbie’ Robinson and a charismatic war veteran and sportsman turned schoolteacher, thirty-five-year-old Hoani ‘John’ Waititi. Waititi was one of a new generation of university educated Maori academics and a pioneer in the introduction of Maori lessons to secondary schools.
It was Thelma Robinson who recognised the name on Nell’s application. Robinson and her husband had seen one of Kiri’s first public performances at the opening of a Maori church a year or two earlier. ‘We saw this young Maori girl in a white dress sing in the open air and were stunned by her voice,’ said Robinson. ‘We made a point of finding out who she was.’ Kiri’s situation didn’t fall readily into the Foundation’s brief. As Kiri herself later recalled, ‘It was mainly for the academic rather than the musical child, and I certainly wasn’t academic.’ However, once Waititi and the Foundation’s trustees, including Maori MP Sir Eruera Tirikatene and Maori Women’s Welfare League leader Mira Petricevich, now Dame Mira Szaszy, had heard Kiri sing, the technicalities were overlooked.
The moment was one of the most significant in Kiri’s young life. When Nell received the phone call from John Waititi confirming the Foundation’s willingness to make a grant of £250 to fund Kiri’s full-time study with Sister Mary Leo she could barely conceal her excitement.
No sooner had she put the phone down on Waititi than she had summoned Tom home and headed off to the Caltex office with him to collect Kiri from work. Kiri later recalled sitting with Tom at her side in the car. There Nell effectively issued their daughter with an ultimatum. ‘Either you sing or you just keep working at Caltex,’ she told her. ‘It’s one or the other, but whatever you do, you’ve got to do it totally.’
Kiri admitted years later that she had been far from certain of her response. ‘I couldn’t think, did I want to study music full time? I didn’t know anything about what it entailed. So for peace’s sake I said yes.’ Peace, however, was the last thing she was granted as she settled down to the life of a full-time student.
In a television interview many years later, Kiri presented a stark picture of the demands Sister Mary Leo’s regime placed on her. ‘I would study from nine in the morning till five,’ she said. ‘She would listen to me through the wall all day and the moment I’d stop even for a breath or a drink or anything she would knock on the wall and off we’d go again.’
Nell too became even more relentless in her control. ‘You have a God-given voice which gives people pleasure. It’s your duty to show them,’ she would berate Kiri if ever her daughter slackened, in a phrase echoing Archbishop Liston.
Back at Mitchell Street the transformation was remarkable. Kiri would spend endless hours rehearsing single notes or scales, much to the irritation of her young niece Judy. ‘One night my grandmother and grandfather were out and we were doing the washing up. She was going through the scales, just to annoy me,’ she recalled. ‘I remember shoving the dishcloth in her mouth, I was so angry.’ When Judy ran out into the night, Kiri locked her niece outside as she continued singing.
Judy and Nola would soon leave Mitchell Street. In 1960 Nola married again. With her daughter and new husband Bill Denholm, she moved briefly to Waihi beach, near where Nell had been born, where she and Bill ran a fish and chip shop before returning to Auckland. As they readied themselves to leave, Judy and Nola could not help notice the new seriousness with which Kiri was now treating her music. One day she, Kiri and the Hanson boys had playfully lit up a discarded Peter Stuyvesant cigarette they had found in the lounge. ‘We heard Nana’s footsteps coming down the passage from her bedroom and we were frantically trying to get rid of the smoke,’ she recalled. ‘Nana came in. She never raised her voice, she just looked straight at Kiri and said, “You smoke, or you sing.” That was it. Simple,’ she said. ‘I never saw Kiri smoke again.’
Wicked Little Witch (#ulink_30c18e16-33cf-5543-a270-66adff5422c1)
A year after Kiri’s decision to devote herself to full-time singing, she and her mother already formed an irresistible double act. What Kiri possessed in talent, Nell had in tenacity; what Kiri had in beauty, Nell had in belligerence; what Kiri had in charm, Nell had in sheer chutzpah. For two months in 1962, conductor Neil McGough and his colleagues on a new and as yet unperformed Maori musical, Uwane, witnessed the partnership operating at the peak of its powers.
If McGough’s memory serves him correctly, his first audition for the show was held in the less than glamorous setting of an ice rink near Auckland’s city centre a few weeks into the New Year. Around seventy nerve-racked singers and dancers had turned up, each of them hopeful of a role in the musical to be staged at Auckland’s premier venue, His Majesty’s Theatre, that April.
More than three decades on, McGough, who went on to become one of New Zealand’s most respected musical administrators, struggles to recollect the faces that filed past him during a long and at times tediously exhausting day of auditions. However, he remembers the words with which the morning’s most remarkable character introduced herself as if it were yesterday.
‘Excuse me, I’m Kiri Te Kanawa’s mother,’ she announced, interrupting him, the show’s director David Rossiter and choreographer Beverley Jordan as they compared notes mid-way through the auditions.
‘Every other singer and dancer came in and filled out a form and plonked it on the table. We’d ask them what they were going to sing, they’d sing it and that was that,’ recalled McGough. ‘I auditioned dozens and dozens of shows and it was always the same procedure. But Kiri arrived with her mother, and it was her mother who came to the table. Instead of just putting the form on the pile we got the big sell. She just rabbited on and on.’
After what seemed like an eternity listening politely, McGough’s frayed nerves got the better of him. ‘I got a bit mad and said, “Look, this is all terribly interesting and I’m sure we will all entirely agree with you once you’ve sat down and we’ve actually heard your daughter sing.” And on that unsubtle put-down she got the message.’
While her mother had been at the reception desk, Kiri had stood quietly in a corner. As McGough invited her to the centre of the room she handed her sheet music to the pianist and announced that she was going to sing a favourite St Mary’s aria, ‘Oh My Beloved Father’. They were her first – and virtually her last – words of the morning. The consensus was quick in coming. ‘She got the job after about three bars,’ said McGough. ‘She put her hands out in front of her and sang, like all the others, except the sound that came out was unbelievable. It had style, it had diction, she’d clearly been well taught, but it had that magic extra as well. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was going to have to walk in to beat her.’
When Rossiter and McGough offered Kiri the role of the eponymous heroine, Nell accepted immediately.
Nell had taken Kiri along to the ice rink audition after another St Mary’s girl, Lynne Cantlon, had declined the leading role in the musical due to other commitments. She had sensed an ideal opportunity for Kiri to make her mark as a rising star, and a Maori star at that.
Written by an Auckland electroplater, Lindsay Gordon Rowell, Uwane represented the first attempt to blend Maori and European influences on the theatrical stage. Conceived as a European style light musical comedy, the three act ‘musical fantasy’ was set in a Maori village and revolved around the story of two warriors and their efforts to woo the beautiful but mischievous Princess Uwane, ‘the wicked little witch of Whakatane’.
Nell would have known that Rowell had booked His Majesty’s Theatre for a ten night run beginning early in April. What she probably did not know, however, was that behind the scenes the portents were already far from encouraging. A number of Maori singers and actors had turned down offers of leading roles in the show, claiming it affronted rather than celebrated Maori culture. Both Rowell and his sister Zella, who had mortgaged their homes to finance the production, had been warned they would find little enthusiasm for such a show within a still deeply conservative Pakeha public.
While his make-up artist wife was already working on the sticky brown dye that would be used to darken the skins of the Maoris’ European replacements, Rossiter was approaching familiar faces to help him out of his crisis.
The role of the male hero, Manaia, had been given to a handsome English ex-soldier, Vincent Collins, who had been a hit as Joe Cable in South Pacific, Rossiter’s previous show at His Majesty’s. As a member of the British Army, the London-born Collins had seen his share of the world. He had been among the troops sent out to Africa to quell the Mau Mau uprising. He was something of a romantic adventurer too.
As rehearsals got under way the thirty-one-year-old Collins was instantly drawn to the eighteen-year-old with whom he would share most of his scenes in the coming weeks. Kiri had matured into a strikingly attractive young woman. Her thick-set frame and puppy fat features still lent her an air of girlish gawkiness. Her oversized personality and air of vaguely seductive self-confidence more than compensated for it. She had grown into a woman capable of inflaming passions. If she had not known it before taking up her role in Uwane, she certainly did by the end of the troubled production.
At the first rehearsal Collins had been as impressed as everyone else by Kiri’s voice. ‘I remember hearing her for the first time and realising there was a magic attached. It was not just another voice, Kiri was able to get a bird-like clarity,’ Collins recalled. Her personality was, if anything, even more beguiling. ‘She had a wonderful innocence and charm,’ he recalled. Collins found himself smitten almost immediately. ‘She was electrifying.’
Collins had recently broken off his engagement to a beautiful young ballet dancer, Beverley Jordan. The embers of their stormy relationship had yet to be fully extinguished, however. When Rossiter and McGough began searching for a choreographer, it had been Collins who had suggested his former girlfriend for the role. Over the coming weeks Jordan’s primary role was to teach Kiri to dance. It would present one of the sterner tests of her career so far.
Neil McGough had spotted Kiri’s lack of mobility almost immediately. He took the view that she had been hired for her voice and that it was Jordan’s job to polish her stagecraft. ‘It was the opposite of Fred Astaire’s famous audition. With Kiri it was “can’t move, can’t dance, can sing a bit”,’ said McGough. ‘But if she’d been a quadriplegic I think we’d have let her do the show in a wheelchair.’
On stage it quickly became apparent that Kiri was incapable of singing in anything other than the studied operatic pose she had struck at the rehearsal. ‘There’s not a lot one can do with a person who had never ever had any movement training unless they go home and work at it,’ said Jordan. ‘Kiri at that stage could obviously swing a golf club but she was not naturally co-ordinated.’
Director David Rossiter was soon despairing at Kiri’s deficiencies. ‘After the third rehearsal, David Rossiter lined them all up and said there was someone on the stage who was not up to it and they should shape up,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘He didn’t name her, but everyone knew it was Kiri.’
By the next rehearsal the following week, Kiri had undergone a Damascene conversion. ‘She went away to Sister Mary Leo and whatever she told her did the trick because the next time she came back you would not have recognised her,’ said Rowell.
Rowell, McGough, Rossiter and Jordan were experiencing a pattern that would become familiar to all who knew and worked with Kiri in later years. When the chips were down her application was absolute. At other times her relaxed approach could easily be construed at best as disinterest, at worst arrogance.
‘She was a little monkey for whom life was a big giggle,’ said Jordan. ‘She had no idea about the value of time and money. People had staked their houses on the success of this production but Kiri had no responsibilities.
‘To me she was an ignorant little twerp,’ she added unequivocally. ‘I think if the situation were repeated today there’s no doubt she would have been thrown out.’
McGough recognised the same immature tendencies. ‘She was late for things and then thought it was all funny, never took it seriously at all. She would not knuckle down and it was so tragic because she clearly had all the material there. Her voice was already powerful and accurate, although I found very quickly that if she got tired she went flat.’ What he came to call ‘Kiri notes’ could also be induced by lack of concentration. It was soon apparent that such lapses were an intrinsic part of Kiri’s professional persona, a trait she would never shake off.
If Kiri was treating her big break as something of a giggle, her mother was approaching it with the utmost seriousness. Nell’s Blockhouse Bay parties had become well known in musical circles. She used them as a showcase for Kiri’s talent and a vehicle for introducing her daughter to potential benefactors. For many they were simply occasions to be enjoyed. ‘There was a bloody good atmosphere up there, always plenty of drink and food,’ said Neil McGough, a talented trombonist, who attended many of Nell’s impromptu soirées with his Dixieland band, the Bridge City Jazzmen. ‘It wasn’t glamorous food – it was Pavlovas and Cheerios – but what there was there was always plenty of it. Nell would always carry out the biggest trays.’
To the eyes of others, like Beverley Jordan, they only served to ‘give an appearance of Kiri being popular’ and deepen the dislike of her bludgeoning mother. As far as many were concerned the hefty figure they saw urging her daughter on from the side of the stage was little more than a crude and at times intimidating bully. Their thoughts echoed feelings that had been widespread on the competition circuit for some time.
The bitching and backbiting which accompanied the singing contests had been apparent from Kiri’s earliest experiences at the Auckland Competitions. Kiri had seen one mother attempting to stop a rival singer from entering the competition hall because she had arrived ‘too late’. The girl ignored her, entered the hall and the competition on time and duly won. Kiri had quickly come to refer to the Competitions as ‘a scrap’. Nell had taken to these treacherous new waters like a duck to water. In the run-up to contests, she would think nothing of spending an hour on the phone to a rival singer, relentlessly holding forth about Kiri. ‘Her voice was very heavy and she spoke very slowly and deliberately,’ recalled one member of the Sister Mary Leo stable at the time. ‘She would talk about Kiri and how good she was. It was almost like she was trying to intimidate. It happened to us all.’
No tactic seemed too underhand, provided it ensured Kiri outshone her colleagues. ‘Sometimes if three or four St Mary’s girls were singing at an event together, she’d ring around asking each of them what they were going to wear that night,’ recalled the same Sister Mary Leo pupil. ‘She’d ask, “What are you going to wear tonight?” I’d say, “I thought I’d wear a long dress.” She’d say, “Kiri’s not going to wear that, she’s going to wear a short dress.” It might be a modest engagement, so everyone turned up in the short dresses except Kiri, who turned up in the long dress with the gloves and the whole works and looked the most attractive and glamorous. That really got up people’s noses and that’s why the general consensus was that she was not good for Kiri.’
Beverley Jordan was close to some of Kiri’s St Mary’s colleagues. ‘I know there was a lot of unhappiness and dissension at Sister Mary Leo’s because of the pushing and conniving that Nell did,’ she said. ‘Nell tried to tell Sister Mary Leo her job and she would undermine other singers, tell them they were no good, they weren’t talented, that Kiri was the star and was the one that would go to London and have her name in lights.’
‘Nell was very one-eyed,’ Kiri’s St Mary’s colleague Gillian Redstone said succinctly.
During the Uwane rehearsals Nell’s technique amounted to a form of telephone terrorism. She would sit quietly enough during rehearsals. Once the show’s production team were isolated at home, however, the phone would begin to ring. ‘It was always on the phone. It never stopped rehearsals and never happened publicly,’ says Beverly Jordan.
Lynne Cantlon’s early offer of the role of Uwane had come partly by courtesy of her mother, Una, who had been hired as the show’s wardrobe mistress. Relations between Una and Nell were already difficult – Una Cantlon was no shrinking violet herself – yet they were soon strained further. ‘She was always baling up poor Una,’ recalled Neil McGough. ‘She was saying Kiri’s costumes weren’t quite as nice as someone else’s and couldn’t she have a little more of this here and a bit less of that there.’
Beverley Jordan’s mother also suffered. Like Una Cantlon, she could not curb her tongue for long. ‘I remember both my mother and Lynne’s mother asking her whether she had any experience or had she just come off the marae in Gisborne?’ she said. ‘They both told her if she didn’t know anything about stage work she should keep her mouth shut.’
Even the show’s writer was not beyond a little lobbying. ‘She didn’t want Kiri described as a wicked little witch,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘She asked me to make a change to the script but I wasn’t changing it for anybody.’
Neil McGough had been exposed to the breed before. Nell’s weakness as a stage mother lay in her inability to know when to stop. ‘We didn’t dislike Nell, we admired her drive,’ he said. ‘She came to all the rehearsals. Everywhere you went, there was Nell. But she always went a step too far.’ To McGough, at least, the real worry was that Nell seemed to be the controlling influence in Kiri’s career. ‘Kiri never gave an impression that she cared terribly that her mother was like this,’ said McGough. ‘Kiri herself was very dominated by her mother.’
Inevitably Sister Mary Leo had also attempted to assert herself on the evolving drama. She had loftily insisted that the script and score were sent to her at St Mary’s. She wanted ‘to check whether there was anything too racy,’ said Lindsay Rowell. Satisfied that her emerging star’s wholesome image was not endangered, she turned her attention to the score itself. ‘And then she stopped Kiri from singing any of the really high notes in case she damaged her voice.’ After that, at least, she maintained a dignified distance from proceedings.
Inevitably Sister Mary Leo and Nell could not protect Kiri at all times. On the rare occasions when she was left to her own devices, however, it was clear she was perfectly capable of looking after herself.
Kiri’s habit of turning up late for rehearsals had done nothing to boost her popularity within an already disgruntled production. ‘Quite often she and her father would be out in the morning playing a round of golf. Everybody thought what a lovely life she led,’ said Beverley Jordan. When, to general dismay, Rowell’s sister Zella eased herself into a position of power within the production Kiri became the inevitable target. Even her own brother declared Zella Rowell ‘a bitch, born and bred. Zella had a way of putting everyone’s back up. She was greedy and selfish and everyone hated her.’ Her attention soon turned to the show’s youngest, least experienced performer.
‘Nasty little sarcastic comments were made between them,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘Kiri was young and couldn’t really fight back, but she was stubborn and she had quite clear ideas about how she wanted things done.’ The confrontations between the two reached a climax during one of the final rehearsals. ‘Kiri hid in the chorus when she was supposed to be up the front of the stage,’ said Rowell. When Zella demanded she move to her proper position on stage, Kiri refused to budge. ‘She turned to Zella and said, “I don’t care. You can like it or lump it.”’
‘Kiri could be emotional if people upset her. She was pretty strong willed in her own way,’ said Vincent Collins, who witnessed the scene.
If Kiri’s spirits ever sagged during the increasingly fraught rehearsal sessions, comfort was always close at hand in the virile form of her leading man. Kiri and Collins had found few difficulties in conjuring up a convincing chemistry between Uwane and Manaia. Away from rehearsals they had begun seeing each other discreetly.
‘It was a romance for a little while,’ Collins confirmed. On stage at His Majesty’s Collins and Kiri were careful not to arouse suspicions. ‘In my innocence I had thought that Kiri and Vince were just acting,’ remembered Lindsay Rowell’s wife Madeleine who watched most of the rehearsals from the stalls. ‘There was an atmosphere but I thought that was because they were playing lovers.’ Others were able to put two and two together to form an educated opinion of what was unfolding.
‘Kiri was a flirt, and a very pretty flirt at that,’ said Neil McGough. ‘Vincent was a good-looking joker and he thought it was very nice. He did respond a little further than he should have,’ he added. One member of the production was more acutely attuned to developments than anyone, however. Beverley Jordan was all too familiar with the wiles of Vincent Collins.
‘I broke things off with him because he was a charmer and had a lot of ladies on the go,’ she recalled. ‘That wasn’t my cup of tea.’ Jordan claims to have shrugged her shoulders at the romance. ‘I couldn’t have cared less. It was over and if he wanted to get involved with her that was his business,’ she said.
Her mother was less philosophical when she discovered what was going on, however. Jordan returned one night to find her involved in a heated telephone conversation. It was soon apparent who was on the receiving end of the abuse. ‘It turned out to be Nell Te Kanawa,’ Jordan recalled. ‘My mother was telling her she should keep her daughter in check and not keep waltzing off with other people’s boyfriends.’
If the tirade had an effect it was the diametric opposite of that which had been intended. Soon Vincent and Kiri were making no secret of their relationship.
On the evening of Wednesday, 11 April 1962, His Majesty’s Theatre was filled to capacity. For the producers of Uwane, however, the grim reality was that only 200 or so of the 2,000 seats had been paid for. ‘They flooded all the nursing homes with free tickets. You lassoed people off the street if you had to on the night the critics were there,’ said Neil McGough.
The lack of interest in the show’s ‘world première’ could not be blamed on Nell Te Kanawa. In the run up to the opening night she had turned her attentions to drumming up support within her ever extending circle of patrons and supporters within Auckland. At another time and in another place, Nell’s innate skills could have made her a mogul within the world of public relations. She wielded flattery and force with well-practised ease. ‘She could charm the birds from the trees,’ recalled Beverley Jordan. ‘She was an absolutely brilliant PR woman.’ Nell had by now begun to cultivate contacts within the Auckland media. The New Zealand press were intrigued by Uwane’s curiosity value if nothing else. Her mother ensured Kiri’s face became a familiar one as the opening night loomed.
Kiri featured in a lengthy article on the musical in the leading magazine of the day, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. On the morning before the show a photograph of Kiri in her traditional flax skirt, or piu-piu, taken at a dress rehearsal the previous Sunday, filled page three of the nation’s most respected newspaper, the New Zealand Herald. Kiri had placed great store in the fact she had no plans to desert her teacher at St Mary’s. In the official Uwane programme she repeated her promise that she had ‘unlike so many of our talented young singers, no desire to travel abroad’. Her words would have gone down well with John Waititi who was among the many to have been given free seats that night. In a late effort to win a little support among Maori organisations, Lindsay and Zella Rowell had announced that all proceeds from the show would go to the Maori Education Foundation. It would soon be clear that the organisation would be the least of the evening’s losers.
At the end of the show the audience applauded enthusiastically. Kiri and Vincent Collins held hands as they took their curtain call together. The following morning, however, Auckland’s small circle of theatre critics damned Uwane with faint praise. ‘Uwane – a good try, but …’ ran the headline in the Auckland Star. ‘Brave Effort’ was the best the New Zealand Herald could muster for the show as a whole.
While the critics couldn’t warm to the Rowells’ blend of the fantastical and the formulaic, they were united in their praise for Kiri. ‘Whether Uwane is a public success or not, it has done a service in bringing forward at least two good voices, the warm mezzo of Kiri Te Kanawa and the resonant baritone of John Morgan,’ wrote Desmond Mahoney in the Star.
‘The star of the show, and a bright one at that, is Kiri Te Kanawa,’ wrote the Herald’s L. C. M. Saunders. ‘Natural and graceful in her movement, speech and singing, she reveals a real talent.’
To judge by the telegram which arrived at the stage door of His Majesty’s Theatre the following morning the previous evening had been a five-star triumph. The brief message bore Nell’s unmistakable imprimatur.
Congratulations, and my personal thanks. I would never have had such nice things said about me in the paper without your wonderful help and support. Thank you all and God bless you.
Kiri Te Kanawa.
By the time the cast took the stage for the second night’s performance, however, the damage caused by the reviews was all too obvious. Even fewer paying customers were dotted around the auditorium. In the absence of the adrenaline of the previous evening, Kiri understandably failed to shine as brightly. In the first half, to Neil McGough’s horror, she accidentally left out a verse from one of her solos. As her conductor attempted to repair her mistake he looked up to see Kiri frozen on stage. ‘She looked straight ahead stoically and carried on until the end of the song while I waved my arms like a demented grasshopper. She just didn’t have the experience to know what to do, to look at me and let me fix it.’
During the interval McGough headed for her dressing room but was intercepted by the stage manager. ‘He said, “She’s locked herself in her room, she’s in tears and mum’s with her. She’s never going to sing again.’” McGough passed a message on to Kiri via Nell. ‘I said, “Tell her not to break her heart about it and that everyone makes mistakes.” Kiri had never sung with orchestras before and I think that was a contributing factor, that she thought it was our job to follow her, because that’s what pianists did. She thought conductors were just for collecting tickets on the trams.’
By the third night she had corrected her mistake like the trouper she had quickly become. This time, however, there were only thirty-two there to witness her performance. Before curtain up that evening Kiri and the fifty-four other members of the cast had been called onto the stage to be told the following night’s performance, the fourth, would be the last.
‘Even though the reasons were obvious it came as a great shock,’ recalled singer Brian O’Connor. ‘Shows didn’t close early in those days.’
While her brother kept a dignified silence, Zella Rowell lashed out. ‘I have no faith left in New Zealanders’ patriotism. I am appalled at the public’s apathy,’ she told the New Zealand Herald. ‘I have lost everything.’ Rowell had promised to pay every member of the cast and crew from the show’s profits. Unsurprisingly few remember ever receiving any money.
In the months and years that followed, almost everyone downplayed their connection with Uwane. It was completely erased from Kiri’s curriculum vitae almost immediately and she appears never to have spoken of her first starring role since. She did not thank McGough when he saw her a few years later and mentioned it. ‘I said, “You’ve come a long way since Uwane.” She said, “You rotten bugger, I’ve been trying to forget that for years.”’
In the immediate aftermath of the show’s failure, however, Kiri fared better than almost any other member of the production. Among the audience on the opening night had been a well-known talent scout Peter Claman, an expatriate Englishman who had been president of the Wembley Music Club in London. He had been sent to the show by one of the country’s leading recording producers Tony Vercoe of Kiwi Records in Wellington. His written report to Vercoe ran along the lines: ‘Tony, you want to get after this one.’
To Claman’s eyes and ears at least, Kiri was the sole redeeming feature in the ill-fated musical. ‘He told me that she stuck out a mile. She was head and shoulders above the music and anyone else in the cast,’ recalled Vercoe.
Drawing on the quiet determination that had helped him survive a lengthy spell in German PoW camps during World War II, Vercoe had turned Kiwi Records into one of New Zealand’s prestige recording labels. Owned by the Wellington publishers A. H. & A. W. Reed, the label had already registered successes with classical recordings of other members of Sister Mary Leo’s stable of singers, including Malvina Major.
Intrigued by Claman’s recommendation, Vercoe decided against approaching Kiri directly. ‘She was so young,’ he recalled. ‘So I approached Sister Mary Leo, who I knew anyway.’ Within days Vercoe was sitting in St Patrick’s Cathedral, captivated by the sight and sound of Kiri singing the solo in ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ from Johann Strauss’s Casanova, with the St Mary’s Choir behind her. ‘She put on a special performance just for me,’ he said. As the final notes of the chorus faded into the air, Vercoe shared his first thoughts with Sister Mary Leo. ‘I was so impressed I said, “Well, we’d better start off by recording that.’” Tony Vercoe would transform the star of the unloved Uwane into the most idolised popular singer his country had ever seen.
Amid the rancour and recriminations that followed the collapse of Uwane, one relationship flourished. Soon after the final curtain came down the show’s leading man moved in to the Blockhouse Bay home of his leading lady. Collins was given a room in the basement beneath the main house and became a familiar face to Kiri’s friends. Her closest allies from St Mary’s had been two fellow music school students she had met in the choir, Raewyn Blade and Sally Rush. Kiri and Blade in particular were passionate lovers of the great Broadway and Hollywood musicals. At the end of that year they joined Collins in an amateur production of The Student Prince. Blade and Kiri would go on the following year to perform in the chorus of a production of the musical Annie Get Tour Gun at the King’s Theatre, starring the English singer Anne Hart in the title role.
Nell and Tom seemed content to have Kiri’s boyfriend living under the same roof. ‘Nell was great, she had a great sense of humour, although no one dared sit in her chair,’ laughed Collins. Kiri’s boyfriend grew particularly close to Tom with whom he would go to rugby matches. ‘He was the most gentle man I have met in my whole life,’ he said.
As he got to know the family better, Vincent sensed Tom and Nell were readying themselves for the inevitable moment when Kiri would fly the nest. ‘I think the parents were thinking about what the future held. Her mother worked tirelessly and Tom in his kind way was always there to support,’ Collins recalled. ‘But they couldn’t be there for ever. They were getting older and I think Tom and Nell were anxious that Kiri should meet someone who would look after her.’ For much of that year, it was clear that the witty and worldly Collins was considered a candidate for the role.
Judy and Nola, by now back in Auckland and living in a home nearby, warmed to Collins immediately. ‘He was a nice guy,’ recalled Judy. To Judy it was clear that Collins had been given Nell’s stamp of approval. ‘Boys always had to be run through the grill,’ she said. ‘They were always checked out by my grandmother.’ The suave Englishman remained a part of the Mitchell Street fixtures and fittings for eighteen months.
Judy recalled how Nell insisted on giving Kiri and her advice on how to behave in relationships with the opposite sex. Her prim and proper pep-talks ranged from the etiquette of the first date to the ending of a romance. One particular piece of wisdom would soon prove useful to Kiri. ‘I remember she told us once how you should never two-time anyone,’ recalled Judy. ‘You got rid of one person and got on with the next.’
A Princess in a Castle (#ulink_bcdb1637-efef-593a-8b3f-023c8acb614f)
In September 1963 Kiri made the long drive south to Hamilton and the finals of the most prestigious of all New Zealand’s singing prizes, the biennial Mobil Song Quest.
From the moment she stepped on to the red carpeted entrance to the city’s grandest hotel, the Hamilton, it was as if she had entered a world attuned to her every whim. Upstairs in her room maids placed bouquets of flowers in cut-glass vases and the telephone rang constantly with dinner invitations and interview requests. Downstairs in the lobby staff introduced themselves politely, complimented her on her appearance and ushered her into the chauffeur-driven car permanently at her disposal. It was, she said later, her first taste of being treated like ‘a Princess in a castle’. Yet in her heart she still did not quite feel worthy of it all.
Even though her voice had matured into a glorious, rounded mezzo, Sister Mary Leo’s lack of praise had done little to ease Kiri’s occasional insecurity about the real depth of her talent. At the semi-finals for the Song Quest in Auckland, Kiri had been convinced her renditions of ‘Come to the Fair’ and ‘She is Far From the Land’ were disasters. Her performance was recorded for transmission on a special radio show days later when the six finalists would be chosen. She could not bear to listen as her voice filled Nell’s bedroom in the early evening broadcast. She had hidden in her own room with pillows over her ears as the names of the six singers chosen to travel to Hamilton were read out. Even the pillows had been unable to drown out the sound of Nell booming ‘You’re in, you’re in’, from the top of the stairs.
