Kiri: Her Unsung Story

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Kiri’s request merely reflected the new determination she had begun to demonstrate. In the week before Tauranga, she and Smith closeted themselves away at a boarding house. Smith duly played exclusively for Kiri, who, dressed in a shimmering white robe, won the major aria competition and its first prize. Smith remembers ‘bursting into tears of sheer relief’ at the result, while Kiri accepted what was her biggest triumph to date with perfect poise. Kiri gave her pianist a giant panda bear as a token of her thanks. ‘She was very generous to me,’ said Smith, who also received jewellery from Kiri.

For Smith, however, Tauranga marked a watershed. ‘From being a very happy, natural, outgoing girl, she became a very scheming, conniving person.’

To Smith, it seemed Kiri was now willing to use whatever means necessary to succeed. Among her most enthusiastic supporters was a contact Nell had cultivated, H. J. ‘Bill’ Barrett, boss of the ASB bank in Auckland. At a private function attended by Barrett and his wife Shirley, Smith was taken aback when Kiri set off on a story that was clearly less than the truth. ‘I was a bit shocked and horrified, and I remember sitting with her in the car afterwards and I said, “You can’t do that, Kiri, that’s not right.” And she just said, “Look, I know I use him, but if he is too silly to see, who cares?” I thought that was an appalling attitude, really.’

In Smith’s eyes, it was clear that stardom had transformed Kiri when she accompanied Kiri and the Maori tenor Michael McGifford to sing at a raffle evening. In a spirit of fun, McGifford had followed a duet with Kiri with a solo serenade of Smith at the piano. When it came to drawing the evening raffle tickets, Smith rather than Kiri had been asked to select the winning numbers. Smith was stunned at Kiri’s reaction in the car on the way home. ‘I was told that was not the way to behave. I wasn’t to overshadow her,’ she said. ‘You and I would not take a bit of notice of that, but Kiri did. She was furious.’

The end of Kiri’s relationship with Peter Webb represented the final turning point as far as Smith was concerned. It had been soon afterwards, in the car as they travelled from St Mary’s towards Blockhouse Bay one day, that Kiri broke the news that she no longer required her services. Smith understood Kiri’s need for male attention better than most. ‘Afterwards, she didn’t want to be seen with me,’ she said. ‘She felt she needed to be seen with a male accompanist-cum-escort.’ Smith played her final engagements with Kiri soon after the twenty-first birthday party. At the time she was deeply wounded by the rejection. Eventually, however, Smith looked back on her relationship with Kiri with a mixture of philosophy and fondness. ‘I always feel I got the best of Kiri,’ she said.

Kiri’s male accompanist materialised soon enough. A few weeks after her twenty-first Kiri was introduced to a talented Auckland pianist, Brooke Monks. Monks’s father Raymond had built the family business, David Elman Shoes, into a thriving enterprise. Brooke’s mother Berys, known as Billie, was a prominent figure in Auckland’s polite society and a keen supporter of arts and music charities in particular. It had been Billie Monks who engineered the introduction. When Kiri suggested her twenty-one-year-old son become her accompanist at her non-competitive engagements he accepted immediately.

Brooke’s love of the piano had been instilled in him by Billie. His playing style was flamboyant, full of florid embellishments and unashamedly romantic touches. On the dine’n’ dance circuit he soon added a new dimension to Kiri’s performances, his flowing melodies combining perfectly with his partner’s voice on West Side Story numbers like ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight’ in particular. The looks of affection the duo were soon exchanging across the piano only added to the romantic effect.

According to Brooke it took little time for their musical partnership to develop into something more serious. ‘It didn’t really take very long. We were doing a lot together and it started to change certainly in the first couple of months,’ he recalled.

Brooke was drawn to Kiri’s down-to-earth beauty. ‘She was a very attractive girl and a great personality. She had no airs and graces,’ he recalled. ‘We were very much alike in lots of ways. We both enjoyed life and we were both musical and there was a great opportunity to do things.’ Soon Brooke and Kiri began using their performances as a way of escaping Auckland. ‘We never turned things down. We did so much.’ Country hotels at Rotorua and Wairaki and, in particular, near the hot pools at Waiwera, became their regular romantic hideaways. On occasions they also hid away at the Te Kanawa cabin at Hatepe.

Often they would travel with Kiri’s fellow Maoris, Hannah Tatana and Michael McGifford. Kiri’s career had already begun to eclipse Tatana’s. To her older partner’s eyes, however, her success was a success for the Maori population as a whole.

As she travelled the country with McGifford, Kiri and Brooke, Tatana was unsure of her friend’s new beau. Yet there was no disguising the passion Kiri felt for her flamboyant pianist. The trio had become particular favourites of the Maori Queen, Te-Ata-i-rangi-kaahu. After singing at her home at Ngaruawahia one weekend evening, Tatana and McGifford discovered their colleagues had left before them. As they arrived at the steamed-up car the reason for their early departure was all too apparent. ‘Obviously something had been going on in the back of the car while we were in the hall,’ said Tatana.

Invariably Kiri and Brooke would sit in the front of the car while Hannah and Michael sat in the back. For years afterwards McGifford teased Tatana about her naivety. As Brooke drove, Kiri’s head would disappear out of sight at the front of the car. ‘What on earth is she doing down there?’ her older, but less worldly-wise colleague would ask McGifford. He would sit in embarrassed silence. ‘She was clearly besotted by him,’ Tatana said.

As ever, Kiri wasted little time in introducing Brooke to Nell and Tom. After ‘running him through the grill’, Nell was impressed by what she saw. ‘My grandmother always liked Brooke,’ recalls Judy Evans-Hita. ‘He always made time to chat. He was a nice guy.’

Nell’s feelings for Brooke were reciprocated. ‘She was a real old battleaxe but we got on very well,’ recalled Brooke. ‘I think she was on my side right the way through the relationship.’

Brooke’s parents were less enamoured with the idea of the couple. Raymond Monks expected his son to follow his hard-working example. Instead Brooke’s devotion to his university studies in German and Italian waned alarmingly as his romance with Kiri deepened. Having brokered the friendship in the first place, Billie Monks was even more horrified at the turn of events. ‘I suppose my parents thought that things moved a bit fast for them,’ Brooke said. Kiri eventually charmed Raymond Monks into accepting her but Billie remained cool. ‘In those days my mother was looking after her son like Nell looked after Kiri, protecting their own.’

Brooke’s mother certainly shared Nell’s resourcefulness. When she heard talk of Kiri’s involvement with Vincent Collins, she invited the English actor’s former fiancée to visit her for a chat. Beverley Jordan had put the horrors of Uwane behind her and was now happily married. ‘She asked if I would go around and have a cup of coffee because she wanted to know about Kiri and her involvement with Vincent,’ she remembered. ‘She wanted to know whether she could trust her son with Kiri. I can’t remember what was said,’ she added diplomatically.

Billie Monks’s frostiness towards Kiri was almost certainly a matter of class. To members of Auckland’s polite society, Kiri was the daughter of a pushy provincial arriviste, a crude country bumpkin with ideas above her station. Nell’s reputation was, by now, beginning to embarrass even Kiri. ‘She could not help be aware of her mother’s background. I think she was insecure about it,’ said Hannah Tatana.

In the years since her daughter’s breakthrough Nell’s unsubtle blend of aggression and avarice had offended many within the musical establishment. Kiri had begun singing on the radio show hosted by Ossie Cheesman, New Zealand’s top musical arranger and bandleader at the time. ‘Ossie kept getting Nell on the phone demanding more money. After a while he got fed up and stopped using Kiri,’ said one of Cheesman’s closest friends, Neil McGough.

McGough had heard a similar story repeated all over the city. ‘Radio had a strict regime of set fees for singers. If it was three pounds ten, Nell would demand seven pounds for Kiri.’ For a time Kiri’s voice had become a rarity on radio. ‘Nell simply pushed too hard. She thought the world had to be changed to suit Kiri, but there were plenty of other good singers,’ McGough said.

Her granddaughter Judy has many happy memories of Nell Te Kanawa, but even she admits, ‘Nana’s life was spent polishing Kiri. Anyone or anything that got in the way of that goal would be removed. Perhaps I would do the same, but that’s the way it was.’

Even the unerringly honest Tony Vercoe, renowned all over New Zealand as a man whose verbal contracts were watertight, found her an awkward customer. ‘She was not as objective as one would have hoped,’ he admitted. ‘I do not want to be criticising those who are no longer with us, but it could have been difficult at times, I will say that. Nell had her likes and dislikes and they were fairly well defined. If people got across her then that was a bit unfortunate for them.’

As the winter of 1965 wore on, however, Vercoe did all he could to remain on the right side of Nell. Kiri had become the hottest property his company had come across in years. In the truest traditions of showbusiness, the success of ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ had caught everyone by surprise. ‘There was a bit of publicity, but there was no payola, no palm greasing, no big hype, nothing like that,’ remembered Vercoe. ‘It wasn’t like the Spice Girls, although I suppose there are similarities. It was much more spontaneous. A big wave started to roll and grew and grew, naturally, somehow. The whole country got behind her. It was extraordinary.’