Книга - Kiri: Her Unsung Story

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.’

Jack’s wife Apo had suspected nothing of her husband’s infidelity, even when he returned with little of his wages left. She put his shortage of money down to his weakness for drinking and gambling on a game called ‘two up’. ‘Jack was terrible with money,’ she lamented. Soon, however, news of his relationship with another woman found its way back to the farm via relations in Tokomaru Bay. While her father, an introverted man, bottled up his fury, Apo packed her bags and headed south to confront her husband. ‘It was a hell of a shock. I hadn’t expected it,’ she said.

When Noeleen got wind of Jack’s wife’s imminent arrival she prepared for the worst. ‘She thought she was coming to knock her block off,’ said Donny, to whom she confided news of the crisis. ‘Maybe Jack warned her because Noeleen stayed well out of the way all weekend.’

Instead, however, Apo maintained a dignified silence. She moved in with Jack in Waima and let him know she intended staying until their marriage was once more on an even keel. When she eventually saw Noeleen on the street she simply ignored her. ‘I couldn’t help but pass Noeleen by – but I don’t think I ever spoke to her,’ she recalled.

Apo treated her husband’s contrition with the scepticism it deserved. ‘He was a naughty boy. Jack said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again.’ In years to come Jack would confirm her suspicions by straying once more, this time for good. Yet by the end of the freezing season of 1943 the couple were able to make the journey back to Rangitukia with their marriage intact.

Unable to see or speak to Jack, Noeleen was powerless as the latest man in her life left Tokomaru Bay. Her pain was compounded by the fact that he did so oblivious to the reality she was left to face alone. She was pregnant once more.

During the early months of morning sickness, Noeleen managed to keep the news to herself. ‘We never knew,’ said her sister Donny. ‘She never told me or anyone else.’

If she had a confidante, it was probably a woman from outside Tokomaru Bay and her family circle, Kura Beale, stepdaughter of the area’s richest landowner, A.B. Williams, for whom Noeleen had worked as a cleaner in nearby Te Puia Springs. According to some, Kura Beale had herself fallen pregnant in unfortunate circumstances and had, apparently, given her child away for adoption. As Noeleen’s condition became obvious, however, it seems her mother realised what had happened and was instrumental in Noeleen’s decision to leave Tokomaru Bay. Noeleen decided to head for Gisborne, a town large enough and far away enough for her to have her baby in relative peace. When she left, her mother had prepared a cover story for her. ‘I remember my mother telling me that Noeleen had gone away to work for a while,’ said Donny.

The unhappiness she must have endured during the final weeks of her pregnancy can only be imagined. Her misery came to an end at the maternity annexe of the Cook Hospital, on 6 March, when she gave birth to a baby girl. She named the child Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron.

With Jack Wawatai once more reunited with his family and unlikely to have been aware of the birth, Noeleen had no choice but to leave the name of the girl’s father blank on the birth certificate. Forced to remain in Gisborne and without an income, however, she could not leave matters as they were for long.

If Jack and Apo Wawatai had hoped the unpleasantness of the previous year had been put behind them, their wishes were shattered when a policeman arrived on the farm one day that autumn. The officer solemnly presented Jack with a summons to appear at the courthouse in Rotorua in the coming days. ‘He had to go to Rotorua for a hearing about maintenance for the baby,’ said his sister, Huka. ‘That was the first we knew of it.’ Shaken and confused, Jack once more turned to his wife in the hope she would be understanding. ‘He said we should take her in as our own,’ recalled Apo. This time, however, his wish was beyond even Apo’s charity. ‘I told him that was out of the question,’ she said softly. ‘Apart from anything, we had enough children already and couldn’t afford it. Things were very hard at the time.’

It is unclear what decision the court in Rotorua came to when it heard the case against Jack Wawatai. Even if Noeleen had been able to prove he was the baby’s father, any maintenance award would have been pitiful given his finances and other responsibilities. The court case only underlined the hopelessness of Noeleen’s predicament. She knew she would eventually be forced to return to Tokomaru Bay and her mother. Yet she also knew that Thelma’s hostility towards her – and the child of an adulterous affair with a Maori man – would be hard to bear.

A few weeks after baby Claire’s birth, Noeleen – perhaps influenced by her friendship with Kura Beale – decided to put her up for adoption and headed back up to Tokomaru Bay where she picked up her life with her mother and her son Jimmy. There she maintained a steadfast silence about the dramas of that year for the rest of her life.


‘The Boss’ (#ulink_d89fd533-7c41-5550-a194-a17d63a4833a)

Within weeks of Noeleen Rawstron’s departure back to Tokomaru Bay, a member of Gisborne’s social services staff took baby Claire to a house at 161 Grey Street, a short walk from the ocean. There the social worker introduced her to a Maori, Atama ‘Tom’ Te Kanawa, and his wife Nell.

The middle-aged couple had been married for four years. While Tom ran a successful trucking company, Nell was in the process of completing the purchase of the Grey Street property which she was already running as a thriving boarding house.

Approaching her forty-seventh birthday, Nell, the mother of two children from a previous marriage, was now too old to bear Tom a child. The couple had decided to adopt instead. According to their own account, passed on to their daughter later, Tom Te Kanawa was particularly keen to adopt a boy and rejected Claire on first meeting her. Unable to find another home for the baby, however, the social worker persisted. When Claire was taken to Grey Street for a second time Tom had been smitten by the dusky-skinned little girl with huge limpid eyes. He and Nell agreed to adopt her as their daughter.

As the legal formalities were completed Tom and Nell were asked to choose the child’s new name. Nell had agreed with Tom’s idea of calling the little girl Kiri, after Tom’s father, a Maori name meaning ‘bell’ or ‘skin of the tree’, depending on the dialect. For her other names they chose Jeanette, one of Nell’s own middle names, and Claire, the only name they had heard the social workers use when referring to the child. For decades to come, the name her birth mother had chosen for her would remain Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa’s sole link with her troubled past.

As she handed her baby over to the town’s social services, Noeleen Rawstron had accepted that she could have no say in choosing the family who would become Claire’s parents. As she dwelled on her daughter’s fate back in Tokomaru Bay, she would have hoped for a life filled with love and security. On a deeper level, her instincts may have wished for a home and a family background that fitted the little girl’s own complex beginnings. In time Noeleen would come to discover the identity of the couple who had taken her daughter in, but she would never appreciate quite how alike Claire’s real and adopted parents were.

In the course of a colourful and eventful life, the redoubtable Mrs Tom Te Kanawa had found herself addressed by any number of names, not all of them charitable. At birth on 14 October 1897, she had been christened Hellena Janet Leece. Since then she had been addressed at different times, and with varying degrees of happiness, as Mrs Alfred John Green and Mrs Stephen Whitehead. In electoral and postal directories around the North and South Islands of New Zealand, her unusual Christian name had been rearranged as Ellenor, Eleanor and even Heleanor. It was little wonder she insisted new friends simply call her Nell. To her family and the boarders she took in at her guest house there was little cause for confusion, however. To them she was The Boss – and she always would be.

A boisterous, ruddy-cheeked woman with a heart – and a temper – to match her oversized frame, Nell Te Kanawa cast her considerable shadow over every aspect of life at the house that became baby Claire Rawstron’s new home. During the formative years of her new daughter’s life she would be its dominant – and at times overwhelmingly domineering – force. She would not thank her for it until later in life. Yet without The Boss, it is unlikely Kiri Te Kanawa would have left the town of Gisborne, let alone the North Island of New Zealand.

Like Thelma and Noeleen Rawstron, Nell Te Kanawa had endured a life of early hardship. She was born in the gold-mining town of Waihi in the Bay of Plenty. Nell’s mother, Emily Leece, née Sullivan, was the daugter of a miner, Jeremiah Sullivan. She was one of fifteen children Emily bore with her husband, another miner, John Alfred Leece, originally from Rushen on the Isle of Man. Like many men of his generation, John Leece dreamt of making a fortune at Australasia’s largest gold mine. Instead, however, his life seems to have disintegrated there. It is unclear whether Emily Leece was widowed or divorced her husband. What is certain is that when Hellena was a teenager her mother uprooted the family to the town of Nelson, at the northerly tip of the South Island, where she set up a new life without John Leece.

‘Nell’, as everyone called Hellena, was less than lucky in her own relationships with men. It was certainly not for the lack of trying.

She had wasted little time in finding a husband. She had been just eighteen when she married Alfred John Green, a twenty-year-old labourer from Hobart. Nell had been employed as a factory worker in the town and living with her mother, now re-married to a Nelson labourer called William John Staines. Emily and her new husband were the witnesses at the wedding, held at the town’s Catholic Church on Manuka Street on Monday, 1 November 1915.

Within four years, the Greens had two children; Stan, born in 1916, and Nola, born three years later. Around the time of Nola’s arrival in the world the family moved to a farm in the remote community of Waimangaroa, outside Westport on the stormy west coast of the South Island where Nell’s parents had been married. Life on the land seems to have proven too hard and soon the family were living in the tiny village of Denniston, where Alfred had found work as a carpenter. The move was no less of a failure. With Stan and Nola, Nell left her husband and Denniston for Gisborne on the East Cape of the North Island. She and Alfred Green were divorced in October 1933.

The divorce inspired a new energy in Nell’s life. In the years that followed, she often proclaimed that she had arrived in Gisborne with nothing but ‘two suitcases and two kids’. With the determination that would characterise her later years, she began the process of building a more secure life for herself and her family.

With Stan and Nola and a relation of her mother’s, Irene Beatrice Staines, she moved into a large boarding house at 161 Grey Street. It was while lodging here that, according to some, Nell began performing illegal abortions. Her services were much in demand in the busy coastal town where too many young women found themselves compromised by visiting sailors and other transient workers. As discreet as she was efficient, she apparently found much of her custom within members of the Gisborne’s growing Greek and Italian immigrant population.

Nell had soon found herself a new husband too. Around the time her first marriage was dissolved she met Stephen Whitehead, a forty-eight-year-old widower from Gisborne. Nell and Whitehead, a bicycle dealer and mechanic, were married at the registrar’s office in Gisborne on 8 August 1935. The marriage proved childless, short-lived and somewhat scandalous. It was Kiri herself who later suggested Nell’s second marriage had left her in disgrace, both with her family and the Catholic Church. ‘There had even been talk of excommunication,’ she remembered. If the exact details of Nell’s shame are unclear, it is not difficult to imagine the outrage her backstreet operations would have provoked if they had become known within the church.

From baby Claire’s perspective, at least, there were more encouraging threads linking the lives of Nell Te Kanawa and Noeleen Rawstron. Of all the parallels, perhaps none would prove so significant as the fact that both Nell and Noeleen had found themselves involved in mixed-race relationships.

As her second marriage headed towards divorce, Nell had met and fallen in love with a soft-spoken, deeply reserved truck driver also lodging at Grey Street. In Atama ‘Tom’ Te Kanawa, it turned out, she had found the ideal man with whom to reinvent herself.

Tom Te Kanawa’s family originated from the west coast of the North Island, near Kawhia Harbour and the community of Kinohaku. His bloodlines led directly back to a legendary Maori figure, Chief Te Kanawa of one of the Waikato tribes, the Maniapoto. Chief Te Kanawa’s primary claim to a place in New Zealand’s history rests on his exploits in the Maori wars of the 1820s. In 1826, Te Kanawa and another chieftain, Te Wherowhero, had ended the ambitions of the region’s most feared warlord, Pomare-nui, by ambushing his canoe and murdering him. According to Maori folklore, the two chiefs had then cooked and eaten their vanquished rival. As the gruesome ritual had been carried out, strange, yellow granules had been found inside his stomach. Thus, corn is said to have arrived in the Waikato region.

Tom was one of thirteen children born to a farmer, Kiri Te Kanawa, and his wife Taongahuia Moerua. By the time Tom, his parents’ fourth child and third son, arrived in the world in 1902, the Te Kanawa family had moved from Kawhia inland to the lush green hills above the small towns of Otorohanga and Waitomo. Tom spent the formative years of his childhood in a community built around the family meeting place, or marae, Pohatuiri. The community was a remote collection of earth-floored houses made from punga logs – the trunks of a native fern tree – set miles from the nearest roads. His early life there was rooted in a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle that had served the Maori people for centuries.

Tom’s younger brother, Mita, later wrote of the Te Kanawas’ way of life in a privately published history. He remembered Pohatuiri as a ‘very busy community’, and looked back with affection at ‘the closeness, unity and warmth of everyone’ who shared their world. The fertile land around Pohatuiri provided almost everything they needed. The families bought in only sugar, salt, flour, tobacco and alcohol to supplement their home-brewed supplies. Seafood was often provided by family members from Kawhia. In this land of milk and honey, the depression that afflicted the rest of the world in the 1930s passed almost unnoticed.

The highlights of each year were the huis, or feasts, prepared communally. ‘Our family homestead was situated just above where the spring and the orchard trees were. Whenever there as a hui approaching, everyone planned on the preparation for the function,’ Mita wrote. ‘Each family group looked after certain duties, but we all helped each other. Fruit picking was done by all of us – we collected the fruit and our kuia [elder women] would be busy with the making of jams, pickles, sauces, preserves and homebrews.’

Both Tom’s parents were God-fearing individuals. Taongahuia’s family were staunch members of the Christian Ratana movement, named after its founder Bill Ratana, a farmer who had become convinced of his pastoral role after witnessing visions in 1919. Kiri was never slow to chastise younger members of the family overheard using bad language. It was a community steeped in the Maori language, and its tradition of passing its history on orally rather than the written word. According to the family, Kiri was the possessor of a fine singing voice. ‘Kiri and his wife couldn’t speak English at all. They didn’t really have to up there,’ said Kay Rowbottom, Tom’s niece, the daughter of his sister Te Waamoana. ‘They maybe could read a little but not speak it, perhaps just a few basic words.’

At school, however, Tom was introduced to the harsh realities of New Zealand life. Tom and his siblings were taught English as a second language and were banned by statute from any use of their native tongue. ‘In that era they would have been beaten with a leather strap for speaking Maori,’ said Kay Rowbottom.

Tom’s childhood in the hills eventually came to an end when he was sent to a foster mother, Ngapawa Ormsby, in the town of Otorohanga. The arrangement was far from unusual. ‘Kids were fostered out as workers,’ said Kay Rowbottom. ‘They were like slaves. In a lot of cases, the girls worked in the houses and the boys on the land.’ Tom’s unhappiness at the arrangement was soon obvious, however. ‘I don’t think Tom enjoyed his time down there. I remember people talking about it years later.’

Tom went to a local school for both Maori and European (or Pakeha) children but, like all but the offspring of the wealthy, had no option but to leave at the age of twelve. Forced to find his own way in the world, he became increasingly estranged from the Maori family in which he had been raised. The death of his parents and the end of the old lifestyle at Pohatuiri, where the old community was slowly reabsorbed into the bush from which it had grown, only added to the distance between him and his siblings.

While the Te Kanawa family moved to the Moerua family’s marae at Te Korapatu, Tom decided to break away from his roots and move to Gisborne on the east coast. He arrived there in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It was while renting a room at 161 Grey Street that he met the formidable figure of Nell Whitehead.

On the face of it, at least, Tom and Nell made an unlikely couple. At the age of thirty-seven, Tom was five years Nell’s junior. He was as taciturn as she was ebullient. She had been married twice before, he had seemingly formed few, if any, lasting relationships. Yet against all the odds they seem to have conducted a whirlwind romance. They were married in Gisborne on 14 July 1939, only twenty-four days after Nell had been granted a decree absolute dissolving her second marriage.

In many respects Tom and Nell Te Kanawa were older, wiser and, in Gisborne terms at least, more financially secure versions of Jack Wawatai and Noeleen Rawstron. From the very beginning, they devoted their lives to giving their only daughter Kiri everything she could possibly want in life.

Perhaps Tom’s most significant gift was the name he chose for his baby girl. His choice of his father’s name served a dual purpose. In the short term the name short-circuited any arguments within the family over the child’s adoption into the Te Kanawa line. While fostering was a common practice among Maori, full adoption was rarer. Tom’s relations, notably his younger brother Mita, believed the Te Kanawa name was reserved for blood family and adoption diluted that exclusivity. ‘Mita didn’t like adopting kids,’ said Kay Rowbottom. ‘His only daughter Collen was fostered by him and his wife but they never adopted her. She was always known as Collen Keepa, her birth surname, and she’s no relation of the Te Kanawa family.’

Tom, who had been unhappy during his time as a foster child, was not about to condemn his only daughter to such limbo. Deliberately or otherwise, by handing on his father’s Christian name, a gift Maori tradition dictates can only be given once in a generation, he signalled to Mita and the other members of his family that baby Kiri was his own child. ‘They believed she was a blood daughter because Tom had given her his father’s name, Kiri,’ said Kay Rowbottom. In the long term, the distinctive name, and the heritage that went with it, would prove an incalculable asset. Kiri would come to draw on her Maori ancestry, even write a book, influenced by the magical elements of her roots. On a more practical level, she would appreciate too how it lent her a name and an image that would count for much when she left her native New Zealand.

As she herself put it years later: ‘It’s unique to be Maori, to sing opera, have a fantastic name; it’s all rather exotic and interesting. Better than being Mary Smith with mousy hair.’

Kiri arrived at Grey Street around the time that Nell became the house’s new, official owner in September 1944. The colonial style, white, weather-boarded house stood in the heart of the town, on a peninsula near the town’s docks and the estuary of the Turanganui River. Nell had paid £1,400


(#litres_trial_promo) for the property, which had been repossessed from its previous owners by its mortgagees. When Nell had first arrived in Gisborne it had been a busy guest house run by a Miss Yates. By luck or judgement she took over as its new owner as Gisborne, a shipping centre for the frozen meat industry for more than sixty years, passed through one of the busiest periods in its history.

Gisborne, or Turanga-nui-Kiwa as it was then known, had been Captain Cook’s first port of call when he had landed in New Zealand in 1769. So unpromising was the greeting he received from the local Maori, he named the sweeping stretch of coastline it overlooked Poverty Bay. The modern settlement had been founded a hundred years later in 1870 and named after Sir William Gisborne, then Secretary for the British Colonies.

By the final years of World War II, Gisborne’s population had swelled to some 19,000 or so people. New Zealand’s links to its former colonial masters remained strong. When Great Britain declared war on Germany it had joined the effort immediately. ‘Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand,’ its Prime Minister, Michael Savage, had pledged. The nation’s navy was placed under Admiralty control and New Zealand’s pilots travelled to England to form the first Commonwealth squadron in the RAF.

A battalion of volunteer Maori troops was dispatched to the front line from where it would return garlanded with honours. While Mita Te Kanawa was among them, his brother Tom stayed behind to help maintain the flow of mutton, wool and food supplies that was among the loyal Kiwis’ greatest contribution to the war effort.

As New Zealand played quartermaster to the warring northern hemisphere, Gisborne’s harbour was filled with cargo ships bound for Britain and other parts of Europe. As it did so, its industrial base mushroomed. As well as freezing factories, the town became a centre for dairy, ham and bacon processing, tallow and woolscouring works, brewing, canning, hosiery and general engineering. Such would be its growth over the following decade that Gisborne would be officially recognised as a city in 1955.

For the young Kiri, the bustling quays were a place of endless fascination. She would make the short walk to the docks and stand for hours watching the ships sailing in and out, flocks of sea birds attached to their masts.

Her home at Grey Street was no less a source of fascination. In the grounds at the back Tom tended a few chickens, there was a disused tennis court and apricots, peaches and strawberries grew freely. At the front a huge, old pohutakawa tree, to be rigged with a swing later, stood outside the porch. The house stood opposite one of the town’s main ‘granaries’, or general stores, Williams and Kettle. The store had donated the Te Kanawas’ two cats, unimaginatively christened William and Kettle.

Given its central position, and the town’s hyperactivity, the Te Kanawa guest house was never short of boarders. Recounting her earliest memories later in life, Kiri realised she could barely remember a time when there were less than twenty people in the house. The one permanent fixture was an elderly boarder, known simply as ‘Uncle Dan’, who inhabited an upper storey bedroom he liked to call his ‘office’.

‘Every available space she could find Nell put someone in it,’ recalled one boarder, Myra Webster, sister of Nell’s son-in-law, Tom Webster. ‘Every little store shed was done up as a room. Upstairs she would have about four people crowded in each room. She wouldn’t turn anyone away,’ she added.

Nell’s head for business extended to a detailed knowledge of each tenant’s financial arrangements. ‘She always knew when their paydays were. She’d stand at the bottom of the stairs when they came home and she’d make sure they were paying up to date. Most of them were young Maori people who came down from the coast to work in Gisborne. She charged the going rate, about one pound ten a week, so she had a pretty good income.’

The healthy living the boarding house provided meant Nell could move away from her earlier sideline. According to one member of the family, Tom insisted that she stop performing abortions when they married. When he discovered she had defied him on one occasion, an enraged Tom grabbed his golf bag and broke each of his hickory-shafted clubs across his knee.

For Kiri as a child, the house – and its sprawling grounds – was a wonderland in which she could run free. Bedrooms climbed all the way to the third floor attic. Downstairs was dominated by a huge, farmhouse-style kitchen and dining room. At the front of the house, a lounge, complete with comfortable sofas and an upright piano, family portraits and Nell’s collection of knick-knacks, offered the only real refuge from the constant comings-and-goings. While the rest of the house was left in a ‘take us as you find us’ fashion, the lounge was kept spick and span for entertaining guests drawn from Nell’s ever widening social circle.

Nell’s social aspirations were clear to see. ‘Nell used to play croquet with a group of ladies at a club in Gisborne,’ remembered Myra Webster. ‘I think they enjoyed afternoon tea more than the croquet, but whenever these ladies came to the house, out would come the best china and all the dainty little trinkets and cakes.’

In his own way, Tom was upwardly mobile too. Unlike many of his family and the vast majority of the Maori population, he was in favour of assimilation into New Zealand’s dominant, white European culture. As he removed himself further from his family he immersed himself in the middle-class enclaves of the town, becoming a popular figure at the Poverty Bay Golf Club. ‘I think he wished he had a paintbrush and could paint himself white,’ one relation used to say.

His success in business only opened the doors wider. On his wedding certificate, Tom listed his profession as ‘winchman’. Since leaving school early he had worked on construction projects all along the east coast, specialising in driving trucks and operating cranes. With the contacts and cash he made from the most lucrative, blasting a road link to Gisborne via the previously impenetrable gorge of Whakatane, he had set up a small contracting company.

Tom, though no more than 5ft 10in, was a muscular and powerful man and prided himself on his physical strength and his capacity for hard work. ‘He had fingers like sausages, and these wonderful hands, worker’s hands,’ Kiri recalled once. ‘He never believed that he couldn’t dig a tree trunk out, lift a boat, lift anything because he was so strong.’

By the end of the 1940s he was able to build his own holiday home, a comfortable cabin, or ‘bach’, on the shores of Lake Taupo, a favourite New Zealand holiday destination in the heart of the North Island. Tom had always been famously industrious. In Kiri he had found a reason to work even harder. Nothing was too much trouble if it was for Kiri, the unquestioned apple of her father’s eye. When she was very young Tom built an elaborate dolls’ house complete with fitted windows, linoleum floors and a dressing table. ‘Kiri stayed in it for about a week, and then the old lady put a tenant in it,’ said Myra Webster.

In time Kiri came to value the Maori qualities bequeathed by both her natural and adoptive fathers. ‘I was given two marvellous gifts. One was white and one was Maori,’ she said later in life. It was not an opinion she voiced often as a young girl, however.

Kiri admitted later that Tom had ‘basically rejected the Maori side’ of his life. ‘My father would not speak Maori and I would not learn Maori because it was just not fashionable to do that,’ she said. ‘I was brought up white.’

Yet as Kiri took her first steps into a wider world, at St Joseph’s Convent School in Gisborne, her unmistakable heritage drew unwanted attention. Mixed race marriages were far from unusual in Gisborne. At St Joseph’s, however, Kiri found herself in more conservative company. She recalled once how her entire class had been invited to a grand birthday party at a well-to-do home in Gisborne. ‘They sent me home because I was the Maori girl.’ At the time, she claimed later, she was too young to notice, but Nell’s anger at the humiliation ensured the incident was burned into her memory. ‘My mother kept reminding me, and I thought, “Why does she keep reminding me?”’

The treatment meted out to Kiri and the two other Maori girls at St Joseph’s on another occasion left even deeper psychological scars. One day, without any warning, the three children were taken from school and forced to have a typhoid vaccination. ‘At that time in New Zealand, Maori children were considered to be dirty,’ Kiri wrote three decades later in Vogue magazine, the memory still painfully vivid. ‘It made me ill. I was on my back in a darkened room for two weeks afterwards. My mother was furious that she hadn’t been consulted and I never forgave the powers that be for doing that to me without bothering to find out that I came from a good clean home.’

At school, Kiri’s sense that she was somehow apart from other children was confirmed on an almost daily basis. Nell never appeared at the school gates to collect her, she recalled. ‘When it rained there would always be a little crowd of mothers outside the school with raincoats and umbrellas,’ she said once. ‘I always half expected her to be there but she never was. I don’t know why. She just didn’t bother, so I walked home in the wet.’

Her sense of her own uniqueness only deepened as she began to learn more about her origins. According to Kiri, Tom and Nell told her the truth about her background when she was a little over three years old. They drew short of revealing the identity of her real mother and father but made no secret of the fact that she was adopted. As a young girl, Kiri’s emotions would have been no different from any other adopted child’s, a tearful confusion of anger, shame, insecurity and isolation. It was only years later that she began to understand the deep and divergent impact it had on her personality. Asked once about the legacy of her adoption, Kiri admitted it had added to her sense of isolation from the world. Kiri could be a naturally solitary child. ‘You grow up with this capacity to cut off,’ she said. ‘It’s a protective device. I become alone, totally alone when something goes wrong.’ At the same time the knowledge that she had been abandoned by her real parents instilled in her a tenacity and a determination she would never have known otherwise. ‘It turned me into a survivor. I felt I was special and had special responsibilities. I’m quite sure if I hadn’t known I was adopted I’d have stayed a nobody and would be in New Zealand breeding children now. But that turned me into a fighter.’

As her childhood progressed, she found a natural opponent in her mother. Kiri was, by her own admission, a classic example of a spoilt only child. It is easy to see how the distrust, antipathy towards competition and often naked jealousy Kiri has displayed throughout her life was born in her early years alone at Grey Street. ‘I was an only child. I didn’t make friends easily. I always wanted everything my way and I wasn’t very happy in a great bunch of children,’ she said once. While Tom doted on Kiri it was left to Nell to administer the discipline she undoubtedly required. If the young Kiri misbehaved she would be forced to sit silently in a chair. If she looked too unhappy she would be sent into the bathroom and told not to come back until she was smiling. Kiri described once how she learned to offer a sickly fixed smile even when her young heart seemed as if it was breaking. The ability to mask her mood would prove useful in later life.

If the crime was considered severe enough, her mother was not beyond dealing out physical punishment. Nell would take a large wooden spoon or a belt to the errant Kiri. Years later Kiri would recall how she had run mischievously through a patch of poppies Nell had planted in the Grey Street garden. ‘As I skipped through I hit the head off each flower.’ Nell’s reaction was instantaneous. The blow she dealt Kiri was ‘so hard it was unbelievable’.

At least once she threatened to run away. Packing a bag in a temper one afternoon she announced her departure to a disinterested Nell, who was entertaining visitors. Like so many other reluctant runaways, she made it no further than the garden gate where she sat sobbing quietly until the evening.

‘Thought you were going to run away?’ her mother asked as she limped back into the house.

‘I was going to but it got too dark,’ Kiri replied, still sulking.

It was Kiri’s greatest good fortune that she grew up in a house dominated by music. Nell liked to claim that her mother Emily was a niece of the great English composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. The story, repeated by Kiri throughout her life, was a blatant piece of fiction. In fact the roots of Nell’s mother Emily Sullivan’s family tree extended back to Lancashire and the town of Radcliffe. It had been there that Emily’s father, Jeremiah, had grown up with his father, a local schoolteacher also called Jeremiah Sullivan. Sir Arthur Sullivan’s only sibling, a brother, Frederic, lived in Fulham, London.

Nell’s talents as a musician seem to have been genuine, nevertheless. Visitors to Grey Street invaribly found its halls and corridors echoing to her fluent piano playing.

As the 1950s dawned, the television age was being born in America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. On the other side of the world, however, New Zealand would have to wait another decade before its first broadcasts, even then only one channel broadcasting three hours a day. In the meantime radio remained king, with racing and rugby forming the three Rs that were the bedrock of New Zealand life. At Grey Street the family would often sit around and listen to concerts and entertainment shows on the local Gisborne station. In the absence of decent music on the airwaves, Nell would provide the entertainment herself, conducting evening singalongs from the stool of her upright piano. ‘She was a very big personality, and a lot of people loved her,’ Kiri said later.

In this environment, Kiri’s raw musical gifts were soon apparent. At the age of two, according to her mother, she had danced to the sound of Uncle Dan’s harmonica. Nell would also sit her on her lap to show her the rudiments of the keyboard. To her mother’s delight, Kiri was soon accompanying her as well as playing solo. It was her tuneful singing voice that impressed Nell most, however. As a five-year-old, Kiri regaled Nell and Tom with her versions of songs like ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and ‘Cara Mia’. ‘By the time she was eight she had a nice little voice,’ her mother said.

At St Joseph’s, Nell encouraged Kiri to study the piano. To her mother’s frustration, however, Kiri was more interested in sport, in particular fishing and swimming, which she had learned at an early age with her father at Hatepe. ‘She used to be a real tomboy,’ Tom proudly proclaimed. She would not be deterred, however. Soon Nell was engineering Kiri a reputation as a new star in Gisborne’s musical firmament. Nell had begun to encourage Kiri to sing solo at Grey Street gatherings. Drawing on connections in town, she had won her a place on a popular local radio show. Kiri was seven when she made her public performing debut on Radio 2XG singing ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She proved such a success she was invited back at regular intervals. Victorian ballads and songs for more mature voices, like ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’, seemed to offer no difficulties. To Nell each of her daughter’s successes only served to fuel her belief that she had real talent. Her mother would reward Kiri with clothes and presents she would pick up on shopping expeditions to Auckland. To the young Kiri, however, the increasing attention became a source of resentment and confrontation.

Kiri got her first indication of the future being planned for her in her bedroom one morning as Nell came in and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘My mother had had a dream where she had seen me on the stage at Covent Garden,’ she recalled once. To Kiri it seemed meaningless. ‘I thought, “Oh, that sounds nice”, and thought no more about it.’ In time Kiri would come to share the same dream. ‘You have to believe in dreams. I don’t think I would have gone on if I hadn’t believed.’ In the meantime, however, she found herself becoming an often unwilling vehicle for her mother’s fantasies.

Kiri’s love of music was real enough. She had been fascinated by the new radiogram that had arrived in the house and had played the family’s first discs, ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake’ and ‘Sweet Violets’ endlessly. When she broke one of them she had run out of the room screaming in fear of what Nell might do to her. Yet she had no real interest in devoting her young life to music. Her defiance was, in part, down to a laziness she confessed stayed with her for years. ‘I can see Mummy constantly kept the music going. I’d tend not to feel like it because I was a lazy child, but she’d insist that I sang,’ she recalled later.

Its roots lay also in her natural need to test the parameters of her relationship with her parents. Kiri knew that whatever her wishes she would find a supporter in Tom, in whose eyes she could do little wrong. In truth, Nell loved her just as much. She was a far less pliable personality, however. Kiri had yet to discover how far she could push her.

Ultimately, Kiri’s dislike of the ever-strengthening spotlight now being turned on her owed most to a simpler truth. For all her high spirits around those she knew and loved, she was painfully reserved among strangers. In the house on Grey Street there were times when she was literally ‘sick with shyness’, she confessed once. She was intensely sensitive, too. Kiri often cried when she was taken to the cinema, the sight of violence or sometimes even a phrase threatening it could reduce her to floods of tears.

When she came to take stock of her early years later in life, a prisoner of an operatic diary planned years in advance and a fame by then extended from Gisborne to Glyndebourne, Kiri’s memories of her childhood were not dominated by memories of dresses or dolls’ houses, living room recitals or early radio stardom. ‘If I had to name one aspect of my early life in New Zealand it would be the aloneness of life there,’ she explained. ‘I was able to be alone and I still seek that, I suppose.’

Nell seemed determined to knock her reticence out of her. Kiri’s earliest motivation for singing in public was the sheer terror with which she viewed her mother. ‘She frightened me into singing,’ she said once. When she threatened rebellion Nell’s words were as predictable as they were menacing. ‘I’ll speak to you when everyone goes,’ she would promise.

Few who watched the effervescent young prodigy singing would have believed it. ‘I was not an extroverted child. You have to learn to be extroverted,’ she lamented later.

Gradually, however, Nell’s bullying began to transform her. Soon Kiri was demonstrating the first, formative hints of self-confidence. She went on to one of her regular radio shows nursing a bad cold. When she hit a false note she heard a voice laughing. It might have been a moment of crushing importance, yet Kiri took it in her stride. ‘It was my first sobering experience of somebody being jealous,’ she said later.

The cold was a far from rare event. The harsh New Zealand winters brought a succession of colds and flus with them. For all the robustness of life at Gisborne and Hatepe, Kiri’s health was a constant worry to Nell. ‘I was very sickly,’ she once confessed. Her sports-loving father had encouraged her to take up some of his favourite pastimes to improve her health. Archery had been suggested as a good exercise to strengthen her lungs. Under Tom’s watchful eye, she would later learn to play golf, too.

It was around the time of her radio debut that Kiri was diagnosed as having ‘a touch of TB’. With the medical establishment conducting a love affair with the relatively new science of X-rays, Kiri’s young body was repeatedly ‘zapped’, without any real consideration of the long-term consequences.

Asked years later about her mother’s past, Kiri replied that Nell had been deserted by her first husband. ‘Or maybe she left him, I’m not too sure,’ she added hastily. In truth Kiri knew precious little about her mother’s turbulent background. As a seemingly strict Catholic there can be little doubt first that Nell’s shame would have been intense and lasting and secondly that her pain remained confined to the confession box. She certainly never shared its details with her adopted daughter. ‘My mother was rather secretive about that part of her life. It’s something I didn’t delve into,’ is all Kiri has confided in the years since.

Nell’s children from her first marriage provided the most positive link with the past. Stan, on whom Nell doted, had served in the army during World War II but had returned to run a poultry farm with his wife Pat in Gisborne. Nola had married Tom Webster, a local farmer, and lived at Patutahi on the outskirts of town. A one-year-old Kiri had been a flower girl at the Websters’ wedding in Gisborne in 1945. Nola had been unable to have children and had adopted a daughter, Judy. By 1954, however, Nola’s marital fortunes were mirroring those of her mother. Her marriage to Tom in ruins, she and Judy arrived on the guesthouse doorstep. Mother and daughter would become a permanent fixture at Grey Street.

Kiri quickly discovered she had much more in common with her five-year-old niece than she did with her grown-up half-sister. In the years that followed, Judy became the closest thing to a sister Kiri would know. Like Kiri, Judy knew she was adopted. Nola had told her she had found her in a shop window in Gisborne.

‘Every time we went into Gisborne to the shops I would have her going all round the streets looking for this bloody shop so that she could get all my brothers and sisters that she left behind in the window. I wanted them all with me. And of course she had to play along with it,’ recalled Judy. Inevitably the knowledge bound the two closer.

Judy recalls how at a ‘do’ once, Kiri had joked about the fact that they were sisters. ‘No we’re not,’ Judy had told her.

‘Yes we are, we are all adopted.’

Kiri’s loneliness as an only child seems to have been a source of concern to Tom and Nell. There was frequent talk of Kiri’s ‘brother’ joining the family, according to Judy.

‘Apparently there was meant to be a brother. I always remember it being talked about that Nana wanted to adopt him as well,’ she remembered. All Judy – and her ‘sister’ – knew of Kiri’s real mother was that she was ‘a blonde lady’ who lived somewhere on the coast of the East Cape.

To Judy, Grey Street seemed more like a hotel than a home. Uncle Dan still lived upstairs and appeared to act as an unpaid nanny for Kiri when Nell and Tom were not around. ‘Come up to my office,’ he used to joke with Kiri when she was alone in the house. Kiri recalled once how ‘Danny’ would fill his pockets with stolen bread rolls from a bakery across the road. ‘I used to have one for breakfast every morning. He used to pull out the middle and I’d eat the middle and he’d eat the outside,’ she said.

‘He used to give Kiri and I handfuls of peppermints,’ Judy recalled. ‘As long as we didn’t tell Nell.’

Judy quickly discovered that her ‘Nana’s’ authority was absolute and her temper truly volcanic. ‘When she lost it, we didn’t ask “How high?”, we asked “Excuse me, when can we come down?”,’ she smiled. Yet, as far as Judy was concerned, beneath her teak-hard exterior beat a generous and genuinely loving heart. ‘She was tough, but she had a soft side,’ she said.

Judy loved nothing more than to hear Nell play the piano. ‘Kiri and I would always be on at her after school to play. She would ask: “Have you finished what you were meant to do for school?” If we said yes, she would play.’ ‘Greensleeves’ was a favourite which Kiri too could play well.

A less musical child, Judy had shown a talent for poetry reading instead. A year or so after Judy’s arrival in Grey Street, Nell persuaded the radio station to showcase the two girls as a double act. Judy’s radio career was short-lived, however. ‘Kiri had to sing and I had to read a poem,’ recalled Judy. ‘Kiri did her piece fine, no problem, but I forgot the words and said “Oh shit”,’ she smiled. ‘Well, of course, it was a live show and it went out clear as a bell to all of Gisborne. I think Kiri started to laugh which didn’t help. That was the start and finish of my broadcasting career all in one night.’

Nell waited until Judy was back at Grey Street before unleashing her anger. ‘I remember getting a scolding for that,’ she said.

For all her ferocity, Nell was vulnerable to bouts of ill health. She had been overweight for years and suffered from related illnesses and general tiredness. She spent much of her time confined to her bedroom where she would listen to the radio, read music magazines and summon Tom and the children to talk to her. ‘She didn’t move around that much,’ Kiri explained once. ‘She liked to lie in bed and hold court.’ Kiri and Judy would lie on her bed with her listening to her read stories from the imported American Post magazine. ‘She was a big lady. She had these big arms we used to push up and use as pillows. I can remember her lying on the bed with me and Kiri either side, tucked up on her arms while she lay there reading the story of the Incredible Journey out of this magazine,’ Judy said. ‘She read the whole thing, from start to finish. We weren’t leaving until we found out what happened to these dogs and the cat.’

In the miniature fiefdom that was Nell’s home, the kitchen was the place where she wielded her ultimate power. ‘She was an absolutely brilliant cook, always cooking scones or something,’ recalled Judy. ‘She filled up jars and tins with all sorts of things, making her own jams and pickles.’ The sublime smells that wafted out on to Grey Street seem to have made it a magnet for friends, neighbours and passers-by. ‘When people bowled in, it was “Have a cup of tea.” If somebody wandered in off the street she would cook for them as well.’

In the kitchen, Kiri and Judy were Nell’s chief underlings. ‘She was like a chef. She made the mess and Kiri and me cleared up,’ recalled Judy. The two girls spent much of their time bickering over who would wash and who would dry. ‘Kiri and me fought constantly over that because if you washed you had to do the benches and the stove as well.’

The most intense arguments were reserved for the nights when Nell served mashed potato. ‘She used to make it in big old aluminium pots. They weren’t soaked of course, so the potato stuck to the sides like concrete.’ As far as the girls were concerned, the highlight of the year would be the family’s annual Christmas trip to the cabin at Hatepe on the shores of Lake Taupo. The cabin allowed Tom to indulge his twin passions – tranquillity and trout fishing. For Kiri, too, Hatepe provided some of the earliest and most magical moments of her early life. She recalled once the excitement of catching her first fish with Tom.

The fact that the house had no electricity only added to its enchantment somehow. ‘There was no power. We would drive up from Gisborne and my grandfather would get out the paraffin lamps from the shed,’ recalls Judy. ‘It was a huge big event down there. Stan and Pat stayed on the poultry farm because they had to work but there was my grandparents, mum, Kiri and all the locals would pile in too.

‘Christmas in those days was like a fairy tale for us and I always remember it as a happy time. Kiri and me used to go into the woods looking for big red toadstools. Sometimes we would sit in the trees very quietly, keeping very still, and wait for the fairies to come,’ she says. Kiri’s love of the open spaces of Lake Taupo had been inherited from her shy, self-contained father.

‘Daddy’ could not have presented a quieter, kinder contrast to the gregarious Nell. When she had the house filled with guests, Tom would blend into the background, a benign, watchful influence. ‘Tom was always there but he was always very quiet,’ recalled Judy. ‘If there was a big pile of people he would be stuck in the corner with his glass of ginger ale.’

Tom’s even temper was the stuff of legend within the family. Judy recalls only seeing him lose his composure once. ‘He was working on a car motor and said “bugger” when he hit his thumb with a spanner,’ she laughed. His love of speed seems to have been his only rebellious outlet. While Nell slept on the drive to Taupo the girls would encourage him to put his foot down on the treacherous, twisting inland roads west of Gisborne. ‘He used to drive like Stirling Moss. He was a brilliant driver, fast but not dangerous,’ recalled Judy. ‘My grandmother would doze off and his foot would go down and away we’d go. When she woke she’d bark: “Slow down, Tom, slow down!” It was hysterical. He’d slow right down and keep looking over at her until she nodded off again and then he’d roar off again. She’d wake up, shout at him, and on it went. Every trip was like that.’

The young Kiri lived for the mornings when Tom would wake her with a gentle kiss at 5 a.m. as he left for work. She would slip out into the dawn and spend the day sitting in the cab of his truck. At Taupo she would sit on the edge of the lake in silence as he fished for trout or simply took in the scene. Sometimes father and daughter would sleep out under the stars, ‘to be there when the fish rose in the morning’.

‘What was wonderful about him was you didn’t have to talk,’ she said later. ‘We used to look at the lake and we’d say nothing. For hours. That was the best part.’

For Kiri, such serenity was in increasingly short supply back at Grey Street. By the time Judy and Nola moved in, the evening get-togethers had taken on the air of a showcase for Nell’s prodigious discovery. If the gathering was confined to the immediate family, Nell would command the stage as usual. If there were visitors present, however, there was only one star. ‘Kiri was the big thing,’ said Judy. ‘Always, whenever anybody came around, I would have to sing,’ Kiri confessed later. ‘I felt at the time like a performing monkey.’

For large parts of her life, Nell had known little more than disappointment and disillusionment. With Tom she had, at last, found security. In Kiri, however, she glimpsed an opportunity for something more. She would not be the first mother to find her life revitalised and ultimately taken over by the vicarious thrill of her child’s success. Few stage mothers would drive their daughters from such unpromising beginnings to such unthinkable heights, however. By Kiri’s twelfth birthday, Nell’s ambition for her daughter had already far outgrown Grey Street and Gisborne.

Lying on her bed upstairs, Nell would listen avidly to the many musical competitions broadcast on the radio at the time. The contests had proliferated all over New Zealand and Australia. In 1956 the Mobil Petroleum Company had added to their credibility and popularity by sponsoring the most prestigious of New Zealand’s domestic contests, the biennial competition from then on known as the Mobil Song Quest.

The competition had produced its share of stars within New Zealand, none greater than the Auckland nun widely regarded as the finest teacher in the country. Sister Mary Leo had been born Kathleen Agnes Niccol, the eldest child of a respectable Auckland shipping clerk and his wife Agnes. In later life, she was mysterious about her exact birthdate in April 1895, as it fell only five months after her devoutly Catholic parents’ wedding. Kathleen Niccol became a schoolteacher and budding singer before, at the age of twenty-eight, she walked into the sanctuary of St Mary’s Convent in Auckland and the Order of the Sisters of Mercy. She never left.

A college had first been established at the convent in 1929. Two decades later, in 1949, Sister Mary Leo persuaded the Order to allow her to establish her own independent, non-denominational music school within the St Mary’s grounds. While she concentrated on voice coaching, four other nuns were enlisted to teach piano, violin, cello and organ. Each year as many as 200 aspiring musicians from all faiths and all corners of New Zealand received their education there. In the aftermath of the war, Sister Mary Leo’s pupils had begun to dominate the lucrative singing competitions. It had been her success with an emotionally frail but extraordinarily gifted singer, Mina Foley, that had transformed her into a national celebrity.

An orphan, Foley had begun singing as an alto in the St Mary’s Choir at the age of thirteen. At sixteen, encouraged by Sister Mary Leo, she had won the prestigious John Court Memorial Aria in Auckland. From there she went on to win almost every domestic singing competition. Her successes turned Foley and her teacher into stars. Crowds of well-wishers and pressmen followed them to their triumphs. When, in 1950, they travelled to Australia for the most lucrative of all the Antipodean prizes, the Melbourne Sun Aria competition, most of New Zealand tuned in on the radio.

Foley’s freakish range allowed her voice to reach across three and a half octaves. She had already been dubbed the ‘Voice of the Century’ by the New Zealand media. By 1951, thanks largely to a scholarship from the British Council, the singer had been accepted as a pupil of Toti Del Monte in Italy.

When Nell discovered that Foley was due to visit Gisborne before leaving for Europe, she wasted no time in booking two tickets for the concert at the Regent Theatre. If she had hoped the trip would inspire Kiri she was soon rewarded. Kiri still recalled the impact of the moment thirty years later. She remembered how Foley had taken to the stage in a wonderful gown, ‘all in green net, with off-the-shoulder puffed sleeves and sparkling jewellery everywhere. I remember it so vividly. She used to wear her hair pulled back with one ringlet trailing forward over her shoulder. It was the most awful style but at the time I thought it was marvellous.’

Kiri was transfixed by Foley’s voice. ‘She sang and sang and I never for one moment stopped gazing at her. I think it was then that my mother realised I was going to concentrate on music and nothing else.’ In the wake of the Foley concert, Nell’s dreams began to solidify. By the beginning of 1956 she was ready to swing into action.

For all its historic importance, the East Cape was far from the hub of New Zealand life. In the 1950s and sixties it was regarded as one of the least dynamic and most isolated regions of New Zealand. Nell knew that a move north to Auckland was vital if Kiri was to make any progress. Nell began by telephoning St Mary’s in Auckland and asking to be put directly through to its most celebrated teacher. It was to be the first of many memorable confrontations between the irresistible force that was Nell Te Kanawa and the immovable object that was Sister Mary Leo.

‘I have a daughter who sings very well,’ Nell announced, matter of factly. ‘Will you take her on?’

Sotto voce, Sister Mary Leo explained that, as a pupil of a school other than St Mary’s, Kiri was ineligible for her classes until she was eighteen. In other words, no, she could not.

Nell was in no mind to be deterred by such a rejection, however. She began her efforts to persuade Tom that the family, including Kiri, Nola and Judy, should move to Auckland and that Kiri should be installed at St Mary’s. She had clearly missed her true vocation as a saleswoman. Soon Tom had not only agreed to put the Grey Street house up for auction, but to sell his business as well.

Kiri, however, could not share her mother’s enthusiasm for the move. Grey Street had provided a happy home. From Uncle Dan to the students with whom she had forged lasting friendships in the town, its cast of characters represented a loving and rather extraordinary extended family. Now she was being forced to leave them. Her protests were pointless, however. The move to Auckland was made shortly after Kiri celebrated what she later remembered as a sad and solemn twelfth birthday in March, 1956. ‘It was pretty horrendous,’ she came to say. ‘All the books tell you that you should never change a child at that age. I had left my beautiful home, a dear old man who was my nanny, and missed my “family”.’

Given the events that had led her to Grey Street a dozen years earlier, there was an added cruelty to the enforced farewells. It would only be later in life that she came to understand the significance of what had happened to her. ‘I basically lost my family when I lost that house,’ she would say.


‘The Nun’s Chorus’ (#ulink_26a48bba-73b2-5b24-aa67-e99056404fb0)

With the proceeds from the sales of Grey Street and Tom’s truck company, Nell was able to put a sizeable deposit down on a new home in the Auckland suburb of Blockhouse Bay, about nine miles south of the city centre. The nine-year-old house at 22 Mitchell Street stood at the bottom of a steep drive overlooking the picturesque Manukau Harbour. Only a set of nearby electricity pylons marred the splendour of the view.

At £5,500 the house was double the average house price in the area. Fortunately Nell had made a healthy profit on the Grey Street house which she had sold to a Wellington hotelier for £6,000, at a profit of £4,600 in twelve years. Tom soon averted any future financial crises when he landed a contract installing underground petrol tanks for the giant Caltex company. Judy was at first put into a boarding school by Nola. It was only after smuggling out a letter expressing her unhappiness to her father in Gisborne that she was able to join Kiri at Avondale Convent Primary school, a short bus ride away from Blockhouse Bay.

To ease her admission there, and at St Mary’s where Nell intended enrolling her at the age of fourteen, Kiri had by now been confirmed. Immaculate and angelic in her white lace gown and veil, Kiri smiled sweetly for the family photographs in the spring of 1956. Yet, inside, she remained deeply unhappy at the upheaval she had been forced to undergo.

Kiri had been a poor student at St Joseph’s in Gisborne and showed even less interest in her studies at Avondale, where she steadfastly refused to fit in. ‘It was a child’s reaction to something new,’ she admitted later. ‘I hated every minute of it – and they hated me.’

Kiri’s unhappiness was understandable given the physical abuse she received at the hands of her new teachers. She recounted, years later, how her music teacher at Avondale repeatedly pulled at the flowing tresses she had been so proud of as a young girl in Gisborne. ‘I had lovely long black hair and she used to grab it by the roots and rock me from side to side,’ she said. ‘I used to work really hard for her because I was so frightened, but it didn’t change her behaviour.’

Eventually Kiri was driven to drastic measures. ‘I got so desperate that I persuaded my mother to let me have all my hair cut off, and I mean right off, real punk rock style,’ she said. ‘It looked awful, but even then the teacher managed to get hold of it.’

Kiri would constantly ask her mother to ‘lop off’ her hair in her time at Avondale. Her peculiar look only deepened the self-consciousness that was already taking root. Even before her decision to crop her hair short, Kiri’s sturdy, strong-boned features had always made her look gawky and boyish. She would never rid herself of the pubescent unhappiness she began to feel over her shape and size. ‘There is nothing that I like about myself. When I look at myself I see thousands of flaws from top to bottom,’ she said later in life. She particularly hated the heavy frame and legs bequeathed to her by her Maori father. ‘I have a very solid body – when you look at me you’d hardly get the impression that I couldn’t handle life,’ she complained once. ‘I hardly look delicate, do I?’ As she entered her adolescence, she seemed content living up to her tomboy reputation.

Away from the tortures of Avondale, Kiri remained happiest water-skiing, swimming or sailing on the waters of Blockhouse Bay, playing golf at the nearby Titirangi Club or practising archery up on One Tree Hill with her father.

In the company of the equally boisterous Judy, she frequently ran riot. Kiri and Judy’s earliest neighbourhood friends were the five Hanson boys, brothers who also lived on Mitchell Street. Their friendship blossomed from the most unpromising of beginnings.

According to Judy, she and Kiri would sometimes get involved in fights on their way home from Avondale. ‘We used to scrap on the bus,’ Judy recalled. As a convoy of buses dropped off their passengers on Mitchell Street one day, Judy had begun fighting with one of the younger Hansons, Mark. As the fight had spilled out on to the street, Kiri and Mark’s brother Andrew had jumped off their respective buses to join in. ‘It was all on. The four of us were having a full-on blue [fight],’ recalled Judy. By the time the four-way contest had progressed to its climax, onlookers were left in little doubt who had emerged victorious. One of the Hansons had been carrying an umbrella. ‘He ended up with the thing wrapped around his neck,’ smiled Judy.

Kiri and Judy inflicted sufficient damage for the boys’ mother Betty to berate Nell over the telephone. ‘It was then we found out there were another three of them. From then they became life long friends,’ recalled Judy.

Publicly Nell defended her headstrong daughter to the hilt. In private, however, such disappointments were only widening the distance between mother and daughter. Years later, a student of the greater psychological insight of another age, Kiri sympathised with the problems Nell must have had to contend with. ‘It was tough for my mother, because at that time people were never told that kids become terrorists at twelve and stay that way until they’re eighteen,’ she said. ‘And if you try to cover up and pretend everything’s OK, the trouble you’ve swept away under the carpet will come back at you – twice as hard.’

On another occasion she put it even more simply. ‘She didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand her.’

There were times when Nell’s frustration at Kiri boiled over into rage. On one occasion it fell to Judy to save her from being flailed by Nell with Tom’s leather belt. ‘Nana didn’t hit her much, and only for specific things,’ she recollected. ‘It wasn’t unfair, but I remember defending her when she was accused of doing something wrong and she was going to get a belt on the backside.

‘I grabbed uncle Tom’s belt and ran off with it. Then I got his other belts from the bedroom and hid them behind the wardrobe – where they stayed for years. In fact Tom ended up with a piece of garden twine holding up his trousers.’

Such moments only served to tighten the conspiratorial bond between the two ‘sisters’. Judy and Kiri spent much of their adolescent lives in defiance of Nell’s tyranny. They would spend evenings running up their own rough and ready clothes on Nell’s sewing machine. It was hardly haute couture. The cut and colour co-ordination left much to be desired. ‘If you had yellow material and green cotton then too bad,’ said Judy. Nell loathed seeing her girls, Kiri in particular, looking scruffy and frequently flew off the handle at the sight of their latest piece of crude needlecraft. ‘She would go crazy, screaming, “What are you doing? You do that properly or not at all!” She used to pull the things apart so the job could be done properly.’

Nell’s musical ambitions for her daughter provided the most frequent source of friction. Like Grey Street before it, the house at Mitchell Street quickly become a magnet for all manner of visitors. Nell had continued to coach Kiri at home and wheeled her out at every opportunity when entertaining guests. Whether or not Kiri complied or complained depended on her mood. ‘There were times when she would resent it, when she would feel like a prize pig,’ recalled Judy. ‘But there were others when she was happy as a sandboy. Kiri herself liked to sing.’

At times Kiri and Judy seemed to be fighting a constant war on Nell’s nerves. The menagerie of pets that had begun to accumulate at Mitchell Street provided another battleground. The by now aged black cat William had made the journey from Gisborne. Kettle had been replaced by another black cat called Two-Ten. ‘From the cost of having it neutered by the vet,’ said Judy. Tom had also bought a cocker spaniel called Whisky. Soon they were joined by a rabbit that Tom had found at work, and which Judy and Kiri named Peter.

‘My grandfather absolutely adored Peter,’ recalled Judy. ‘Peter followed Tom everywhere.’ Tom, Kiri and Judy spent much of their time protecting Peter from the predatory instincts of Two-Ten. ‘Two-Ten used to want to kill this rabbit and the rabbit used to fly up and sit by my grandfather’s leg.’

Nell posed almost as great a danger. ‘We had this green carpet in the lounge and Peter started to eat holes in it,’ said Judy. ‘Kiri and I kept moving the furniture over the holes but eventually Nana found out and the rabbit was in big trouble.’

Almost half a century later, a mother of five herself, Judy cannot condemn Nell’s overbearing behaviour towards Kiri. ‘My grandmother was just very proud of her,’ she said. The more she heard of Kiri’s confident, commanding voice, the more Nell was convinced her decision to move the family to Auckland had been justified. Her conviction only deepened in the summer of 1958 as Kiri finally began making the daily bus trip across Auckland to the most celebrated music school, and the most feted singing teacher, in New Zealand.

Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, dressed in her new, navy-blue uniform, Kiri became one of the 500 or so girls entrusted to the care of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy at the Convent of St Mary. The Order’s nuns liked to claim that one in every four of their pupils remained with them for life. Kiri would never be a candidate for holy orders. Yet in her own way she would keep faith with St Mary’s and its principles as devotedly as any nun. ‘The poetry of earth is never dead. And the music of St Mary’s never really sleeps,’ read a two-line verse in the 1958 St Mary’s Annual, summing up the alternative gospel for which the Order were rightfully famous. Kiri would embrace it like no other pupil in the hundred-year history of the college.

The Order of the Sisters of Mercy had arrived in Auckland from Ireland around 1850. They had erected an elegant, wooden church on a hilltop overlooking the middle-class suburb of Ponsonby soon afterwards. By now the striking, Spanish-style buildings erected on the site dominated the skyline. However, it had been the achievements of Sister Mary Leo that had lifted its profile not just in Auckland but all over New Zealand.

As Kiri arrived at St Mary’s the achievements of the teacher’s latest crop of prodigies filled the pages of St Mary’s Annual. Lengthy reports described the successes of Mary O’Brien, the soprano who had won that year’s John Court Memorial Aria in Auckland, and the former pupil Betty Hellawell who had sung that year in Boris Godunov opposite Boris Christoff at Covent Garden. Artistic portraits of St Mary’s prize-winning choirs and orchestras, star instrumentalists and singers seemed to feature on every page.

The main musical event of March 1958 had been a gala concert held inside the college chapel in aid of the Hard of Hearing League. The event would have offered the young Kiri her first glimpse of the legendary Sister Mary Leo and her stable of stars. Afterwards the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, addressed the audience. His words were directed particularly at St Mary’s prized performers. ‘Music is a wonderful gift which God has bestowed on you to give pleasure to others,’ he said. As she settled into college life, however, Kiri found her own gifts overlooked.

The Sisters of Mercy lived a less rigid existence than other orders within the Catholic Church. Its nuns were among the first in New Zealand permitted to wear the looser, less stifling ‘modern’ habit. Yet, as she settled into the rhythms and rituals of college life, her days dictated by the muffled toll of the church’s bells and their seemingly endless calls to prayer, Kiri could not help but absorb the powerful influence of her surroundings. The faith she discovered there would never desert her. Somehow her belief in God filled the void she still felt when she thought about her uncertain past. ‘I was brought up a Catholic and I know there is a God,’ she said once. ‘You need to believe it when you’ve been given a pretty sticky start, being adopted – as I was – by a couple who didn’t have very much. Sometimes I feel strongly that there is somebody looking after me personally. It gives me an extra strength.’

Kiri joined a third-form class led by an Irish nun, Sister Mary Leila. For the first year her timetable was dominated by English, Arithmetic, Social Studies, Art, Sport, School Singing and, naturally, Christian Doctrine.

Under St Mary’s ‘parental preference’ system, however, Nell and Tom were soon required to chose the direction Kiri would take for the remainder of her two years there. The choice was a simple one – Kiri could take the academic path, learning languages and preparing for New Zealand’s equivalent to the British O level, ‘school certificate’, or else opt for the ‘commercial’ curriculum in which girls were prepared for business college or secretarial jobs with classes in typing, shorthand and book-keeping.

Kiri, a self-confessed non-academic, remained an underwhelming performer in the classroom. If Kiri shone anywhere during her early months at St Mary’s it was as a sportswoman. In 1958 Kiri made her first noteworthy appearance in the school annual not as a singer but dressed in a gymslip and plimsolls as a member of the ‘Post Primary C’ basketball team. The accompanying report described her as ‘the mainstay of the team’.

In later life she blamed her lack of academic progress on the demands of her musical education. In a 1990 television profile, for instance, she told interviewer Melvyn Bragg, ‘I think my formal education suffered because I would be trying to sort of study … and more often than not I was pulled out in the middle of the class to have another singing lesson or rehearse with the choir and while I was doing half these subjects I never ever got a full lesson done.’

Later she added, ‘Sister Mary Leo enabled me to miss classes so that I could study music. I can now see that I might have been good at many subjects – languages, arts and crafts – which I never got the chance to study. I never received the formal education my parents sent me to school for.’

Nuns who remember Kiri are confused by these accounts, however. ‘There’s some misunderstanding there, maybe,’ said Sister Mercienne, the college archivist. She explained that throughout Kiri’s time at the school, she was not seen as exceptional and was not treated any differently from any other pupil. That meant that her English and arithmetic lessons, and of course Christian Doctrine, were sacrosanct, and that if Sister Leo had chosen to give Kiri any extra tuition it would only have been with the agreement of her class teacher. The truth seems to be that Kiri’s academic ambitions were ultimately frustrated not by Sister Mary Leo’s demands but by her own mother’s grasp of the situation.

As decision time arrived, without much deliberation Nell told the school principal to stream her daughter in the commercial class. To Nell’s frustration, Kiri had arrived at St Mary’s to be told that Sister Mary Leo still refused to teach her personally. With 200 mature pupils attached to her music college and only a limited number of places available to girls from the school itself, Sister Mary Leo insisted that all fourteen- to sixteen-year-old singing pupils were also proficient at the piano. Despite Nell’s early efforts to teach her, Kiri had failed to make the grade required. It took Sister Mary Leo’s accompanist to spot the latent talent in the Order’s midsts.

‘Kiri was pestering Mary Leo for singing lessons but Sister wouldn’t teach anyone who couldn’t play the piano so she kept fobbing her off,’ recalled one of the members of the present day Order, Sister Dora, at the time one of the youngest teachers within the music school. Kiri was forced to take lessons with the college’s keyboard specialist, Sister Francis Xavier. While Sister Mary Leo revelled in the spotlight, her colleague Sister Xavier was so painfully shy she rarely revealed more than the tip of her nose from behind her wimple in photographs. She was every bit as canny a judge of musical talent as her colleague, however. ‘Kiri went to Sister Francis Xavier for piano lessons but still kept on and on about singing, so she gave her some singing exercises just to keep her quiet,’ recalled Sister Dora.

The college pianist was immediately struck by the beautiful clarity of Kiri’s voice and raised the subject of her joining the stable of singers with Sister Mary Leo. Sister Francis’s influence was considerable. Away from the music room she and Sister Mary Leo would share feasts of sweets and ice cream and it was perhaps during one of these that the college pianist pleaded Kiri’s cause. ‘She noticed there was something terrific in the voice and talked to Mary Leo about her,’ recalled Sister Dora.

At first Sister Mary Leo remained stubbornly disinterested. ‘She kept urging her to have a listen and eventually she did. From then on Kiri never looked back.’

In the years that followed, even the most reserved member of the Order could not resist the odd gentle boast. ‘Sister Francis Xavier always used to joke with us saying, “I was the one who discovered Kiri”,’ said Sister Dora.

To her contemporaries, Kiri seemed one of the more carefree spirits at St Mary’s. ‘I have fond memories of Kiri sliding down the banisters,’ recalled one classmate from Commercial IV, Elsa Grubisa, now Vujnovich. Yet, for all her outward exuberance, Kiri was, with good cause, intimidated and a little awestruck as she finally underwent her first encounters with her formidable new teacher.

Sister Mary Leo taught in a light, airy, L-shaped room on the first floor of her music school, a two-storey building in the St Mary’s grounds a short walk from the Convent and the main college. With its miniature brass busts of Schubert and Wagner and framed photographs of former pupils, the room was a shrine to her second religion. Sheet music was piled neatly in almost every alcove. The room was equipped with a modern, reel-to-reel tape recorder and a radiogram. The floor was dominated by a highly polished grand piano. To a fourteen-year-old, it seemed an utterly intimidating place. Sister Mary Leo’s reputation for toughness only added to it. She often began work after early morning prayers at 8 a.m., hardly pausing for breakfast, and continued teaching long into the evenings. She expected the same dedication from her pupils and was intolerant of any signs of immaturity. Nervousness, for instance, had no place in her music room. ‘She hadn’t much time for nerves. She’d just tell us to pull ourselves together and stop that nonsense,’ recalled Sister Patricia, another of Sister Mary Leo’s former pupils. The greatest sin a pupil could commit was to turn up underprepared. Sister Mary Leo would expect an apology before the lesson could continue.

‘With Sister Mary Leo you had to be totally committed to your singing. She would not tolerate anything but total commitment,’ said another pupil of the time, Diana Stuart.

For those who did not match up to her exacting standards, the punishments were severe. For all her air of saintliness, Sister Mary Leo possessed a withering tongue. ‘There wouldn’t be a pupil of Sister Mary Leo’s that she hasn’t had in tears,’ said Gillian Redstone, another contemporary of Kiri’s at St Mary’s. ‘I always remember her telling me I had expressionless eyes, like a cow’s,’ recalls Elsa Grubisa. ‘That was her style. You had to accept what was being said to you and either shape up or ship out.’

Having been accepted as one of her personal students, Kiri was called to sing with Sister Mary Leo twice a week. Her first impressions, she said later, were that Sister Mary Leo ‘seemed enormously old to me, even then’. As she overcame her fear, the knowledge that she had relinquished all to devote herself to God only deepened the respect she demanded. ‘She was first of all a nun and a very devout Catholic. When I was singing, wherever I would go I would always have to go into the church,’ Kiri recalled later in life. Her knowledge and undoubted love for her music was quietly inspiring. ‘I think she was sometimes torn between the two because the music sometimes took over and God had to take a small backseat. But she was a very dedicated person and that’s, I think, why I liked being taught by her because she had no other interests, it was just music and God.’

As a tutor, she could not have presented a starker contrast to Kiri’s mother. At home she had been showered with praise by her family and their house guests. She soon discovered Sister Mary Leo operated according to different principles. In her classes conversation was kept to a minimum. Sister Mary Leo often spent an entire lesson scribbling notes to herself. ‘She never stopped writing in her notebook,’ said Diana Stuart. ‘She would make copious notes but she never told you what she was writing.’ If a passage was sung to her liking she would say ‘good’ or ‘fine’.

‘She was not a great one for compliments,’ Kiri said once. Yet as she began working with Kiri, Sister Mary Leo quickly understood why Sister Francis Xavier had recommended she take on her discovery. Her only disappointment was that Kiri’s raw yet powerful voice had been trained to sing undemanding material from musicals; what Sister Leo later rather loftily referred to as ‘music of an essentially trivial kind’. During her first weeks with Sister Mary Leo, Kiri sang nothing more taxing than folk songs.

In the meantime she set about preparing Kiri for more serious music. Sister Mary Leo’s teaching methods bordered on the bizarre. Kiri found herself joining other girls in curious physical exercises designed to improve her physical ability to project her voice. ‘She got these bees in her bonnet. She’d have this new idea or she’d hear or read something and we’d be on that for a week,’ recalled another student, Hannah Tatana. ‘There was singing with a pencil in your mouth which was supposed to loosen your throat but tightened your jaw. Then another time she’d read somewhere about Caruso pushing a grand piano two inches with the expansion of his diaphragm and we had to do that.’

The Caruso exercise was preferable to another recalled by Gillian Redstone. ‘One method she used to teach us to control breathing involved Sister’s big old reel to reel tape recorder, a very heavy machine in a case,’ she said. ‘We had to lie on the floor with the tape recorder stuck on top of the diaphragm and then lift it with our breathing for a few minutes. It wasn’t on long enough for us to go purple, but it was certainly quite a lesson.’

Such was her pupils’ faith in their teacher’s near divinity, no one ever protested at the tortures they were put through. ‘We didn’t dare question it at the time. And we believed in her, that she was doing the right thing,’ said Redstone. Like every other pupil, Redstone knew the potential cost of dissent. There was too much to lose.

Sister Mary Leo controlled her singers with an almost absolutist power. Her word, and her word alone, dictated the speed with which they progressed up the St Mary’s ladder. If a girl had talent, Sister Mary would invite her first to join the St Mary’s Choir. If she shone there she would be encouraged to sing the occasional solo at the choir’s frequent public and charity appearances. The ultimate accolade was to be invited to represent St Mary’s – and therefore Sister Mary Leo herself – in one of the highly competitive singing contests. A girl only had to look at the portraits of Mary O’Brien and Mina Foley to imagine what might lie ahead from there. Talent and success were not necessarily related. It was no different in the rarefied world of St Mary’s. Sister Mary Leo alone ordained the chosen ones. It paid to stay on her side.

Kiri’s late start did little to inhibit her rapid progress through the ranks. She was quickly installed as a member of the St Mary’s Choir. In keeping with the traditions on which their Order was founded, the nuns visited Auckland’s less privileged, performing at hospitals, mental institutions and prisons.

Kiri sang at church and charity events all over Auckland. Sister Mary Leo also added her to the list of girls recommended for engagements in and around Auckland society. The christening, wedding and funeral – ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ – circuit could provide a girl with a tidy supplementary income. Booking agents invariably had to go through Sister Mary Leo, who insisted any flowers a girl was given be donated to the St Mary’s altar. She was motivated less by money than control, and although she did charge her private students the going market rate of a guinea an hour, brown envelopes stuffed full of the cash fees collected from her singers would gather in small piles round her music room. Kiri’s years as a ‘performing monkey’ at home stood her in good stead. Soon she was one of the most assured performers at the school. Tom bought her a secondhand Standard Ten as a fifteenth birthday present. The car was soon clocking up the miles as Kiri spent more and more time shuttling to and from her various engagements.

If the compliments were in short supply in Kiri’s presence, Sister Mary Leo was soon leaving few in any doubt that she sensed St Mary’s had an important new discovery. Elsa Grubisa recalls that she outshone Kiri in a singing exam carried out by an English examiner, a Mr Spinks. ‘He actually gave me a better score than Kiri. But Sister Mary Leo made no bones about telling me that she didn’t know what the examiner was thinking about and I had no business scoring better than Kiri,’ she remembered. The moment confirmed two suspicions that had been forming in Grubisa’s mind. Personally she no longer had any interest in subjecting herself to Sister Mary Leo’s authoritarian regime. ‘That was it for me. I gave up after that,’ she said. She also sensed St Mary’s once more had a star on its hands. ‘I think Sister Mary Leo realised from the beginning that she had someone a bit special in Kiri,’ she added.

Sister Mary Leo saw her role as more than a mere voice coach. She was a Mother Confessor and best friend, musical guardian and Svengali all rolled into one. ‘I suppose I mother the girls to a certain extent. I don’t just teach them singing, I am interested in their own lives,’ she said once. ‘To be able to get the best out of them one has to be a bit of a psychologist too. I don’t treat them all as peas in a pod. I try to understand them and realise that, like everyone else, they too have their problems.’

One day during her second year at St Mary’s, Kiri visited Sister Mary Leo’s room with a gift of handkerchiefs she had bought with a group of other girls. Sister Mary had invited her new discovery to sit down for a lengthy, intimate talk. Unlike most of the St Mary’s girls, Kiri had quickly overcome her fear of her mentor. ‘Kiri was confident and could communicate with her,’ recalled Elsa Grubisa. As she grew to understand her precocious new pupil, Sister Mary Leo had, in return, been ‘completely frank’ with Kiri. By now Sister Mary Leo recognised a gift as natural as anything she had encountered in her long career. She also understood how easily that talent could be squandered through indiscipline and over-confidence. ‘You have got a lot of ability, dear, and you’re going to have a lot of people giving you all the encouragement and praise in the world,’ she explained. She went on to explain why Kiri could not expect her to be anything other than her toughest taskmistress. ‘I’m going to be harder on you than anyone else, because it is better for you.’

Moments later, as she walked Kiri to the door, Leo revealed the real reason for her wanting their little tête-à-tête. ‘Now tell me, Kiri,’ she smiled. ‘Next term, would you like to go for competitions?’

At the dawn of the 1960s, with the exception of live commentaries on the All Blacks rugby test matches and the races of the Olympic middle-distance star Peter Snell, few radio programmes drew such avid audiences as the transmissions of the singing competitions that had by now proliferated all over New Zealand. Since the Mobil Petroleum Company had begun pouring sponsorship cash into the hugely popular Song Quest, so the smaller competitions held all over New Zealand became more popular and highly publicised. During the autumn and winter months provincial outposts like Tauranga and Te Awamutu, Te Aroha and Rotorua became the focus of intense interest among New Zealand’s music-loving public.

The aria contests helped many young singers develop into stars. Long player recordings of the winning competitors sold well. Recording contracts and overseas scholarships were commonplace for the feted few who made it on to the winner’s podium. Financially the rewards were considerable. The Mobil Song Quest first prize was £300. The purse at the most high profile of all Australasian contests, the Melbourne and Sydney Sun Arias, was £1,500, about double the average annual wage at the time. In short, the contests offered a stairway to stardom, a tantalising route to fame and fortune, in New Zealand terms at least. Perhaps most importantly, they offered New Zealanders an opportunity to overcome the inferiority complex they felt in comparison to the mother country, the ‘cultural cringe’ as Kiwis called it.

‘With rugby and horseracing, singing was the big thing in New Zealand at the time,’ recalled Diana Stuart. As a gifted soloist and cellist, Stuart was given a deeper than average insight into this competitive world. She often played in the orchestras accompanying the singing finalists. To the New Zealand public, the competitions seemed like genteel, elegant affairs contested between neatly groomed young ladies and gentlemen. The backstage reality was rather different. ‘The rivalry really was ferocious.’

Nowhere was the competition more intense than among the teachers themselves. Publicly Sister Mary Leo tut-tutted such petty jealousies. ‘I hate that competitive spirit,’ she told the New Zealand Weekly News once. ‘I tell all the girls: “Do your best. Don’t merely concentrate on winning, music is too beautiful, the voice is a gift they have been given, to give joy to other people.”’ The truth was no one hated losing more.

Sister Mary Leo’s main opposition invariably came from singers attached to a small group of rival teachers, the Drake family and Mary Pratt in Dunedin and a Madame Narev in Auckland. Her representatives were left in no doubt what was expected of them. ‘She would say things like: “I’m going to be very disappointed if you don’t do so and so,”’ recalled Diana Stuart. ‘She loathed losing.’

As Sister Mary Leo began preparing Kiri for her entry into this new world she quickly realised she had unearthed a natural born winner. Like every other Sister Leo girl Kiri found herself taught how to dress, pose and behave on stage.

‘She endeavoured to train them even in things like how to walk, how to look gracious, how to bow, how to accept applause,’ recalled Sister Mary Leo’s contemporary, Sister Mercienne, now the school’s archivist. ‘She would do her best to bring them to the point where they could make the most of themselves and stand up there like young queens and sing their hearts out.’

Perhaps Sister Mary Leo’s greatest gift, however, lay in her ability to teach girls to express their personalities in their singing. ‘She was not a flamboyant person herself, but she encouraged that in her singers because it is what you need on the stage. She was very good at drawing people out and getting them to express themselves,’ recalled Hannah Tatana.

Tatana had been educated at Queen Victoria’s, Auckland’s all Maori girls’ school, where she had come to the attention of Sister Mary Leo. By 1960, she was already being talked of as the first female classical star to emerge from the Maori population.

Tatana had first heard Kiri sing at a talent competition held at Taupo in the Christmas of 1960, where, with her brother, she had been asked to act as a judge. ‘Kiri sang “Ave Maria” and I was bowled over by her voice,’ she remembered.

Back at St Mary’s, she had taken a keen interest in her progress under Sister Mary Leo. ‘There was this wonderful sound that was new and so gorgeous and luscious that it gave the impression that with judicious choice of repertoire – which was something that Sister Mary Leo was good at – there was no limit to what she might achieve,’ she said.

As Kiri took her first tentative steps on to the competition circuit, her towering talent made an immediate impact. Kiri’s first important competition appearance came in her home city’s premier event, the Auckland Competitions, in 1960. She sang two songs, ‘When the Children Say Their Prayers’ and ‘Road to the Isles’, in the sixteen-year-old age group. She won with ease.

In March 1960, as Kiri celebrated her sixteenth birthday, her days within St Mary’s College itself were drawing to a close. By now she had been accepted for a year-long ATCL course at Auckland Business College. As far as Nell was concerned, her schooling there was subsidiary to her continuing education as a member of Sister Mary Leo’s 200-strong group of private, fee-paying students. Her Sisters at St Mary’s regarded Sister Mary Leo in much the same way Kiri’s family saw Nell Te Kanawa. ‘The other nuns quivered in her shadow,’ Kiri laughed later in life. To Kiri, her teacher was ‘a very grand lady – a “grande dame”. However, my mother was also a “grande dame”, who liked to command and demand everything so the two characters didn’t get on very well.’

Yet the two women had formed an alliance that was as formidable as it was unlikely. Nell had made no secret of her ambitions for Kiri. ‘It was mainly her mother’s wish and ambition on Kiri’s behalf which led her to devote herself chiefly to more serious music,’ Sister Mary Leo conceded later.

As Kiri continued her studies, however, she realised the financial cost of maintaining her embryonic career was considerable. The differing demands of the competitions and choir performances and her less formal wedding engagements required a well-stocked wardrobe. Resourceful as ever, Nell made a collection of full-length evening costumes, cocktail dresses and ballgowns. Her eyes were also eternally open to opportunities to acquire or borrow outfits that enhanced Kiri’s image. As Kiri reached the end of her studies at business college, emerging with an honours pass, Nell made it clear that she too would have to contribute to maintaining her lavish professional lifestyle. A succession of menial jobs followed, the first at the main telephone exchange in Auckland where Kiri began working from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day.

By May 1961 the Te Kanawa household was forced to find the money for the most glamorous addition yet to Kiri’s wardrobe. With a handful of other girls from St Mary’s, Kiri was invited to attend the highlight of the Catholic community’s social calendar, New Zealand’s equivalent to London’s debutantes’ ball.

For the girls of St Mary’s the event represented the romantic zenith of their adolescent social lives. ‘It was a big thing for us,’ recalled Gillian Redstone, who joined Kiri in walking the length of the Town Hall to meet the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, that night. ‘We all looked forward to reaching the age of seventeen when we could actually be presented.’

Kiri was one of the undoubted belles of the ball afterwards. The tomboy was rapidly metamorphosing into a striking young woman. Her emerging beauty shone through in the carefully posed studio portraits taken to mark the event. Kiri’s dazzling white lace dress was set off by a pair of long silk gloves, an elaborate pearl necklace and floral earrings. The pictures offer a jarring contrast to the story of the girl who, in Kiri’s own words, ‘came from nothing’. They stand as evidence too of the skill with which Nell was now moulding her daughter’s image.

Nell had become friendly with the leading Auckland couturier Colin Cole. Cole’s salon on Queen Street was the domain of New Zealand’s high society. The designer’s exquisite garments were all one-offs. A Cole blouse cost around £250, four months’ wages for the average New Zealander, while evening gowns retailed at a stratospheric £1,200 – the cost of a modest home.

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.

Kiri and Tom had spent the day of the radio broadcast trying out a new Simca to replace the battered old Standard Ten. The Simca was more expensive than the Triumph Herald Tom had intended buying. That night, with the prospect of a £300 windfall if she won again in the final in Hamilton, the decision was made to go ahead and buy the more expensive car. After listening to a repeat of the show on the radio, Kiri later recalled, she, Tom and Nell drove the Simca up to the Waitakere Ranges overlooking Auckland. ‘That night all of the streets were sprinkled with diamonds and gold dust,’ Kiri said, looking back sentimentally on the moment.

Kiri was one of two St Mary’s girls to be chosen for the final. Both girls knew Sister Mary Leo expected one of her singers to collect the prize for a third consecutive time, following the successes of Mary O’Brien in 1959 and Patricia Price in 1961. Malvina Major’s colourful, beautifully enunciated singing style made her one of the immediate favourites, especially in her home town. Yet many saw Kiri as an equally likely winner. Despite her youth and relative inexperience, Kiri had channelled her natural personality into an irresistible stage persona. Her ability to strike an instinctive rapport with her audiences had already won her an under twenty-one aria competition in Te Awamutu that year.

It had been at the less serious engagements that her regular accompanist Susan Smith had watched Kiri’s natural appeal begin to blossom. Smith, the daughter of a Blockhouse Bay butcher and another member of the St Mary’s musical circle, had known the Te Kanawa family since childhood. In many ways Kiri remained the same carefree girl she had first seen running amok with her niece Judy. ‘Kiri never had a confidence problem then. It was all a bit of a game,’ said Smith. ‘She wasn’t singing at these engagements because she was thinking “One day I’m going to be a star”, she was just singing because it was a fun thing to do and she did it well. If an audience wanted her to sing another six songs she would. She often told me she’d sing down a coal mine.’

Kiri enjoyed ad-libbing her repertoire. Her carefree attitude only added to the audience’s enchantment. Smith recalls how at one concert Kiri had come over to her and whispered in her ear that she was going to sing ‘The Laughing Song’ from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. ‘But we haven’t rehearsed that. We don’t know that,’ a panic-stricken Smith whispered back. As the audience watched on the two girls continued their giggled conversation before pressing on with an impromptu version of the song. ‘Halfway through the song, where it goes “Most amusing, ah ha ha ha”, she really burst out laughing. Kiri had a really infectious, throaty laugh,’ Smith recalled. ‘She laughed and laughed and laughed, it was real hysterics. The whole hall just erupted. Soon everybody was laughing.’

When she eventually regained her composure Kiri explained that she was laughing at the conversation she had had with her accompanist. ‘Then she said, “I’ll turn around three times and we’ll do it again, and we’ll sing it properly this time,”’ recalled Smith. The audience sat there simply entranced. ‘Those sorts of things were special and the audience would never have forgotten that. They would have thought, quite rightly, “What a lovely, natural girl.”’

Kiri drove to Hamilton with Tom, Nell, Judy, Nola and Vincent Collins. As they mixed with the judges and officials from Mobil, the Te Kanawas were introduced to the four male singers chosen to make up the final six competitors. Among them was Rodney Macann, a Christchurch bank clerk whose fine bass voice had been polished in the choir of the Baptist church where his parents were staunch members.

During rehearsals at Hamilton’s main music venue, Founders Hall, Macann had been struck by the clarity and power of Kiri’s voice. On the night of the competition itself, however, he witnessed something else. ‘The initial impact in that hall was just electric,’ he recalled. ‘She sang a couple of songs and of course she was very beautiful, but it was this desire to communicate with people that she had which was unique. I’ve never seen anything like it since and I had certainly never seen anything like it at the time.’

For Kiri, however, the tragedy was that her performance was ultimately wasted. The format for the competition involved the judges listening to the performances in a radio booth at the other end of Hamilton. The thunderous applause that accompanied Kiri’s bow to the audience was the only clue the panel would have had of the dazzling performance they had missed. The competition’s main judge that year was James Robertson, a distinguished English musician working with the New Zealand Opera Company at the time. Back in England he was a favourite to be appointed the first director of the soon-to-be-opened adjunct of the Royal Opera House, the London Opera Centre.

Impressed as he had been by Kiri’s creamy voice, Robertson had found Malvina Major the more classical singer at that stage. With the six singers on stage he announced that he had placed Major first with Kiri second. A baritone, Alistair Stokes, was placed third.

As the winners were presented with their cheques and sashes, Kiri could not resist playfully upstaging her rival. Sister Mary Leo’s student Diana Stuart had been playing the cello in the orchestra pit. ‘I remember Kiri taking a handkerchief from one of the male singers and dabbing her eyes,’ she said.

As she watched events in Founders Hall, Stuart had not been surprised at the result. ‘The difference in the two was that between a huge canvas that Kiri had and a small but highly colourful canvas which Malvina had,’ she said. ‘On the night I thought Kiri had wonderful performing potential but the song didn’t do her much of a favour.’ Crucially, unlike Kiri, Malvina had concentrated on singing to the judges. ‘Malvina was not really involved with the audience.’

Even as a distant member of the Sister Mary Leo stable, Stuart knew the shock waves the surprise result would cause at St Mary’s. The result was precisely what the two girls’ teacher wanted. ‘Sister Mary Leo did want Malvina to win because she was ready for it and Kiri wasn’t,’ she said. Nell Te Kanawa, however, would never accept the result. ‘There was rivalry between Kiri and Malvina and I think that was precipitated by Nell. Nell would always ask “Why, why, why?” “Why did somebody beat Kiri?”’

Kiri declared herself overwhelmed with her second place. ‘I don’t think she was in the least bothered,’ said Rodney Macann, who joined Kiri at the post competition party. ‘At that stage she was new on the block and was just pleased to be there.’ Macann found Kiri even more charming than she had been on the Founders Hall stage. ‘She actually said to me afterwards she was disappointed that I hadn’t won.’

Nell, Tom, Judy, Nola and Vincent had decided to head back to Auckland that night. In the absence of her family and her boyfriend, Kiri and Macann soon began monopolising each other’s company. When the formal celebrations finished the party continued in Kiri’s room. She later recalled how her suite was so full she was reduced to sitting in her wardrobe where she sipped lime cordial. For most of the young singers there was no need for anything stronger. ‘We were all pretty high. Some of us were away from home for the first time,’ said Macann. Eventually Kiri, Macann, Malvina and one or two others slipped away from the celebrations and walked along the moonlit bank of the Waikato River together. Kiri and Macann stayed out under the stars until the small hours.

‘It was a beautiful evening, and quite a romantic sort of a thing,’ smiled Macann. ‘It was about that time that things sort of sprung up a wee bit between Kiri and myself.’ Kiri returned to Auckland the following day to sing in another of New Zealand’s premier competitions, the John Court Aria in Auckland. Close to exhaustion from the travel, the excitement of the competition and her night with Rodney Macann, she performed Sibelius’s ‘The Tryst’ on automatic pilot and expected little in return for her efforts.

A friend, Ann Gordon, called her at Mitchell Street to tell her she had won with a remarkable mark of ninety-five per cent from the judges. The judge, Clifton Cook, could barely contain his excitement at the discovery. ‘If I had had a bouquet I would have laid it at her feet. She is one of the finest New Zealand artists I have heard,’ he eulogised.

Kiri’s mind was already elsewhere, however. Within days of returning from Hamilton she telephoned Rodney Macann reiterating her invitation for him to come and stay in Auckland. Even in Hamilton Macann’s starchy Baptist background had left him unprepared for Kiri’s whirlwind openness. She had made no secret of her involvement with Vincent Collins, in whose company Macann had seen her in Hamilton. No sooner had he arrived in Auckland than Kiri matter-of-factly announced his path was now clear. For once Kiri had heeded Nell’s advice to the letter. ‘I supplanted Vincent Collins,’ he said. ‘She dropped him when we met.’

Like Collins, Macann was welcomed with open arms at Mitchell Street. However, he switched to a hotel for the rest of his stay. Macann found it difficult to warm to Nell’s uninhibited blend of bluster and blind faith. ‘Nell was not an easy person. She was determined that nobody would be ahead of Kiri,’ he said. Macann was appalled at the manner in which Nell belittled Malvina Major. ‘Nell put around all these rumours after Malvina won the Mobil that it had all been agreed beforehand. She said that Malvina came from a much poorer background and needed the money. It was part of her coping with the fact that Malvina had won, which was a huge shock to everyone to be absolutely fair.’

As he returned to Christchurch, however, he and Kiri pledged to keep the relationship alive. ‘We got very interested in each other, although we were living a long way from each other,’ he said. ‘We had something quite special. We were both moving towards musical careers and there was this huge passion that we both had for singing.’ Kiri’s spontaneity could not have presented a starker contrast to the stolidity of Macann’s life. Back at work in his bank in Christchurch Macann was amazed when Kiri called out of the blue to announce she was making the thousand-mile journey to see him.

‘She just announced that she was coming down to Christchurch and she wanted to see me.’ Kiri’s parting words to a startled Macann were, ‘I expect you to be at the airport and I want a big kiss when I arrive.’

‘I was amazingly inhibited when we first met,’ he said. ‘It was the last thing I’d be seen doing in those days because I was terrified.’ Kiri was not Macann’s first girlfriend. He too had broken off a relationship in the wake of Hamilton. Yet he had not met a girl remotely like her. ‘I didn’t find her a terribly sexy person, it was rather an energy. She was very lovable and she had these wonderful eyes. It was energy and eyes that got me.’

After her success in the competition circuit Kiri had begun charming the malleable New Zealand media with equal ease. In one of her first in-depth interviews, with the Auckland Star in September 1963, she presented herself as a serious and dedicated young artist. She said she was working hard at learning Maori. ‘I’m part Maori so I feel I should learn to speak it properly – it will also help me when I sing Maori songs,’ she said. In May and June that year, Kiri had sat through eight lessons in Maori with her friend the mayoress, Thelma Robinson. They were members of a class being used as guinea pigs for a new Maori textbook written by Johnny Waititi. Throughout the interview Kiri did all she could to reassure the Maori trustees of the wisdom of their investment.

Despite her headline grabbing success at that year’s competition, Kiri said she was determined to protect her voice. ‘If a baby tries to walk too young, then its knees might go wobbly,’ she smiled. ‘In the same way when a voice is as young as mine it can easily be killed by wrong use.’ Her instrument would remain under wraps for another two years while she studied with Sister Mary Leo, she reassured her new following. ‘Until I feel I know more about technique and my voice has developed I do not feel competent enough to accept many public engagements,’ she told the Star.

In reality her blossoming popularity left little room for such sacrifices. Kiri was still the queen of the ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ circuit and the uncrowned diva of the dine and dance circuit.

Like the Standard Ten before it Kiri’s blue Simca became a familiar sight flying around Auckland. ‘She had this sports car and I’d see her roaring off from the church to get to the next wedding. She was a wild girl with a real lead foot in the car,’ recalled John Lesnie, one of Auckland’s premier society photographers in the 1960s.

Kiri accepted as many engagements as she possibly could – and was capable of cut-throat tactics to ensure her diary remained full. During her early St Mary’s days she had been friendly with another of Sister Leo’s star singers, Pettine-Ann Croul. ‘She came to our home and I would go through songs with her. She wanted me to mark them down for her voice. We had two entirely different voices. I was a coloratura and she started off as a mezzo,’ explained Croul, who went on to earn an MBE for her work in teaching singers and today runs her own performing arts college. Relations began to sour when Nell began subjecting Pettine-Ann’s mother, Mercia, to her interminable telephone calls. ‘She would tell her how Kiri had sung so much better than me, and everyone else. It was always how Kiri had been hard done by,’ Croul said.

Nell would call Pettine-Ann too. ‘I had calls from Nell asking what I was going to sing at a competition and she’d say I couldn’t do such and such because Kiri was going to sing that.’ Like Kiri, Pettine-Ann desperately needed extra money to support her singing education. Her father was a clerk of the works at the city council and was unable to afford the lessons she needed. She too had begun to sing at society weddings around Auckland. ‘I lost engagements because they would offer to do them for a lower fee. I remember one society wedding where I had quoted £15, which was reasonable for a full day’s work as it was, and later they rang back and said Kiri had undercut me by quoting £10.’

Inevitably the tensions strained friendships. ‘It became difficult to have a friendship with Kiri and we moved apart.’ If Kiri’s combination of talent, drive, good looks and influential support was not sufficient cause for jealousy among her rivals, her popularity as a nightclub singer only added to the deepening resentment. New Zealand’s stringent drinking laws meant that its pubs still closed at six o’clock in the evening, even on Saturdays. Londoner Bob Sell’s Colony Club had become one of the most popular venues for couples in need of an evening’s entertainment. ‘Women wore little bolero jackets and tucked bottles of gin or scotch under their arms,’ said Sell, the owner of a chain of restaurants who had converted an old city centre warehouse into his most successful venture.

Sell would hire three or four acts to entertain his clients from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. in the morning. At first he had been unsure how Kiri’s studied elegance would go down with his raucous regulars. ‘She was a good Catholic girl and when she came on stage, the dress came up to her neck and down to her ankles. I used to say to her, “Why don’t you shorten the bloody thing?’” he recalled.

Yet Kiri’s combination of talent and charisma conquered even the rowdiest of Saturday night gatherings. ‘Everybody was, as I put it politely, Brahms and Liszt, yet they loved her. Absolutely. She had this magic.’ Kiri’s renditions of favourites from musicals like West Side Story and The Sound of Music regularly brought the audience to its feet. Soon Sell’s other acts refused to follow her on the bill. ‘She might have started off as an opening act but she certainly finished as a closing act,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t get anybody to follow her because she killed the audience for everybody else.’

Such was the spell Kiri cast at the club, she could reduce the room to silence with a rendition of a favourite hymn from St Mary’s. At first Sell had feared the worst when at 1.30 a.m. one morning Kiri suddenly began singing an unaccompanied version of ‘Ave Maria’. ‘I thought to myself, “What the hell is she doing? Is she mad or something?” And all of a sudden, you could hear a pin drop.’

From then on the aria, along with ‘Oh My Beloved Father’, became Kiri’s signature song at the Colony. Sell remained close to Kiri long after she had graduated to rather grander establishments. ‘I said to her once, “You may think it’s tough when you stand up and sing at Covent Garden, but I reckon the toughest audience you ever faced was at the Colony,”’ he said.

At the Colony Club Kiri learned to make every member of the audience feel as if she were singing for their personal pleasure. ‘She could hold them in the palm of her hand,’ Sell remembered. By the end of 1963 it was a feeling Rodney Macann understood better than most. In the months since the Song Quest Kiri’s relationship with Macann had intensified. ‘She made you feel at times that you were the only person in the world, and it was genuine,’ said Macann. ‘She gave me lovely presents, sent me endless photos and we wrote a letter a week.’

To the straight-laced Macann, Kiri could be a maddening collection of contradictions. He was in no doubt that she saw her career as her primary concern. ‘The career came first from a very early stage and the boys came second. She had a huge determination to succeed, to be the best. She was absolutely single minded,’ he said. Yet beneath the outgoing exterior lurked a deep and at times painfully obvious insecurity. Macann would constantly hear Kiri complain about her rivals. ‘One of the things that characterised her in the early days was she needed a rival. She had to have somebody she could set her sights on.’

The placid Macann found her occasionally poisonous outbursts hard to handle. ‘She would veer between very lovable and hugely frustrating. She was enormously giving as a person but she could be pretty difficult at times. She’d drive you crazy because she’d do very silly things, which I found incredibly irritating being a more sedate person. Things like saying something so bitchy and stupid about another singer that it was totally unnecessary because she was so much better than that person anyway.’ Kiri was still demonstrating this thinly disguised disdain for her rivals many years later. She once described herself as blossoming ‘like a petunia in an onion patch’.

It was hardly difficult to detect the influence that had produced her straight-talking manner. ‘My grandmother would say exactly what she thought, and if you didn’t like it, too bad. She wasn’t going to back down,’ said Judy Evans-Hita.

‘It may have been something that was instilled by Nell,’ agreed Macann. ‘Kiri was not a devious person in any sense, and therefore if she was thinking something that was a bit bitchy she would say it.’ Macann wondered whether Kiri had the dedication to go with her mother’s overpowering ambition. ‘She was lackadaisical because she had a limited intellectual ability to grasp some things and therefore she got very, very bored,’ he said. ‘She just had a lot of energy and found the discipline of concentrating on musical things very frustrating, I think.’ As he watched her perform, however, her talent was unmistakable. ‘Kiri is not someone like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf who has a very intellectual approach to music. There was something within her which was innately musical, and it’s not something that you can train somebody to have. You had the voice, you had the personality which communicates itself, but then you had this amazing musical gift as well. She was also a person, at that time, really without inhibition on stage. It was just there.’ Soon that gift was winning a wider audience.

In the two years since she had performed ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ for Tony Vercoe, Kiri had begun to wonder whether she would ever be given an opportunity to become a recording star. By the winter of 1964, however, the wait was over. Vercoe contacted Nell with the news that he was finally ready to record her daughter for the first time.

Vercoe had resisted the temptation to release a choral work first. His instincts told him that the key to Kiri’s success lay in her Maori heritage. ‘It was just a feeling I had. I felt the time was right perhaps for someone of a Maori background to emerge,’ said Vercoe. Yet the Uwane débâcle had reinforced Vercoe’s hunch that the New Zealand public were not quite ready for musical marriages between European and Maori music. Kiri’s first careful steps should be taken down the traditional path, he felt sure. Vercoe understood the Maori sensibility better than most. He had been a close friend of Inia Te Wiata while studying opera and theatre at London’s Royal College of Music after World War II. He commissioned the composer Ashley Heenan to arrange five traditional Maori love songs. On 5 June 1964, in Wellington, Kiri, a rising Maori tenor Hohepa Mutu and an instrumental quartet began recording work on the songs: ‘Hokihoki tonu mai’, ‘Hine e hine’, ‘Tahi nei teru kino’, ‘Haere re e hoa ma’ and ‘E rere ra te Matangi’. Mutu recalls the studio sessions as ‘quite arduous’ and with good reason, according to Tony Vercoe.

To the experienced and perfectionist Vercoe, Kiri was the rawest of raw recruits. It fell to him to instil the effervescent twenty-year-old with a touch of discipline. ‘She had other interests and she was very outgoing,’ he recalled. ‘She was part of a group of young girls and wanted to be out doing things with them.

‘I was a bit of a restricting influence on her. I would demand all her time while she was going to be recording and that was a bit hard for her.’ Punctuality was never his new protégée’s strong suit. ‘We would get into the studio at nine o’clock and she mightn’t be on time. I would be as tough as I felt I needed to be,’ he said. Vercoe also insisted on perfectionism in the studio. ‘She had the voice and a fairly natural musical feeling. But she was not so wonderful note for note. Instead of a crotchet, a dot and a quaver, she might put in two crotchets and say, “Oh, that’s near enough.”’

Inevitably Kiri’s devil-may-care attitude drew Vercoe’s fire at times. ‘I wouldn’t say they were fights, but I insisted on it being right. Not in an unpleasant way, but for a while she kicked against it,’ he added.

Vercoe would not be the first nor the last to detect a streak of laziness in Kiri. It is something she has freely admitted to herself, over and over again. ‘She didn’t like hard work very much. And of course it is hard work in a recording studio. You can get away with singing a song in public and people think it’s marvellous, but put that on tape and all the flaws show up,’ he said. ‘The number of takes we would have to do irritated her slightly.’

In truth, Kiri was actually working hard to moderate her behaviour in Vercoe’s presence. Don Hutchings, Vercoe’s sales manager at Kiwi Records, got to know the high-spirited soloist socially as well as professionally. He saw her temper her behaviour in front of one of New Zealand’s leading musical lights. ‘For Kiri, Tony was a stepping stone to something very bright and he was someone to be respected,’ he said. ‘With others, she would use all sorts of language but she was very demure around Tony.’

Ultimately, the balance of power would shift and Vercoe would pay the price for his exacting standards. He, more than anyone, saw the likely scenario from the start. ‘There was a future, and I saw that to some extent I had to prepare her, not just for the recording, but for whatever might follow. She was going to need this discipline and I was the mug who was going to have to impose it initially,’ he said philosophically.

Kiri’s impatience was understandable enough. By now her growing reputation had begun to draw interest from a variety of quarters. As she had taken her first tentative steps into the recording studio, she had already made her debut as a screen actress. The producer and director John O’Shea had raised the £67,000 he would need to make his film Runaway himself. Before she had completed her recording work with Vercoe, he contracted Kiri to play the female lead, a young girl who undertakes an illicit affair with an older man. Nell agreed on a fee of £20 for the week’s work.

Kiri had been suggested for the part by O’Shea’s male lead, Colin Broadley. Broadley had known her through his Auckland record store The Loft and his television show, In The Groove. Around Auckland, Broadley knew Kiri had earned herself a reputation as something of a wild, party-loving spirit. As O’Shea prepared for a three-week shoot near Opononi, towards the northernmost tip of the North Island, she remained a paragon of decorum, a good Catholic girl of whom Sister Mary Leo could be proud.

Kiri insisted on one crucial change to the original script. ‘She wouldn’t get into bed with the leading actor,’ recalled O’Shea. Broadley had originally raised no objections to the love scene in which he and Kiri would end up in bed together. He was surprised but equally easy about removing the scene to spare Kiri’s blushes. ‘I don’t remember the discussion, but I know we decided it wasn’t appropriate for whatever reason,’ he said.

Kiri was acutely conscious of her figure, and her small bust in particular. Her unsubtle nickname among the St Mary’s set was ‘tiny tits’. Her preference for long dresses had been instilled at St Mary’s but she also had a dislike of her chunky calves. Even though she remained fully clothed, Kiri became increasingly nervous as the camera scrutinised her face and figure.

Her key scene came when Broadley proposed marriage to her character. ‘When I proposed she pointed to a hedgehog and said, “No, no. I’m like a hedgehog. You can’t get close to me. I’ll roll up and you’ll get prickled,”’ recalled Broadley. When it came to shooting the scene, however, Kiri’s nerves had become so severe she had broken out in a livid rash. ‘Kiri was nervous about acting. It was all new to her and she did very well but the stress contributed to her getting eczema.’

O’Shea and his make-up team tried all they could to mask Kiri’s problem. ‘We held a willow branch in front of her to put shadows over her face to disguise the eczema, but it didn’t work,’ said Broadley.

When, months later, Kiri, accompanied by her niece Judy, turned up for the première at New Zealand’s Civic Theatre cinema in Queen Street, she found the scene had been cut from the final film. ‘It had to be left out, which was a pity because there was a later scene with me about running over a hedgehog which then made no sense,’ said Broadley. It was a common enough reaction within the cinema.

‘At the time it was wonderful because Kiri was in it, but looking back now it was probably the most dreadful movie I’ve ever seen in my life,’ recalled Judy. ‘At one point I turned to her and asked what she thought. She just said “Boring!”’

The film failed to set the box office alight, leaving O’Shea to spend the next fourteen years paying off the debts he had run up during its production. Once more Kiri was left ruing her journey down what, at the time at least, seemed like another creative cul-de-sac.

The disappointments of her short-lived movie career were mercifully brief. In the winter of 1964 ‘Maori Love Duets’ was released as a 7-inch EP (extended play) record, complete with a painfully posed photograph of Kiri and Mutu dressed in traditional Maori costume. The record sold well, particularly among souvenir-hunting tourists. As his investment provided an early return, Tony Vercoe activated his original idea of recording ‘The Nun’s Chorus’.

Shortly before Christmas in 1964, Sister Mary Leo and the St Mary’s Choral Group, with Lenora Owsley at the organ, repeated the performance that had caught his imagination two years earlier. Vercoe had asked Sister Mary Leo to suggest a B-side that Kiri could sing as well. Her suggestion, Handel’s ‘Let the Bright Seraphim’, would become one of the more significant pieces of music in Kiri’s life. The recording at St Patrick’s Cathedral was overseen by Don Hutchings.

Hutchings’s official title of sales manager failed to do justice to his role within Kiwi Records. In reality he was Tony Vercoe’s right-hand man, a combination of record plugger, A&R man and all-round Mr Fixit. Based in Auckland rather than Wellington, Hutchings was a familiar face to many of the St Mary’s Choir. As the popular, not to mention handsome host of his own television show, ‘21 And Out’, he was one of Auckland’s more eligible bachelors. He had dated most of Sister Mary Leo’s starlets. Hutchings had also got to know Kiri and Nell Te Kanawa during the making of the ‘Maori Love Duets’. He had formed a particularly good relationship with Nell, who had, he recalled, ‘taken an instant liking to me’.

As far as Hutchings was concerned, Nell was far from the ogre he had heard described by the girls of St Mary’s. ‘She was a stage door mum, but an innocent,’ he said. ‘She knew she had a diamond in Kiri and all she wanted to do was make sure no one mucked it up for her.’

During Kiri’s lengthy spells in the recording studio, Nell had begun to confide in Hutchings. She left him in no doubt as to the dominant item on her agenda. ‘Because Kiri was not academically brilliant, mum felt that the greatest protection she could offer her was a marriage to someone who had managerial skills, entrepreneurial skills, all of those things,’ he said.

Nell and Hutchings shared the same earthy sense of humour. ‘One of the great jokes of the time was Mum’s list of “10 who might be”,’ he recalled. Nell and Hutchings would often discuss the roster of eligible bachelors she kept scribbled in her diary. ‘I think I got on to it for about a week. I disappeared off it again because I was courting a beautiful woman from Wellington.’

As he got to know Nell, Hutchings was left in no doubt that her primary target for a husband for Kiri was Peter Webb, an English television producer. ‘Mum saw Peter Webb as the number one for a long time,’ said Hutchings. Kiri had begun seeing Webb in Auckland while still continuing her long-distance love affair with Rodney Macann. He was only one of several difficulties slowly driving Kiri and Macann apart, however.

Macann’s relationship with Kiri had always been fraught with problems. In the year or so since the Mobil Song Quest, he had come to see that he and she were polar opposites.

‘At that stage the Baptists were very anti-drink, anti-gambling. I was a very inhibited Baptist and she was a much looser Catholic. That was a big barrier in those days,’ he said. Macann’s worries had been exacerbated by a speech he had heard by a leading churchman of the day on the subject of inter-denominational marriages. ‘He said that basically it was very difficult.’ To Macann, already a deeply religious young man, the speech precipitated a crisis. ‘As far as I was concerned, at any rate, this was a turning point in our relationship. I was just being aware of all the prejudice you had to deal with in those days.’

Macann had seen other girls in Christchurch. ‘It was pretty embarrassing one time because I was going out with someone else and Kiri just arrived and said she wanted to stay,’ he recalled. At the same time Kiri had made no secret of the fact she was also close to Peter Webb. ‘I was the one out of town and he was the one in town for a while.’

Matters came to a head in Wellington when Kiri travelled down to spend time with him at Macann’s aunt’s house. Macann’s relationship with Kiri had never progressed to sex. ‘There was none of that in our relationship,’ he confirmed. Instead they spent the hours through till dawn discussing their chances of a life together. ‘We talked right through the night and decided that, although we were pretty smitten with each other, ultimately our relationship had no future,’ he said. ‘Things moved on to a more Platonic footing after that.’

If somewhere in her mind Kiri had hoped this would clear the way for Webb, however, she was soon disappointed. Kiri had met Webb while making one of her, by now, regular appearances on television, on the station AKTV2. Like Vincent Collins before him, the blond producer had moved into the basement at Mitchell Street. To those who were close to Kiri, however, it was already clear that the relationship was not progressing as she wanted.

Kiri’s need for affection was acute. ‘I’m the kind of person who needs to be loved,’ she admitted a few years later.

For those who knew her well it was not difficult to detect where the source of her vulnerability lay. ‘She was very insecure, mainly because she didn’t know her background,’ said Hannah Tatana. ‘She was very aware of the fact that she was adopted and did not know where her roots lay.’

To her friends at the time it seemed clear the men in her life were expected to fill the void. ‘Her men had to prove that they loved her. The relationship itself wasn’t enough,’ said Susan Smith. ‘It was a case of her saying, “If you really loved me, you’d do this, this and this.”’ For much of the time that Smith and Kiri performed together, Susan had a steady boyfriend called Ronald, an Auckland pharmacist. ‘Very often he brought me presents, make-up and stuff that he could get through work, and he also loved writing poetry, so I got poems,’ she recalled. ‘She couldn’t bear that, because Peter never did that for her.’

Susan realised the extent of Kiri’s insecurity when she suddenly began showing off presents she had been supposedly bought by her boyfriend. ‘She started buying things and sending the bill to Peter. She ordered anything, even a gown from Colin Cole,’ she said. ‘Then she could say, “Look what Peter bought me.” It was extraordinary, it all sounds so petty, but that’s what she did.’

The sense that Kiri’s neediness was driving Webb away was inescapable. Kiri’s problems were helped little by the fact that, at Mitchell Street, Webb had to contend with Nell’s demanding personality too. ‘He was under both of their thumbs,’ said Susan Smith. Inevitably his patience ran out. ‘I think in the end Peter just thought, “I can’t do this any more.”’

At a wedding early in 1965 Webb’s eye fell on a pretty young ballet dancer turned television presenter called Nerida Nicholls, sitting in the sunshine in a rocking chair. When he approached to introduce himself she smiled coolly and said, ‘I think you’re supposed to fall at my feet.’ He then did precisely that.

‘I think we pretty much decided there and then we were going to be together,’ said Nicholls. When Nicholls suggested they move on from the party together Webb had admitted his involvement with Kiri, with whom he had a date later that night.

‘We were keen to go on somewhere but he told me he was supposed to take Kiri out somewhere,’ said Nicholls. ‘I told him to call her, and if she was in then he’d have to go, but if she was out we should carry on. We drove off in Peter’s Mini, stopped at a phone box and he rang. She was out. We went to a jazz club called the Montmartre and two weeks later we were engaged.’

The first the Te Kanawas knew of the unfolding drama was when Webb suddenly announced he was moving out from Mitchell Street. ‘Peter just upped and packed his bags one day,’ recalled Susan Smith. ‘There was no discussion, he just left, whoosh, end of scene.’ For Kiri the humiliation was made even worse when she turned up at a party she knew Webb was attending soon after his sudden departure. She arrived to find him there with Nerida Nicholls and her parents.

‘We had decided that afternoon to get engaged. We hadn’t even told my parents and then suddenly we were up in front of everyone saying, “We’ve got something to tell you all …”’ recalled Nicholls. Amid the passion of her new romance, Nicholls had learned little about Webb’s now discarded girlfriend. ‘I didn’t know how serious it had been with Peter and her, otherwise maybe I would have taken off. Peter didn’t tell me much about it,’ she said. The party offered her her first glimpse of the girl she had now replaced in Peter Webb’s affections. Amid the excitement of the celebrations that followed her announcement, she can recall nothing of Kiri’s reaction.

Webb and Nicholls were married in Auckland in June, three months later, with Kiri in attendance. The two girls were to meet frequently, appearing together on television. The subject of Peter Webb, however, was never mentioned.

Instead Kiri reserved her displays of anger for friends like Susan Smith. ‘I don’t know if she particularly wanted Peter for being Peter,’ said Smith. ‘But she wanted a partner and she always felt that she offered so much no one would dare let her go.’


Now is the Hour (#ulink_ff903303-f81f-5b69-aabf-451307809859)

In March 1965, around 300 people packed the Eden Roskill War Memorial Hall in suburban Auckland to celebrate Kiri’s twenty-first birthday. The black tie gathering amounted to a ‘Who’s Who’ of New Zealand’s musical talent. Radiant in a shimmering, low cut dress, her hair piled high in a voguish French twist, it was a new, sophisticated Kiri who monopolised the limelight.

Nell had done all she could to make the party one of the social events of the year. Resourceful as ever, she had persuaded Cliff and Billie Trillo, owners of Auckland’s premier restaurant Trillo’s, to provide free catering. The mayor and mayoress of Auckland were present, as was John Waititi and a representative of the Maori King Koroki. The numbers were also swollen by people who barely knew Nell, let alone her daughter. Susan Smith recalls turning up with an aunt and uncle who had never even met Kiri.

A few formal presentations ensured the Auckland press had their photo opportunities. Kiri was presented with a greenstone pendant by the King’s representative. Johnny Waititi delivered a speech and an elaborate scroll addressed to ‘Dearest Kiri’ on behalf of the Maori Education Foundation.

In the years since he first offered support, Kiri had become increasingly close to the quiet, dignified Waititi. In ‘Uncle John’, as she often called him, she saw a younger version of her father. Yet it was Tom who provided the emotional highpoint of the evening with a powerful and heartfelt speech. ‘We didn’t know he had it in him,’ said Don Hutchings, who like everyone else in the hall had grown used to Tom’s almost invisible presence.

In the time he had known the Te Kanawas, Hutchings had been touched by the quiet devotion Tom had shown his daughter. ‘He would sit there and look at her and not say a word. His eyes would twinkle and you knew what was going through his head,’ he said.

For the first time he expressed those feelings publicly. ‘He called her his jewel and said this was the magic part of his life because he had been gifted both the time with her and Kiri the person. Kiri was his gift from whoever was looking after him.’ Kiri’s tears were not the only ones shed during Tom’s oration. ‘It was a magnificent presentation, a very moving address,’ said Hutchings.

Kiri, naturally, was asked to sing at one point in the evening. Her performance opened at least one guest’s eyes to the true extent of the talents she had, as yet, barely tapped. ‘Everyone was asking Kiri to sing and eventually she said “Alright.”,’ remembered Neil McGough, her old conductor from Uwane. ‘Everything went quiet and she sang a lovely aria. As Kiri came to this great, glorious moment in the aria and everyone had their mouths open, Lou Clauson and Simon Mehana, the popular radio comedy duo, tiptoed in the door and stood quietly at the back. She stopped in mid-phrase and shouted “Hello Lou! Hello Simon! Be with you in a minute”, and then finished the song.’

McGough was stunned by Kiri’s seeming disconnection from her singing. ‘It was one of the most amazing things. You’d think that to sing like that would have taken complete focus. But she could have been thinking about whether there was enough pâté in the fridge at home,’ he recalled.

For McGough, at least, it was the most revelatory moment of the night. ‘That really made me realise Kiri had no idea how good she was.’

Kiri ended the musical interlude by inviting Lou and Simon to join her on the stage. Her hammy performances with the duo had become hugely popular at Mitchell Street. ‘The three of them would have us all in tears of laughter singing “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza”,’ recalled Kiri’s niece Judy Evans-Hita. That night, however, they played it straight, linking arms with Kiri for an emotional version of the Maori favourite, ‘Pokarekare ana’.

It was clear that Kiri was having the time of her life. ‘She had an absolute ball that night,’ remembered Hutchings, who had done more than most to contribute to her high spirits. By now the best-selling success of ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ was transforming Kiri into a new musical star.

Hutchings had begun the job of chivvying and charming ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ on to the New Zealand airwaves early in the year. At first the record’s sales had been sluggish. Over a friendly beer Hutchings had persuaded Les Andrews, an old friend of Tony Vercoe and the host of the country’s most popular radio show, on the ZB station, to inject a little interest with a few, contrived early plays. Hutchings smiled at the memory. ‘Obviously, we dreamed up a few requests. It was marketing ploy people are not reluctant to use today either.’

In its two-hour Sunday lunchtime slot before New Zealand’s television service cranked into life at 3 p.m., Andrews’s show drew an audience any Royal wedding or cup final would be proud of. It may only be a small exaggeration to say that, with the whole country listening, the gift of stardom was his to confer. ‘It was the most popular programme in the country. It had the market to itself,’ Hutchings recalled.

After three weeks of false solicitations Andrews suddenly began to receive genuine requests for the record. ‘There was a trickle at first and then an avalanche,’ recalled Hutchings. Soon ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ became the most requested record Les Andrews ever had. It was perhaps an indication of New Zealand’s curious musical taste that the only record that remotely rivalled it was Spike Milligan’s quirky ‘Bad Jelly the Witch’.

Kiri’s popularity was soon being translated into record sales. ‘It was in the hit parade for weeks,’ said Hutchings’s colleague Tony Vercoe. ‘It was extraordinary.’ As he travelled around New Zealand capitalising on the momentum now under way, Hutchings heard the same response when he asked people’s opinions of her. Kiri’s striking looks and simple, girl-next-door appeal were as important as the quality and clarity of her singing. ‘She looked the part and that was a great help,’ he said. Most significant of all, however, she was presented as a Maori. Kiwi Records had hit on a nerve.

‘It was a method of marketing. If you’d said, “Here’s Pettine-Ann Croul and she sings opera”, they’d say, “Well, so what?”,’ said Don Hutchings. ‘The argument then was, “Maoris can’t sing opera; they don’t have the discipline either with the voice or personally.” Here was a Maori who could sing opera, and that was how we got the door open.’

Vercoe’s colleagues at Reeds wasted no time in capitalising on the breakthrough. Their PR assault had soon put Kiri’s face on the cover of magazines and newspapers across the country. As she became a favourite on television shows like ‘21 And Out’, the bandwagon became unstoppable. Suddenly she was a star. The marketing drive focused on Kiri’s Maori credentials. She was willing to play along with the image, dressing up in the piu piu and other items of ceremonial wear. The approach impressed both sections of the New Zealand community: to the Europeans she was something of an oddity, a Maori capable of singing music hitherto unheard by a mass audience; to the Maori she was a beautiful and aspirational role model, the most enviable ambassador their people had yet produced.

Yet Kiri’s sudden transformation into a Maori singer seemed curious to those who had known her in her formative days. After she had won the Tauranga Aria in May 1964, Susan Smith had seen Nell’s unease at a newspaper headline. ‘It said something like “Maori girl wins aria” and Mrs Te Kanawa was furious,’ she said. ‘Kiri had no interest in Maoridom at all. She didn’t even like to be called Maori.’ This was, in many respects, far from surprising given Tom’s distance from his roots and the racism Kiri had encountered as a child. Nell’s instincts would also have been alive to the danger of Kiri being stuck with a patronising ‘Maori-girl-does-good’ label that might limit her future scope.

There was, however, no mistaking the realignment under way. St Mary’s other Maori star, Hannah Tatana, had helped Kiri out by lending her traditional clothing for her concerts. ‘I had a feathered cloak which she borrowed a couple of times because she didn’t have that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘It’s a heritage Kiri didn’t have.’

If Susan Smith was surprised at Kiri’s sudden embracing of the Maori cause, she was dismayed by the transformation in her personality which she witnessed in the period before and after her breakthrough into pop stardom. Smith’s first glimpse of the shift in Kiri’s attitude had come back at the Tauranga Aria the previous year. As well as working with Kiri, Smith had happily accompanied other St Mary’s girls who approached her for her help. In the run-up to the contest Kiri had asked Smith that, in return for a generous fee, she play exclusively for her. ‘She said, “I want you to play just for me.” I said, “Yes, no problem.”’

Days before the competition another soloist rang asking Smith to play at Tauranga. ‘I said I couldn’t do that, at which point she went back to Sister Mary Leo and all hell let loose,’ recalled Smith. ‘It had never happened before. It caused a lot of strife.’

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.’





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