Читать книгу Kiri: Her Unsung Story - Garry Jenkins - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWith 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.’
