Kiri: Her Unsung Story

COPYRIGHT

Harper Non-Fiction

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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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Source ISBN 9780006530619

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008219345

Version: 2016-09-08

DEDICATION

For Eva and Gabriella

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

The Road to Gisborne

‘The Boss’

‘The Nun’s Chorus’

Wicked Little Witch

A Princess in a Castle

Now is the Hour

PART TWO

Apprentice Diva

Mr Ideal

Tamed

A Pearl of Great Price

New Worlds

Fallen Angel

Lost Souls

PART THREE

‘250,000 Covent Gardens’

A No-win Situation

Home Truths

A Gift to the Nation

Pop Goes the Diva

Paradise Lost

Out of Reach

Freefall

Footnote

NOTES AND SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

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

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

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’

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.