Kiri: Her Unsung Story
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.