Kiri: Her Unsung Story

Wicked Little Witch

A year after Kiri’s decision to devote herself to full-time singing, she and her mother already formed an irresistible double act. What Kiri possessed in talent, Nell had in tenacity; what Kiri had in beauty, Nell had in belligerence; what Kiri had in charm, Nell had in sheer chutzpah. For two months in 1962, conductor Neil McGough and his colleagues on a new and as yet unperformed Maori musical, Uwane, witnessed the partnership operating at the peak of its powers.

If McGough’s memory serves him correctly, his first audition for the show was held in the less than glamorous setting of an ice rink near Auckland’s city centre a few weeks into the New Year. Around seventy nerve-racked singers and dancers had turned up, each of them hopeful of a role in the musical to be staged at Auckland’s premier venue, His Majesty’s Theatre, that April.

More than three decades on, McGough, who went on to become one of New Zealand’s most respected musical administrators, struggles to recollect the faces that filed past him during a long and at times tediously exhausting day of auditions. However, he remembers the words with which the morning’s most remarkable character introduced herself as if it were yesterday.

‘Excuse me, I’m Kiri Te Kanawa’s mother,’ she announced, interrupting him, the show’s director David Rossiter and choreographer Beverley Jordan as they compared notes mid-way through the auditions.

‘Every other singer and dancer came in and filled out a form and plonked it on the table. We’d ask them what they were going to sing, they’d sing it and that was that,’ recalled McGough. ‘I auditioned dozens and dozens of shows and it was always the same procedure. But Kiri arrived with her mother, and it was her mother who came to the table. Instead of just putting the form on the pile we got the big sell. She just rabbited on and on.’

After what seemed like an eternity listening politely, McGough’s frayed nerves got the better of him. ‘I got a bit mad and said, “Look, this is all terribly interesting and I’m sure we will all entirely agree with you once you’ve sat down and we’ve actually heard your daughter sing.” And on that unsubtle put-down she got the message.’

While her mother had been at the reception desk, Kiri had stood quietly in a corner. As McGough invited her to the centre of the room she handed her sheet music to the pianist and announced that she was going to sing a favourite St Mary’s aria, ‘Oh My Beloved Father’. They were her first – and virtually her last – words of the morning. The consensus was quick in coming. ‘She got the job after about three bars,’ said McGough. ‘She put her hands out in front of her and sang, like all the others, except the sound that came out was unbelievable. It had style, it had diction, she’d clearly been well taught, but it had that magic extra as well. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was going to have to walk in to beat her.’

When Rossiter and McGough offered Kiri the role of the eponymous heroine, Nell accepted immediately.

Nell had taken Kiri along to the ice rink audition after another St Mary’s girl, Lynne Cantlon, had declined the leading role in the musical due to other commitments. She had sensed an ideal opportunity for Kiri to make her mark as a rising star, and a Maori star at that.

Written by an Auckland electroplater, Lindsay Gordon Rowell, Uwane represented the first attempt to blend Maori and European influences on the theatrical stage. Conceived as a European style light musical comedy, the three act ‘musical fantasy’ was set in a Maori village and revolved around the story of two warriors and their efforts to woo the beautiful but mischievous Princess Uwane, ‘the wicked little witch of Whakatane’.

Nell would have known that Rowell had booked His Majesty’s Theatre for a ten night run beginning early in April. What she probably did not know, however, was that behind the scenes the portents were already far from encouraging. A number of Maori singers and actors had turned down offers of leading roles in the show, claiming it affronted rather than celebrated Maori culture. Both Rowell and his sister Zella, who had mortgaged their homes to finance the production, had been warned they would find little enthusiasm for such a show within a still deeply conservative Pakeha public.

While his make-up artist wife was already working on the sticky brown dye that would be used to darken the skins of the Maoris’ European replacements, Rossiter was approaching familiar faces to help him out of his crisis.

The role of the male hero, Manaia, had been given to a handsome English ex-soldier, Vincent Collins, who had been a hit as Joe Cable in South Pacific, Rossiter’s previous show at His Majesty’s. As a member of the British Army, the London-born Collins had seen his share of the world. He had been among the troops sent out to Africa to quell the Mau Mau uprising. He was something of a romantic adventurer too.

As rehearsals got under way the thirty-one-year-old Collins was instantly drawn to the eighteen-year-old with whom he would share most of his scenes in the coming weeks. Kiri had matured into a strikingly attractive young woman. Her thick-set frame and puppy fat features still lent her an air of girlish gawkiness. Her oversized personality and air of vaguely seductive self-confidence more than compensated for it. She had grown into a woman capable of inflaming passions. If she had not known it before taking up her role in Uwane, she certainly did by the end of the troubled production.

At the first rehearsal Collins had been as impressed as everyone else by Kiri’s voice. ‘I remember hearing her for the first time and realising there was a magic attached. It was not just another voice, Kiri was able to get a bird-like clarity,’ Collins recalled. Her personality was, if anything, even more beguiling. ‘She had a wonderful innocence and charm,’ he recalled. Collins found himself smitten almost immediately. ‘She was electrifying.’

Collins had recently broken off his engagement to a beautiful young ballet dancer, Beverley Jordan. The embers of their stormy relationship had yet to be fully extinguished, however. When Rossiter and McGough began searching for a choreographer, it had been Collins who had suggested his former girlfriend for the role. Over the coming weeks Jordan’s primary role was to teach Kiri to dance. It would present one of the sterner tests of her career so far.

Neil McGough had spotted Kiri’s lack of mobility almost immediately. He took the view that she had been hired for her voice and that it was Jordan’s job to polish her stagecraft. ‘It was the opposite of Fred Astaire’s famous audition. With Kiri it was “can’t move, can’t dance, can sing a bit”,’ said McGough. ‘But if she’d been a quadriplegic I think we’d have let her do the show in a wheelchair.’

On stage it quickly became apparent that Kiri was incapable of singing in anything other than the studied operatic pose she had struck at the rehearsal. ‘There’s not a lot one can do with a person who had never ever had any movement training unless they go home and work at it,’ said Jordan. ‘Kiri at that stage could obviously swing a golf club but she was not naturally co-ordinated.’

Director David Rossiter was soon despairing at Kiri’s deficiencies. ‘After the third rehearsal, David Rossiter lined them all up and said there was someone on the stage who was not up to it and they should shape up,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘He didn’t name her, but everyone knew it was Kiri.’

By the next rehearsal the following week, Kiri had undergone a Damascene conversion. ‘She went away to Sister Mary Leo and whatever she told her did the trick because the next time she came back you would not have recognised her,’ said Rowell.

Rowell, McGough, Rossiter and Jordan were experiencing a pattern that would become familiar to all who knew and worked with Kiri in later years. When the chips were down her application was absolute. At other times her relaxed approach could easily be construed at best as disinterest, at worst arrogance.

‘She was a little monkey for whom life was a big giggle,’ said Jordan. ‘She had no idea about the value of time and money. People had staked their houses on the success of this production but Kiri had no responsibilities.

‘To me she was an ignorant little twerp,’ she added unequivocally. ‘I think if the situation were repeated today there’s no doubt she would have been thrown out.’

McGough recognised the same immature tendencies. ‘She was late for things and then thought it was all funny, never took it seriously at all. She would not knuckle down and it was so tragic because she clearly had all the material there. Her voice was already powerful and accurate, although I found very quickly that if she got tired she went flat.’ What he came to call ‘Kiri notes’ could also be induced by lack of concentration. It was soon apparent that such lapses were an intrinsic part of Kiri’s professional persona, a trait she would never shake off.

If Kiri was treating her big break as something of a giggle, her mother was approaching it with the utmost seriousness. Nell’s Blockhouse Bay parties had become well known in musical circles. She used them as a showcase for Kiri’s talent and a vehicle for introducing her daughter to potential benefactors. For many they were simply occasions to be enjoyed. ‘There was a bloody good atmosphere up there, always plenty of drink and food,’ said Neil McGough, a talented trombonist, who attended many of Nell’s impromptu soirées with his Dixieland band, the Bridge City Jazzmen. ‘It wasn’t glamorous food – it was Pavlovas and Cheerios – but what there was there was always plenty of it. Nell would always carry out the biggest trays.’

To the eyes of others, like Beverley Jordan, they only served to ‘give an appearance of Kiri being popular’ and deepen the dislike of her bludgeoning mother. As far as many were concerned the hefty figure they saw urging her daughter on from the side of the stage was little more than a crude and at times intimidating bully. Their thoughts echoed feelings that had been widespread on the competition circuit for some time.

The bitching and backbiting which accompanied the singing contests had been apparent from Kiri’s earliest experiences at the Auckland Competitions. Kiri had seen one mother attempting to stop a rival singer from entering the competition hall because she had arrived ‘too late’. The girl ignored her, entered the hall and the competition on time and duly won. Kiri had quickly come to refer to the Competitions as ‘a scrap’. Nell had taken to these treacherous new waters like a duck to water. In the run-up to contests, she would think nothing of spending an hour on the phone to a rival singer, relentlessly holding forth about Kiri. ‘Her voice was very heavy and she spoke very slowly and deliberately,’ recalled one member of the Sister Mary Leo stable at the time. ‘She would talk about Kiri and how good she was. It was almost like she was trying to intimidate. It happened to us all.’

No tactic seemed too underhand, provided it ensured Kiri outshone her colleagues. ‘Sometimes if three or four St Mary’s girls were singing at an event together, she’d ring around asking each of them what they were going to wear that night,’ recalled the same Sister Mary Leo pupil. ‘She’d ask, “What are you going to wear tonight?” I’d say, “I thought I’d wear a long dress.” She’d say, “Kiri’s not going to wear that, she’s going to wear a short dress.” It might be a modest engagement, so everyone turned up in the short dresses except Kiri, who turned up in the long dress with the gloves and the whole works and looked the most attractive and glamorous. That really got up people’s noses and that’s why the general consensus was that she was not good for Kiri.’

Beverley Jordan was close to some of Kiri’s St Mary’s colleagues. ‘I know there was a lot of unhappiness and dissension at Sister Mary Leo’s because of the pushing and conniving that Nell did,’ she said. ‘Nell tried to tell Sister Mary Leo her job and she would undermine other singers, tell them they were no good, they weren’t talented, that Kiri was the star and was the one that would go to London and have her name in lights.’

‘Nell was very one-eyed,’ Kiri’s St Mary’s colleague Gillian Redstone said succinctly.

During the Uwane rehearsals Nell’s technique amounted to a form of telephone terrorism. She would sit quietly enough during rehearsals. Once the show’s production team were isolated at home, however, the phone would begin to ring. ‘It was always on the phone. It never stopped rehearsals and never happened publicly,’ says Beverly Jordan.

Lynne Cantlon’s early offer of the role of Uwane had come partly by courtesy of her mother, Una, who had been hired as the show’s wardrobe mistress. Relations between Una and Nell were already difficult – Una Cantlon was no shrinking violet herself – yet they were soon strained further. ‘She was always baling up poor Una,’ recalled Neil McGough. ‘She was saying Kiri’s costumes weren’t quite as nice as someone else’s and couldn’t she have a little more of this here and a bit less of that there.’

Beverley Jordan’s mother also suffered. Like Una Cantlon, she could not curb her tongue for long. ‘I remember both my mother and Lynne’s mother asking her whether she had any experience or had she just come off the marae in Gisborne?’ she said. ‘They both told her if she didn’t know anything about stage work she should keep her mouth shut.’

Even the show’s writer was not beyond a little lobbying. ‘She didn’t want Kiri described as a wicked little witch,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘She asked me to make a change to the script but I wasn’t changing it for anybody.’

Neil McGough had been exposed to the breed before. Nell’s weakness as a stage mother lay in her inability to know when to stop. ‘We didn’t dislike Nell, we admired her drive,’ he said. ‘She came to all the rehearsals. Everywhere you went, there was Nell. But she always went a step too far.’ To McGough, at least, the real worry was that Nell seemed to be the controlling influence in Kiri’s career. ‘Kiri never gave an impression that she cared terribly that her mother was like this,’ said McGough. ‘Kiri herself was very dominated by her mother.’

Inevitably Sister Mary Leo had also attempted to assert herself on the evolving drama. She had loftily insisted that the script and score were sent to her at St Mary’s. She wanted ‘to check whether there was anything too racy,’ said Lindsay Rowell. Satisfied that her emerging star’s wholesome image was not endangered, she turned her attention to the score itself. ‘And then she stopped Kiri from singing any of the really high notes in case she damaged her voice.’ After that, at least, she maintained a dignified distance from proceedings.

Inevitably Sister Mary Leo and Nell could not protect Kiri at all times. On the rare occasions when she was left to her own devices, however, it was clear she was perfectly capable of looking after herself.

Kiri’s habit of turning up late for rehearsals had done nothing to boost her popularity within an already disgruntled production. ‘Quite often she and her father would be out in the morning playing a round of golf. Everybody thought what a lovely life she led,’ said Beverley Jordan. When, to general dismay, Rowell’s sister Zella eased herself into a position of power within the production Kiri became the inevitable target. Even her own brother declared Zella Rowell ‘a bitch, born and bred. Zella had a way of putting everyone’s back up. She was greedy and selfish and everyone hated her.’ Her attention soon turned to the show’s youngest, least experienced performer.

‘Nasty little sarcastic comments were made between them,’ recalled Lindsay Rowell. ‘Kiri was young and couldn’t really fight back, but she was stubborn and she had quite clear ideas about how she wanted things done.’ The confrontations between the two reached a climax during one of the final rehearsals. ‘Kiri hid in the chorus when she was supposed to be up the front of the stage,’ said Rowell. When Zella demanded she move to her proper position on stage, Kiri refused to budge. ‘She turned to Zella and said, “I don’t care. You can like it or lump it.”’

‘Kiri could be emotional if people upset her. She was pretty strong willed in her own way,’ said Vincent Collins, who witnessed the scene.

If Kiri’s spirits ever sagged during the increasingly fraught rehearsal sessions, comfort was always close at hand in the virile form of her leading man. Kiri and Collins had found few difficulties in conjuring up a convincing chemistry between Uwane and Manaia. Away from rehearsals they had begun seeing each other discreetly.

‘It was a romance for a little while,’ Collins confirmed. On stage at His Majesty’s Collins and Kiri were careful not to arouse suspicions. ‘In my innocence I had thought that Kiri and Vince were just acting,’ remembered Lindsay Rowell’s wife Madeleine who watched most of the rehearsals from the stalls. ‘There was an atmosphere but I thought that was because they were playing lovers.’ Others were able to put two and two together to form an educated opinion of what was unfolding.

‘Kiri was a flirt, and a very pretty flirt at that,’ said Neil McGough. ‘Vincent was a good-looking joker and he thought it was very nice. He did respond a little further than he should have,’ he added. One member of the production was more acutely attuned to developments than anyone, however. Beverley Jordan was all too familiar with the wiles of Vincent Collins.

‘I broke things off with him because he was a charmer and had a lot of ladies on the go,’ she recalled. ‘That wasn’t my cup of tea.’ Jordan claims to have shrugged her shoulders at the romance. ‘I couldn’t have cared less. It was over and if he wanted to get involved with her that was his business,’ she said.

Her mother was less philosophical when she discovered what was going on, however. Jordan returned one night to find her involved in a heated telephone conversation. It was soon apparent who was on the receiving end of the abuse. ‘It turned out to be Nell Te Kanawa,’ Jordan recalled. ‘My mother was telling her she should keep her daughter in check and not keep waltzing off with other people’s boyfriends.’

If the tirade had an effect it was the diametric opposite of that which had been intended. Soon Vincent and Kiri were making no secret of their relationship.

On the evening of Wednesday, 11 April 1962, His Majesty’s Theatre was filled to capacity. For the producers of Uwane, however, the grim reality was that only 200 or so of the 2,000 seats had been paid for. ‘They flooded all the nursing homes with free tickets. You lassoed people off the street if you had to on the night the critics were there,’ said Neil McGough.

The lack of interest in the show’s ‘world première’ could not be blamed on Nell Te Kanawa. In the run up to the opening night she had turned her attentions to drumming up support within her ever extending circle of patrons and supporters within Auckland. At another time and in another place, Nell’s innate skills could have made her a mogul within the world of public relations. She wielded flattery and force with well-practised ease. ‘She could charm the birds from the trees,’ recalled Beverley Jordan. ‘She was an absolutely brilliant PR woman.’ Nell had by now begun to cultivate contacts within the Auckland media. The New Zealand press were intrigued by Uwane’s curiosity value if nothing else. Her mother ensured Kiri’s face became a familiar one as the opening night loomed.

Kiri featured in a lengthy article on the musical in the leading magazine of the day, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. On the morning before the show a photograph of Kiri in her traditional flax skirt, or piu-piu, taken at a dress rehearsal the previous Sunday, filled page three of the nation’s most respected newspaper, the New Zealand Herald. Kiri had placed great store in the fact she had no plans to desert her teacher at St Mary’s. In the official Uwane programme she repeated her promise that she had ‘unlike so many of our talented young singers, no desire to travel abroad’. Her words would have gone down well with John Waititi who was among the many to have been given free seats that night. In a late effort to win a little support among Maori organisations, Lindsay and Zella Rowell had announced that all proceeds from the show would go to the Maori Education Foundation. It would soon be clear that the organisation would be the least of the evening’s losers.

At the end of the show the audience applauded enthusiastically. Kiri and Vincent Collins held hands as they took their curtain call together. The following morning, however, Auckland’s small circle of theatre critics damned Uwane with faint praise. ‘Uwane – a good try, but …’ ran the headline in the Auckland Star. ‘Brave Effort’ was the best the New Zealand Herald could muster for the show as a whole.

While the critics couldn’t warm to the Rowells’ blend of the fantastical and the formulaic, they were united in their praise for Kiri. ‘Whether Uwane is a public success or not, it has done a service in bringing forward at least two good voices, the warm mezzo of Kiri Te Kanawa and the resonant baritone of John Morgan,’ wrote Desmond Mahoney in the Star.

‘The star of the show, and a bright one at that, is Kiri Te Kanawa,’ wrote the Herald’s L. C. M. Saunders. ‘Natural and graceful in her movement, speech and singing, she reveals a real talent.’

To judge by the telegram which arrived at the stage door of His Majesty’s Theatre the following morning the previous evening had been a five-star triumph. The brief message bore Nell’s unmistakable imprimatur.