Kiri: Her Unsung Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now is the Hour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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