Nell sensed a changing mood – and acted.
In the Gisborne of the 1940s and the Auckland of the 1950s, her daughter’s Maori heritage had remained a source of unease. Tom continued to be almost completely estranged from Maori life and from his family, to the extent that his youngest sibling, Te Waamoana, only learned that he was, like her, living in Auckland, when she saw his picture in the paper with an unusually large catch of Taupo trout. When Te Waamoana attempted to rebuild the bridges with the family Nell welcomed her and her daughter Kay, now Kay Rowbottom, to the house on Mitchell Street. According to Rowbottom, however, Nell ‘was very selective about the members of the family she liked to have at Kiri’s events’.
Suddenly, however, the pendulum had swung in a new direction. The MEF’s regional committee in the city was run by two co-chairmen, Thelma Robinson, fourth wife of the city’s Mayor, Sir Dove-Myer ‘Robbie’ Robinson and a charismatic war veteran and sportsman turned schoolteacher, thirty-five-year-old Hoani ‘John’ Waititi. Waititi was one of a new generation of university educated Maori academics and a pioneer in the introduction of Maori lessons to secondary schools.
It was Thelma Robinson who recognised the name on Nell’s application. Robinson and her husband had seen one of Kiri’s first public performances at the opening of a Maori church a year or two earlier. ‘We saw this young Maori girl in a white dress sing in the open air and were stunned by her voice,’ said Robinson. ‘We made a point of finding out who she was.’ Kiri’s situation didn’t fall readily into the Foundation’s brief. As Kiri herself later recalled, ‘It was mainly for the academic rather than the musical child, and I certainly wasn’t academic.’ However, once Waititi and the Foundation’s trustees, including Maori MP Sir Eruera Tirikatene and Maori Women’s Welfare League leader Mira Petricevich, now Dame Mira Szaszy, had heard Kiri sing, the technicalities were overlooked.
The moment was one of the most significant in Kiri’s young life. When Nell received the phone call from John Waititi confirming the Foundation’s willingness to make a grant of £250 to fund Kiri’s full-time study with Sister Mary Leo she could barely conceal her excitement.
No sooner had she put the phone down on Waititi than she had summoned Tom home and headed off to the Caltex office with him to collect Kiri from work. Kiri later recalled sitting with Tom at her side in the car. There Nell effectively issued their daughter with an ultimatum. ‘Either you sing or you just keep working at Caltex,’ she told her. ‘It’s one or the other, but whatever you do, you’ve got to do it totally.’
Kiri admitted years later that she had been far from certain of her response. ‘I couldn’t think, did I want to study music full time? I didn’t know anything about what it entailed. So for peace’s sake I said yes.’ Peace, however, was the last thing she was granted as she settled down to the life of a full-time student.
In a television interview many years later, Kiri presented a stark picture of the demands Sister Mary Leo’s regime placed on her. ‘I would study from nine in the morning till five,’ she said. ‘She would listen to me through the wall all day and the moment I’d stop even for a breath or a drink or anything she would knock on the wall and off we’d go again.’
Nell too became even more relentless in her control. ‘You have a God-given voice which gives people pleasure. It’s your duty to show them,’ she would berate Kiri if ever her daughter slackened, in a phrase echoing Archbishop Liston.
Back at Mitchell Street the transformation was remarkable. Kiri would spend endless hours rehearsing single notes or scales, much to the irritation of her young niece Judy. ‘One night my grandmother and grandfather were out and we were doing the washing up. She was going through the scales, just to annoy me,’ she recalled. ‘I remember shoving the dishcloth in her mouth, I was so angry.’ When Judy ran out into the night, Kiri locked her niece outside as she continued singing.
Judy and Nola would soon leave Mitchell Street. In 1960 Nola married again. With her daughter and new husband Bill Denholm, she moved briefly to Waihi beach, near where Nell had been born, where she and Bill ran a fish and chip shop before returning to Auckland. As they readied themselves to leave, Judy and Nola could not help notice the new seriousness with which Kiri was now treating her music. One day she, Kiri and the Hanson boys had playfully lit up a discarded Peter Stuyvesant cigarette they had found in the lounge. ‘We heard Nana’s footsteps coming down the passage from her bedroom and we were frantically trying to get rid of the smoke,’ she recalled. ‘Nana came in. She never raised her voice, she just looked straight at Kiri and said, “You smoke, or you sing.” That was it. Simple,’ she said. ‘I never saw Kiri smoke again.’
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