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