A friend, Ann Gordon, called her at Mitchell Street to tell her she had won with a remarkable mark of ninety-five per cent from the judges. The judge, Clifton Cook, could barely contain his excitement at the discovery. ‘If I had had a bouquet I would have laid it at her feet. She is one of the finest New Zealand artists I have heard,’ he eulogised.
Kiri’s mind was already elsewhere, however. Within days of returning from Hamilton she telephoned Rodney Macann reiterating her invitation for him to come and stay in Auckland. Even in Hamilton Macann’s starchy Baptist background had left him unprepared for Kiri’s whirlwind openness. She had made no secret of her involvement with Vincent Collins, in whose company Macann had seen her in Hamilton. No sooner had he arrived in Auckland than Kiri matter-of-factly announced his path was now clear. For once Kiri had heeded Nell’s advice to the letter. ‘I supplanted Vincent Collins,’ he said. ‘She dropped him when we met.’
Like Collins, Macann was welcomed with open arms at Mitchell Street. However, he switched to a hotel for the rest of his stay. Macann found it difficult to warm to Nell’s uninhibited blend of bluster and blind faith. ‘Nell was not an easy person. She was determined that nobody would be ahead of Kiri,’ he said. Macann was appalled at the manner in which Nell belittled Malvina Major. ‘Nell put around all these rumours after Malvina won the Mobil that it had all been agreed beforehand. She said that Malvina came from a much poorer background and needed the money. It was part of her coping with the fact that Malvina had won, which was a huge shock to everyone to be absolutely fair.’
As he returned to Christchurch, however, he and Kiri pledged to keep the relationship alive. ‘We got very interested in each other, although we were living a long way from each other,’ he said. ‘We had something quite special. We were both moving towards musical careers and there was this huge passion that we both had for singing.’ Kiri’s spontaneity could not have presented a starker contrast to the stolidity of Macann’s life. Back at work in his bank in Christchurch Macann was amazed when Kiri called out of the blue to announce she was making the thousand-mile journey to see him.
‘She just announced that she was coming down to Christchurch and she wanted to see me.’ Kiri’s parting words to a startled Macann were, ‘I expect you to be at the airport and I want a big kiss when I arrive.’
‘I was amazingly inhibited when we first met,’ he said. ‘It was the last thing I’d be seen doing in those days because I was terrified.’ Kiri was not Macann’s first girlfriend. He too had broken off a relationship in the wake of Hamilton. Yet he had not met a girl remotely like her. ‘I didn’t find her a terribly sexy person, it was rather an energy. She was very lovable and she had these wonderful eyes. It was energy and eyes that got me.’
After her success in the competition circuit Kiri had begun charming the malleable New Zealand media with equal ease. In one of her first in-depth interviews, with the Auckland Star in September 1963, she presented herself as a serious and dedicated young artist. She said she was working hard at learning Maori. ‘I’m part Maori so I feel I should learn to speak it properly – it will also help me when I sing Maori songs,’ she said. In May and June that year, Kiri had sat through eight lessons in Maori with her friend the mayoress, Thelma Robinson. They were members of a class being used as guinea pigs for a new Maori textbook written by Johnny Waititi. Throughout the interview Kiri did all she could to reassure the Maori trustees of the wisdom of their investment.
Despite her headline grabbing success at that year’s competition, Kiri said she was determined to protect her voice. ‘If a baby tries to walk too young, then its knees might go wobbly,’ she smiled. ‘In the same way when a voice is as young as mine it can easily be killed by wrong use.’ Her instrument would remain under wraps for another two years while she studied with Sister Mary Leo, she reassured her new following. ‘Until I feel I know more about technique and my voice has developed I do not feel competent enough to accept many public engagements,’ she told the Star.
In reality her blossoming popularity left little room for such sacrifices. Kiri was still the queen of the ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’ circuit and the uncrowned diva of the dine and dance circuit.
Like the Standard Ten before it Kiri’s blue Simca became a familiar sight flying around Auckland. ‘She had this sports car and I’d see her roaring off from the church to get to the next wedding. She was a wild girl with a real lead foot in the car,’ recalled John Lesnie, one of Auckland’s premier society photographers in the 1960s.
Kiri accepted as many engagements as she possibly could – and was capable of cut-throat tactics to ensure her diary remained full. During her early St Mary’s days she had been friendly with another of Sister Leo’s star singers, Pettine-Ann Croul. ‘She came to our home and I would go through songs with her. She wanted me to mark them down for her voice. We had two entirely different voices. I was a coloratura and she started off as a mezzo,’ explained Croul, who went on to earn an MBE for her work in teaching singers and today runs her own performing arts college. Relations began to sour when Nell began subjecting Pettine-Ann’s mother, Mercia, to her interminable telephone calls. ‘She would tell her how Kiri had sung so much better than me, and everyone else. It was always how Kiri had been hard done by,’ Croul said.
Nell would call Pettine-Ann too. ‘I had calls from Nell asking what I was going to sing at a competition and she’d say I couldn’t do such and such because Kiri was going to sing that.’ Like Kiri, Pettine-Ann desperately needed extra money to support her singing education. Her father was a clerk of the works at the city council and was unable to afford the lessons she needed. She too had begun to sing at society weddings around Auckland. ‘I lost engagements because they would offer to do them for a lower fee. I remember one society wedding where I had quoted £15, which was reasonable for a full day’s work as it was, and later they rang back and said Kiri had undercut me by quoting £10.’
Inevitably the tensions strained friendships. ‘It became difficult to have a friendship with Kiri and we moved apart.’ If Kiri’s combination of talent, drive, good looks and influential support was not sufficient cause for jealousy among her rivals, her popularity as a nightclub singer only added to the deepening resentment. New Zealand’s stringent drinking laws meant that its pubs still closed at six o’clock in the evening, even on Saturdays. Londoner Bob Sell’s Colony Club had become one of the most popular venues for couples in need of an evening’s entertainment. ‘Women wore little bolero jackets and tucked bottles of gin or scotch under their arms,’ said Sell, the owner of a chain of restaurants who had converted an old city centre warehouse into his most successful venture.
Sell would hire three or four acts to entertain his clients from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. in the morning. At first he had been unsure how Kiri’s studied elegance would go down with his raucous regulars. ‘She was a good Catholic girl and when she came on stage, the dress came up to her neck and down to her ankles. I used to say to her, “Why don’t you shorten the bloody thing?’” he recalled.
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