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