Millie Elder-Holmes: Dad and Connor were very stubborn

Millie Elder-Holmes writes a clean-living blog and has cayenne in her morning hot lemon drink. Photo / Dean Purcell

Boxer's strength shows after troubled teenage years and the deaths of two men in her life.

This is weird, I thought, at the KFC Fight For Life press conference at a Ponsonby pub on Wednesday morning. And if I thought that, what on earth must the star of the circus, Millie Elder-Holmes, think of it?

The idea was that I would go to the press conference before we sat down for an interview. Nobody said that if the interview went badly, at least I'd have some colour from the circus. Nobody needed to. There was a degree of nervousness about the interview; some of it mine. I'd seen her on Sunday in one of those teary television interviews. We all know about the tragedies of her life. She was a P addict, as a teenager; her dad, Paul Holmes died of cancer in 2013; her long-term partner, Connor Morris, was killed, violently, in August. She is only 26. Of course she wept. She told me she wept again when she watched it. I wondered, though, whether she was also upset about watching her grief so publicly aired. I didn't - not finding them illuminating - want tears. I did want her to talk, obviously, and I feared she might be fed up with talking.

At the press conference she was introduced as having had a life akin to the Kennedy family. She said, later, to me: "What did he say? The Kennedys! Sweet Jesus. That's grandiose. F***en hell. I don't know about that! Do the Kennedys live in West Auckland? F***!"

But in front of the cameras she spoke so quietly I couldn't hear her. I read the next day that she said: "I hate this." You knew that without hearing it. She exuded hating this. She looked shirty and sulky and terrified. I was thinking something like: Sweet Jesus.

The press conference went on and on and she came out for that brief, uncomfortable moment and then vanished. I asked her later what she'd been doing and she said, hiding out the back, playing with her phone. I had actually wondered if she'd fled but out she came and along her way scooped up a baby. She looked like a different person - relaxed and smiley and happy - and she came out to meet me and gave me a little kiss. Thank goodness for babies!

Actually, I think she was just so relieved to be away from the swarm that the idea of just one journalist and one photographer represented some strange sort of haven. I said it was weird. I said, to her: "Is it weird?"

She said: "Yeah. I don't really like to have a lot of attention put on me so it's ... different. It's very dramatic ... whereas my life is not like that." She might be finding it interesting. "No." Her life is very simple and calm, because, she said, it has to be. She said she thinks she "was going crazy for a little bit" after Holmes died - "I would have these extremely intense conversations with dad in the car!" - and then a bit crazy again after Connor died. She took up smoking again, but she says it's "filthy" and she's stopped. She started smoking in her early teens and I said, well, small wonder, Paul was always fagging away like there was no tomorrow. "Oh, I know! Bloody ridiculous."

She leads a pretty pure life; she has a clean-living blog (she may go back to tertiary studies next year to study nutrition; she gave up her nursing degree after Connor's death.) She drinks hot water with lemon and cayenne in the morning. This sounds both disgusting and severe. "I love it. It's not that severe. You should try it." Could I put the cayenne in my cup of tea? "No," she said, severely. She hardly ever drinks alcohol. "I'm not against it but I can't be bothered. None of my friends drink." She claims to have only two friends (other than her family and Connor's family); one is Pebbles Hooper who is, among other things, a gossip columnist. She hates gossip. There are many contradictions in her life, which is both simple and calm and complicated and angry. You don't need to point these out to her.

She is very grown up for 26. "Well, I've had to deal with a lot." Her father's friend, Richard Griffin, once said about her that at 14 she was already going on 35. "Ha, ha, ha. Well, I had a couple more years of immaturity after that! But I was around a lot of things when I was younger that not a lot of young kids would have been around." I wondered whether she'd ever been seduced by her father's fame; if she had thought she wanted that sort of life too but she said: "No, we saw it that we missed out on time with dad because he was always so busy. It was always like a negative thing to us. We'd have the Woman's Weekly at our house for day shoots and it wasn't enjoyable. Maybe we'd get some free clothes or something! But in the scheme of things, we didn't enjoy it."

And yet, here we are and there she was on TV, watching her private life made public. She said: "I don't want a public life. I don't want my personal life to be public. But if I have an opportunity - with my jewellery [she is designing a jewellery line] --to have the type of publicity that not many people would have ... If you're given opportunities, it's smart not to waste them. So, it's a double-edged sword, really. And I have to be very careful about how much I give of myself and how much I keep to myself."

Sunday, then? She said that when she found out they intended to "bring it all up, I was just like: 'No. I don't want to do this thing at all, if you're going to be like that.' I really couldn't be f***ed. But ... well, you are contractually obliged to ..." Cry on TV? "Yeah! It's very intense. I mean, am I constantly going to be defined by my teenage years? It's just ridiculous. When you first meet someone, do you have the opportunity to know what they were doing in their teenage years? So I find that idiotic. It's so backward."

She is also defined by being the daughter of Paul Holmes. "Constantly. It's a lot to put on someone but you just have to keep your head held high and carry on."

And yet, again, here we are. She said: "I feel like people are fed up with me! They must think I'm some princess who always wants to be in the media, or some shit." She said: "I really don't want to be here, you know." I said that I was sorry about that and she could go soon and she was truly mortified. "No! no!" she said, she didn't mean me, she meant at the circus. "But I'm an adult and I meet my obligations." What I was trying to fathom was why, when she so hates the gaze, she is doing this - as she puts it "celebrity, in inverted commas" - fight at all. She said: "They give $100,000 to hospice ... And it's not often in your life that you can give back to people who gave so selflessly to you at a time when your dad passed away."

She wears her father's Breitling watch, which is very masculine and quite blingy. He would have had that watch, I said. She laughed and said he had a collection of flash watches. "Ridiculous." She adored him but she is not soppy about him. I thought it must have meant a lot that he and her mum, Hinemoa Elder, made their peace before he died and she said: "It was kind of weird to have them in the same room, to be honest!"

My dad wasn't very supportive of me during all my drugs stuff and Connor and his family were amazingly supportive ... [And] both of them were stubborn as f***. Ridiculous." I said they do say women often choose blokes like their fathers and she laughed her head off and said: "I don't know if Connor was like dad! But, yeah, they were both very stubborn and hard-headed.

I also thought that Holmes had refused to meet Connor for many years because of his gang connections, but she said that, actually, Connor didn't want to meet Holmes. "He had no interest in meeting him. My dad wasn't very supportive of me during all my drugs stuff and Connor and his family were amazingly supportive ... [And] both of them were stubborn as f***. Ridiculous." I said they do say women often choose blokes like their fathers and she laughed her head off and said: "I don't know if Connor was like dad! But, yeah, they were both very stubborn and hard-headed."

The one thing she is stubborn and hard-headed about is talking about the Head Hunters. "I don't talk about the gang thing." Because? "I don't talk about things I don't know about." Is she defensive about it? "I don't talk about things I don't know about."

I know stubborn as when I see it, so I give up on that topic. She says she doesn't bear grudges and she didn't bear one with me for asking. So we talked about her eyelashes instead which are, to borrow a word, ridiculous, in an enviable way. I thought she was wearing falsies but she said she uses some serum stuff which you put on at night and miraculously your eyelashes grow. What rubbish, I said. "I swear to you! It's real! It works! It's so good!"

I had an idea about her as some domestic goddess, all made-up, in floaty dresses, cooking her healthy meals. "No! No, no, no! I'm walking around my house in track pants and bare feet and over-sized T-shirts that belong to Connor and doing my blogging and cooking my food and playing with my dogs and covered in dog hair." She has three dogs: Her new pitbull puppy, Morrie, "Connor's namesake"; Booya, "the matriarch" who was Connor's dog; and Bear, the product of Booya and Connor's dad's dog, a cross between a pitbull and a mastiff. "He's 60kg, so he's huge. He's delicious." He's a mastiff crossed with a pitbull. People are terrified of those dogs! "He's a good guard dog. No one will break into my house. Are you not a dog person? I love cats too," she said, soothingly.

She has a sweet little voice and a sweet nature. It is hard to imagine her hitting anyone. "It kinda feels good!" She is not an angry person, but she is angry about Connor's death. "I don't want to be angry about this forever. I want justice served." She said: "Sometimes my life feels like a bad dream." She has her fragilities but she is, perhaps against the odds, a strong person. Those tattoos must have hurt like hell, I said, and she said: "Oh, compared to some of the emotional things I've had to go through ... Nothing really." Yes, well, she does eat cayenne for breakfast. "Ha, ha, ha. Everyone's so whingey!"

She has the face of an angel - and of her mother. "Yeah, she's my doppelganger. Every time I upload a picture to Facebook it thinks I'm my mum. It's infuriating. She loves it, of course." She swears like a trooper - like her father.

I said, at the end: "You're nicer than your father!" I told her how he used to shout "Out of range! Out of range!" when I had to phone him. "Ha, ha! I know! He could be a prick sometimes! Trust me. I know!"

Then she gave me another little kiss and said something sweet about our interview and off she went and the really weird thing was that we ended up liking each other.

The KFC Fight For Life is live on Sky Arena Pay Per View, 8pm, tonight.