Bevan Chuang, former mistress of Auckland Mayor Len Brown, feels she has been victimised. . Photo / Greg Bowker
Bevan Chuang, former mistress of Auckland Mayor Len Brown, feels she has been victimised. . Photo / Greg Bowker
With the TV dramatisation of her life story nominated in five categories at this week’s NZ TV Awards, Steve Braunias profiles Bevan Chuang, the ex-lover of former Auckland mayor Len Brown.
It was vaguely interesting to sit around in the lobby of the Cordis Hotel in downtown Auckland recently and watch a brood of reporters crowd around the front door waiting for news scraps in the shape of Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and Winston Peters as they emerged from their coalition talks. But I was there on other business. I was waiting for a legendary and much more exciting figure of political intrigue to arrive. I chose to meet her at the Cordis hotel because it was where we had first met, 10 years ago, when I interviewed her for a story that inspired the title of a $2.5 million TV drama based on her role in a sex scandal.
Bevan Chuang walked through the hack pack in a high-definition colour – she wore a full-length navy blue vintage dress with white lace, her hair dyed crazy pink. “So when are you gonna charge for the IP?” she laughed. I had described her as a “princess of chaos” in my 2013 profile; she liked the term so much that she adopted it as her Twitter bio line, and TV producers grabbed it too. Princess of Chaos - the story of the woman who had an affair with the mayor of Auckland, and then, much worse, fell into the orbit of that disgraced figure of political intrigue, Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil - has been nominated for four awards at the New Zealand Television Awards on December 5.
One of the nominations includes Best Script, for Ally Xue and Fiona Samuel. Everyone has always wanted a piece of the Bevan Chuang story, and I interrogated the two writers about the extent of their plunderings, their profiteerings. They took the high ground – everyone always does – but it was true they could do so in the knowledge their plunderings and profiteerings were courtesy of Chuang’s permission, and that Princess of Chaos was framed as Chuang’s story. She got a piece of her own story, too. She said at the Cordis, “I think what that story is about is it’s like, you can take your power back, and be who you want to be.”
Her affair with Brown lasted for about two years. After it ended, some of New Zealand’s ghastliest men learned of the secret and used it to discredit Brown. Brown was merely brought low; Chuang was shamed. She went into hiding, but then had the courage to go public with how she was the victim of a pack of pathetic right-wing schemers and dreamers. She came out fighting, and reclaimed her dignity. It’s this narrative of triumph over shame that forms the story arc of Princess of Chaos.
Princess of Chaos tells of the Bevan Chuang, Len Brown scandal. Photo / Supplied
I asked Samuel about her contributions to the script, and she singled out the idea of having Chuang’s character speak directly to the camera. I asked, “Why did you think of that?”
Samuel is a wonderfully articulate writer. She speaks with emphasis, no ums and ahs, always with conviction. She said, “To make it really clear who’s telling the story. Because that’s one of the deep themes of the piece. Who is telling this story? Who is in charge of the narrative? Because all those guys, the Whale Oil cohort, they took charge of the narrative and they painted Bevan as a flaky little slut, which is a very popular story to tell about a young woman. It very quickly gains traction. It completely invalidates her because everyone’s going, ‘Well, you’re flaky and you’re a slut.’
“And I look at a story like that, with my humongous bias towards the female protagonist, and I think, ‘Well, how would she tell it?’ Sure, I’ve met some flaky sluts in my time, but I’ve met a lot more smart women who set out to do something for themselves and got derailed for any number of reasons. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”
“I definitely got a sense of the forces that were against her. And I got a sense of her family background, like her dad’s three wives and the way he moved from woman to woman. Like, he’d still be with wife number one while he had a mistress in an apartment who became wife number two. And then he left her as well. I looked at that, at the serial abandonment, and I thought, ‘Well, her earliest experience of men is they come, they go.’
“So you’re actually not as special as you thought you were. So that makes you so vulnerable, especially to an older man who might say you are special. You know, ‘I really see something in you. You’ve got potential, and I want to encourage you’, and what that would mean to somebody who had that kind of insecurity in their background. That’s the kind of stuff that interests me in writing drama. What does the character want on a deep-down level? You know, what are the things that are driving them that even they may not be aware of?
“And of course, that involves a certain kind of ‘Godness’ on my part, like thinking I can see things that maybe the person themselves doesn’t see.”
I said, “Did you become the latest person to take Bevan’s story away from her and present it yourself?”
She said, “Well, I don’t think so. Because apart from anything else, she was positioned at the very centre of the story, and she was telling the story. And I know she liked it.”
Well, she kind of did.
Richard Crouchley as Luigi Wewege and Xana Tang as Bevan Chuang in Princess of Chaos, nominated for five awards at the NZ TV Awards 2023
Photo / Supplied by TVNZ
Bevan Chuang said of Princess of Chaos, available on TVNZ ON Demand, “It’s slightly different to the last edit which I saw. I really loved that edit, and I have to say it was better than what’s on screen.”
It was her feeling that TVNZ got nervous and watered it down. She sat in on long meetings with lawyers who kept a steady eye on the potential for defamation. That was always a concern; as head script writer, Xue said, “My approach as a writer was to approach it from her perspective, as well as approach it from within the legal bounds.”
It was based on real events, real lives. But all drama is liberated from fact, and it was precisely these freedoms that Chuang enjoyed, and encouraged in the making of Princess of Chaos. “I said to them, ‘Look, obviously it’s a creative piece, it’s not a documentary. Please, make it as much fun as you want it to be. Do whatever you want with it’. My only thing was that they keep the essence.”
For all the intrigue and the dark workings of Whale Oil and his deranged cohort, Princess of Chaos plays as comedy; it’s jaunty, bright, upbeat, exactly like Chuang herself. She’s good fun, doesn’t take herself seriously. When Xue first pitched Princess of Chaos to TVNZ, she was partly inspired by the black comedy of I, Tonya, the 2017 movie based on US figure skater Tonya Harding: “There are funny moments, but the essence is a very dark story.”
“I like that word,” said Samuel, when I described Princess of Chaos as jaunty. “I mean, the story does have its amusing elements. It might make myself sound insensitive and mean, but I think there are some obviously comedic aspects to a well-intentioned older white boss having a workplace affair with his ethnic affairs adviser.” She meant Chuang’s job title at Auckland Council, when she worked for Brown. “That’s funny! I mean, not at all funny for all the people who got hurt by it. I don’t mean that. I just mean when you take that step back that comedy requires, you can see its farcical elements. Some of it’s like a restoration comedy - you know, plays where people whizz in and out of doors and hide in wardrobes.” Of course, Princess of Chaos recreates the famous revelation that a security guard wandered into the council’s Ngāti Whātua room one night and interrupted Brown and Chuang having sex.
At the core of the film is a love story, or what appears to be a love story: not between Chuang and Brown, but the romance between Chuang and Luigi Wewege, an adviser to mayoral candidate John Palino, who persuaded her to blab to the Whale Oil site about her affair with Brown. In Princess of Chaos, the couple seem very much in love. They have hot sex in a hot shower, he cooks her breakfast, he dresses well and looks absolutely gorgeous. But all this was creative licence. “I take it you’ve not seen a photo of Luigi,” Chuang laughed, very loudly.
Yes, said Xue, there’s a lot of sex in Princess of Chaos. “That was a deliberate choice,” she said. “The whole story was a sex scandal, so let’s not ignore the elephant in the room, but I wanted to do it creatively, and apply the feminine gaze. Most sex scenes are filmed by male directors, with male writers who wrote them, but I loved the idea of a sex scene written by a woman and shown in a way that feels like it’s from the woman’s perspective … There was a lot of feminine energy on the set.”
Bevan Chuang, whose life story inspired the TV movie Princess of Chaos.
Photo / Supplied
Samuel agreed the core of Princess of Chaos was a love story, but she meant the loyal and supportive love between Chuang’s character and her mother. “In a lot of women’s lives, the key relationships are actually with other women,” she said. “I’m talking about, you know, women and their mothers, women and their daughters, women and their sisters, women and their friends. Men are not so interested in those stories because men are not centred in those stories.
“But women are interested, and for a lot of women, a lot of people, their mother is just a really key person in their lives, and the relationships are often complicated, thorny, difficult, you name it, but still that person is central to you. And in Bevan’s story, her mother was hardly happy about what had unfolded, but she stuck by her daughter in a way that nobody else did. The men just ran for the hills for one reason or another, but her mum was there and continued to be there for her. And I think that that’s its own kind of love story - the person who actually sticks by you.”
I wondered if all this was just more artifice, more creative licence. I asked Chuang, “Did your mum actually back you when the scandal broke?”
“Yeah, absolutely, 100 per cent,” she said. At 42, she still lives with her mum in their house in the eastern suburbs.
The affair between former Auckland mayor Len Brown and Bevan Chuang caused a scandal in 2013. Photos / File
Whale Oil plundered her story to try to destroy Len Brown, Ally Xue and Fiona Samuel profited from the New Zealand On Air funding of $2.5m to tell her story in Princess of Chaos – but who was I to make pious little moral judgments of their motives? I was just another story pirate. When I reread the profile I wrote of Chuang 10 years ago – it was part of a portfolio that was rewarded with a Best Feature Writer of the Year award; hooray for me – I was appalled at the way I treated her in my interview: making her weep, pressing her for answers, actually kind of bullying her throughout our encounter in a private room at the Cordis. She resisted this latest interview, but I played the “old mate” card until she relented.
Such is journalism, with its getting and taking, and yet we maintained friendly, happy contact over the years, and I would invite her to the star-studded free lunch extravaganzas I used to stage at the Hamilton Press Club. She was the perfect guest – a newsmaker who charmed everyone she met, one of the great characters of public life, pretty much an eccentric, definitely an individual, out there and at ease in her own skin. We hugged when we met at the Cordis. It was good to see her. She was a lot more relaxed than our first post-scandal encounter all those years ago - no longer brittle, and just as passionate and sincere about her work in community development as an employee at Auckland Council. She has dedicated herself for more than a decade to advocating for ethnic communities in Auckland. A trailblazer, a force for good – it’s her work that defines her, and Princess of Chaos acknowledges that in numerous scenes. But the point of the show is to bring the Bevan Chuang story back to the scandal, to fix it in the affair and its shabby aftermath.
“Sadly, you don’t get to say what defines you,” said Samuel. “Other people made that decision for Bevan - I don’t think we repeated the popular narrative. We said, ‘Here’s another way of looking at it. If you are the person at the centre of this, how do you see it? How would you tell your story?’”
“Yes,” I said, “but the story that you wrote for her is centred on the scandal.”
“Well, that’s the story,” she replied. “That’s the reason why anybody knows her name.”
It all comes back to the scandal, the affair, the fallout. In 2019, New Zealand On Air approached film-makers with something called an RFP – a Request for Proposal – aimed at Asian and Pasifika film-makers to pitch ideas for a TV series or film. It was a call for more diversity in New Zealand television. Xue immediately thought of Bevan Chuang. And so Princess of Chaos – story of a sex scandal, a story of political intrigue, a #MeToo story – also qualifies as Asian storytelling.
Wait, there’s more. Xue referenced the Tonya Harding movie; Samuel referenced Monica Lewinsky. “They both had a workplace affair with a considerably older man and political figure who was very encouraging about their abilities and prospects, and was also married with a family. And Monica got absolutely dragged through the mud, and has emerged from it to a certain extent, but my God, what an effect those few encounters with Clinton have had on her. That’s been the dominating story of her life.”
But the story of Chuang’s life is a lot more than a few years in the early 2010s – and there was a lot more going on with her even at the time. Samuel talked about the love story of her relationship with her mother; Princess of Chaos examined her distant, painful relationship with her father. It was one of the themes of our interview, too, in 2013. The subject made her cry back then. In 2023, their relationship seems just as unfulfilled, just as sad.
He lives in Hong Kong. They don’t see each other. Sometimes they call: “Rarely,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t even know what to say. It’s very hard to sort of start a conversation when I don’t know what to say.”
There I was once again, picking over her life, taking away her personal stories – naturally, I breezed right on in and asked about her love life. “I’m so happy not being in a relationship,” she replied. “Everyone around me has stopped asking that question now. Even my mum has given up asking that question. My friends say, ‘Oh you’re just being picky’. I’m like, ‘Why can’t I be picky?’ It’s nice to be picky.
“I also feel like – it’s 2023 now, you know? You don’t have to be with somebody just for the sake of being in a relationship.”
She laughed for joy, a picture of happiness with her pink hair and her blue dress; the one and only Bevan Chuang, completely her own person, living her own story.
Princess of Chaos, available to stream on TVNZ+, has been nominated for five awards at the NZ TV Awards, which will take place on Tuesday, December 5 at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre.
