Niccole Duval in the Roxy Music PR Show, 1975. Photo / Murray Cammick
The Auckland floods were a once-in-a-century event and made the city’s population aware of the fragility of many things. In one story amid the thousands, David Herkt talks with Niccole Duval, about losing her life in the floods and starting again at nearly 79.
Niccole Duval prefers to call herself a “queen” and the word fits. She isn’t much fond of “transgender” or any of the other terms.
She has been well-known in the New Zealand entertainment world since the early 1960s, working in Auckland strip clubs like the Pink Pussy Cat and the Windmill Follies, then Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge and the Balcony in Wellington, and with long residencies at Mojo’s and Alfie’s on Queen St. Duval has featured in clubs in Hong Kong and Australia. She is still slim, vibrant, fashionable, and 78 years old.
On Friday, January 27, 2023, she had a short evening nap. Earlier, the rain falling on Grey Lynn indicated a night at home with her big black poodle, Pitch. There was no warning of anything else.
“When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was that Pitch wasn’t there,” Duval remembers. “I called to him, but he didn’t come, which is unusual. When I put my feet down on the carpet, I realised that I was calf-deep in water. I waded to the bedroom, where he was just sitting silently on his dog-bed, which was floating.”
“A friend phoned and said that I had to leave right away. At the front door, I could see my car was completely drowned. Pitch has never had to swim before and he wriggled free from his collar. I had to grab him by the scruff of his neck. We swam through the waist-deep water. Up on the road, people were wandering past me in shock.”
Duval had lost everything it seemed – all her household goods – but what most concerned her was her irreplaceable collection of many thousands of photographs of the New Zealand gay and transgender world dating back to the early 1960s.
Duval’s life has been well lived.
She was born a boy in 1944. Her father was the principal of Mount Albert Primary School, her mother a homemaker. She attended Mount Albert Boys’ Grammar, where she was captain of the under-15 boys’ tennis team.
“At lunchtime, I used to get away from everyone and play tennis against a wall. In those days, you used to have to whiten your own sandshoes, and mine were very, very white,” she laughs. “My shorts were as tight as I could get them and I would wear these little white sockettes and a tight singlet.
“Once we went over to the North Shore to play a team there. We had the captain-on-captain match there, and they tittered when I went on to the court. I thought, “Right!” – so I thrashed him.”
Duval played the lead girl’s role of Becky Thatcher in the Mount Albert Grammar production of Tom Sawyer, even receiving squashed-up love notes from boys afterwards, wanting meetings.
However, she had already discovered the allure of the city, just over the hill, sneaking out of her bedroom at night, and catching a tram.
“There was a coffee bar called the Ca D’Oro which was down on Customs St. We all went there.”
The Ca D’Oro was a destination for many young gay teenagers of the time. Later they would walk up Queen St to the unlicenced Picasso nightclub by the Town Hall, with its scoria walls and live bands.
There was also the glamour of shipping in an age when passengers and goods moved by sea. Stewards on the big liners were often gay. New fashions and a whole underground gay culture travelled with them. Duval saw her first cross-dressing performance by Misty, a P&O liner steward, at the Pink Pussy Cat on Karangahape Rd. She asked if she could perform there too, and the club’s owner, Rainton Hastie, accepted.
Duval made her own costume at home in the Christmas school holidays, sewing it in front of the fireplace. Her father drove her into the city for her first performance.
“To be honest, I am not sure he knew exactly what a strip club was.”
But outside the Pink Pussy Cat, he had some words to say when he dropped her off.
“It was the only thing he ever said to me about it: ‘If you are going to do it, do it well.’”
Duval wasn’t yet 16. Soon she’d also be working at the Windmill Follies.
“You’d get down to your bra and your G-string at the end, then you’d take off your wig and bra at the same time to show that you were really a boy.”
Her career had begun. She was called Tinkerbelle, or Tinks for short. The downside was that she became the target of police harassment, built on prejudice and homophobia. She was arrested one night as she walked home to Mount Albert in what the Police considered woman’s clothing, charged with being a “Rogue and a Vagabond”, and sentenced to a term in borstal, the Youth Offender’s unit of the time.
“The thing was, I actually hadn’t done anything!”
Eventually Duval would see the inside of every prison in New Zealand, from Auckland’s Mount Eden to Paparua in the South Island. She was repeatedly raped by Peter Fulcher, who would later go on to be the enforcer for the Mr Asia network. She saw a prison riot and witnessed the savage beating of a prison officer during an escape.
On her release, she returned to Mount Albert.
“When Mum said, ‘You’re home now, there’s no need to worry anymore,’ I just burst into tears and sobbed and sobbed.”
Duval soon moved to Wellington, where she established a relationship with Steven, which lasted seven years at a time when homosexuality was illegal. While she worked as a waiter in the day, she was often in drag at night. On a trip to Sydney, she visited the famous drag show at Les Girls in King’s Cross.
“I just loved the look of what I saw,” she explains. “It was just what I wanted to do.”
She came back to New Zealand with a bag full of female hormones and began her transition. Soon she was living exclusively as a woman. She performed and stripped at the Purple Onion. Meanwhile, Carmen Rupe had established the transexual-owned and staffed Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge in Wellington’s Vivian St.
Duval began waitressing there and one night she got her new name.
“There was a lawyer who used to come into the Coffee Lounge. He was really quite friendly, so we asked him about changing names,” she says. “He brought in the papers in for the name change. I had always liked the name ‘Niccole’ and he asked me, ‘Do you want to change your surname as well?’ I couldn’t work out what to change it to and he said, ‘Why don’t you try Duval? It goes with Niccole.’”
Duval spent 1970 in Hong Kong, where she performed at the Playgirl’s Den, an all-male revue in Kowloon. At the time, 50,000 British troops were stationed on the island, but going with them could be a problem because of the jealousy of the Triad girls. “The Chinese girls used to call us Jan-jiu because there was no real name for us in Chinese. Jan-jiu meant half-monkey, half-man.”
Once the Hong Kong police had to rescue Duval and several British troops.
“After escaping from a club, we eventually went to the Hilton because we figured that we would be safe there, but while we were having breakfast, the Triad girls all came in and they were picking up knives off the table and making gestures at us and it really was quite frightening.”
Back in New Zealand, she became a founding member of Mojo’s in Queen St. Owned by well-known music entrepreneur, Hugh Lynn, it was New Zealand’s first great transexual show. Duval was its lead performer, choreographer, and director, using the lessons she had learned in Hong Kong.
There was one Neil Diamond song from the movie Jonathan Livingstone Seagull she loved. A friend hired the movie and snipped out a scene.
“We did it a production to it, with white costumes and capes. At a certain time, Mojo’s would go completely dark and the projector would go on and there would be the seagulls flying over our capes as we moved,” she laughs. “It really was quite spectacular.”
Lynn used Mojo’s for press functions for the bands he brought to New Zealand. Photographer Murray Cammick captured Duval performing for Roxy Music in some famous images.
However, it was at Alfie’s that Duval would make her enduring mark on a generation. The Bloomer show would run for more than eight years. The cast included Georgina Beyer, who would later become New Zealand’s first transexual Member of Parliament.
“It was billed as a ‘gay-friendly’ club – it was never a ‘gay club,’” she remarks. “Alfie’s sold more beer than any other club in New Zealand, which is why they could have dollar-beer nights.”
“We had two performances on each Friday and Saturday night. They were about 20 minutes long. Brett Shepheard, the owner, didn’t want to keep them away from the bar for too long.”
Duval remembers a show to Madonna’s Hanky Panky, using big false buttocks she got from Geoff’s Emporium, another to Malcolm McLaren’s Madam Butterfly, and one of her favourites used an obscure French disco-opera by Kimera.
“I did that production with soldiers and huge gold masks covering our faces with lattice-work, and big wings, all with gold shields and spears.”
“For another one, we painted Philip, one of our dancers, with cold cream into which we’d mixed fluorescent paint. All the lights would go out and the fluorescents would go on and it would splatter all different colours. They copied it everywhere after that.”
These was also Alfie’s well-known Best Buns Competition.
“When you are playing to a different crowd every night you can tell the same jokes, but when you are playing to the same crowd, you can’t. It really started with me giving away a few beers to patrons and then they started, ‘Show us your buns! Take it down!’ It was quite easy entertainment ... In order to win beer and champagne, they used to line up with their best undies freshly laundered!”
It took three days before Duval’s thousands of photos could be retrieved from her flooded house.
Two of her friends took them home, laboriously peeled apart and air-dried those that had stuck together. Some were regretfully lost. The collection required further work and climate-controlled conditions. At this moment of need, the Charlotte Museum contacted Duval.
“We are a community-based museum, gallery and research library focused on collecting, preserving and exhibiting the lesbian, sapphic her-story of individuals and their cultural experience,” says its co-ordinator, Sarah Buxton. “The history of our rainbow communities is still not being collected by or made accessible at other institutions in Aotearoa.”
The Charlotte Museum holds photographs, diaries, letters, badges, information about lesbian balls, a treasure trove of memorabilia from the 1980′s ‘Golden Era’ of lesbian music, including that of Jess Hawke Oakenstar and her band, Red Beryl, and even a collection of 15 lighters containing risque images of women.
“As people downsize, or reorganise as they clear out their possessions, they don’t think anyone is interested in their lesbian T-shirts, posters, cards, coffee mugs, lesbian calendars and vintage publications,” Buxton says.
“A collection like Niccole’s is of significant cultural importance to our rainbow communities and that is why we offered to help … We are only the temporary custodians of the collection, which will be returned to Niccole as soon as she wants it back.
“Her personal archive is an example of a collection that does not fit our mission as a lesbian museum, but we know it has nowhere else to go. It is a priority for us to help wherever we can – to ensure things are preserved and not lost to any of our communities.”
For now, the collection is being held in a humidity-controlled environment at the Charlotte Museum. Duval’s life has been up-ended. Her house was yellow-stickered. Most of her possessions have gone, placed on the berm for collection like those of her neighbours. Soon to be 79, she will have to begin again.
There is a Give-a-Little page to assist Duval replace lost possessions: https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-niccole
The Charlotte Museum’s website is https://www.charlottemuseum.co.nz/