Michele Hewitson Interview: Dame Cath Tizard

Dame Cath says her career as Auckland City Mayor and Governor-General was a series of unplanned, lucky accidents. Photo / Brett Phibbs

The former Governor-General said to the former minister of the Crown: "Oh, rubbish. Piss off."

That was Dame Cath Tizard's riposte to her daughter, Judith Tizard, who had just gleefully told me, "Do you know how terrified she's been of this? She's been worrying about you."

Dame Cath said, "I'm not worried," in a way which suggested her daughter might have something to worry about later.

A flea in the ear perhaps, although I assume she's had a few of those before - and it's hard to imagine what her mother might say to her in private that she wouldn't in front of an audience.

Judith tried to get a word in. "You may speak," said her mother who can still do a rather good impersonation of a Governor-General. She said, to Judith, "You be careful. I'm speaking to a reporter here." You could have fooled me.

The intention was to talk to Dame Cath Tizard about her soon-to-be-released memoir, Cat Amongst the Pigeons. I thought I'd better get a plug in there because after I left, I did wonder whether we'd talked about her book at all. I got not so much an interview as a front-row seat from which to watch a screwball comedy starring a former Governor-General and a former MP.

There was the business with the coffee. Judith made it, which was kind of her, but she got a growling for pushing the plunger down in some unknowably wrong way. Judith said I could have the mug of coffee with the crema.

Dame Cath said: "The what?"

Judith: "The fluffy stuff on top. We are in Herne Bay, after all, mother." That earned her a vice-regal glare. "Judith," said mother, "who brought you? Who said you could come around?"

"Nobody," said Judith, and retreated, curtseying and cackling, temporarily to the kitchen.

I took the opportunity to get a question in: about her mother's love life. We'd been talking about how revealing of that, and of her, the book is and the answer is: to a point.

She has talked, for the first time, about her former husband Bob Tizard's affair with a woman he subsequently married.

She tells me she knew the marriage had run its course the night she and Bob were lying in bed: she was reading Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female and he was reading some tome of statistical analysis.

Years later, at a family gathering, Bob's wife apologised to her. She said, "That's all right, dear. You did me a great favour!"

She wrote a memoir because people kept asking her if they could write her biography and she wanted to get in first. She is - and I asked this because she has that politician's talent for what looks like candour but is often really deflection, otherwise known as getting in first - much given to reflection.. "Oh, very much so. I am quite introspective, you might be surprised to know."

So there is candour, again, to a point. She writes about a long and loving relationship she had, while mayor, with a colleague, who later married. She's asked me not to name him because his wife is very ill and she doesn't want to cause her any hurt.

Fair enough: it's ancient history and everyone who gave a damn knows who he is. She was asked questions at the time of the Aotea Centre saga and says she saw off two journalists then. There was prurient interest, but as she points out, previous male mayors weren't asked about their sex lives. And, "Only from people like you! Excuse me! My sex life has been so bloody respectable. Most of the time. I haven't had a wild career, I promise you."

I'd already been ticked off for prurience, and as Judith was back, I said I'd risk them both telling me to piss off, and ask about those wild, and to me, wildly funny, rumours of both of them having had an affair with Helen Clark.

I wondered whether they were bothered by the rumours. Dame Cath said, "No! They make me laugh." Judith said, "Well, they piss me off", and then proceeded to tell me about a rumour I'd never heard: about her having an affair with Lianne Dalziel, because they flatted together.

Dame Cath: "Haven't you heard that one!" Judith: "The point I'm making is that the feminist response is that when Don McKinnon and Winston Peters flatted together, are people going to accuse them of ... ?" Dame Cath: "Being homosexuals!"

I said, "Do you mind?" Judith said "Exactly. Why are you not mildly offended on my behalf?" I said: "Who said I'm not?"

Dame Cath, amused, laughed. Judith, not amused, said, "I've got lots of gay friends. I'm not going to treat that as an insult ..." And so on. Dame Cath had had enough of her daughter's feminist lecture. She had a better story to tell about how she heard from a colleague, in the tea room at the zoology department at the University of Auckland where she was teaching, a rumour that she was having an affair with someone called Allan Clarke. She said the only Allan Clarke she'd heard of sold cars. "Then the penny dropped. I said, 'No, you've got it wrong. I live with Helen Clark [who was boarding with her.]' And she said, 'Oh! I never thought about you being in a lesbian affair!"'

I really had expected them to gang up on me and tell me to sod off, or something equally Dame Cath-ish. But they are too fond of gossip, for one thing, even or perhaps especially, when it involves them. And they can't resist what is obviously a family game of one-upwomanship.

Inevitably then, Judith had her own story: about a rumour that she and Helen Clark had bought a house in Pt Chev. "My response was, 'bugger Pt Chev'. If I've got to live with Helen and all her bloody paper, I want somewhere posh. Helen was very offended on behalf of Pt Chev."

That was a good story, I thought. Her mother said, "Judith. Shut up. Where were we? I'm sorry Michele."

And that was the first half of an hour and a half with the former GG, at which point I could really have done with one of her famous gins.

She writes about some chap coming for dinner and asking plaintively whether "there were to be any courses other than gin?" As she is the one who says that she is "believed to like a drink", I dared to ask whether she'd ever been drunk. She said, "oh, yes. Have you?" On occasion.

"Yes, well. Snap! Not in recent years. Not since I grew up." But that was much later, after we'd looked at the Webb caricatures of former Governors-General with Tizard in the foreground with a formidable bosom, very big hair and, I pointed out, little legs. She said, "I've always had good ankles."

She told me about a dear friend of hers who has just died and how, "According to his daughter his practically last request was ... 'will you read me a bit more of Cath's book?' Isn't that lovely?"

She said, "You've got me on a very bad day, Michele." This was because for the first time she's been unable to solve the Code Cracker puzzle in the Herald. She proceeded to tell me that the only reason she still gets the paper is for the puzzle and the cryptic crossword. "That's right," I said, "butter us up."

I would later suggest that she could be tactless. "Ooh, yes I can! But less so now than I used to be." I said, faintly, "Really?" "My mother always said my tongue would get me hanged. I haven't actually been strung up yet, but it's got me into a bit of bother from time to time." She says she suffers from the "guilts", about the "inept things I say and the faux pas of mine." And despite her tough hide, and that breezy persona, "nasty things do hurt me".

She's still got the huff with Paul Theroux for writing "vicious" things about her in 1992 in his book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. He called her "silly and shallow ... as well as bossy, vain and cunning ..." But it is the description of her table manners that still stings.

She writes: "Should I ever have the bad luck to meet him again I will inquire as to how he suggests one should peel unshelled tiger prawns without using one's fingers!" One can do dignified rather well. "I try to behave appropriately for the occasion, but at after-match functions I'm a renowned interrupter, for making a crack."

She portrays her career as Mayor of Auckland City and then Governor-General as a series of unplanned, lucky accidents. Her political skills were, she says, being "sensible and cheerful and not bearing grudges".

I suggested her greatest talent might have been her bossiness. "Yeah. I'm bossy." She said, "and you are." I could have said it takes one to recognise one, but I wasn't that game, or silly. So I said I felt I had been expertly out-bossed today, a thought she very much enjoyed.

She said, "I didn't expect this to be fun!" She said, mock trembling: "I was too frightened! I thought, 'she's coming to kill me'!" Now that really was acting. Somebody should cast her in a screwball comedy starring a former Governor-General and a former MP. I'd be more than happy to watch that show, just don't ask me to attempt to interview the leading ladies.