The Heron is grounded

JILL MALCOLM recalls the heady days of the once fabulous White Heron Hotel.

The White Heron Hotel has folded its wings. "Dust to dust," I am told, and so I drive down St Stephens Ave in Parnell before it is too late to have one more look at this angular white building that was an Auckland icon from the 60s to the 80s, a rendezvous for the city's glitterati, jet-setters and wannabes.

The partially intact facade is boldly tagged with graffiti, with shattered tiles and glass and torn panel boards lying scattered around its base. But on the one intact exterior wall there still stands the large emblem of a white heron staring loftily into the distance, as a ship's captain might stand stalwart on the bridge while his ship sinks beneath the waves.

Inside, if you can still call it that, four burly men, resting from the demolition job, are tucking into slabs of bread and cold sausages, washed down with tea in plastic mugs. The sofas they lounge on, remnants of brighter days, are faded and belching stuffing.

This lunchtime gathering would once have been slap in the middle of the splendid Four Seasons Restaurant. Patrons could gaze over the Waitemata Harbour to the North Shore through its great wall of glass as they consulted their buff-coloured, over-sized menus tied with a golden cords: toheroa soup, perhaps, then steak diane and crepes suzette to follow. There was a full list of wines - all from overseas - and the service was said to be the best in the country.

Now the head demolition man rubs his forehead with a large calloused hand and looks at me sideways as if he thinks I'd had a hand in the decision. "It's a terrible thing to pull such a beautiful building down," he says, accusingly.

There are many who would dispute that the building was beautiful. It was never known for its lofty proportions or the flair of its interior design, but it rested magnificently on its site overlooking the harbour and was discreetly presented to the street.

Shortly before it opened in 1965, a New Zealand Herald supplement promised "the largest and most luxuriously appointed tourist accommodation house in New Zealand". It could accommodate an astonishing 120 guests and had parking for 80 cars.

As well as the Four Seasons, where you could cut the decorum with a butter knife, there was a heated outdoor pool with an adjacent pool bar and bistro and a bewildering array of other modern luxuries - rooms with private baths, telephones, coffee-making facilities and bowls of fruit. Auckland society fluttered with enthusiasm for this new white wonder.

The project was driven by Sir Robert Kerridge who bought the land in 1961 and employed architect Rigby-Mullen to design it. The hotel was built in 1962-3, at the staggering price, it was later rumoured, of $1.5 million.

"It was considered spectacular in those days and regarded with awe," says Bob Kerridge, Sir Robert's son. "As well as the commercial concerns my father was motivated by a tremendous love of and belief in the beauty of New Zealand and he wanted to establish the sort of place that would attract tourists here. At that stage there was not much else around in terms of sophisticated accommodation."

It did attract tourists - those with high disposable income - but it became better known as the place where the visiting performers stayed, a sort of Auckland-style Hotel Bel-Air or Chateau Marmont. To accommodate the most famous, several grand apartments were built on the clifftop across the road.

Tony Goodliffe, Kerridge Odeon's publicity manager in the '60s and later one of the country's best-known show-business publicists, can reel off a string of celebrities who placed their illustrious heads on the feather pillows of the White Heron.

"Pretty much all the stage artists I managed stayed there," he said. "Peter Paul and Mary, the femme fatale Yvonne de Carlo, Inia Te Wiata, Vera Lynn, Marcel Marceau, John Denver, Billy Joel, Elton John, Alice Cooper, Rolf Harris, Victoria de Los Angeles, Joe Cocker, Douglas Bader, Gene Pitney, Sid James and Bob Marley and the Wailers are the ones that come to mind.

"Then of course there was Sir Robert himself. He was a celebrity of sorts - a self-made millionaire of the old school and highly respected. He dined at the Heron most nights.

"He'd bought a house in Judge St just behind the hotel and he would arrive, dressed for dinner, in his Rolls-Royce even though he was only one minute away. Sir Robert had a well-developed sense of arrival.

"On Saturday nights he would sometimes call a staff meeting at the White Heron and for these he would change into shorts and sweep into the arrival courtyard in his small British sports car.

"He was a great character," says Goodliffe. "A workaholic, a proud New Zealander and a hell of a good teacher about the entertainment industry.

"He could be generous, but in business he was extraordinarily frugal. Economy pervaded every aspect of the company. I remember once when the White Heron needed painting, Sir Robert got quotes which all shocked him, and so he employed students who were cheaper.

"One day he noticed a student, who, instead of painting, was spending his time waving at people. Sir Robert set off to remonstrate with him, to find as he got closer that the boy was sand papering."

Sir Robert sold the White Heron in 1975, just four years before his death. It was rumoured it was because he didn't want the expense of replacing the carpet. "I can quite believe that," says Goodliffe.

Whatever the reason, the place was never quite the same again.

But even if the building has not endured, stories from the White Heron have become legend. There was the time when Spike Milligan was a guest and the hotel was robbed. The night's door takings were stolen from the tour manager's room and Milligan lost his briefcase. Rather oddly, the thieves also took a wheelchair from near the entrance.

Milligan decided to help the police inquiry. He rang the Central Police Station. "I have a clue for you," he said. "Look for an Irish gang. They stole the getaway car."

Kiri Te Kanawa took things more seriously. Her jewellery was stolen one night when she was staying in one of the villas - apparently she never stayed there again. When Bob Marley was staying at the White Heron reporter Dylan Taite was granted a rare interview.

"We both have a thing about soccer," Taite says. "Marley was obsessed with the game and a stunning player. In his entourage there were a number of people who played excellent soccer and, not being too bad myself, I played a game with them on an area of grass close to the hotel. Bob would be interviewed and photographed by me any time I wanted after that."

Hotel staff also remember Marley for the unsavoury mess in his room when he left, including the pungent odour of spicy cooking and marijuana smoke. The staff refused to touch the room and commercial cleaners were called in.

Taite recalls Joe Cocker staying at the Heron: "He was a really lovely human being," he says, "but he had a major booze problem and to try to control it there was a rule among his crew that there was to be no room service. Every call from his room was monitored.

"I said to him one day, 'Joe, I heard you're getting your problem with alcohol under control.' 'Yes,' he said, 'I'm down to a bottle of wine a day now - well that's just for breakfast'."

But the hotel was not just for the rich and famous - local playboys and girls, displaying a crawling adoration of wealth without necessarily having it, made it their venue at weekends when the pool bar was the place to be. And on Friday nights, car dealers took control.

"I'm not sure that was quite what Sir Robert had in mind," says Goodliffe, "but it filled the till."

With the car set came the chicks and sheilas who lounged around the pool clad in as little as possible. They sipped champagne and looked for opportunities through eyes etched with black eyeliner.

There are plenty of stories of high jinks and indiscretions from those heady days. Some are funny, others seedy. The best-known goes something like this: a woman had come to the hotel (maybe on one of those Friday nights) and caught her husband in flagrante delicto with one of the dolly birds.

She flounced from the building, jumped into her philandering husband's new Jaguar, slammed it into gear and drove it into the pool. True? We'll never really know.

There's another tale of a car magnate who apparently dropped his Cartier watch into the cocktail blender and dared Brian Hunt, the bartender, to turn it on. Hunt was a biddable man, so he did.

My own memory from a poolside weekend at the Heron pops up again as I stand at the smashed window of what had been the Four Seasons and gaze down at the pool, now surrounded by long grass and filled with bits of timber and ash.

The bistro is trashed beyond anything Bob Marley might have left, and empty except for the graffiti-decorated bar and one forlorn red bar stool.

It could have been the very one on which he'd sat, that Adonis with an open-necked white shirt and black skin-tight trousers who captured my girlish heart, even though I must have been well into my 30s.

He had casually arranged himself between stool and bar and was sipping on a rip-top can of Beaujolais; so riveting and yet so far beyond me that I couldn't will myself to approach him. Like all lost opportunities he remains vivid in my mind.

When Bob Kerridge went back to the White Heron a few months ago to record something of its past before it turned to dust, he also stood in the the restaurant area and his own memories surfaced.

He didn't see the Adonis of course, but no doubt he saw his father sitting at the table in his favourite booth with his "three fingers" of neat scotch, and the hovering figure of Big Bob, Sir Robert's favourite waiter. It was a sad moment.

Since his father sold it, Bob has watched the hotel's slow decline. "It gradually whimpered away until it became an old and unimpressive place in complete contrast to what it had once been. The last time I went there it was a backpackers, and not a very good one at that.

"Standing in the restaurant was an eerie feeling. I could almost hear the tinkling of champagne glasses and see the flickering light of candles and steak being flambed, and through my mind paraded all those stars and heads of state, the businessmen, the debutantes and brides and children experiencing their first adult treat.

"And then I glanced over the pool to where the sauna had been and there on the pool's edge stood two graceful herons. As I watched, one of them rose up, circled the building and settled on the balcony of the top floor.

"It was like a ghost returning to a loved place for one last time."

He never went back again.