Stark confessions

Freda Stark, clad in body paint, wowed audiences at the Civic in the 1940s. Stark's life was just as captivating off stage, the dancer embroiled in titillating scandal, recounts MICHELE HEWITSON.

When the crumbling grande dame of Auckland theatres re-opened last year, it was not only the faux-Moorish interior, the gilded elephants and star-studded sky which were restored to Auckland.

Attached to the Civic, the street-level bar is named in a tribute to another of the city's legends. Stark's is named after Freda Stark, the woman who wowed the American Troops at the Civic in the 1940s and scandalised not a few of the locals with her solo dance, clad only in gold paint and a g-string.

That, at least, was the legend. But in the just released biography, Freda Stark: Her Extraordinary Life by Dianne Haworth and Diane Miller (Harper Collins, $39.95) the gold paint is revealed to have been silver powder mixed with glycerine, spotlit with amber lights. It was also toxic.

Stark would jete from stage to a baby's bath (there was no shower in the Civic's dressing room) filled with hot water boiled by the Civic's resident fireman, to be scrubbed down by any cast or stage crew handy.

Scrubbing off the patina of the Stark legend to reveal the truth about a woman whose name was linked with both glamour and a particularly sordid murder case has been attempted with a lightness befitting their subject, say Haworth and Miller. "It is not," says Haworth, "a heavy-duty biography. You're not talking about Sir Ernest Rutherford."

It is more, they say, "a story of the times." Of a woman who, says Miller, "was like a butterfly; she flew in and out of your life."

Miller is Stark's niece Her aunt, says Miller, was adamant "in her quiet way" that no biography was to be written in her lifetime.

After Stark's death in 1999, a week before her 89th birthday, Miller and Haworth sat down to talk about how to piece together a story which Stark had requested be told with the involvement of family. As well she might have. The "butterfly" had once asked Miller "how it felt to have a skeleton in the family."

The skeletons in the Stark closet were not ones which took too much excavating. In 1935 Freda Stark's name - and face - were headline news. Her lover, Thelma Trott, was dead of a suspected Veronal overdose; Thelma's husband the enigmatic and exotic conductor, Eric Mareo, stood accused of her murder. Freda Stark was the prosecution's star witness. It turned out to be one of her best performances.

Mareo was found guilty by first one, then a second jury in a retrial, of poisoning his wife. Stark had to give evidence twice; the defence admitted that "they could not break her." They tried. Stark was asked questions about her relationship with Thelma. Why, asked Counsel for the Defence, Humphrey O'Leary, did Thelma keep a nude photograph of Freda in her bedroom? And why did witnesses attest to having seen Freda and Thelma in bed together "on a fine sunny afternoon?"

There is no doubt that Freda lied on the stand. She was in bed with "Mrs Mareo numerous times ... that was the custom." But only, she insisted, to keep Thelma company, until Mareo arrived home. "I would take off my dress so that it would not crush, and my shoes. It's nothing unusual to get into bed with any of my girlfriends."

In the New Zealand of the 1930s such behaviour was most certainly not "the custom." Letters written to Thelma were produced which referred to, said the detective in charge of the case, "abnormal relationships and non-Christian practices."

It was a trial, write Haworth and Miller, "that would expose a celebrity life of drugs, sex, lesbian love and glamour to a shocked and fascinated nation pinned to the drudgery of the Depression years." The immorality of it was too much for a wide-eyed, shocked general populace. Too much, that is, for them to keep away: newspapers showed crowds queuing for admission to the Auckland Supreme Court.

Mareo was sentenced, twice, to death by hanging. Instead he was reprieved to serve a term of life imprisonment in Mt Eden jail and released in 1948. He remains an enigma. The authors could find no birth certificate for him. He changed his name and the details of his parents' names at whim - and on each of his three marriage certificates (he is also known to have had one common-law wife). When the man known as Mareo died at Greenlane Hospital in 1960 he was buried as Eric Curtis at Purewa Cemetery. His death certificate states: "Not known whether married."

There remains speculation about Mareo's guilt. Miller says she's ambivalent. Haworth is convinced he killed Thelma. She believes he had used up all of his wife's money and had another woman, with a healthier bank balance, lined up as the next target for his attentions. An appendage to the book contains conflicting legal views (previously published in 1971), including one from the now Queen's Counsel, Peter Williams.

Williams points to one piece of the puzzle that will never be placed: why did Freda, who was at a semi-comatose Thelma's bedside, not insist that a doctor be called? The biography has her pleading with Mareo to get medical help yet she did not call for help until the Monday afternoon, almost three days after Thelma began to exhibit signs of serious illness.

Haworth and Miller hold that the 24 year-old Stark was too in awe of Mareo to override his authority. And until Thelma's death, they had been close. Certainly close enough that she, Thelma and Mareo often shared a bed. This was a secret that Stark kept from the probing of the police.

"Bisexuality," write the authors, "was prevalent in their circle ... but three in a bed was not the standard fare for New Zealanders in the 1930s."

Much later, Stark would laugh and say "we were theatre people," by way of explanation. But this was much later, of course, and in safer times. As then Herald columnist, Jack Leigh wrote after her funeral, Quentin Crisp had it about right: "Time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address, they eventually live in the metropolis."

She survived such episodes as being invited to the home of an "old duck" for morning tea who then locked her in the toilet and "shouted through the other side of the door and accused me of putting her hero Mareo behind bars."

Stark's metropolis became Ponsonby (or Ponsonby hers) where she shocked the neighbours in her pensioner housing block by sunbathing topless into her 70s.

There is more than scandal. As befitting a woman whose niece recalls as being more interested in conversations about "lovely French shoes" than about the much more compelling interior of her past, there is plenty here of Stark's often stunning outward presentation. She was used to making do. The Civic Dancers pranced across the stage in lavish costumes fashioned from the best wartime rationing had to offer: hospital gauze stiffened with methylated spirits, patty cake cups, mutton cloth dyed to do duty as tights, mosquito cloth.

And Harold, the ballet dancer she married in 1947, tells a colourful story about the first night he and Freda spent together. "I had these ghastly baggy cotton underpants, which was all you could get then. They were striped purple and emerald green and a sort of reddish shade and white. And there above the bed was this plain white lightshade with its naked bulb beaming down on us, so I hurled my underpants up and over the nightshade for some exotic stripes of colour. What a night we had."

That Harold was predominantly gay, and Freda, as he put it, "a lesbian at heart" had no bearing on their long and loving relationship, say Miller and Haworth. Harold, now 81, was named a beneficiary in Freda's will. Freda's ashes were buried on Thelma's grave.

"Well," you can almost hear Freda Stark laughing, "we were theatre people, darlings."