Shirley Horrocks’ documentary about musician Don McGlashan is set to hit the big screen. It’s the latest in her long career of telling tales of creative and inspirational Kiwis.
Documentary-maker Shirley Horrocks tells other people’s stories. More accurately, she wants the person she is making a documentary about to tell their own stories. Her new documentary is Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story. She followed him for three years, around the country and to New York and Vancouver. Even if people know his music, she says, they probably don’t know much about the travails and triumphs of his long career. The film premieres at Auckland’s Civic Theatre on Saturday, August 9 and nine other centres thereafter.
“Anchor Me was my first profile of a music icon who led bands,” she wrote in a piece about the making of the film. “Don was relaxed and supportive about the documentary business, which is crucial to me as I always want the artist primarily to tell his own story.”
Horrocks’ own story “was preordained from the moment before I was born”. When she left – reluctantly, you sense – Epsom Girls Grammar after her sixth form year, she went to work as an assistant in her father Louis’s Dominion Rd pharmacy, which he owned for 43 years. Five nights a week, she went to pharmacy school. It was expected that she would one day take over the family business. She might have resented this.
“No, no. I loved my dad. I really adored my dad.” His was one of the old-fashioned type of chemist shops that no longer exist. “People used to come and ask Dad’s advice for all sorts of things. I’ll tell you a funny story. I used to work in the shop [after school] and I was given strict orders: ‘You are not to serve any of the younger male customers that come in.’ Because they might ask for condoms.” Heaven forbid.
Did she ever get asked for condoms? “Once or twice. But I usually allowed Dad to deal with those men. I thought that was hilarious.” Her mother, Rachel, worked in the pharmacy, too. She liked her mother, but she says they were too similar in temperament and so they clashed. She means they were both stubborn.
She married at 18 and had two sons. She was supposed to stay at home and be a good wife while also being decorative. “I mean, he’s the father of my children. Obviously, I liked him enough to marry him, but he was the type who treated his wife as some sort of beautiful object that shouldn’t change and should be very much kept in its own little jewel box.”
She went off script. She began studying Italian at night classes and her teacher asked if she was doing Italian at university. “That put the idea into my head. And very much against my first husband’s, um, quite repressive sort of way of carrying on, I went to university. I changed and I grew and my interest in my mind grew.”
She taught high school English for a few years. She made her first documentary, Ensemble, about Auckland’s Theatre Corporate, in 1979 as a project for her drama diploma. She had gone way off script and has happily stayed off script ever since.
She does not give out her age. Not out of any silly vanity but because, she says, “The industry is ageist. I’m not wanting to pass myself off as a chicken. You only have to look at me to know what I am, but the industry is ageist. In fact, you know, New Zealanders are a bit ageist really.”
She remembers when she was about 40, and sitting with a cameraman “and I had on this dashing red catsuit and he looked at me and said, ‘You must have been quite lovely when you were young.’” This made me shriek. Which made her laugh. It is one of her favourite stories. She is, by the way, you silly cameraman, still quite lovely.
‘I was a loner’
Her childhood. “I was an only child and very protected, very sheltered. And so I was a kid who liked to sit and read a lot. And my best friend was this lovely little spaniel puppy. He arrived as a puppy for my 10th birthday. He came, apparently, in a wooden packing case from up the line somewhere. And Prince was the runt. He wasn’t a show dog, so I guess my dad didn’t have to pay a whole heap of money for him. But he was an absolutely beautiful, beautiful dog.”
It can be a bit lonely being an only child. “I wouldn’t say I felt lonely. But I was a loner.” In addition to Prince, she did have “real best friends”, but she has never been gregarious or desirous of having a large social circle.
She didn’t come from a particularly arty background. “I’d say my parents were probably a bit middle ground. They didn’t listen to a lot of classical music but my father played the violin. And my uncle played the baby grand that was in my grandparents’ house.” Her grandfather sang Italian opera songs.
“Gosh, I adored my grandfather. I thought he was very good-looking and he had a beautiful singing voice. And he’d go around the house singing things like Celeste Aida, and all in Italian. So I loved Italian.”
Her grandfather fled Poland after World War II to get away from the communist Russians. “He went off around the world looking for a place they could immigrate to.” He tried Cuba for a time, then settled in Sydney before the family ended up in New Zealand. He was fluent in Polish, obviously, and Russian, Strine and, eventually, presumably good old New Zild English. She speaks Italian and French. Her father was born in Lithuania. So she might have inherited a restlessness, a propensity to wander, except her restlessness, her wandering to new places was of the mind.
Creative heaven
She is married to Emeritus Professor Roger Horrocks, the writer, critic and academic. He took early retirement from the University of Auckland where he was the head of the film, media and television department to concentrate on his writing.
She makes films; he writes. It was, and remains, a match made in a creative heaven.He had been her lecturer when she was studying English at the university.
I asked if she fancied him then. She said, “No. I had spent my studies being totally overawed by all the lecturers because I was married and had two children.”
Then she was no longer married, “I had finished my degree and I was tutoring in the Italian department and he was teaching. We met in a coffee shop.”
She said about being married to him, “Aren’t I lucky?” She said, “Well, you would understand if you knew my first situation. Instead of having somebody who was trying to tie me down, Roger encouraged everything I did. He never got in the way. He was always interested.”
They are both lucky, I reckon. They have what sounds like a lovely and loving marriage. They like the same things: art, books, film. “We talk a lot about our work. We talk about the state of the world. We talk a lot still after having been together for a long time. So I am lucky that we have a relationship that still goes on and it feels fresh.”
They married in 1979. She sent through a “studio photo” taken on their wedding day (above). Two of the kids in the photo are hers; two are Roger’s. “They put their own money together to pay for that studio portrait as a complete surprise. Our wedding was very simple, on my parents’ back lawn.”
Establish a connection
She is an observer. Observers have to create a certain distance, maintain a reserve. But they also establish a connection. If you are making documentaries about people you have to, obviously. She is, like many of the artists she examines from behind the camera, partly extrovert but, by nature, an introvert. She likes to be in control. She is not a bit bossy, but she is accustomed to being the one looking in, asking the questions. If anyone made a documentary about her, what would it reveal? “I really don’t know. Anyway, I hope they don’t. And they won’t.”
She would, I suggest, be a difficult subject. Not out of any desire to be difficult – she is not a difficult person, though she does have a certain reserve – but because she is most comfortable behind the camera. She’s a director. She likes to be the one doing the directing.
She said, “I think everybody’s difficult. Everybody’s difficult to pin down. I mean with Don, he has done so much that my problem was not what to put in but what to take out.” That she likes McGlashan’s songs was no advantage. “Listening to his music wasn’t work, it was a joyride – but the scope of his career was certainly daunting.”
Her relationship with the people whose lives she documents comes back to her nature. “I don’t put myself forward in social situations. I am animated, maybe, with a group of people, yeah. But if it comes to pushing myself forward, I just don’t.”
The problem with cataloguing her career reflects her experience with McGlashan. She’s done so much. What to put in and what to leave out? Anchor Me is the 13th of her films to be shown at the NZ International Film Festival. What to put in?
Her 2004 documentary Marti : The Passionate Eye, about the late, marvellous photographer Marti Friedlander, who captured New Zealand and New Zealanders through the lens of an immigrant who had grown up in a Jewish orphanage in London.
I had, I say, attempted to interview Marti and failed miserably. All she did was boss me around while insisting on taking photographs of me. She says she had been warned that Marti was a bossy britches. But she wasn’t bossy with her. Until Marti the documentarian insisted on taking a photograph of the person documenting her life.
Why artists and latterly scientists? “Because I’m interested in art and also I’m only too aware, particularly a few years ago, and to a certain extent now, that artists weren’t really recognised or admired except by the people who are interested. But on the whole, they’re not known, the way they work isn’t known, the difficulties they have aren’t known.”
Scientists, she says, have the same difficulties. Her first science documentary was about an English astronomer, Jeremiah Horrocks, who had predicted the Transit of Venus in 1639. No relation? “Well, that’s what we set out to find out. It was called Venus: A Quest. And my stepson Dylan [the cartoonist], who is very personable and articulate, he was the person we set off on the quest to find whether Jeremiah Horrocks was a relative or not. He died when he was 21, so there were no offspring.”
Through genealogy, they found a possible connection and that person had their DNA tested, as did Dylan. The answer to their quest was, through an amazingly complicated investigation, that Dylan and therefore Roger were related to the astronomer. It is an extraordinary story.
Here is another story, one she really wants told. It is that in 1987 she had breast cancer surgery. Then, many years later, she had cancer in her other breast and had a mastectomy.
“I always like to tell women that you can survive breast cancer, and I’m an example. But please, please, have regular mammograms.” That she wants this story told might be revealing. It is a story about her and also not a story about her. It is for other people in the same way that her documentaries are.
She wasn’t, I felt, entirely comfortable with being interviewed. She is more comfortable being behind a camera, remember.
But she said, at the end of our hour: “I quite enjoyed it.” She didn’t need to add that quite enjoying being interviewed came as quite a surprise. As it did for me.