‘He was funny, also very intelligent,’ said a woman who knew him in the 1990s, ‘and completely mad.’ She tolerated his eccentricities — the grimy stove, the robes — and was amused by his rabid way of talking. ‘He always banged on about discovering all the models who did well in the ’80s. According to Derek, it was him who discovered Rachel Hunter. I was sure he wasn’t lying as he told everyone.’
Rachel Hunter’s agent, Andy Haden, rejected the claim. On holiday in Fiji, he emailed, ‘We have a letter and a series of photos that Rachel has authenticated as the first shots taken of her as a model, and the photographer wasn’t Derek King . . . I’ve never heard of the guy.’
5
King went on a sickness benefit in the late 1980s. He couldn’t find work as an architect. He was fading from view, retreating, going underground. All the wretched Mondays at art openings — he didn’t stand a chance. He couldn’t claim the same pretensions, was lost in their maze of put-downs and snobbery. Over thick espresso coffee served in china thimbles at a Ponsonby villa, painter John Reynolds and his brother Patrick, who photographs sliding doors and such for magazines, recreated King’s agony.
John said, ‘I thought he was a tremendously opaque individual. Hard to read. And most people who met him had this sense of — you just backed away a little bit. There was a disquiet about him, because—’
Patrick interrupted, ‘Why was he at the art openings? There was no engagement with the work on the walls.’
John said, ‘Derek was someone you didn’t want to spend time with. Not because he was odious or malevolent; you just had the sense that—’
Patrick interrupted, ‘He was slightly slippery, though.’
John said, ‘Well, you just had this feeling—’
Patrick interrupted, ‘He was all wrong.’
John completed his previous sentence, ‘That he was out of alignment.’
‘Very bad sunglasses,’ said Patrick. ‘Too big and too flashy, and wearing them at night! And also the baffling perm.’
John said, ‘He needed to get out in the sun a bit more.’
Patrick said, ‘The pale, pale skin and the tight hair. And there was a sponginess to him; he wasn’t a coiled spring, he was the reverse to a coiled spring.’
‘Dissolute,’ said John. ‘He was dissolute. And conversations didn’t actually advance with him. He didn’t have anything to say.’
‘He’d make these sly asides,’ said Patrick. ‘Non sequiturs. And you get this feeling of being trapped with him.’
‘All of us have that social antennae where you pick up some sense of a person’s chemistry, or you get a sense of their social animus,’ said John, ‘and there was a palpable sense there was never any Mrs Derek.’
6
But he had another, better life, full of lissome young Maori girls, back at his townhouse, in that sealed dark zone of fantasy and grime. He said in court that he first came across street-kids in 1986 — a couple of glue-sniffers, in Albert Park, homeless, ‘living in the sewer’, runaways from foster homes and abusive families. Then he discovered 40 more, hanging around Karangahape Road. Hardly anyone lived in the city back then; King had downtown Auckland almost all to himself, it was his patch; the arrival of street-kids, frightened and tough, offered him company, society, purpose.
He was asked in court, ‘Your house was made available to young people. How did that happen?’
He said, ‘Living in the city, when I go out, I’m in Queen Street, that’s my patch, that’s my suburb, you know. And there they were. It never occurred to me that that would happen in a first-world economy. After the stock-market crash, it really went off then. And they got to know me as somebody who helps them out. There was a huge problem and the community wasn’t handling it. I suddenly realised, “I have to do something. I can’t just walk away from it.” That’s when I made the decision that there was no net for them, there was nothing for them. Goodness me, it — it just took you over really, it’s quite amazing . . .’
King rented out the top floor of his townhouse to TV production company Cinco Cine. A friend remembered, ‘He used to drop blankets and food left over from film shoots to the street-kids over Grafton Bridge at night . . . We were seriously under the impression that he was being compassionate towards them with no other motives.’
Another woman who knew him said, ‘He used to go on about how they were on the street as they were being abused at home, and that’s why he also had some of them to stay, sometimes for months at a time. He probably imagined himself as some kind of hero.’
Well, wasn’t he operating at some level of goodness? As well as providing blankets and food for street-kids living rough under Grafton Bridge, there were many other acts of kindness, or patronage, over the years. He bought tampons and make-up, offered shelter, warmth, food; he did nice things. ‘I suppose so,’ said Nikita Jones, who showed up at his door in 1997. ‘Everyone would leave their dirty clothes there, and he’d wash them all with the Lux flakes. He fed us his famous cheese and onion on toast. But he was a cunt.’
She meant the time he found her when she tried to slash her wrists, and responded by throwing her out of the house. ‘He shooed me out the door, going “Fuck off, fuck off!”, and I was pissing blood everywhere. That’s when I turned on him.’
Nikita was a ‘fourth wave’ street-kid when she met King. She was born in Grey Lynn, ‘back when it was just coconuts’. She
