MICHAEL, WAITING
B
The unemployed 41-year-old man who sleeps downstairs at his mum’s house on the North Shore is Mikey Havoc. STORY STEVE BRAUNIAS PHOTOGRAPHS ALISTAIR GUTHRIE
ev Roberts said, “This is Yoda.” Her handsome black cat padded across the living-room floor of her house in Campbell Bay on the North Shore. “He’s naughty; he wants to eat what we eat. And he’s got overweight. If Michael feeds him, he has to leave a note, otherwise I’ll feed him, too.” It was Saturday morning. The TV and radio entertainer known as Mikey Havoc answered the door, and then went back to bed. His room is downstairs. Clothes and newspapers were scattered on the floor; there was a toy robot, and masks — he loves masks. Across the hallway was a room full of boxes from the house he sold after his marriage to actress Claire Chitham ended in 2009. There were a lot of boxes of fireworks — he loves fireworks. “I didn’t like having to sell the house,” he said. “I let fireworks off every single night. Every
46 / Metro / january-february 2012
single night. Every single night.” Bev and her elder son, 41, will sit on white couches of an evening and watch TV. “I’m really into sport,” said Bev. “If he comes in and mum’s watching netball, then that’s what we watch. But we both love Downton Abbey. I like NCIS. Michael laughs and says, ‘Mum, that’s just what you do all day.’” She works as a legal secretary for criminal barrister Mike Edgar. There were pretty watercolours on the walls, a piano, a remarkable green carpet. The upstairs porch looked over the bay. It was the family home. Bev and her husband Clive bought it just before Michael was born in 1970. They had another son, Allan, now head of drama at Rangitoto College, where both boys went to school. Bev said, “Allan knew at 14 what he wanted to do. Michael isn’t forward thinking.” He lived by himself after the marriage break-up, but couldn’t afford the rent, and moved home about a year ago, just after he left his job as host of the breakfast show on 95bFM. He said, “It’s always been part of the plan — but maybe not the whole fucken year, to be honest — to forgo regular income, to see what the next challenge is. I’m… I’m just waiting.” He’s on call with RadioLive, where he’s filled in for the Karyn Hay-Andrew Fagan evening show, and worked a shift on Christmas Day. He said, “The two radio stations who gave a shit when I worked at bFM were Live and ZB. I went to a meeting with them and the first thing they said was, ‘We just want to let you to know before we start that your abilities as a broadcaster aren’t under any question at all. You’re
january-february 2012 / Metro / 47
an amazing broadcaster.’ That was cool. “So maybe the challenge is to do some thing like talkback, which seems so formulaic and so predictable in a sense, but if fucken Leighton Smith and Michael Laws can get radio shows… It’s been way more interesting than I thought it was going to be. If I got offered a job tomorrow, I’d take it, a), because it’s a job...”
H
e never got around to naming b). No one could ever accuse him of having linear thought patterns. “His mind’s going all the time,” said Bev. It’s sometimes moved too fast for the rest of his life to catch up. Money runs through his fingers. There was the family inheritance he got from his grandparents. Bev: “I said, ‘Put it away.’ But he put it into Squid, and it all went.” She meant the O’Connell St club he operated for five years. And there, on the front lawn, was his Mitsubishi Galant, which famously got ticketed for parking fines of over $20,000. “There were weeks when the fines were more than I was getting paid at bFM,” he said. How much was he getting paid? “You’d be appalled.” He named a figure. “When you’re doing a fucken good radio show that everyone’s talking about, that’s fucken nothing.” But, he said, it was more than anyone else at the station was getting paid. “I remember [former breakfast host] Hugh Sundae saw my payslip on the fucken printer once, and had a mental about it. Firstly, fuck you, Hugh. Secondly, how much money was I making for bFM every week? Heaps. So that guilt trip didn’t really work. “For a long time I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not getting fucken paid anything, but it definitely helped me get the TV shows.’
His stardom and charisma remain in good working order. “Enjoy your lunch,” meowed a pretty girl when we went for lunch in Takapuna. And as far as interesting things happening in my life — I may not be rich, Steve, but I’m rich in credibility.” Bev said, “He tries very hard to earn enough at the moment to pay his own expenses. I said to him once, ‘Michael, even if you’ve got no money, you’ve had the most wonderful life.’” He was overweight. He told long, addled stories. He was frustrated, paranoid, resentful, but he was all right, open, warm, considerate, quick of wit, a good guy, the same old Mikey Havoc, former singer in hair band Push Push, former star of genuinely really funny TV programmes alongside Jeremy Wells, still a 95bFM legend — he used to make grand entrances into the studio one or sometimes two hours late for his breakfast show, wired, ebullient, sated, smelling of hair spray and perfume. His stardom and charisma remain in good working order. “Enjoy your lunch,” meowed a pretty girl as she brushed past him when we went for lunch in Takapuna. He said, “I’ve had some great girlfriends, and I’ve had sort of varying this and that
since Claire as well.” Bev said, “He comes and goes as he wants. Sometimes I don’t see him for days on end.” He said, “I still love going out. I really like night time.” Bev said, “Allan could sit in his room and play with his little Playmobil people quietly by himself. Not Michael. Six kids around him at least, always.” Was he, in fact, a loner? “Yes,” he said. “It weirds me out that I am. When Claire and I broke up, for the very first time in my life I started to think of the future as just being about me. I’d always thought, ‘When we do this, when we do that’ — it was always us, with whatever girlfriend I had at the time. Now I’m thinking, ‘It might just be you from now on. You might not have kids.’ And that’s pretty fucken heavy. I’m dealing with it pretty well I think, considering. I’m kind of stoked I haven’t had a massive midlife crisis.”
B
ill Kirton directed him in five TV series, and was working at 95bFM when Havoc was given his first shows by programme director Graeme Hill. “It was very obvious to everyone that he was X-factor. ‘Weapons-grade talent,’ as [Listener TV critic] Diana Wichtel later wrote about him. Really quite special.” What are his talents? “Instant recall,” said Kirton. “And an ability to make shit up, and make it work. And he can do what only a few people can do: put their arm around someone. Remember how Paul Holmes would do things like land in a helicopter at a flood zone? He’d put his arm around someone, and it’d work. They wouldn’t shrink away. Mark Sainsbury doesn’t do that. John Campbell doesn’t do that. Mikey
Clockwise (from top left): Havoc with Peter Urlich and Claire Chitham, Star Wars premiere, 2002; with Claire , music awards, 2008; with Jeremy Wells and Claire, Lord of The Rings premiere, 2001; with Wells, Hero Parade, 2001; with his fur coat, music awards, 2004; with Tiki Taane, 2007.
48 / Metro / january-february 2012
can do it. I’ve seen him do that all around the country. People really like him when they meet him. That’s X-factor.” But now he was ex-factor. “I suspect he doesn’t feel plugged in anymore,” Kirton said. Havoc, unplugged — he’d said over lunch in Takapuna, “I would love to be making TV right now. But the people who decide what goes on TV in this country are doing a terrible job if you ask me, and that’s just probably digging myself into a further hole than I’ve already dug myself.” He picked at his food, gnawed on his fingernails. Nick Dwyer, George FM announcer and host of TV show Making Tracks, shared the love. “I first met Mike when I was 12 and hanging around bFM, and he put me under his wing. It was like being made by a Sicilian mob guy. He was the Man. To be around him was incredible. He was like the Tasmanian devil crossed with Aslan from Narnia, just this witty, articulate, passionate big old bag of charisma… To my mind, he’s the greatest broadcaster New Zealand has ever known.” Havoc has made over 300 TV shows, and worked at 95bFM for 16 years, including two long, fondly remembered stints on breakfast. He played house music at 7am, hollered, invented characters, had the time of his life in public. And now? “He’s taking
a little break,” said Dwyer. “A little bit of chill time is no bad thing. We’re talking a career that’s spanned four decades! Did you know he had a cameo in Gloss, in 1989?” No. “Yeah! So. Anyway. I strongly believe Mikey has got it in him to come back.” “He needs a gig. He needs something,” said Josh Hetherington, sales rep at bFM, who first met Havoc at the Fanshawe St club Attica. “He needs a break. He deserves a break.” He remembers Havoc bounding up the 95bFM stairs when he was still in Push Push; Hetherington watched him gradually take over Auckland’s coolest playground, become its most famous property. “People were bereft when he left,” he said. “I’ve got clients who still miss him. He just has this natural talent, and genuinely original ideas, and a great instinct, and a brazen self-belief… Maybe the flipside of the energy and confidence that allows him to be larger than life is that he finds it difficult to accept criticism. He alienates people. He doesn’t forget his enemies.”
I
n 2006, it was leaked that 95bFM wanted to replace breakfast host Wallace Chapman with Havoc, then on the drive show. Damian Christie denounced the move in his blog on Public Address, and 1137 people signed a petition calling for the station to keep Chapman. They
also took the time to bag Havoc, big-time: “Arrogant… Self-absorbed… A mental midget…” Dylan Kerr of Newton wrote, “Mikey’s been smoking too much P (i should know as i work in the drug rehab field).” Havoc: “That whole thing was horrible, man. I always thought highly of Wallace up until then. Wallace was just a wee bit of a martyr. And the petition with all those names on it — fuck, believe me, I’ve read every single one of those fucken names. I actually called up some people on it, and said, ‘Yeah, saw your name on the fucken list — Kate Sylvester, get fucked!’ What they did was really horrible, because regardless whether you like me or not, at least show some respect. Like, Damian Christie — fuck him. Cunt.” Had he resolved things with Jeremy Wells? In 2004, Wells ended their onscreen partnership, signing with Phil Smith’s Great Southern production company to host Eating Media Lunch. Havoc said, “I felt betrayed by it in the most medieval sense. It was three weeks before we were supposed to do a show I’d been in meetings with for a year at TV3 — I’d been selling Hudson and Halls to them, and suddenly it’s just Halls. So I had three weeks to come up with a whole new TV show [Quality Time]. “But me and Jeremy are enjoying a gentle renaissance, I suppose, and I’m glad that we can still talk about the good times we had. It really sucked at the time, I never raised my voice to him about it. The closest was I said, ‘You should probably go now. Fuck off.’ “But it was people like... Phil Smith, who — like, a few years later, Jeremy invited me around to his house for a wrap party for one of his shows, and Mark Sainsbury and [TVNZ programmer] Jane Wilson and all sorts of fucken idiots are there, and Phil Smith rocks up to me. Phil Smith gave me one of my first jobs in TV, as a snowboard reporter on Sportsnight. So Phil Smith comes up to me at this fucken party after all this stuff had gone down with me and Jeremy, and we’d just sort of reconvened the friendship, and it was kind of nice to be invited to his place, and Phil Smith comes up to me and says, ‘You know what, mate, fuck I respect you, I respect you so much.’ I said, ‘Phil, if you ever say that to me again, I’m going to smash you in the fucken head.’” What for? “He’s the one who went behind my back and said to TVNZ: ‘If we just get Jeremy.’” Smith responded: “Jeremy’s a grown man and he made his choice.” Wells declined to be interviewed. He texted, “I’m not sure I’m keen to be an egg in that pancake.” Havoc said he’d heard Wells had recently made some sort of remark about him “hitting the bottom”. Had he spoken to Wells about it? “No, because there’s some other issues which are a little more sensitive for my old cobber,
january-february 2012 / Metro / 49
which I found out about, and he’s not very happy that I know.”
B
ev said, “When he first came home, I felt really sorry for him. He was still getting over his marriage breaking up. He’s going upwards now. He’s been to the bottom. He was very low… I just thought Claire was the ideal person for Michael. I was so happy to have her as a daughter-in-law. But the two of them were in the same area — she was in acting, and he was in radio, and there was no stability. I think what Michael needs is some stability.” She thought he was ready to settle down and have a family. Did she think that would happen? “I hope so,” she said, “Oh, I do hope so. But he’s got to have the courage to do it. I mean, I didn’t when my husband died when I was 32.” Clive Roberts was an electrician, and the first New Zealand yachtsman to win a world championship. There is a plaque in his memory beside the Takapuna boat club. It reads, OUTSTANDING YACHTSMAN AND NORTH SHORE CITIZEN. Bev was in the passenger seat when her husband was killed in a collision with a logging truck. The other driver had been drinking. “Pitch black night. Raining. He swung out, and that’s when he hit us. I got a graze on the top of my head. I always say
50 / Metro / january-february 2012
I was saved to bring up my children. “Allan was 22 months and Michael not quite five. It was difficult. Michael felt responsible for me. For a while there he was trying to marry me off to anyone that was single. But as he got older, he was, ‘No, no. We’re all right as we are, Mum.’” Havoc said, “I can so clearly remember him explaining to me how the solar system works. I can even remember the T-shirt he had on. Everything about it, where we were sitting, I can remember.” Fatherless, childless. His close friend Emma Wilkinson, an advertising account director, first met him in the summer of 2002, when they partied with mutual friends at Takapuna club Fever; she said he was “very conscious” about not having had kids. “I remember telling him about an uncle of mine who had kids in his early 40s. He was asking all about him. He just adores kids.”
“He’s going upwards now... I think what Michael needs is some stability.”
A lot of his old 95bFM mates are now living out in west Auckland with two or three kids. “To be honest, that’s what I thought I’d be doing,” he said. “Probably what I want more in the world in the last 10 years is kids. If Claire had said to me, ‘I’ve got this massive job doing McLeod’s Daughters, we’re going to have to move to Brisbane for eight years,’ I would have been happy to sit in board shorts renting DVDs and bringing up kids, to be a househusband for the rest of my life.” But there were other wants, other desires. “Nightclub duties,” as he put it. His life could be traced on a map of Auckland clubs — Squid, Attica, Fever, The Box, Calibre, Galatos, Crow Bar, Legends… The music, the glow, the long night’s journey into day; the white lines, the illustrated tabs, the fantasy cans. And now the reality of being 41, of being Michael. Josh Hetherington knows him as “a sweet guy”, generous, happy, able to create radio characters “filled with a pathos, and a little sadness, too. There’s a disappointment to them.” Emma Wilkinson knows him as intensely loyal, a great listener, positive, in limbo. “I was telling him about my bad day once, and he said, ‘It could be worse. You could be 41 and still living with mum.’ You can’t really argue with that. “I just hope some really great opportunities work-wise come along. What amazes me about him is his incredible brain. He knows information about all sorts of different things, and just has this thirst for knowledge. I can see him writing a book… He’d be a great assistant director working on ad campaigns; he’s got such a good eye for things… He’d be great on something like 7 Days.” Havoc said, “If it doesn’t end up being radio or TV, it’ll be something. If I was just going to do a job that paid really well, I could wangle my way into something tomorrow. You know what, I think I’ve got amazing shit to offer to advertising in this country. So maybe advertising, maybe another bar…” Bev said, “I pray every night that he’ll get something permanent that will let him showcase his talents.” Yes, she said, she really did say her prayers every night. She was Anglican and used to regularly attend services at St John’s in Campbells Bay. She gets the family around for a Sunday roast as often as she can. Clive’s mother, as if to make up for her son dying at 33, is 107. Allan is married and recently became a father to Sky. “The Roberts and Green families — I’m a Green — we’re all loud, we’re all noisy. “Allan’s very much like his dad. Michael’s like me,” Bev said. “We’re quite similar. Our sense of humour, things that we believe in. Michael and I are on the same wavelength. We understand each other… We’ve always been very close. Very close.” ■
