Steve Crow

Steve Crow launches a new political party today as part of his campaign to be voted in as Auckland's mayor. Does New Zealand's best-known pornographer - sorry, adult entertainment provider - have any idea what he's actually doing?

Steve Crow said, "It's very stiff at the moment." We sat in his office on a wet, dreary winter's afternoon in Auckland. His son David fetched two cups of coffee from the kitchen. The bathroom door was open; the seat had been left up, and a supply of Budget toilet paper lay on the floor. Crow's cellphone rang. "Hi baby," he said. It was his wife. "Love you," he said.

The stiffness was a complaint: he had surgery on his right knee last week, and was given a set of crutches. He will model them in public at 2pm today when he launches a new political party. Crow, 50, is running for the Auckland mayoralty. The party is called 1auckland. com. He said, "When it's on the electoral register, because it starts with a 1, it'll be at the top. It's also an advert for our website, because our website is our name. So that's all there."

What was all there? I asked about the party's candidates. He fished up the name of someone called Julie Chambers. Who? He said, "To be honest... Let me think about this... Um... I'll forward you some background on each of the people, rather than trying to remember off the top of my head, because I don't remember."

Why not? "I know who they are," he said. He asked himself: "Do I need to know their background?" And he answered, "No. No, I don't."

This was fast turning into a nonsense. What was he playing at? But he wasn't playing. I asked him whether he was a funny person. "No, I don't think so," he said. "But I think I'm quite sharp intellectually." He said his IQ had been measured at 148.

I remarked that he was probably very astute at business. He agreed. Crow runs a business called Vixen. The biggest income is sales of DVDs. You could say it's a quick buck: "Buying porn is something people tend to do as an impulse." Then he said, "Actually, I'll qualify that, because Steve Crow and Vixen don't trade in porn. We trade in adult entertainment, which is between consenting adults.

"Let me define some terms. If any parties involved are not consenting, then it's porn. A child doesn't have consent, so that would be porn. If you're dead, there's no consent, so that would be porn. If you're an animal, you're not a human, so that's porn."

Amazing. I asked him what had been Vixen's best-selling DVD.

"You know the answer to that," he said. I said I didn't know the answer to that.

"Oh," he said. "Ripe. The pregnant porn-star one." He meant the New Zealand movie starring a woman who was filmed giving birth. It generated a lot of headlines.

Had the thing actually sold? He told a story: "We released an adult video last year called Pirates. It's based on Pirates of the Caribbean. Cost about $6 million to make. It was the biggest-selling adult title in 2006 worldwide by a long, long way. Well, we sold six times as many units here with Ripe. And it's a shit movie."

Illuminating. What, I asked, were the most popular genres sold by Vixen? "The most widely demanded fetish, and we're unable to sell it because of New Zealand law, is golden showers. We get asked for it every day. But the biggest genre is amateur. It's reality adult entertainment - genuine people in their homes doing what they do."

Appalling, but I began to wonder what Crow does in his home. He has had four children; two were from his first marriage to a Chinese woman in Malaysia, the other two from his second, current marriage, to Gaylene, a policewoman. In each case, he was their stepdad. I asked whether he couldn't father children of his own, and he said he could, although not any longer, because he had a vasectomy.

Why did his first marriage collapse? "Because I cheated on my wife," he said. After he met Gaylene, he had a relationship with former Penthouse pin-up Hayley Marie Byrnes, but they broke up and he got back together with Gaylene. "My wife's the best thing that's ever happened to me," he said. "But my persona and activities have a severe negative impact on her job. We try and keep that separate. She goes alone to police Christmas parties. In fact, until I dropped her at the airport on Monday, I'd never seen my wife in a police uniform."

He said he'd been in love four, maybe five times. Did that include Hayley Marie? "Yeah. I fell pretty heavily. It was the usual grandiose thoughts of a 47-year-old with a 23-year-old."

Had he ever tried Viagra? "Once. About five years ago. I took one tablet. And it gave me a massive," he said, "headache."

POOR, STUPID, bungling, unloveable Auckland. New Zealand's biggest city works hard and likes a drink, always puts on a show and never takes itself too seriously, enjoys a mild climate and lots of shops - but it only ever seems to attract wretches to run the place.

In this year's mayoral race, the two likeliest candidates to wear the robe and drag the chain are incumbent Dick Hubbard, maker of dowdy breakfast cereals, and John Banks, maker of breakfast radio blather.

Crow is polling third. He could be doing Hubbard a favour; it's possible he will split Banks's right-wing vote. He said today's launch of 1auckland. com might feature two high-profile women, "about 50", who would announce their "association" with the party. He wouldn't name names, but at a guess, one of the women may be that neo-right harridan, Christine Rankin. Crow is libertarian, and talks about "individual freedom"; like most people who follow that doctrine, the quality of his mercy is strained.

His views on refugee Ahmed Zaoui: "Deport him." Why? "Why not? He's not a New Zealand citizen. Do we need the grief?"

Does he believe in tougher sentences for criminal offending: "Very much so. I don't believe in parole."

Yes, he said, he was sticking to his statements last week that he backed the Dubai consortium bid to buy Auckland International Airport: "I would hazard a guess it would prosper much better under the ownership of a United Arab Emirates corporation with pretty much bottomless coffers... Who owns an asset doesn't concern me at all. As long as the asset can't be picked up and taken away - I mean, I don't think you should be able to sell off our antiquities and our... um... treehouses and things like that, and transport them offshore."

Treehouses! There was something about Crow that was impossible not to like - a kind of oafishness. Actually, he was probably just nervous. Yes, he said, he was a very shy person. He had a panic attack the first time he talked in public; that was way back in about 1990, at a conference in Hong Kong -Crow lived in South-east Asia for many years, working on oil rigs as a marine biologist. He once went 270 days at sea. He said he'd always been a workaholic; these days, he gets to work at about 7.30am, and stays until maybe 8pm, 9pm, six days a week, sometimes seven. I asked him whether a motive for working long hours is that he avoids contact with people. "That's an interesting perspective," he said. "I don't think so. But then come to think of it, I spent a large part of my career underwater with no contact at all."

For the mayoral campaign, he will refuse to doorknock: "It's intrusive." He said, "Banks and Hubbard are both out to garner popularity, and I genuinely don't care." He will also refuse to advertise his mug on hoardings: "I'm not particularly pleasant to look at." Well, he was no oil painting, but beneath his naked head was a nice, soft, quite vulnerable face. I tried to picture him as a young man, and saw him with long fair hair. "No, I had long brown hair with a slight auburn red tinge," he said.

I tried to picture him as Auckland's mayor. I could not.

Gently, I said to him that voters would want a man who has a firm hand on the tiller.

"Oh, you'll have that," he said. Less gently, I said to him that he didn't have a clue where the tiller was located.

"I'll find it quick," he said. "And I'll move it into where I want it to be. Put it this way: I'm not interested in being mayor of Auckland under the current system. Unless there is a mechanism, or a legislative way for me to make some serious changes, I don't want to be involved. Because it's a hiding to nothing.

"The current mayor is just a figurehead. He has very little power."

I asked him if he would like to be a dictator, and he said, "For a short period of time, the answer to that is yes. Sadly there is a serious need for a little bit of dictatorial behaviour."

We said goodbye on cordial terms. He seemed a nice fellow. I walked back out in the wet, dreary afternoon, and left Steve Crow to his stiff joint and his various assorted fantasies.

 

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