Feature
A tough Hide
by Diana Wichtel
Remade man Rodney Hide is dancing to a new, dangerous tune.
There’s a strange glint in the eye of Rodney Hide, Act leader, born-again fitness fiend and all-round entertainer, as he trawls through the astonishing events of the past 12 months. Triumph? Tears?
It’s his new contact lens. All the working out, swimming, healthy eating and tragic cha-cha-ing in the world can only achieve so much. Hide has been fitted with a pair for reading. I alert him to the fact that something in his right eye is making a bid for freedom just as he raises a hand to brush it away. This is the second time the lens has come out, he says.
Plonking the errant disk on a plate provided for his mum’s excellent muffins, Hide is unbothered by this double rejection. Expounding on leading Act in the age of MMP, being the best MP Epsom has ever had, etc, the new, improved Rodney. His glass remains half full even when his eyes seem determined to be half empty.
We’ve met at the hospitable Glen Innes home of his parents, Margaret and Philip, where Hide has been lodging since the break-up of his marriage to Jiuan, his one-time university flatmate. The occasion is the release of his often mad, really quite entertaining memoir-cum-personal-growth-manual, My Year of Living Dangerously. “It’s like a cross between a Barry Crump book, because I love his writing, and to sound a bit more cultured, [Conrad’s] Heart of Darkness,” declares Hide. “No, really!”
Certainly the book has you ricocheting wildly between “Crikey” and “The horror! The horror!”, sometimes in the same paragraph: “In the moment before we went live I turned to Krystal [Stuart] to tell her I was going to dance as though my backside was on fire. She said, ‘Do it. Do it for me.’” That was after the immortal moment in local television history when he dropped her on her head.
Then there’s the time a younger Rodney and his mentor, businessman Alan Gibbs, careened around the shores of the Kaipara Harbour in Gibbs’s new toy, a 26-tonne tank. It’s an apt image. Hide, with his fetish for hard work and David Brent-like ability to absorb derision, rolls through My Year of Living Dangerously like an erratically driven, unstoppable armoured vehicle. Here is where to find out why Hide has been called everything from a dancing potato to a threat to western civilisation.
The formative years included travel, which opened young Rodney’s eyes. “I didn’t know the bar was a gay hang-out during the day,” he writes, of taking a friend from home to a London pub. “Men were openly and passionately kissing, some with their hands down each other’s pants. It was a long way from the DB Hari Hari.”
There’s Rodney working on oil rigs in the North Sea, Rodney the scholar, ripping through a second master’s degree at a US university as if his backside was on fire.
On his OE, while others partied, Hide took himself off to Swan Lake or boned up on the classics. “I get bored drinking. That’s why I gave up.” He still reads David Copperfield every four years. “It’s like going back to an old friend.”
Bang on time, there’s the midlife crisis. Staring down the barrel of 50, you wake up one morning, throw your life up in the air, agree to prance about on national television (“I felt like a pudding,” he confesses), then write a book about it. “Absolutely!” beams Rodney. “Dancing with the Stars certainly changed my life.”
In old clippings you’ll find Hide calling Jonathan Hunt, a target over his $27,000 taxi bill in Hide’s gun-slinging days, a “big slug”. Dancing made him a kinder, gentler, thinner MP. “From that point on I’ve never said a critical thing about another politician. It was that dramatic.”
Well, he does allow himself the odd swipe. “I have on many occasions observed how people don’t notice what you say on TV as long as you look good and appear confident. How else to explain Winston Peters’s amazing political career?”
And the ghost of past Rodneys is glimpsed when I respond to his hail of free-market rhetoric by mentioning the failings of Telecom. He’s off. “No! Let me finish, it’s important!” he says when you try to get a word in. When I ring back, I can’t help but mention a report in the NZ Herald of serious under-investing by Telecom. But he won’t be drawn. “Ha! Ha! Must be right!” he says. “I was thinking I shouldn’t have had that argument.”
No. Because right now Hide is selling the remade man. He certainly looks trim and healthy, nothing like the grinning blimp on his hilarious Rodney-mobile. “That was a photograph. I tell people it’s a cartoon.”
Some MPs will be relieved that the ferocious energy Hide put into tormenting them has been redirected at tormenting himself. Take the day of his first big swim. He had to be fished out of the harbour. “Apparently, my arms and legs were still moving when they finally lifted me out,” he writes. “I actually swore at them,” he recalls fondly. “Piss off!”
Not content with drinking half the Waitemata, he heads straight off on a charity walk, followed by a public meeting and a game of squash. He made himself ill. What was he thinking? “I was probably thinking I was Superman and I discovered that day I wasn’t.”
Page 1 
