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SCMP Reporter

SATURATION publicity heralded the Hong Kong launch of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera this summer. Caviar and champagne parties, sellout shows and an impressive audience list promised outstanding performances.

   But as press photographers bounced their camera flashes off opening night socialites Brenda and Kai-bong Chau, David Tang, Governor Chris Patten and his family, Phantom star Leigh Munro was bathed in relief at having made it through the show at all.

  The woman who plays a lead role as the operatic diva, Carlotta, has astonished Hong Kong fans with her vocal acrobatics. Audiences watched as Carlotta flounced offstage - back to Italy in disgust, we presumed - when the Phantom replaced her with the unknown Christine.

  Months before reaching Hong Kong, Leigh Munro was excited at the prospect of performing here.

  After a whirlwind romance in October, she married financial analyst Bernard Muldoon, 43, to the skirl of bagpipes on a New Jersey beach at sunset. The Hong Kong tour, the couple decided, was perfect timing. It would be their exotic eastern honeymoon.

  'We were taking off for here and it was going to be a fabulous trip,' she said, reflecting on the view from her Tsim Sha Tsui hotel window.

  But before Phantom's Hong Kong season - or the honeymoon - could begin, Leigh was hospitalised after her new husband tried to strangle her, and the couple faced each other across a tense courtroom.

  When Leigh sang her first notes in a hushed Hong Kong Cultural Centre, her husband was in a Canadian jail and she was alone on her eastern honeymoon.

  The man who had worked all day in her New Jersey garden, prepared candlelit dinners and filled her dressing room with roses, inexplicably turned on his wife after a Canadian performance of Phantom.

  'We had been Christmas shopping. He picked me up after the matinee, which finished at 5pm, and we walked to the restaurant where we had first met, had dinner with the friend who had introduced us and celebrated our marriage.'   When the couple left the restaurant and hailed a taxi, Bernard seemed agitated and incoherent.

  'He jumped out of the cab ahead of me - which is unlike him - and when I got up to the apartment he was in a rage,' Leigh recounted.

  'I went into the bedroom. He was ranting and raving; the next thing I knew he had put his fists through the bedroom door. I said: 'What are you doing? This is a sub-let, it's not our apartment.'   'He threw me on the bed and started strangling me. The last thing I remember is him saying 'I love you'. The doctors tell me that's the last thing to go, the auditory sense.

  'When I came to, everything was soaking. I'd lost control of my bladder. He was gone. I leapt up and changed my clothes. I ran downstairs searching for him and there was an ambulance. I asked who they were there for. The officer jerked his thumb and said: 'Some guy just flipped out up there'. '   Dazed, Leigh wandered a few blocks to a grocery store, where she telephoned her 26-year-old daughter, Amy, from a previous marriage. She walked on to a nearby hospital and checked herself into the emergency ward, to discover medical staff and police had been searching for her.

  'Bernard had already reported,' she said. 'He'd gone into a police station, thrown his keys on the bench and said: 'I just killed my wife, I think.'   'On the evening news, you would have thought I'd died. There was footage of me singing, the apartment block was there, the reporter stuck a microphone in Amy's face. I wanted to scream: 'I'm not dead'. '   Instead, Leigh remained silent and defended herself against media intrusion. She testified in the trial which found her husband guilty of aggravated assault but refused to tell her story to the Canadian press.

  A psychiatrist advised her to uncover all she could about Bernard's background.

  The truth was devastating. Leigh's husband had no job. Yet he had worn a suit and carried a briefcase each morning, calling her from the 'office' during the day and returning home at night. It was all a sham.

  'With each little bit of delving, my heart broke a little more,' she said. 'There were lots of things - lies in financial dealings. I had turned over all my finances to him, because he was an analyst. I could have done a better job myself.

  'It's such a tangled web, I have five attorneys working to sort it out. He knew I'd find out at some stage, and that must have triggered the rage. He had been a little belligerent before, but never violent or threatening.'   Before the court handed down 15-months jail and a three-year parole period, she arrived in Asia and began singing Carlotta's role. Memories of early happiness moved her to write a letter to the judge in Toronto, giving evidence of her husband's previously gentle and generous nature.

  He had been a devoted 'pussycat,' she wrote. But the letter was entered as court evidence, becoming a public document. It was immediately reprinted in the Canadian press.

  'In my naivete I thought it was a personal letter. That was the only night I cried in the wings while waiting to go out. I said: 'God, you've got to do this for me, because I don't think I can do it for myself',' she said.

  Her long letter, described by the judge as 'very compassionate', may have helped soften the sentence, Leigh said. 'When I came here to sing it was a great refuge because I thought I was leaving it all behind. And I did, for a while.

  'But then I would see a couple walking down the waterfront and I would start sobbing; this was to be our honeymoon. I'd see an athlete or a sports game and think that he would have loved to see it. It's as if I'm a widow.'   While Leigh sang to standing ovations from Hong Kong's social elite and lovers of music and theatre, she decided the best way to handle her trauma was to speak.

  'I've been in denial, I've been whining, now I'm in grieving. I guess the next stage is anger. I really hope the anger comes soon.

  'When I saw him [in court] I wanted to hug him and make it all better. I'm trying to go through every feeling and process it.

  'I've been told that this kind of trauma can end up in a very serious illness. Evidently, the more you talk, the better; you don't go through flashbacks.

  'So, I'm trying,' she sighed. 'I don't know if I'm succeeding, but I'm trying very hard.

  She has roller-coastered through high and low points. She needed anti-depressants to attend her daughter's wedding at Christmas; she posted the Christmas card she had bought Bernard hours before he strangled her, signing it 'your almost-dead wife' in a grim attempt at levity.

  Between performances, Leigh has received therapy from a Hong Kong psychiatrist. She no longer searches for an answer to the most pressing question: Why?   'It's egotistical for me to say to God, I need to know why,' she said. 'I don't need to know why.'   Her husband has written letters and telephoned her during her Hong Kong season, and this week she flew back to Toronto on her way to a new singing role in Switzerland. Her understudy, Kim Stengel takes over as Carlotta this week.

  'I wish I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I won't see him again but, honestly, I can't say that,' Leigh said.

  A driving motive for agreeing to lay bare her grief is to encourage women in areas from Tuen Mun to the Peak to do the same - to leave abusive homes and begin again with the help of women's shelters such as Harmony House or help hotlines.

  'For anything to be accomplished, you have to talk about it. You have to put it in the paper so that when there's a woman sitting at home with her three children, she has a point of reference - she knows she's read about this, she knows where to go, where she can get support,' she said.

  'It usually escalates from verbal abuse, then maybe a slap, whereupon the wife can say: I'm getting out of here. But I wasn't given that opportunity. I went from honeymooner to 'almost-dead wife'.

  'There were two men: the Bernard I loved so desperately and then this other man who was able to put his hands around my neck, knowing how important the throat is to a singer, and strangle me.' Women can call the Harmony House hotline on 2522-0434, the Federation of Women's Centres on 2386-6255, Christian Service counselling hotline on 2318-0028, expatriate group Safetalk on 2386-6255 or the Social Welfare Department's general hotline, 2343-2255, for referral to a Family Service Centre 



Phantom lady Leigh sings away the blues