Hot lunch with Carolynne Waterhouse

There is a delightful category of people in society who are born sprinklers of fairy dust.

Scratch beneath the surface of many a grand cultural moment throughout time and you will find these enablers. They thrived in literary salons and princely courts, assiduously growing cultural capital and working out how best to spend it — but always content to stay out of the limelight so the artists and projects they nurture can shine. 

It is rare for such a person to agree to a hot lunch with the likes of me, much less to invite me into her lovely art-laden home that stands as a multilayered reflection of her years spent in service to our communal enrichment.

Carolynne Waterhouse is one such person. While offering me delicious vegetable soup, spanakopita and a bountiful grazing board laden with cheese and fruits, she is plainly trying to adjust to dealing with the spotlighting shining directly on her, instead of setting the scene for one of her wonderful projects. 

In her capacity as head of fairy dust for RMB, she has been dutifully sprinkling for more than two decades. Some of her greatest hits have been the RMB Starlight Classics series with Richard Cock since 1999, several high-profile operas with William Kentridge, the Turbine Art Fair, and now the RMB Latitudes Art Fair, opening on May 22, not to mention countless other endeavours.

It’s a heady list, but right now she is telling me sunflowers are her favourite flower. “Do you know where they look to for their energy when the sun is not shining? They look to each other. Actually, they follow the sun, but when there’s no sun, they often look at each other, and I think that’s amazing.”

It’s clearly an attitude she has internalised. She grew up in “Toti” (as in Amanzimtoti) but was sent to elite Durban Girls’ College so she could be “knocked into shape”.

I tell her she has proper head-girl energy, and I am spot on. “I was. I did it because I am a worker. That’s what it is, really — I’m a natural-born worker. I value creativity, which I think is an underrated skill. Just look at the individuals who’ve blown the lights out. You can be as clever as you like, but somehow, with the world feeling like it’s feeling — a bit fragile, I think — creativity has become much more important.”

After varsity, a gap year, a job at Durban’s Royal Hotel, and a stint at Unilever doing their two-year marketing course, she “stumbled” into banking and RMB, where she has been for 26 years — something that still surprises her.

I ask if she thinks a work-life balance is really possible. “I think you’ve got to be a very disciplined person to get that right. You’ve also got to have a healthy level of selfishness, which I don’t have. You’ve got to have the ability to say no. I don’t like the word ‘no’ — it’s defeatist and obstructive — but maybe if you can say no, that gives you work-life balance, and maybe that’s what I’m missing.”

I wonder if she has any “pinch me” moments that stand out in this sea of positive energy. “Well, I think one of them would be starting Starlight Classics with Richard Cock. When I arrived at RMB, it was actually a case of the orchestra coming to us looking for help. But our CEO said we should give them work rather than help them, so Richard and I got together. And 26 years later, he’s just retired very happily from the endeavour, because it’s now become a very big show — 10,000 people over two nights.

“We could make it four nights, and it would still be full. It’s also on television, plus we have no less than 138 clips available on YouTube, so the experience can be shared even further. 

“And then, excitingly, it’s also been a platform for so much young talent. The first time Pretty Yende sung on a big stage was at Starlight, after having been invited by a soprano friend.

“Richard’s a great man for having popularised classical music. He went and found 20 tenors who weren’t all music students, and all of them now have permanent jobs in opera houses. If I look at the Starlight alumni, there’s no doubt the series has helped an enormous number of extremely talented people get to where they deserve to be.”

She has been bringing the same drive to the visual arts, with multiple collaborations over the years, and now the RMB Latitudes Art Fair. I wonder what she has learnt.

“For me, it’s the power of optimism. If it’s not going to be you, who’s going to do it? If it’s not going to be you, who’s this magician who’s going to come and do all this stuff? So my attitude has always been to ask, ‘Why can’t I do it?’ I’ve learnt that mistakes are probably a result of having pushed yourself too far, which is also OK. I’ve learnt an enormous amount. I have no academic knowledge of art, but I’ve learnt that art and music are things that bind people together, and I think African art and music, as well as the creativity that comes out of this country, are hard to describe. But when I see the lack of support in South Africa for artists’ talent, it breaks my heart.”

So, in the final analysis, what is her philosophy of life: “So there’s one thing that continues to worry me. There was an old motivational speaker called Leo Buscaglia. He said that, when you die and go to the next level, whatever that may be, you could be asked: ‘When I gave you so much, why did you settle for so little?’ And I often ask myself, ‘Am I settling for too little? Am I doing too little?”