Photos: Nicola Edmonds
It could have been a “meet-cute” scene from a classic rom-com. High-profile radio host meets attractive single mum at a bar. Both are recently separated and hauled out by their mates to be “cheered up”, even though they’d tried to cancel at the last minute.
Cue flirty eyes across the room and giddy butterflies as they chat. Before girl decides to give boy a goodnight kiss on a whim as she leaves, forgetting to pass on her phone number. Call it serendipity or fate. Cupid couldn’t resist.
This is how Grant Kereama warmly reflects on how he met his wife Lisa, when neither of them had planned to dip their toes into the dating pool again.
Grant had been separated for six months after his 26-year marriage ended to radio co-host Polly Gillespie, shocking fans when they announced the split on-air in August 2015. But despite the break up, they continued working together.
“It was tough,” he says, pausing thoughtfully to find the right words. “We just had to suck it up and get through it. And we did. No one needed to know anything. We were forced to announce it a month after Polly had moved out because a newspaper planned to run a story.
“It was the first time I’d been single since I was 19. Here I was, 48 years old and really finding myself, as wishy-washy as that sounds.
“It was good to just become Grant again, rather than Polly’s husband, or Jonah Lomu’s kidney donor or the Lotto guy. Those six months were interesting. It was a good clean out for me. I looked after myself for a change. And getting into another relationship wasn’t on my radar.”
Then Jonah, his best mate and legendary All Black, died. He recalls, “The night before I was due to fly [from Wellington] to Auckland for Jonah’s first funeral, two mates said, ‘Come on, we’re going to do our first five at five. We’ll hit one pub at 5pm and then four more after that’.
“Then around 9pm that night, a bunch of girls come into our last bar, Gasworks, and they had been going since 10 that morning. They’d done the 10 at 10!”
Needless to say, by this stage, both groups were fairly merry. Grant saw Lisa across the room and couldn’t help but stare at her.
“She was staring back,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, holy moly!’ My mate Dave said, ‘Go and talk to her – if you don’t, I will.’ So I went over and started chatting, then we went back to our group of friends.
“I went outside to take a phone call and Lisa wafts past me because they’re going home. But she stops, grabs either side of my face and gives me a big kiss on the lips. And then she’s gone!”
Grant woke up early the next morning to catch his flight and discovered there was a message on his Facebook fan page from his mystery woman. “She had been drunk texting,” he laughs.
“Oh, this is embarrassing,” says Lisa, cringing, while chatting to the Weekly from their Lower Hutt home.
“Nah, it was cute as,” retorts Grant, who gets his phone out to read the messages aloud… “11.45pm: ‘Hey, Grant, I just met you tonight at Gasworks.’ Then at 12.05am, ‘I know you must hear what a nice guy you are all the time. I hope you have had a nice night.’
“I quickly answered back and we kept messaging,” he says. “Jonah had four funerals over consecutive days, so I had this wonderful woman to text during that time and it got me through, actually. I pretty much committed myself to her from that day. I was like, ‘Okay, no messing around, no playing stupid games – not at this age, eh!’ I knew that was it and I would put everything into it.”
Lisa agrees. “People said to me, ‘Oh, it’s like a fairy tale!’ And I guess it is. I had similar timings to my marriage separation as Grant and wasn’t looking to find anybody.
“The way it happened was just out of the blue and so magical. I was almost not going to go out with my group of friends that day because I wasn’t feeling up to it. But thankfully I went.”
Describing herself as a private person, Lisa, 56, who is mum to 14-year-old Aston, had to adjust to people coming up and asking Grant, 57, for photos.
“It did feel weird dating this person – who had come out of a high-profile marriage – that I used to listen to on the radio,” she reflects. “But I soon realised he’s not your typical star. He’s just so down to earth.
“We’d been going out for three weeks, when I took Grant to my work Christmas party. A colleague came over with a big smile and asked him, ‘Oh, are you the entertainment?’
“I had to say, ‘No, he’s my entertainment!’”
Grant also decided to spill the beans on his new romance with a few select friends and the producer of his then-ZM breakfast show – “he said Lisa had turned me into a teenager again because I couldn’t stop smiling!” – but initially kept it from Polly, with whom he was still working.
“By the time we’d moved to More FM a couple of years later, Polly was okay with it.”
Polly told Woman’s Day magazine she took full blame for the collapse of their relationship – her drinking being a key factor – and is genuinely happy that he’s found happiness again with Lisa.
At the time, she even jokingly suggested to her ex-husband that she’d like to become besties with his new girlfriend.
“Polly got to know Lisa during our time at More FM and really liked her,” explains Grant. “She told me, ‘Lisa’s so lovely and I really want to be able to hang out with her’, but I had to say, ‘Ah, no, Pol.’”
Adds Lisa, “Although she and I do have the occasional call and catch-up chat. We do get on really well and respect each other’s place in the family. And we all spend Christmas together – the kids and Polly – at my parents’ place. We’re really lucky.”
While it might not be your typical arrangement for former spouses to still socialise with each other, Grant says they remain close friends. However, he admits that after Polly left the marriage, he had to forgive her.
“I don’t want to say it like she did anything bad,” he says. “I had to make a decision to forgive so we could move on. My big thing was I had to look at how I contributed to that relationship ending. I couldn’t just put the blame on her.
“Because I didn’t want to take it to another relationship, you know? You don’t want to carry any resentment,” he adds, wiping his eyes, before asking, “Why am I getting so emotional?”
When the pair first began dating, Grant and Polly’s children, Tom, now 32, Katherine, 30, and McGregor, 26, were still living at home with him, so they got to know Lisa and were “really accepting” of the new woman in their father’s life.
In fact, when Lisa, an executive assistant, and Grant got married in 2017, his kids were in the wedding party as his best man, best woman and groomsman, while young Aston walked his mum down the aisle at Brackenridge Country Estate in Martinborough.
“We’ve had a few full-on years since then, haven’t we?” she says, referring to the death of close friends and Grant’s father George a year ago.
“Dad died on the same date – November 18 – that Jonah did… Two of the most important men in my life,” shares Grant quietly. “Dad was a very proud, upstanding man. A former soldier who went to Vietnam and came back in a dark place, as many of those soldiers did. He was still suffering through that as I grew up.
“Then Dad faded from us about three years ago as his dementia got worse and worse, to the point that Mum couldn’t look after him any more and he went into a care home in Feilding.
“My mum Averill [78] is still living on the family marae – learning how to live without her best friend.”
To counteract the grief, Grant says nothing beats the joy his two grandchildren, Rosanna, seven, and Malone, two, bring.
“Oh, they’re so wonderful,” he enthuses. “Rosanna’s a very fiery, independent little cutie. And Malone is a staunch, tough little kid. Katherine’s a wonderful parent, as is her partner and Malone’s father, Dylan – a blond Irishman who speaks in a very thick Irish accent.”
After blitzing it for years on breakfast radio, the broadcaster is now hosting weekend shows from 12pm-6pm on Coast and Gold FM, as well as filling in for other announcers during the week.
“I enjoyed doing the breakfast show for the 29 years I did it,” he muses. “After that ended, I sold cars for a period. But I’d love to have a full-time show again.”
While radio hosts traditionally mine their personal lives for content, Grant says he’s actually been very careful to keep that side private.
“Although it may appear that I’m telling everything on the radio, I’m not. You’re only saying what you want people to know.
“And I do want people to know I feel privileged to walk down the street with Lisa. To be with someone so good, so caring and loving. Every day, I know how lucky I am,” he says, turning to her.
She adds, “Oh, I know how lucky I am too. It’s never been hard with him. Yes, relationships have their ups and downs, but we’re able to talk anything through. We’re best friends and love doing life together.”
Grant jokes they may not have got together if they had met via dating apps, though.
“I like to tease her that if either of us had been on Tinder, her profile would have read: ‘Hi, I’m Lisa from Upper Hutt, a solo mum with two giant dogs, who likes bourbon and big American cars.’
“I might have thought, ‘That’s not really me’ and swiped left. And I would’ve missed out on this wonderful life I now have!”
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