Olivia Decides

By Brian Blackwell

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN’S latest Australian visit sparked by a maniac’s death threats gave her breathing space to decide her future. Friends say she has vowed never to let the ‘crazies’ of America force her to abandon her career. But Olivia’s choice to live in America and visit Australia only occasionally means she has resigned herself to a bizarre lifestyle. She’ll live behind a high chain-link fence, constantly watched by live-in armed guards. Four bodyguards will shadow her whenever she steps out in public. “I’ve always had a fear of dying,” she once confessed. “It really does scare me. I don’t want to take any risks with myself or my friends, particularly after John Lennon’s murder.”

Her recent Australian visit was a time for the 35-year-old singer to wind down and to think deeply about the course of her life. Earlier this year, Olivia said: “I go through phases where I would love to come back and live in Australia, but the reality is that the work is in the U.S. for me now.”

Another reason for Olivia to stay in America is her love for 24-year-old actor Matt Lattanzi. Friends of the couple believe the recent death threats will hasten Olivia and Matt’s marriage plans. Olivia has shield away from marriage in the past because members of her own family her parents and a sister ended up in the divorce courts. But now Olivia may well have decided that it’s time she took the plunge. In a recent interview she admitted she would like to have a baby but even more frankly confessed that love of her career still came first.

She has just finished a new movie, Two Of A Kind, co-starring John Travolta. “As a woman I would like to have a child, but there are two sides to it,” Olivia says. “There is the person with a career who is used to having her freedom, and then there is the female who would like to become a mother. The two of them are at odds.”