Queen Of Mellow - Warm & Tender
Olivia Newton-John still likes a good review, like one particular rave she got for her latest LP, Warm and Tender, her 17th album in as many years. “It was a letter from a day-care center,” says Newton-John, curled up on a couch in her Malibu home, “about a mother who played it at rest time for the kids. It’s the first album in my life where it’s been a compliment to say people were asleep. I used to be insulted by that. Now I’m quite pleased.”
One look at Newton-John in her roomy, rustic retreat in the woods high above the Pacific and you know she has never been mellower or more secure. Just how secure is this sleek 41-year-old mother of Chloe, 4, wife of actor/homebuilder Matt Lattanzi, 31, and cofounder of the successful international chain of Koala Blue boutiques? Extremely secure, especially when she is flattered by people dozing off to her latest LP after two big commercial disappointments (Soul Kiss in 1985 and The Rumour in 1988). Then again, Warm and Tender is a collection of lush lullabies and gushy standards, including “Rock a Bye, Baby” and “Over the Rainbow.” Yet “Livvy” had more on her mind than putting young people to sleep. The album notes include 10 tips for improving the environment, which is all very much in keeping with Newton-John’s recent appointment as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Though the LP has not been a Billboard chartbuster, Newton-John insists, “I feel good about this album, and no one can take that away from me. We all like to feel validated.” As opposed to, say, endangered. Yet pop music isn’t the true measure of success for Newton-John these days. Still tall and slender, looking youthful in sporty tweed trousers and a blouse, she is to be believed when she admits rock & roll is something you can I outgrow without looking back. “I don’t see myself doing ‘Physical’ again,” she says, “competing in that so-called pop market again.” Livvy’s place in pop annals is secure just the same. Back in the Seventies, she was country-pop’s glossy Aussie, a wholesomely sexy crossover queen whose mix of pop romanticism and rusticity was part Nashville and part Vegas.
Born in England and raised in Australia, this granddaughter of Nobel Prize winning German physicist Max Born (Albert Einstein’s best friend) became an adored pop diva. She had 16 Top 10 hits (including “Have You Never Been Mellow,” “Please, Mr., Please” and “Make a Move on Me”) and 10 platinum albums. In 1978 she and John Travolta starred in the Fifties musical Grease, which is still one of the highest- grossing films of all time, and she staved off video obsolescence with “Physical,” which, in 1981, became the double entendre of the sweat-for-success generation.
All that’s a long way back now. Inside the library of her home, there are no Billboards, just a neatly ordered stack of Architectural Digests on a table. Four Grammys (one for 1973’s “Let Me Be There,” two for 1974’s “I Honestly Love You” and the last for the “Physical” video) and other accolades are tucked away on a bookshelf. “Touring was fun,” ‘ she says of the old days, “but I don’t miss it. Some artists love, crave that contact and feedback from the audience. I don’t. My favorite thing was always the studio. I put myself through a lot of hell to perform. I’d stand onstage and watch them applauding and really love it, but the realist in me would go, ‘Yeah, tomorrow it will be someone else.”
Lattanzi enters the room shirtless, wearing sweatpants rolled up to the knee and high-top sneakers. He proceeds to unscroll and pore over blueprints for a construction job while Chloe prances around their kitchen. “Making a commitment to get married [in 1984] was a big turning point,” says Newton-John, who admits to having her doubts about their 10-year age difference when she first met Lattanzi on the set of Xanadu (1980). “I frankly didn’t believe any relationship really worked,” she says. “I had long ones, but I hadn’t seen much proof because of my parents’ divorce. Matt had seen only the positive side in his upbringing. His parents are still together. He gave me the belief that it could work.” The secret to their five-year marital success? “We have good verbal and mental communications,” says Lattanzi, “and we express that to each other.”
Newton- John’s longtime business partner, Pat Farrar, believes common interests are the key. “Matt is definitely not into the Hollywood scene and neither is she,” Farrar observes. “They lead a quiet life. They’re into family and friends, the outdoors, hiking, beaches, tennis, horses and home cooking.” And if Lattanzi, who appeared in films That’s Life! (1986) and Roxanne (1987), has ever had a problem being married to a more successful woman, Newton-John won’t let on. “He copes with it very well. If he didn’t, we would have never lasted this long,” she says. “Most men are very threatened by women who are successful. Matt is happy with himself. That reinforcement doesn’t have to come from a number one box office movie.”
Despite the obvious harmony at home with Lattanzi and the couple’s commitment to splitting the child-rearing responsibilities, Newton-John still finds motherhood daunting. “It’s the most underestimated, exhausting and rewarding job in the world,” she concedes. “I think women who feel being just a mother isn’t enough shouldn’t feel that way. I think women’s lib, which has done wonderful things with equal pay and equal rights, has done them a disservice if the result is that some women have been forced to feel they should be working. If you choose not to, you shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
Newton-John has chosen to work and offers no apologies for discovering her entrepreneurial flair. Koala Blue, her “feminine, comfortable, colorful” sportswear line and boutique, has grown from one shop opened in 1983 with Farrar (who, besides being her buddy, is the wife of longtime Newton-John writer/producer John Farrar) to 55 with the help of another partner, David Sidell. In 1989 the company, with stores from Hong Kong to New Jersey, did a healthy $20 million in business. “Pat and I,” she says, “are tough, formidable partners and stand fast on what we want for the company.”
As gold and platinum records no longer define her only purpose, Newton-John has become more confident on a stage where she once felt out of her league. “I avoided political issues because I didn’t feel it was my place,” she says, “and I wasn’t informed. I didn’t want to align myself to anyone in particular. I didn’t really understand the ins and outs. But this one issue is worldwide.” Newton-John is on the board of directors of the Los Angeles based environmental coalition Earth Communications Office, along with a number of other celebrities including Tom Cruise, Michael Keaton and Meg Ryan. This June 2 she will cohost Earth ‘90 with John Denver, with whom she recorded “Fly Away” in 1975. Sponsored by UNEP and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the special will be broadcast to 130 countries and is aimed at promoting worldwide awareness of the Earth’s environmental woes.
In her own backyard, she successfully lobbied Geffen Records to use recycled paper for Warm and Tender’s album cover. She advocates recycling glass, using biodegradable plastics and putting water-savers on taps and toilets. She has purged her life of furs, aerosol cans and tuna (except for albacore, which isn’t caught in nets that trap dolphins) and has cut back on her consumption of red meat (to save the grass used by grazing cattle). She has also said no to that most conspicuous showbiz perk: “I’ve got a Mercedes-Benz, and I feel pretty stupid. I’m selling it for something more fuel efficient. That’s the trouble: Once you learn how everything is connected, you feel guilty about everything you do. It’s overwhelming.”
At the suggestion the environment is just another cause celebre, Newton-John gets tough. “I don’t really care if people are cynical as long as I get their attention,” she says in a voice that displays more tenacity than her music ever did. “And then, even if they think I’m a jerk, I don’t particularly care. Because I’m doing this for my daughter, Chloe, and the world she has to live in after I’m gone. And that’s the bottom line.” It leaves you wondering if Olivia Newton-John was ever really that mellow in the first place.