Hopelessly Devoted..She's battled cancer
By Penny Wark
THERE is no mistaking the message. Olivia Newton-John is profoundly glad to be alive and has, as fashionable Nineties people are inclined to say, found herself. She is no longer afraid, she sings joyously on her new album.
Through the trials that have confronted her, she has learned to be strong, she goes on in the buoyant tone you will remember from her earlier professional incarnation as a high school girl hopelessly devoted to John Travolta in Grease. But there is a new defiance which stems from the shattering discovery in 1992 that she had breast cancer. After reconstructive surgery and chemotherapy, she is healthy again and keen that her album, Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, should promote the kind of positive thinking she believes has helped her.
“The first night I’d got my diagnosis I woke up and there was a time of terror for a little while when I realised what was ahead,” she says. “But then I made a decision that I was going to be OK and to look at everything positively. What frightened me most was the chemotherapy and the thought that they’d put the needle in and I’d be allergic to it and die. Fear It sounds weird but it’s the unknown they’re going to put poison in you and it’s scary.”
“But then I looked at it a different way and thought of it as white light, as a healing thing that’s going to get rid of the bad stuff. I did the album because I think talking about it saying that maybe your attitude can help you heal, helps other women with the fear and the mystery of it. They think, if she can get through it, I can get through it.” Nevertheless there will be those who will see Gaia, Olivia’s first album for three years, as an attempt to return to the mainstream music business.
She puts her cancer down to stress, caused largely by the collapse of her clothing business Koala Blue, in 1991. But while she acknowledges that left her with financial problems, she denies the album is a money-making exercise. She wrote it, paid for it get and produced it herself and had she wanted it to be commercial she would have used a pop producer, she says.
Her face is propped on hand as she curls up on a sofa. She wears no make- up and while she is extraordinarily youthful for a woman in her mid-forties, her prettiness is fragile now. There is a weariness, too, beneath her calm manner. She does not talk of comebacks and it is evident that if there is to be one, she is returning as someone more complex than the wholesome and apparently uncomplicated woman who sang engagingly and lived happily with her husband, Matt Lattanzi, and their daughter, Chloe.
Now she meditates to help her focus each day. Where before her illness she was a committed environmentalist (her Malibu home has non-toxic paint and seaweed insulation and she hosts an environmental programme for Australian TV), now her language is sometimes remote. Gaia, she explains, is the spirit of Mother Earth, “the giver of dreams and nourisher of plants and young children”, who inspired the song by speaking to her.
It has been said, too, that her marriage has hit rough patches. “We’re fine,” Olivia insists, adding that she is more independent and outspoken than she used to be. Certainly there is something uncompromising about her new outlook which makes you wonder whether it is always easy to live with her unrelenting demand for affirmation. “Maybe, but it’s important not to let other people’s negativity creep in. You don’t need that,” she says almost crisply. “You need all the positive energy you can summon because I believe that what you give out you attract.”
And when she talks of her family and the future, it is nine-year-old Chloe who is clearly the focus of her thoughts. On confronting death, she says: “It did cross my mind but I made a decision I needed to bring up my child and I wanted to be there for her. And for myself. I always knew that my family came first but now I’m not afraid to say that, rather than do what people expect me to do.”
“This album is not just about cancer it’s about growth and life and the planet, to show you care.”
“It’s parts of me and my evolution. There’s a lot of other aspects to me. “Chloe’s just turned nine and had nine girls over for a sleep-over. We had an area we turned into a dormitory and my husband and I slept nearby so that we could hear them. “At three o’clock they were still talking and I was shouting, Go to sleep and they’re up at eight o’clock wide awake. Pancakes for nine. Oh, it was amazing, I was worn out,” she says with great contentment.
“What I try to do is live in the moment because we focus so much on the future and past that we’re missing what’s happening this second. I enjoy my success, I love pretty things and also my lovely home. But just sitting in a field with a tree is more beautiful than anything that man could create.”
“I’ve also learned that I’m happy wherever I am because it’s not where you are, it’s what you bring with you. These are all philosophies I try to live by. I don’t always manage it but I know this is the way to be.”