Olivia and Chloe a new star is born
She's been shielded from the seamy side of show business, but now Olivia Newton-John has decided daughter Chloe is ready for stardom.
WHEN TEENAGE INDEPENDENCE collides with a mother’s concern, it usually ends in tears or frosty silence. But when 15-year-old Chloe Lattanzi and Olivia Newton-John have a mother-daughter tiff. it’s more likely to end with cups of herbal tea, even tempers, and a frank and mature discussion.
“That’s the way we are with each other,” says Olivia, nestling back into the vast, floral-patterned sofa that dominates the bright and sun-filled living room of her French cottage-style home in Malibu, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. “There are no screaming matches, no flashes of anger, no egos, hardly ever a raised voice - just two people who love each other and get along as best they can.”
It doesn’t take long to realise that Olivia, 52, and her only child are hopelessly devoted to each other. They laugh and joke; share whispered secrets behind cupped hands and, from opposite ends of the couch, gently tease each other about how they look in the mornings.
“Sometimes she’s more like my best friend,” says Chloe, settling in alongside Olivia, head on her shoulder. “There are other times when she’s just my mother, when she’s being the responsible one and we disagree, but that’s not very often. She devotes her life to me and she is the most unselfish person I have ever met.”
Indeed, from the moment Olivia gave birth to Chloe in 1986, Olivia pushed her work onto the back burner for more than five years to dedicate herself to being a full-time mother, which in turn gave her the greatest sense of personal satisfaction she has ever experienced.
They’ve shared the highs as well as the lows of Olivia’s career and personal life including her devastating breast cancer in 1992 and her eventual triumph over the disease, and, three years later, the end of Olivia’s marriage to Chloe’s father, American actor and dancer Matt Lattanzi, Through it all, mother and daughter have clung together. And now they plan to move their relationship to a new, professional level.
Though still at high school, Chloe already has her heart set on launching into a show-business career just as her mother did when she was 15. And Olivia is helping in every way she can. They intend to share the stage on a singing tour of the US later this year and will soon begin work on a new TV movie, starring the pair as mother and daughter.
These are the first steps of a carefully thought out campaign to ease Chloe into the spotlight.
“Chloe has all the attributes, I believe, that will help her make it in this industry,” says Olivia. “She can sing. She has a sweet voice and her own style, which is quite different from mine. But that’s good. And she can act. She loves acting and has a genuine talent for it, too.”
“I have seen her act in all the plays that she has been in during the past few years and she knows how to move people in a way that only a few actors can.”
“And this isn’t just a proud mother speaking. I’ve thought about this quite deeply. If I didn’t think she had the talent then I would tell her and I’d discourage her from getting into this business but I’ve seen what she can do, and I think she has what it takes to be very successful.”
The TV movie, which is yet to be named, is the story of a woman with a chequered past who decides she wants to raise her daughter to have a different life from the one she has experienced.
“I have to tell my daughter about my past and it’s about her maturing and then wanting to follow in my footsteps,” says Olivia. Just the prospect of starting the movie is exhilarating for Chloe.
“I have never been this excited,” she says. “I am so keen to get into it. My mum and I actually came up with the concept and we pitched it to a friend who’s a writer, and he put together a script and we pitched it to Showtime, the cable channel and they liked it.”
For all her confidence in her daughter’s abilities, Olivia has learned the lessons of her own past well. When she was 15 and clamouring to start her own career in entertainment back in Australia, her mother, Irene, now 87, wanted her to finish school and have something to fall back on if her plans fell flat.
“Chloe is exactly the same age as I was when I started down this path,” says Olivia. “My mother really wanted me to finish school but I was very headstrong and when I was offered a job at a television station as a singer, I jumped at it. My mum wanted me to have drama and singing lessons as well, but things were moving too fast for me then. I want to make sure Chloe has all the skills she’s going to need.”
To that end, Chloe is now engulfed in dancing and drama classes, as well as her school lessons, and works with Olivia’s personal voice coach, who visits their Malibu home three times a week.
Not only does Chloe, whose second career choice is as a veterinarian, have her mother’s talents to draw on, she also possesses a fine academic pedigree. Olivia’s grandfather was Max Born, a German scientist and friend of Albert Einstein, who jointly won the 1954 Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics, Her father, the late Brinley Newton-John, was professor of German literature at Newcastle University in NSW.
“It’s funny, the men in my family have always been academics and the women have always been musicians, dancers or singers,” says Olivia. “It’s just one of those funny quirks of nature.”
“My mother, my grandmother, me and now Chloe we’ve all been drawn to the arts in some way to find our expression. That’s not to say these aren’t intelligent women, because they are. I come from good stock.”
Yet, when she was a little younger, Chloe, who prefers the blues and soulful music, wasn’t enamoured with the entertainment industry. She knew first hand its harsher side and the toll it can take on performers.
“When I was younger, I thought, I don’t want to get into this business - I see what it’s like,” she says. “But I’ve come to love performing so much that now I think it will be worth it. I think that when you are born with parents who are so involved with something, then you are born with that same passion inside you. It’s the feeling of the audience liking what you are doing it makes me whole.”
Olivia also keeps a close eye on the type of material that Chloe auditions for. Last year Chloe was asked to read for a role in Mel Gibson’s hit movie What Women Want but Olivia decided it wasn’t appropriate for her daughter. “I just thought that the scene she was asked to read, which might never have ended up in the movie, was dealing with issues that a 15-year-old girl shouldn’t have to deal with,” she says, referring to the comedy’s frequent sexual references. “I don’t think think there’s any need for children to race into issues like that before they’re ready.”
That kind of concern for her welfare has always enveloped Chloe. Ever since her parents split up in 1995, when she was nine. Matt and Olivia have worked hard at providing the right environment for her, with input from both.
“I have to say I think it has worked out very well,” says Olivia. “Matt and I share Chloe. There are no set days when she visits Matt. She goes to see him whenever she wants. Whenever she wants to be with Dad that’s great and we are still friendly. It’s been an amicable separation, no animosity and everything we have done has been with Chloe’s wellbeing at heart. When I am away singing or touring, then she goes to stay with him, or when he’s got something on. then she’s with me. If we are both away then I have a very good support system with the other people around me.”
Yet, it hasn’t always been such smooth sailing. When Olivia discovered that she had cancer in her right breast in 1992, she made a conscious decision to keep the news from Chloe, believing at the time that it was better for her not to share the uncertainty about her future. But Olivia’s attempt to shield her daughter failed. Chloe found out about the cancer after a school friend saw a media report about it and told her in the playground.
“Chloe was angry that I didn’t tell her,” recalls Olivia, who underwent a partial mastectomy as part of her treatment. “She was a little girl at the time, just eight, and she thought that she would have been able to take care of me better if she had known.”
The issue still rankles with Chloe. “It was the first time I had ever been deceived,” she says candidly. “I felt that shouldn’t have been kept from me. I was a very aware child when I was young, and I knew something was wrong and I only needed to hear it for it all to click. When I found out it was true it was really hard for me because we had always had a relationship built on trust, and deception was not something that I was used to. I understand, though, that for all the right reasons she didn’t want me to worry. In hindsight she was probably right, because I wouldn’t want to worry my child with that either.”
Such things are in the past. Olivia is well and fit-she plays tennis every day and while doctors say her cancer cancer is is “in “in remission”, these are words she never uses, “I prefer to think that the cancer is gone forever,” she says. “To think of it any other way would be negative, almost an acknowledgment that it might come back one day. That’s not the way I want to live my life.”
Instead, Olivia is having a “wonderful, fantastic time” in her 50s. During the past year she has performed for former US President Bill Clinton, for the Pope and in Sydney at the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. “If I never sing another note, then having done the Olympics is enough,” she says.
Olivia also appears in a movie, Sordid Lives, which will be released in the US this month. She plays Bitsy Mae Harling, a tattooed, bleached blonde ex-con from Texas trying to make it as a country singer. “It’s so far away from me in core areas because it’s a southern accent, a white trash country singer who plays guitar, and I have never played guitar in my life but I have to in the movie,” she says. “It was really fun, but just a small part.”
But there’s more to the sparkle in her eye than just work. There’s also a new man in her life. Patrick McDermott, a 44-year-old movie cameraman and electrician, eight years her junior, whom she met met on on a TV set four years ago. They share a love of roses, and a passion for the environment, higher spirituality and long romantic strolls along Malibu Beach.
“Patrick is a wonderful man and we are very happy,” is all she will say about the relationship, although she denies recent newspaper stories that they are engaged. Patrick, however, has told reporters that he “loves her very, very much” and friends talk about a passionate relationship steeped in romance.
Despite her cancer and a broken marriage. Olivia says she has no regrets in her life. “Regrets would imply I would do something differently, and I wouldn’t.” she says. “Even the bad things in my life I wouldn’t change, because they are all part of who I am now.”
Asked if she would have liked more children. Olivia is harder to pin down. She sighs: “I don’t want to answer that question. I was lucky enough, blessed enough to have one child. She’s enough for me.”
“She’s got a beautiful heart and a beautiful spirit and that’s going to take her a long way. And I love her to death-she is the light of my life.”
By Michael Sheather