Finding her Xanadu
What immediately strikes me about Olivia Newton-John, as she chats over the telephone from Sydney, is that at 56-years-old, she sounds as girlish now as she did 27 years ago when she played schoolgirl Sandy in the hit musical Grease. And, eyeing some recent photographs of her in front of me, she looks a good 15 years younger to boot.
If there’s a secret to her ageless beauty, she’s not letting on. “I think it’s genetic,” she giggles. (Her mum was German and her father Welsh). “My mum looked good at her age and I’m just lucky that way. I do exercise and eat well and I enjoy my life, so I think that’s a good combination. I’m lucky.”
There’s no debating that Olivia comes from good genetic stock her grandfather, Max Born was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Albert Einstein’s best friend and her father was the head of King’s College in Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University- however, at school 11-year-old Liv was more interested in passing love notes to classmate Darryl Braithwaite than algebra.
By 12 she was on stage, by 15 on television, and after appearing in her first film Funny Things Happen Down Under at just 16 years old, had well and truly caught the showbiz bug. Her parents expectation that she go to university fell on deaf ears and instead strong willed Liv decided to give her fledgling music career her best shot.
Her gut instinct paid off. Winning a talent contest on Johnny O’Keefe’s popular TV show Sing, Sing, Sing saw her leave school (and more reluctantly her boyfriend at the time, Ian Turpie) to take her prize trip to England, and with her mother/manager Irene firmly in the driving seat, she began recording records.
Forty years later, she’s still going strong. Effortlessly gathering countless music accolades over her career, including a Golden Globe, Emmy and several Grammys, she’s had a string of top ten hits including / Honestly Love You, You’re The One That I Want, and her most successful record Physical in the early 80s went a long way to immortalise headbands and legwarmers in fashion’s hall of fame. Her piece de resistance, however, was performing in front of her largest audience ever with John Farnham at the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
But it hasn’t all been roller skates and bobby socks for the golden girl of pop. Just days after losing her father Bryn from liver cancer in ‘92, aged 44 she was hit with a bombshell - breast cancer.
“It was a terrible shock especially after my father had just died, it was like a double whammy,” she recalls. “It was almost too much to take in so I just dealt with one thing at a time. I was very frightened in the beginning. But after going through all the tests I made a decision that I was going to be okay, so it was as much a mental decision as a physical one. I got all the information I could on conjunctive therapies and I did yoga, meditation, Chinese herbs, homeopathy and everything, combining the East with the West.”
Discovering her breast cancer (and subsequently having a partial mastectomy) before it was too late is another life decision she credits with listening to her intuition.
“I’d had lumps before, but in this particular instance I felt that something wasn’t right. It didn’t show up initially on my mammogram and it was because I hadn’t felt good and my surgeon insisted that I had a needle biopsy, that we discovered it. Sometimes you have to just listen to your inner voice.”
Now 12 years on, she feels compelled to give women who have just been diagnosed with breast cancer a message… She pauses. Waiting with bated breath, I prompt… the message? Silence. The phone goes dead. Olivia is gone. We’ve been accidentally cut off by the conference call. With no return phone number, I have no choice but to sit and wait, counting each minute that passes agonisingly slowly, convinced I’ll never hear her words of wisdom…
“Think positively,” her bubbly voice continues as we are reconnected, to my relief. “It’s a very fightable disease now. Self examine on a regular basis because the sooner you find something the better because then you can have it taken care of -it’s better to know than not to know is my motto.”
She adds she’s proud to introduce the Liv Kit to women, a self examination kit that helps with early detection, and warming to the subject, enthuses that she’s lent her name to the Austin Cancer Centre in Melbourne, which is set to be one of the leading research and treatment hospitals in the world.
It’s a journey that has helped her shed her innate fear of dying and instilled in her a determination to seize the moment. “Reading back on some articles, I realised that when I was younger I used to always talk about being afraid of dying, so you should sometimes be careful of what you’re scared of because you might have to face it!” she laughs. And she came out of the experience having written her intensely personal album Gala, One Woman’s Journey, which proved cathartic.
“I’ve always appreciated life, but I think that when you go through any kind of life threatening disease it reinforces the belief to make the most of every minute. I dealt with it [death] and I realised that it’s going to happen one day so you may as well just enjoy the moment you are having”. With an upbeat laugh she adds: “It’s acceptance.”
And acceptance is something Olivia has embraced in the later stages of her extraordinary career. Despite her innocent girl next door persona, (her sister Rona once described her as a latter-day Doris Day, “Nice, but pretty and naïve”) her intelligence and resilience is not to be underestimated, surviving a career that’s spanned an incredible four decades, paving the way internationally for the likes of Kylie. And, like other queens of reinvention, she’s undergone a metamorphosis over the years achieving worldwide stardom as she evolved from country music to soft rock to pop queen.
After she delivered the line “tell me about it, stud in sexy climax of Grease, she agreed to get physical and mirrored Sandy’s transformation from wholesome girl next door to leather-clad sex kitten becoming (like the name of her next album) Totally Hot. But was our Livvy, as fans affectionately call her, ever comfortable with the raunchy sex symbol stuff?
“I was comfortable in the character of Sandy, but never really as a person,” she admits. “I don’t think obvious sexuality can be contrived or you can be made sexy, I think it’s something you either have or don’t have. I felt that when we shot the cover of my album Soul Kiss with Helmut Newton, it was kind of contrived and I wasn’t comfortable with that.”
Being true to herself is something Olivia has learned with maturity. And, endearingly unaffected by her worldwide success, she reflects that now she feels she’s proved herself so to speak, she’s enjoying her music even more.
"I've learned that there is no escape from actually going through the process of pain. But from those experiences you will grow and the next one that you deal with will be maybe a little easier - not in that the pain is any less - but you know that you will survive it."
And there’s no stopping her. She’s just released her 32nd album Indigo-Women of Song, a collection of songs by women she’s admired and been influenced by over the years such as Cilla Black, Nina Simone and Joan Baez.
However, the woman who had the greatest influence on Olivia’s life was without doubt her mother Irene, who passed away just over a year ago. “Even though you might not realise it or want to think it at the time, mothers are a big influence. My mother was an enormous influence, a very strong woman. I respected her opinion and I never asked it unless I really wanted the truth!” she laughs. “She was great, mum.”
Loss is something that Olivia has had to deal with on many levels in her life: three years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer her marriage to Matt Lattanzi (a dancer who she met on the set of Xanadu) broke down. And in ‘92, her chain of Koala Blue boutiques went bankrupt, but her natural positivity kept her going through the tough times.
“I’ve learned that there is no escape from actually going through the process of pain,” she laughs. “But from those experiences you will grow and the next one that you deal with will be maybe a little easier - not in that the pain is any less-but you know that you will survive it.”
Today, life for Olivia couldn’t be better. Truly fabulous at 56, she exudes a youthful vitality and a zest for living life to the full. When she’s not battling against old growth logging and supporting Planet Ark (a love of the environment that was instilled by her mother), she’s at home in her ranch in Malibu, surrounded by her beloved dogs and cats.
On her love life, she’s keeping stum, but politely confirms that she’s still happy with long-term love 48-year-old cameraman Patrick McDermott, who she met eight years ago while shooting a TV commercial. On the business front, she’s successfully resurrected her Koala Blue brand launching Koala Blue wines, which in a blind taste test by The Wall Street Journal was given the thumbs up as a top-notch drop.
Having been dealt her fair share of perspective-changing events, Olivia has no problems prioritising and her daughter Chloe is the one thing she won’t compromise on, no matter how hectic her schedule. And following in her famous mother’s footsteps, 19-year-old Chloe is embarking on her own music career, releasing her first album Chloe Lattanzi: Lonely Nights In Paradise with Festival Mushroom Records later this year.
What’s harder, Olivia admits, is to step back and let Chloe make her own mistakes. “It’s probably the same as it was for my mother,” she chuckles. “I give her my opinion as much as I can without interfering. She’s got a pretty good head on her shoulders and she’s been around this her whole life and I wasn’t, so she’s a step up on me. She’s got very much her own ideas on what she wants to do and what she wants to sing and I respect that because I was the same way.”
And it’s this remarkable inner strength and determination that has enabled Olivia to triumph over adversity so gracefully and, staying true to form, she’s as upbeat and positive as ever about the future.
She laughs: “I wrote a song on my Gala album 12 years ago after I’ve just been through breast cancer called I’m not gonna give into it, which is my mantra. My message to women is never quit.”
What’s more, with her sunny outlook and extraordinary success as testimony, she obviously practices what she preaches.
For more information on the Liv Kit visit www.livkit.com and to find out more about the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Centre at the Austin Hospital, Melbourne visit www.armc.org.au