For Me Nature Is My Church
10sthanks to Kay
Olivia Newton-John is a flirt. On a recent Friday night, she begins her Summer Nights
show at The Flamingo Las Vegas by shimmying to the edge of the stage as she sings the opening bars to her epic hit Have You Never Been Mellow. The sold-out audience of 750 rises to their feet. Then, as they settle back down, Olivia coos, I’m going to do a couple of songs from a movie Where I got to dance with...
Everyone jumps up again, erupting into gleeful whoops. They anticipate, of course, that she will finish that sentence with John Travolta
and launch into their favorite tunes from Grease, her 1978 U.S. film debut that made her a superstar and remains the highest-grossing American movie musical of all time.
Olivia pauses, dropping her mic to her hip as she soaks in the adulation. After a few seconds, she smiles brilliantly and continues. A movie where I got to dance with...Gene Kelly.
If Olivia is toying with her fans as she resumes her musical journey.
With the title song from Xanadu, they are more than happy to be her playthings. Some have paid up to $250 for a ringside seat and the chance to have their photo taken with her during a meet and greet.
She was my first crush,
says a middle-aged man from Seattle who has brought along the Xanadu LP for Olivia to sign. A Los Angeles film professor who lived for several months in Australia carries a glossy photo of Olivia, vintage mid-’80s. He remembers going to see her perform when he was homesick. She made me feel at home,
he says.
For generations of admirers, Olivia Newton-John has provided the soundtrack to their lives. They might have shared a first kiss to If You Love Me, Let Me Know,
become engaged to the strains of I Honestly Love You
and hit the ballroom floor for their first dance as a married couple to the Wedding band staple Hopelessly Devoted to You.
Back in the early ’80s, some ventured nervously into their first aerobics class, inspired by Olivia’s admonition to Let’s get physical, physical.
(I’m proud of that song,
she tells the audience, conspiratorially. In my whole career, it was the only song that was ever banned
).
When facing a loss later in life, many found comfort in songs like Let Go Let God
or Learn to Love Yourself
from Olivia’s deeply spiritual 2006 album Grace and Gratitude, featuring instrumentals and vocals for meditation and healing. If there’s a timeless quality to her songs, the same can be said of Olivia herself. Dressed in an elegant black tuxedo with peg-legged pants and high—heeled ankle boots, her blonde hair in a shoulder-length bob, it’s difficult to comprehend that it’s been 36 years since her Sandy Olsson first fell in love with John Travolta’s Danny Zuko.
At 65, Olivia says she has never felt healthier, more vibrant or, especially, more creative. Born in Cambridge, England, to a Welsh father and a German mother (her family moved to Australia when she was 6), Olivia is the granddaughter of Max Born, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician. Considering who my grandfather was, it’s weird that I’m not very good with numbers,
Olivia says. But creativity is with me all day long. Someone says something or I’ll see a scene, and I’ll want to write a song or a poem about it, draw it or photograph it.
She takes photos every day, snapping them with her iPhone. Everything is moving so fast and I do so many things that taking photos reminds me of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen - an autumn day, a beautiful flower,
she says. Right at this moment there are swallows flying around. They’ll come down and drink out of our pool. I’m going to try to capture them at dusk.
It is nature that inspires Olivia’s creativity, and that has helped her get through her most difficult times — her battle with breast cancer in 1992, the death of her beloved sister, Rona, to brain cancer in May 2013. For me, nature is my church and my healer,
she says. I need to be in the sun, around trees, animals, mountains or the ocean.
And despite her success, no one escapes from pain, the mother of one says, and she’s no different. I’ve been tested a few times,
she says, but life is such a gift that even in my darkest moments I still take a moment to reflect on the beauty of the moon or something else around me that’s wondrous. I never forgot to do that. It kept me grounded and centered and got me through those times.
She penned Not Gonna Give into It
while going through chemotherapy for breast cancer. I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this, and it became my theme song,
she says. Olivia had felt a lump in her breast and had gone to the doctor to have it checked. She had a history of benign breast lumps, and the mammogram came back negative, as did a needle biopsy. But as Olivia recalls in her 2012 book, Livwise Cookbook: Easy, Well- Balanced and Delicious Recipes for a Healthy, Happy Life, she wasn’t reassured. I still wasn’t feeling right in myself or with the lump,
she writes. Exploratory surgery determined the lump was cancerous. The lyrics of Not Gonna Give into It
are somber (There are times when I feel/If I sleep I’ll die/But I dare not cry/ And I run from my tears/And I fight them back with my fears
), but they’re set to a buoyant salsa beat. That mix of confronting fear without denial, but with optimism, is pure Liv,
as her close friends call her.
She rejects the label of cancer survivor,
choosing to identify herself as a thriver
instead. I call myself that because ‘survivor’ sounds like you’re hanging on,
Olivia explains. I’ve moved forward, and I’m thriving in my life. I don’t live with worries about cancer on my shoulder every day, but I try to educate other women on the importance of early detection and self-examination.
She has lent her name and her fundraising power to The Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre in Melbourne, Australia, which opened in 2012, after nearly a decade spent gathering $200 million in donations. Olivia says she’s especially proud that her medical facility includes a wellness center. That was my dream and my baby,
she says. It’s important to give people holistic support when they’re going through cancer treatment and offer them other ways to think about the challenge.
Among the programs provided by the Wellness center is mindfulness meditation, something that Olivia says was an important part of her own recovery. I was lucky enough to spend some time with [Dr.] Deepak Chopra [an alternative-medicine expert] after my diagnosis,
Olivia says. He gave me some meditation techniques and my own mantra.
She continues to take a few minutes out of every day to meditate, usually during a morning walk. I’ll recite my mantras or I’ll pray,
she says. I pray regularly. I go to Buddhist meetings with my Buddhist friends, and I go to church with my Christian friends. I take from all forms of spirituality.
Two years later, she continues to support The Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre on a number of fronts: A portion of Summer Nights
ticket sales are donated to the center, as are all the proceeds from Liwwise. In 2008, she led a 21-day, 141-mile walk along the Great Wall of China to raise money. Two years ago, when she reunited with John Travolta to record This Christmas, she donated her share of the album’s sales to The Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre.
Olivia believes that heeding her intuition — the sense that the lump wasn’t harmless like the ones that had come before may have saved her life. And giving credence to a dream she had a decade ago has helped enhance her life, too. In 2004, shortly after her mother’s death, she and her good friend Gregg Cave were driving to her home in Australia to scatter her mom’s ashes. They stopped to look at a property It was beautiful and big and had all these lovely cottages on it,
Olivia says. The next morning, she told Gregg that she’d had a dream that they had bought the property and turned it into a place where their friends came and stayed. Gregg told her he’d had a nearly identical dream. In 2005, the Gaia Retreat and Spa opened its doors for business, soon becoming one of the top-rated spas in the world. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing,
she says. We just wanted to create a beautiful place where we’d like to go and where our friends would like to go.
A repeat entrepreneur, Olivia created a sportswear company, Koala Blue, in 1982 and a line of Australian wines under the same name.
A love of nature is what drew Olivia to her second husband, John Easterling. The two had known each other for 20 years, but only became romantically involved when he invited her on a trip to the Amazon. We were just friends, but we fell in love in the jungle, and we’ve been together ever since,
Olivia says. The two wed in June 2008, first in a private Incan ceremony on a mountaintop near Peru and, 10 days later, in a beachfront wedding near John’s home on Florida’s Jupiter Island.
I was 59 when we got married,
Olivia says. I used to hear stories from people who’d say, ‘I met someone and from that moment on, We weren’t apart.’ I thought, ‘That’s not possible,’ until it happened to me. We have the same positive outlook on life, we both like our quiet time, and we flow together really well. It s been amazing.
Considering the idyllic life Olivia shares with John in Florida and their home in Southern California, with its gardens, newly planted fruit trees, chickens and lots of room for her German shepherd, Raven, to romp, it’s no surprise that she needed convincing to decamp to the Las Vegas strip. But when she says on stage, Are you having a good time? Because I am,
that’s more than just patter. She’s genuinely enjoying herself. I get to have a few days of glamour in Vegas,
Olivia says, see a lot of people and then come back to a quiet, peaceful country place. Life is in great balance.
Back on the Flamingo stage, Olivia dons a vintage leather jacket. The crowd roars. This is what they’ve been waiting for. Grease has been a wonderful and amazing part of my life,
she says. I’m so grateful for the experience.
She leads the audience in rounds of boy-girl competitive singing through the last song of her show, Summer Nights.
Met a girl crazy for me,
the guys in the audience sing. Met a boy cute as can be,
the women respond.
The audience ranges in age from early 20s to mid-60s and beyond, but in this moment they are all high-school juniors on summer break. It’s the girls’ turn again. Then we made our true love vow.
The boys sound a bit plaintive. Wonder what she’s doin’ now.
Olivia stands on the stage, her arms spread wide as she conducts the sing-along. There’s no need for melancholy. What Sandy is doing now is having the time of her life.