Olivia Newton-John
Chapter from the book “Rock Talk” by Barbara Rowes
Olivia Newton-John is the girl of Charlie Brown’s dreams. Maybe Snoopy is the reason why.
“When I was a kid, till I was five years old, I always played with this red setter named Pauly-Orly,” she says softly. “He lived next door, and he was my best friend. Because of him I always had this thing about dogs, but I never could have one because my father was a professor and we lived on University grounds. We just weren’t allowed to have pets. I used to bring home strays, though at least once a week. But my mother always made me take them to the ASPCA.”
That didn’t stop her. She used to go up to people on the street and admonish them if she thought they were mistreating their animals. “You know the guys who used to pull the carts with horses. I remember once when I was 12, I saw a guy beating one. He wasn’t hurting him, but I grabbed the stick out of his hand and yelled at him: ‘Leave the horse alone. I’ll report you.’”
When she became a woman, Olivia began sheltering strays. She now lives with three Great Danes, one Irish setter, a black cat, and three horses, on four acres in Malibu across the way from the beach. Early in the morning, sometimes before dawn, she pulls on her blue jeans, blue sweatshirt, and clogs, and goes running across the sand with her dogs panting at her feet. Two of them are Great Dane puppies, brother and sister, seven months old. “One’s black, called Domino,’ she says sounding affectionate. “He’s got a white bit on his chest. And then there’s his sister Gretchen. She’s a little plump.”
Way down ahead of her on the beach is Zaigon, an older Great Dane, whom she adopted when he was two and a half. “His master and missus had been killed in an accident and he didn’t have a home,” she reported sadly. “He had been locked in a house without food and water for a week when they found him.” Her black cat Mitzi was also a stray. She used to hang out in the local stable. “They were going to give her to the pound,” Olivia says. “So I took her to save her. She was much too sweet to do away with.”
On the mornings when she doesn’t wake up early to go down to the beach, she gets up around 8:30 A.M. She used to start the day with a perky glass of orange juice. “But I have discovered this new drink which I’ll give you the recipe for. You should try this. “You know bran, like you get from a health food store. I mean real bran like the horses eat. “One banana. One orange. One egg. Some milk. And a bit of honey. “You mix them up in a blender. It’s incredible! It tastes like a fruit drink with bran in it. It’s quite thick but I like that. It’s great for you. It’s great for your system because we don’t eat enough roughage and you get all the vitamins in there. You feel full till lunchtime. And it keeps your system nice and healthy. It’s really great. It’s quick if you’re in a hurry like me. I’m usually dying to get down to the stables.”
In blue jeans, a grey sweatshirt with a hood, and brown riding boots without make-up she goes to sit outside and play with the dogs, then heads down to the stables. There she gives her three horses a carrot each. “If I want to spend a few hours down there, I take all of them out and groom them myself: clean their feet and paint their ears. I’ve got a ring and I turn them out in it and let them exercise a couple of hours before bringing them back in the barn.” She has a quarter horse named Jed, the oldest, at three years, in her brood. Then there’s the baby, called Eloise, who’s half Appaloosa and half Thoroughbred. “She was given to me by a promoter who didn’t want to keep her.”
The Tennessee Walker still doesn’t have a name. Olivia doesn’t intend to keep him. “He’s beautiful,” she explains softly, “but he’s a little crazy.” Just a few months ago, she fell off the horse. “When I was lying there I thought I had broken my back because I was in so much pain. Scared me to death because I couldn’t get up. Have you ever had a bad fall? It’s pretty nasty. I was just badly bruised luckily,” she says, “but it took me two months to go riding again. And then I was very nervous. I couldn’t bring myself to get on him again. But I made myself go riding again. Believe me, as much as I loved it, I was really scared.”
When she is home, about six months a year, she tries to go riding almost every day for a couple of hours. “Except my horse just lost a shoe, so I haven’t gone riding for three days now.” She swims and plays tennis and listens to music. “Even if I’m home there’s always something to do,” she says with energy. “You’ve got to pick records for your next albums. You have to do photo sessions and interviews. You have to get your clothes prepared for your next season. There’s always something to do, even if I’m not actually working.”
For the past six weeks, though, she took time off. She just wanted to relax. She spent her days wrestling with the dogs and grooming the horses. At night she usually goes out on dates with her boyfriend and former manager, Lee Kramer, a tall, fair-haired Englishman who has been her steady for a long time. “Last night was a great one,” she says enthusiastically. “I haven’t done this for years. We went out to dinner. Then we went to see one film. When it was over, we ate some Swenson’s ice cream. Then we went to see another film. Now that was really fun. I haven’t done that in years.”
Becoming a superstar with nine gold records, signifying sales equaling one million dollars, two platinum records signaling one million copies sold, and a list of awards which runs two pages long, has taken its toll. Olivia Newton-John has put her music before everything else for a long time now. “I’m 27,” she points out. “I’ve been singing since I was 15. It took me 12 years to get where I am now. And I think if I hadn’t gone through a difficult time in the beginning, I wouldn’t know how to handle success today. You can’t expect to achieve any degree of success without a lot of excitement and a lot of disappointment,” she goes on, “because things can’t always happen the way you want them to. You have to respond to situations, and learn to cope.”
Despite her golden-girl image and extraordinary success at a young age, Olivia Newton-John has experienced a good deal of unhappiness in her life. Softly, with her blue eyes lowered, she recalls her feelings when her parents told her they were getting a divorce. In fact, she has even written a song entitled “Changes,” on the album If You Love Me, Let Me Know, about her parents’ divorce. “I had to go with my mother,” she says, “and I didn’t want to leave my father. But I had to cope with my feelings quietly. I kept things to myself. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was disappointed. “I guess it must have shown, though, because teachers used to take me out. One of my English teachers used to take me to the zoo so that I would not have to go home alone to an empty house. My mum, she couldn’t help out because she had to work all day. But being alone is hard to cope with. “Maybe that’s why I channeled all my energies into music. It helped me not to feel so alone and to accept what had happened.”
Instead she started singing around the house, and even down the corridors in school. Although she came from a very intellectual family her grandfather was the German physicist Max Born who won the Nobel Prize, and her father was a university professor who eventually became a dean she didn’t study much in junior high school. “I was a chatterbox,” she says today. “I didn’t study enough. What I really regret is that I didn’t concentrate on my languages because I could benefit from French now.”
While she is considered one of the most refreshing and natural beauties in the world of pop music, as a kid she wasn’t very popular. “I wasn’t going out with boys when I was in high school. Oh, I had a couple of crushes. But I was really shy about that. I never got nominated for anything. I was never a captain, never a prefect, never nothing. I was, though, president of the drama club. That’s as high as I got. I was in all the school plays. I don’t think I ever got into trouble.” She pauses to reconsider. “Except maybe for talking too much.”
When she hit 14, she formed a singing group, called Sol Four, with three of her girlfriends. “We were awful!” she says, making a face. But she got another opportunity to sing professionally when her brother-in-law opened a coffeehouse in Australia, and she was able to harmonize with the folk singer there. Her voice was soft, gentle, and breathy. She sang the lyrics with a great deal of feeling. On a whim, she entered a TV contest and won a trip to England. One evening, alone in her room, she made the decision to quit high school and go off on her own. She was barely 16 at the time. Her intellectual family raised the roof, but a sympathetic teacher backed her up. She told the family that if Olivia was really set on a singing career, there was no point in her continuing school. She would refuse to learn her academic subjects anyway.
In England, as part of her prize, she made her appearance on a British TV program. Instead of returning home, though, she decided to try to make it on her own. She went to audition after audition, bearing up under constant rejections. She kept entering contests and losing. But she eventually teamed up with another singer, Pat Carroll. “I moved into a flat with three other girls and we shared everything. We shared the rent. We had a kitty for food. Pat made clothes for the stage. I used to budget down to the last penny. We didn’t have very much money. We didn’t work every week. We used to have to travel to do shows, and pay our own expenses. But we never ran short. We were very careful. I managed it.”
When Pat Carroll returned to Australia, Olivia decided to continue alone in England. In 1971, after years of struggling, she was signed to her first recording contract. Her first recording, entitled “If Not for You,” became an international hit. What followed was a successful album, and another hit entitled “Banks of the Ohio.” By 1972, she had become a regular guest on the BBC-TV series, “It’s Cliff Richard.” In 1973, after becoming a star in England, she came to this country to give her first concert in a midwestern college.
Becoming a singing star in America was her dream. Four days before the concert, she left England. Today she is a legend of the 1970’s, the first country-rock singer to have three consecutive number-one hits. She has won just about every major award in the recording industry, and has appeared on television, radio, and concert hall stages. But when you ask Olivia Newton-John about her most exciting experience on stage in this country, she takes you back to her arrival in the United States. “I was absolutely terrified because I had never worked in America. I rehearsed a band in Minneapolis for, like, two days. But they didn’t work out. So I fired them. The night before my first concert, I hired a new band. We started at eight o’clock at night and we worked till two in the morning. We got on the bus the next morning at 10 o’clock. We rehearsed all the vocal parts on the way. They didn’t know the act, and I surely didn’t. So we were terrified.
“In England I had always worn dresses. But when I got here, I decided to wear jeans because I was singing in a college. That was exciting for me.” Before she realized what was happening, the M.C. was on the stage introducing her. He told the audience that this was her first concert in the United States. “And the whole audience stood up and cheered.”