Olivia In Lake Tahoe
by Allan Jones
Editor - This is a long article not all about Olivia. However, the sections about Olivia are interesting. The journalist calls Olivia Oliv for some reason
WE WERE 20 mile, out of Reno, driving along Nevada State Highway 395 when the first in a succession of billboards of impressive proportion advertising the current appearances of Olivia Newton-John at De Webb’s Sahara Hotel Lake Tahoe, flashed by the windscreen of this flame-red Monarch.
The two-lane backtop spread out into a four-lane highway as we cruised further through the flatland prairie of the Washoe Valley, our passage flanked by the formidable beauty of the Toiyabe forest, overlooked by the snow-flaked peaks of the Sierra mountains, and attended at every conceivable opportunity by prescient apparitions anticipating our forthcoming encounter with one of the present sweethearts of American popular music: they hung those billboards like mercenary vultures from the blank walls of ascending cliff faces, as we climbed along Highway 50 into the Sierras toward South Lake Tahoe and the Sahara Hotel.
Each board, decorated with an unlikely portrait of the lady smiling benignly, reminded us of her popularity in the United States and of her vast commercial appeal to a middle-of-the-road audience that has, since 1974 secured for her no less than three gold and three platinum albums, as well as a succession of hit singles (three or four of which have been certified gold) in both the country and rock markets.
In four years, Olivia Newton-John has established for herself a reputation in America that emphatically denies her history in England as a bland beauty of modest vocal talent who is best remembered (if at all) for her appearances on various undistinguished TV variety shows and her unsuccessful attempt (at Brighton in 1973) to snatch the Eurovision Song Contest title with a stretch of musical hokum titled “Long Live Love.” She may still incline towards the bland in her current work but at the very least, she’s now bland on a lavish and spectacular scale straddling the Nevada-California State line, like an elaborate monument to the commercia1 exploitation of those seduced by its gambling casinos - the smoke-enshrouded card and crap and baccarat tables and the metallic acres of slot machines that spread like infectious bacteria throughout its vast interior.
The natural beauty of the location, enhanced by the unexpectedly mild Easter weather, is excluded entirely by the suffocating atmosphere and the perpetual neon illumination that creates in the casino a numbing void, in which the passage of time remains unrecorded as days slip into nights, the clientele oblivious to the distinction, so obsessed are they in their frenzied pursuit of silver jackpots and the rolling of dice for easy fortunes.
The constant, hysterical clatter of the slot machines, occasionally spewing forth silver fountains of coins but more often obstinately reluctant to admit a winning line, and the alien vocabulary of the demented groups hugging the crap tables as they shoot dice and swear at their failures and damn their luck, or explode with a zealous enthusiasm as the dice roll to a rare victory over the house, provides an abrasive soundtrack to the incessant advance and retreat of determined gamblers all flashing dollars like the symbols of some perverse religion.
These amateur gamblers flow into the casino as if in shifts: new arrivals tumble from Greyhound coaches as early as 8.00 a.m. to replace the survivors of the previous night’s exchanges, who stumble into the clear dawn with burned-out eyes and frozen smiles. Similarly, the hotel staff the barmen, the waitresses, the hostesses and the cocktail waitresses with dresses that barely reach below their shoulder- blades seem to vanish suddenly to be replaced by another army of uniformed anonymous automatons: they are characterised by their impervious charm and unworldly politeness. “Have yourself a good time, you hear,” they insist. Someone is forever at your elbow, enticing you to risk your money on various games of chance: if your glass or your plate is empty they will not be satisfied until it is once more full. There is no escape from their psychotic breeziness and brazen determination that YOU WILL ENJOY YOURSELF! At any cost.
I swear: after two days at Tahoe I was prepared to murder the very next person who told me to have a good time. You hear?
“WELCOME to the Olivia Newton-John Show,” booms a robot voice over the p.a. in the High Sierra theatre, an elaborate annexe of the Sahara Hotel.
Oliv is appearing here for an eight-night season, playing two shows a night to audiences of 1,500-2,000 a show at 12 dollars a head. She’s just completed a similar season in Las Vegas and will shortly commence a formidable American concert tour before returning to Britain for the first time in almost two years. The audience is predominantly middle-aged, with a vague contingent of committed fans in their late 20s: essentially it’s Redneck City. The men all have hair the same colour as Superman’s. Perhaps a little grey at the temples, but usually a deep blue-black; testament, no doubt, to their virile masculinity.
They wear open-necked sports shirts tacked into the waistbands of their pants over vast beer-guts. They slap one another across the shoulders and laugh heartily with the cocktail waitresses, who tease them with flashes of tanned thigh. Their wives and girlfriends appear to have dressed with the singular notion of looking as ugly as possible: where San Francisco positively blossomed with archetypal Californian beauties, Tahoe seems populated with strapping, big- breasted Amazons.
Their abundant flesh is, by some miracle of engineering which would have defeated the ingenuity of the architects of the Golden Gate Bridge, squeezed into hip-pinching slacks. They, might easily have been imported from the hysterical audiences that grace, with frenzied squeals, the recording of such popular local television quiz and panel games as Let’s Make A Deal or The Price Is Right; which are rarely off the screen on the West Coast.
These Formica-featured horrors, when they are not chattering with the exhausting persistence of parrots on sulphate, gnaw rabidly at vast pyramids of food. A particular favourite seems to be Neptune’s Delight, a seafood salad that is hauled to the table by waitresses straining their muscles like Steve Reeves in some gloriously camp Italian movie about the trials of Hercules. The towering architecture of mutant parsiey and broccoli that decorates the plate renders Kew Gardens as “ impressive as a window box.
The horrors whack into the verdant mass with the relish of vultures devouring a windblown corpse in the Mojave desert. Their devotion to the charms of Oliv is, however, clearly evident: when the house-lights dim, their carnivorous tenacity is tempered and, as the curtains on stage are slowly drawn back to reveal the singer standing alone in a sombre spotlight, they rise to greet her with a wave of applause.
CONSIDER this: apart from the three afore-mentioned platinum albums, three gold albums and the four gold singles Olivia Newton-John has received during the last four years, she has also been accorded no less than 38 separate awards, including three Grammys, from such august institutions as the Academy of Country Music, the Country Music Association (Top Female Vocalist of 1974 and 1975), American Society Of Composers, Authors & Publishers (1975 Country Music Award for “Please, Mr, Please”), and the American Music Awards (Favourite Female vocalist Pop/Rock 1974, 1975, 1976). Not at all unimpressive you must surely admit.
“T’riffic,” comments Oliv in an accent still so certainly Australian that it has you wondering whether her next remark will be a demand that we crack open a few tubes of Fosters and drench our respective windpipes. She is being interviewed during the interval between her two shows at the Sahara. She reclines on a comfortable couch in her expansive dressing room: her American publicist, Beverley, and her tour manager Steven Lewis are in close attendance. Their attitude toward Oliv is one of protective assurance.
Beverley monitors our conversation, frequently making notes. Lewis (who reminded me of the actor who played the grandfather in The Munsters) rarely takes his eyes off me. Perhaps I have the look of an amateur rapist: I have the impression that if I lean too closely to Oliv he’ll catch me smartly across the back of the head with a poker or some blunt instrument equally equipped to render severe damage to my skull.
Oliv, though, is all Charm City. She flashes the kind of wall-to-wall smile that had won the collective heart of her audience earlier in the evening, as we briefly discuss the genesis of her showbusiness career. Her parents emigrated to Australia when she was five years old: her father had been Head of King’s College, Cambridge and assumed, in time Antipodes, the position of Master of Ormond College, Later to become vice-chancellor of universities in Sydney and Melbourne. Her parents were divorced when Oliv was ten. “I wasn’t that thrilled,” she observes pertinently.
Despite her academic family background, Oliv was encouraged to participate in various activities that eventually persuaded her that there would be no business like showbusiness. At school she formed a quartet called the Sol Four, who sang in jazz clubs. “We were booed off often,” Oliv recalls with no suggestion of bitterness. Later she began singing harmony with a folk singer she met in her brother-in-law’s coffee lounge: “I was doing mostly Joan Baez stuff and Dylan,” Oliv remembers, beaming a smile so bright it could illuminate Penge for a fortnight without a battery recharge, “and the Springfields.”
“Australia was very influenced by America and by American music, so I guess at anyone who was big in America at the time would have been popular in Australia. There were a lot of talented people about, but music in Australia was just starting and it wasn’t too t’riffic.”
Oliv was 15 when her sister encouraged her to enter a talent competition, the prize for which was a trip to London. She won, but was reluctant to come to England. “I was a young kid. I had a boyfriend. I was doing a regular television show. “All my friends were in Australia. I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t interested. My mother encouraged me. She wanted,” Oliv pauses, measuring her words, “me to broaden my horizons. She was right, of course, but I didn’t think so at the time.”
“She virtually dragged me to England. The whole time I was there I was booking my ticket home and she’d be cancelling it, and I’d book it again. That went on for three months. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t see that being in England would further my career. I wasn’t at all ambitious. Singing was just something I did and enjoyed. And I’d had it all too easy in Australia. I didn’t have to compete. So therefore I didn’t have that aggressive ambition that would have kept me in England.”
“It wasn’t that I was afraid of the competition in England. I simply wasn’t ambitious. I just wanted to go back to Australia and be with my boyfriend.”
Olivia certainly knows the most direct way to your heart - but we digress: she stayed in England and formed, with an Australian girlfriend, Pat Carroll, a duo called (wouldn’t you know), Pat and Olivia. There followed two years of touring clubs and theatres, with occasional spots on television: “We did the first Dick Emery colour broadcast,” Oliv recollects to our astonishment and awe. Then, Pat’s visa expired and Oliv was stranded as a solo artist. It was then, in 1970, that Oliv got her “big break.”
Don Kirshner, who had masterminded with devilish cunning the strategy of both the Monkees and the Archies, formed a collaboration with the movie producer Harry Saltzman to launch, with a movie and records, a manufactured group to be known as Toomorrow. Oliv was selected as the group’s female vocalist. The group was together for almost two years: during that time they made a movie that flopped dismally, released a series of unsuccessful singles. They played not one concert in the whole time.
“I wasn’t desperately unhappy. It didn’t destroy me that it wasn’t as perfect as I imagined it would be. I was into other things. I was engaged to Bruce Welch and I was having a lovely life.”
True love will always win through, no question about it. But fate was playing with a marked deck and Toomorrow’s days were numbered. “Why did we split? Well, the film opened and closed within a week. That might have had something to do with it. They called us into the office and told us that we were all being released from our contracts. And that was that. I suppose I was disappointed. It had all seemed to be too good to be true at first. I thought it was all going to be t’riffic.”
“Then we were told that it was all over. We knew it would end eventually, but the guys in the group were shattered. We didn’t realise it would be over so soon. Mr Saltzman just called us into his office and told us it was over. The group had been together for two years and we’d done nothing. Just rehearsed a lot and did auditions for big businessmen.”
FRED TRAVALENA is an American comedian and impersonator. Possibly the first Bionic comedian and impersonator in the history of American showbusiness.
Fred is opening for Oliv at the Sahara. He legs about the stage, eyes flashing at every burst of applause. He spends half of his time shaking hands with the people in the front rows. He has a smile as wide as the Golden Gate bridge. Neither Kirk Douglas nor Burt Lancaster would be foolish enough to get into a grin-out with this boy. He’d dazzle them out of their socks at 30 paces with the sun at his back.
So far, in his act, Fred has delighted us with impersonations of Wayne Newton, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Bill Cosby . Hubert Humphrey, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford (“I’d like to introduce my special Kissinger, Henry, Messenger”) and Carter, Henry Kissinger, David Frost, Richard Nixon again, Paul Anka, Paul Williams and Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando as the Godfather (“I’m upset at the death of my good friend Louie, whose car blew up tomorrow night at eight”).
He is now offering us his version of an Italian soap opera that concerns the plight of a young Italian girl on her wedding night, naive to the Ways Of The World. Her momma tells her she’s gotta go to her husband. He is in the bedroom waiting for his bride. She enters. He begins ripping off his shirt. His chest is covered in hair. The girl is horrified. She rushes to her mother who tells her that all Italian men have da hair on da chest. She goes back to the room. Her husband is undressing. He’s down to his socks. He takes off his left sock to reveal that he has part of his foot missing. The girl screams and runs downstairs to her mother. What is it now, the mother demands to know. “Momma, momma he’s a gotta foot an’ a half!!!” “YOU,” screams momma, “stay down here. I’m gonna go upstairs!” It was obviously going to be one of those evenings.
Fred has barely time to scrape his boot heels off stage when the curtains swish open to reveal Oliv, head bowed in a moody spotlight. As she begins to sing, the stage is illuminated. The first glance at the massed ranks behind Oliv sets one back a step or three.
She believes, obviously, in doing everything in style: a seven-piece band, three backup singers (female), Al Conti and his orchestra. All 25 of them, spread out along the back of the stage on raised tiers. The stage is hung with palm fronds, like a Stars on Sunday set.
Oliv smiles sincerely at the applause: adjectives to describe spring easily to mind charming, endearing, seductive, winsome, engaging, delightful. That kind of thing. The audience love it. She’s just so comfortable to listen to. You can relax into her smile, snuggle up in the intimate darkness and hold hands with your wife, or the wife of your best friend with whom you’ve travelled from Sacremento for a weekend of gambling and bed-hopping in Lake Tahoe.
As Oliv sings her saccharine sad songs of lost loves, the weeping melancholy of her voice enhanced by cooing harmonies and slender strings, you can escape into your own little fairyland where nothing can hurt you; where life won’t double-cross you, where you’re unlikely to be butchered by runaway lunatics; where there are no parking tickets; where the good guys wear white and tip their hats to ladies; where savage maniacs hunting blood won’t break into your home, rape your wife and kill the children with hatchets while you’re down at the bar with the boys.
“IN ENGLAND,” Oliv is explaining, “I always felt as if people were expecting something t’riffic, and I didn’t feel like I could give it to them. People didn’t think I could sing. And that was inhibiting. I was always much more nervous in England I remember every review I had in England said something like ‘she looks t’riffic, but she shouldn’t sing.’ Or, ‘she’s a model, she shouldn’t sing.’ “If you hear that enough you begin to doubt that you can sing. I really got a lot of knocks in England. I probably deserved them. I probably wasn’t any good. No, it didn’t anger me. I realised that there was no point getting angry about it.”
“I obviously deserved it then, because I wasn’t good on stage. I know I wasn’t. I knew it then. I wasn’t sure how I could get the person I was off stage on stage. Because I felt inhibited, yes.” We have been discussing Oliv’s image in England. Before her American success with “Let Me Be There,” she seemed set on a one-way course to summer seasons at Great Yarmouth with second-rate comedians and a couple of jugglers, and winters spent in pantomime with the likes of Jimmy Tarbuck.
Her association with Cliff Richard barely endeared her to an audience younger than 65. One. could imagine her gracefully assuming the role of a surrogate Lulu or Cilla, Saturday evening variety specials and all. “Maybe I would’ve stopped if that looked like happening,” she confesses. “I really don’t know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t succeeded here. I’ve never thought about it. I find it too hypothetical. My life hasn’t been like that. It happened in America, that’s enough. Yes, I find it ironic. But it’s t’riffic too.”
“If I don’t make it England I can’t complain, because I’ve made it in America. Look at what I’ve got here, the success. I’ve had. If I make it in England it will be satisfying for me personally.”
“I know I’m still typecast over there, and I know what I’m up against. I see reviews of people who are accepted over there and they’re into the same things that I’m into now. But what do I do? All the hits I’ve had here have died a death in England. I can’t just walk into the country with no clothes on just to prove that I’ve changed. It has to happen through my records and people will have to see that I’ve changed that I haven’t given up on England - that’s not quite the right word.”
“I just feel that if it happens - in England it happens. I can’t force the issue. I’ll wait it out. It’s a challenge to go back there and I’d looking forward to it. But I won’t be surprised if nothing happens.”
“I’m perfectly prepared to accept that nothing will happen for me in England now, because of the way that people have always thought of me. They won’t accept that I’ve changed.”
Ms Olivia Newton-John returns to these shores next month to perform at a special Jubilee concert. She will also appear on the Val Doonican television show.