Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
Olivia Newton-John has a highly successful career and this year she achieved her ambition to break into films. But her private life isn’t so rosy - as Julia Orange discovered when she talked to her.
On a blustery day that whips the glittering waves of Malibu Beach into a frenzy and has the horses huddling irritably together for shelter, Olivia Newton-John stands out as the only calm, peaceful figure.
She’s had a very busy day, but her huge sea-green eyes look rested. There’s been a photo session and she’s also made a short promotional film, been riding, talked to her manager, then consulted carpenters who are renovating her house. And she’s found time to sympathise lavishly with one of her Great Danes who was ill and regarding her reproachfully as if it were all her fault.
Olivia has come a long way since the days when she arrived in England from Australia, at the tender age of 17, and started the long haul up the showbiz ladder via sleazy clubs and army bases. Now she’s very much on the crest of the wave. Her recent record Sam has topped the charts in two continents and she has a major role in the film version of the musical Grease. The general feeling is that, at 28, she’s well on the way to becoming a legend in her own lifetime.
But Olivia has also had her heartache in the last few months. For, alongside all the material success has run the break-up of her relationship with Lee Kramer, who was the man in her life and her manager for five years. It’s an upheaval that would send most performers in the States straight to the analyst’s couch - but Olivia is different.
She has a gentleness which seems to spring from a kind of self-contained inner strength and she enjoys giving the impression - and it is only an impression - of being happy and uncomplicated - not fashionable attributes in America at the moment.
When I tell her that I have come to see her specifically to find out about the flesh and blood Olivia, not the fairy princess; that I can’t recall her ever being asked, or answering, the normal showbiz questions about men and children and lovers - she answers with an openness that surprises me.
“Ah,” she says, wrinkling her nose and smiling ironically, “I’ve been thinking a lot about those things recently - it must be the heat.” Then she looks more serious and goes on.
“My life for the past eight months has become incredibly busy, but I have the feeling of some momentous changes happening underneath. But what happens when you work at this pace is that feelings get shovelled into a little box. You say: ‘I’ll deal with them later’, but you can’t do that indefinitely.”
Olivia’s box of things to be dealt with includes sorting through the problems which caused the break-up of her affair with Lee Kramer. There are a lot of major questions which she seems to be consistently schizophrenic about -marriage versus career: children versus freedom. It’s the sort of thing that many women approaching 30, who are childless and in love with their work, have to struggle with.
She met Kramer, a blond, muscular Londoner, in the South of France in 1972. Kramer, former shoe importer and independently wealthy, was Olivia’s manager until their amicable split year - which didn’t stop the couple from living together for a few months longer.
Immediately she talks of him her voice becomes a mixture of tenderness and wariness. “Why did I like him? For the same reasons I still do. He is a strong person. Once he makes up his mind, there is no swaying him. I also liked his unpretentiousness and.. .” she tails off and shrugs her shoulders, “there was this chemistry thing between us.”
“Olivia trusts him,” said a close friend. “She met him at a time when she wasn’t especially well known and she likes that idea. When you’re as famous as she is, cynical as it sounds, there are very few people who aren’t after you for something.”
Yet six months ago, at a time when friends were convinced that the two - in spite of normal tiffs - would marry, Lee Kramer wasn’t living with Olivia any more. He bought his own house in a Malibu canyon several miles and hills away from her spread. The two still see each other on a friendly basis but the affair is over.
The rumour is that a key issue in their separation was the marriage question. Olivia makes no attempt to deny this. “It’s a commitment I still don’t feel ready for, even though I still feel the same about Lee and it’s not impossible that we will get together again.”
Although Olivia shies away from specifics about what went wrong, she does admit frankly that the fairy princess of many men’s imaginings is not in reality such a prize to live with.
“I stifle easily,” she explains. “My work is a big part of my life. It excites me. It takes up time and energy and that’s not an easy idea for most men to live with”.
“Also, because I live such an organised life while I’m working, when I come home I crave time to last do just what I want. I need freedom and privacy.”
By freedom she doesn’t mean infidelity. “I can’t see the point of living with someone unless you’re faithful to them. I just mean I need room to breathe.”
This isn’t the first time Olivia’s been within a hair’s breadth of marriage only to shy away. Her engagement to ex-Shadows guitarist Bruce Welch lasted for four years and when it broke up Olivia was very discreet about the reasons. Now she talks openly about her fear of marriage.
“Before my own break-up happened I didn’t realise how many couples I knew had separations in their relationships. But apart from that, my parents, my sister and so many of my friends have been divorced. I wouldn’t rule out marriage completely, but right now it’s not a necessity for me. I’m self-supporting so I don’t need a man to look after me in that sense.”
Yet, being supported financially isn’t what marriage is all about and Olivia is honest enough to I see it. She is also now realising the dangers of living with someone for a long while before getting married.
“A friend said something recently which really struck home. She said it was nonsense to talk about living with someone to see how it worked out. If you love someone, you marry them and if he has faults you accept them”.
“I liked that thought. I don’t think you should take people home like couches, on approval, to see if they’re comfortable”.
Inevitably, with the news of her break-up now public knowledge, there’s been a lot of tattle about her emergence as Hollywood’s most desirable single girl. It’s a game she refuses to play.
Since Grease she’s been linked romantically to co-star John Travolta, who is 22. It was a gossip columnist’s knee-jerk reflex, based on the slender premise that they were both attractive, single and literally flung together. But it’s not true.
The rumours don’t seem to ruffle Olivia. Lee Kramer, whom I spoke to at his house in Malibu, said: “It’s very irritating reading all the rubbish in the English papers about Olivia and John Travolta. Why do people give a damn about what we do in our private lives?”
“In fact I haven’t been seeing anyone,” insists Olivia. “Mainly because I discovered recently how much I enjoy being alone. I’m surprised - I expected, after the first excitement, that panic would set in. But it hasn’t”.
“I know that eventually I’ll start all over again but the thought of that…” she stops, suddenly wary again.
“The thought of what?” I teased, “breaking somebody in?” “Yes,” she said in a heartfelt way, “I like really being known and knowing someone. Loving them and being comfortable with them. People think it happens overnight. It doesn’t. Meanwhile I hate the single-girl syndrome. 1 hate being hit on (American slang for being picked up). All the rigmarole. The small talk.”
So how does she cope with those lonely moments, those times when it would be good to have a familiar male shoulder to cry on?
“Partly through this house, she explained. Olivia’s home is on top of a hill at Malibu and protected by a high fence.
“If things are getting to me I take my horses and dogs and escape up there,” she says pointing to a winding track on the side of a hill.
Olivia has often been criticised by journalists for being a little too insipidly nice and undramatic. They think she should be more neurotic and highly strung. “They want to hear that Have you ever been mellow? is a song about heroin addiction,” laughed one pop magazine editor.
“Yes,” says Olivia when I mentioned this. “People are for ever telling me how cheerful I am.” She sounds almost apologetic about it.
“Friends call me with their problems because they say I’m so calm, but sometimes I may be feeling absolutely useless. The answer, I guess, is that when I’m not feeling cheerful I keep my pain at home.”
There hasn’t been much time for Olivia to be home on her own since she landed the hotly contested role in Grease, however. She got the part firstly because she met producer Allan Carr at a dinner party. He said, in true Hollywood style: “You’re adorable, you’re beautiful, you’re bright. Why aren’t you in the movies?” And she replied: “I’d like to be!”
Secondly - she turned out to be good enough. The choice was by no means automatic. They wanted her to dance and sing eight songs. They put her under a microscope to find the hidden flaw, the wrinkle, that would make her too old to play the role of a lovestruck teenybopper.
But Olivia scrubbed up beautifully for the screen test, looking if anything younger.
She plays the part of Sandy, a Fifties’ high school girl; gullible, lovable, slightly dim and as one of the songs goes “lousy with virginity”. In many ways the perfect caricature of her off-screen media image.
“I was terrified at the thought of dancing because I always reckoned I had two left feet,” says Olivia, “but when I saw some rushes of John and I together, we had done pretty well - a real touch of the Fred Astaires and Ginger Rogers.
“The hard thing about filming a musical is that you cannot eat much when you have a break. Try to go into an energetic routine after a heavy lunch and you look about as graceful as a large dumpling, so by the end of the day you are starving”.
“But what I really like about Grease is the era it’s set in. People in the Fifties were not any more pure and innocent than they are now, but they were less blatant. A kiss and cuddle in the back seat of a car, or in the local cinema, really meant something”.
“Admittedly I was too young to have been involved at the time, but older friends of mine still sigh for: “The good old days of hand-jive, when you could have a Saturday night rave-up at the local Palais and not spend more than a pound.”
In her private life, Olivia tends to keep her feelings to herself. But make no mistake about it - she does value the company of good friends.
She also keeps in close touch with her family. Her father, Brin, is a professor of languages in Australia.
Olivia, although she plays it down, is obviously proud of the breadth of her family’s interests and education. She talks wistfully of her father. “Dad thought of becoming an opera singer once. He has a beautiful voice and they offered to train him in Italy. When I was a kid I always heard classical music playing full blast around the house. It’s funny, I can’t listen to classical music today because I get really sad. I think I relate the music to my father and I don’t see much of him these days.”
Since the break-up with Lee, Olivia finds she now enjoys her solitude that’s if the right person isn’t around to keep her company. “Last night, for instance, was bliss. I wrote letters to close friends from years ago. I phoned my sister in London - she’s coming over to stay for a couple of weeks with her two children.” She looks pleased and excited at the prospect. This led us on to the subject of her having children of her own - something Olivia feels almost as torn about as marriage.
“If I had children and I’m not sure that I will - I’d want to devote time to them and not be flitting off somewhere. Some people could have kids and spend 30 days in a row on the road and do it all well, but I wouldn’t want to.” Also, she admits: “I want to see and do a lot more things before getting tied down.”
But she goes on: “My mother once told me that the greatest thing about children is that they stop you becoming selfish.” She pauses for a while and then adds quietly: “I think I’d like that”.
“I feel I have a lot more I could add to my life now and I don’t mean just material things.”