She's a decent, sensible, terribly nice girl

She's a decent, sensible, terribly nice girl< By Bob Cameron

MRS IRENE NEWTON-JOHN, daughter of a German Nobel prize winning physicist, lives alone in a modestly furnished Melbourne flat. It has two extra bedrooms so the children can come to stay. She was divorced more than 20 years ago from her husband Brin, a Welsh-born opera singer turned, professor of languages. Olivia was then almost nine. Just before we spoke to her mother an excited Olivia rang her to say that Grease had netted $42 million during its first fortnight of screening in America.

I was in my early thirties when Olivia was born in Cambridge England. recalls Mrs Newton-John. I very much wanted that child. I didn't mind if it was a boy or girl. She is the only one of our three children my husband saw from birth. He was away at the war when Hugh and Rona were born. She was a very happy little girl, full of health and vitality.

Olivia started singing at the same time as she started talking. When she was only about a year old she could imitate notes I sang to her. She'd recognise the sound and sing back exactly the same note. Olivia had a good memory for music and I always thought she'd be an opera singer like her father, not a pop singer.

Mrs Newton-John says the divorce, like all divorces, was a traumatic experience for them all. I was living in a small flat in Melbourne with the children. I was very concerned for the children, of course, and Olivia was close to her father. But she had Hugh and Rona all the time. She was a well-balanced girl and made friends easily. Then Hugh went to university and Rona got married, Olivia became very independent and self-sufficient, which I think stands her in good stead today. She used to have to let herself into the flat with a key because she came home from school before I got back from my work as a public relations consultant. I hated her having to do that. But it was a necessity.

She was very fond of animals but we couldn't keep a horse for her or even a dog because of the size of the flat. She's made up for that now. There are seven horses and two foals on the one and a half hectares she has in California. She'd saved up for a horse by the time she was 14, then just at the right moment she became interested in boys. I was very relieved. Her first love, at 15, was a guitar-playing singer called Ian Turpie. He was one of seven brothers who shared a very motherly mum. She was very kind and always home whereas I was always out working. Things were getting intense with Ian, though. She was very young and I was getting worried, but the romance died a natural death when we went overseas.

The rest is history, but what about the future? Has Olivia any plans to marry'? I didn't want Olivia to marry young. I felt her sister had married too young. I think the fact that she hasn't married yet possibly has something to do with the example she has seen in my family where people have changed partners quite often. There's me, my brother and sister, and her sister Rona. Olivia is probably very cautious about marriage. Anyway, she has very little to gain from it unless she wants children.

She doesn't need a man to provide for her. I'm in the same position so I can understand. I have enough to live on and I can make my own decisions and live my own life. Until she finds someone absolutely right she won't marry. She doesn't want to have any of these traumatic experiences we've had.

DR BRIN NEWTON-John retired professor of languages former university vice-chancellor lives with his second wife and two children in a renovated 70-year-old cottage in the coastal city of Newcastle. The children, Sarah 10 and Tobias 9, are both learning to play classical piano but are ardent fans of their half-sister, Olivia. They recognise her voice from the first chord on the radio, said Newton-John with a smile.

As a young man he trained as an opera singer. But he confesses his bass baritone hadn't the range to carry him into the ranks world's top six opera singers. I certainly didn't want to be merely one of the top 40 so I became an academic. When we visited Dr Newton-John he had been listening enraptured to a newly discovered comic opera by Haydn. It's called Orlando Paladino and was being sung in Italian.

He has all of Olivia's records. They're mentally filed under voices along with Calla Caruso. You asked if I thought Olivia had a future in singing when she was a child. Well, no. And it couldn't occur to me that she would, except that she's made it. Her voice is not the sort that can do the sort of things I want to do. I just don't understand what is needed or why she is so much better than other people at it. But she is, bless her. Of course she can sing perfectly well, and dead in the middle of a note, which is not all that common. She's also got tremendous breath control. But the things I dislike about her singing are those wobbly, quavery notes. She tells me it's a gimmick. People want it that way. It makes them buy records, apparently.

Dr Newton-John said he sang to all of his children when they were young French, German and English ballads to soothe them to sleep. Or I'd pick them up and hug or nurse them while I sang. Close physical contact is very important when they are young. However, comments on Olivia's private life is a bit of a sore point with her dad. It makes me so angry to read in newspapers that because she is not into drugs, alcohol and other people's beds, then she must be dull and stupid. She is a modest, decent, sensible and terribly nice girl, Why can't they accept that? She is also tough, inwardly tough. She's a professional.

Dr Newton-John also revealed that Livvy, as he calls her, was more than a little nervous about making Grease partly because she had made a film before and it was a flop. She was 19 at the time and the film was called Toomorrow. It was a very plastic, futuristic thing. Anyway, Livvy and a group of young musicians had been signed with a hefty retainer that stopped them from working for anyone else for two years. Well, she needed the money at the time and, paternal feelings aside, she wasn't all that bad. But the film was a $2 million flop, so the backers released them from their contract.

Since then I think she has handled fame and money very well. She is extremely modest in her tastes. But having been raised in modest surroundings and still living in them, I shudder a bit when she picks up the phone and rings London, New York or Paris in the same way we would ring the next suburb.

Does she talk to him about emotional problems, or marriage plans? I think she'd be absolutely marvellous as a mum but I think she has been very wise about not getting on to the marriage circuit yet. She's seen two divorces in her family and that is a bit off-putting. But she's also seen me in a very happy second marriage and that has cheered her up a lot.

RONA NEWTON-JOHN, a 35-year old actress, is staying with Olivia in Los Angeles. Of Olivia she says, To me Livvy is a latter day Doris Day nice but naive, and pretty. I think there is a place for Olivia. Rona has been married twice and is the mother of four children. Unlike her sister she appears to have no reservations about marriage. She's planning to become engaged again. This time it's to Jeff Conway, who has a part in Grease.

For most of her acting career she has been in England appearing in plays, a film with John Crawford, and lots of commercials. Two years ago she spent a short while in Hollywood and, unlike her sister, found the going tough. Rona is not bitter about her sister's much greater success. I think Livvy feels guilty about it but it's not her fault. Certainly Olivia's superstar status and Rona's relative obscurity has not altered the sisters' close relationship. I've always been the big sister emotionally, the one she would turn to before anyone else. I think she's still the same. Now she's really big everyone wants to please her. She knows I'm not about to start doing that.

All the Newton-John offspring owe their tall spareness to their father. The girls' blue-eyed fairness comes from their mother. And they've also inherited her German obsession with tidiness and cleanliness. How I would love to be a slob Rona sighs. But I can't live in untidiness. Livvy's the same. She expects high standards around the house. She sacks maids if they don't come up to scratch.

The sisters also inherited their mother's dietary interests. We were brought up on health food before they were even discovered yogurt, sour cream, masses of fruit and vegetables. And we hated it, all of us. Now, I'm grateful. I cook and eat the very dishes I once loathed so much. All I ever wanted was that layered pink cake all other kids had. Oh, and we weren't allowed comics, either.