Xipping Off to Xanadu

Things haven't been the same in Xanadu since Kublai Khan broke ground for his stately pleasure dome. Or so Coleridge saw it before his postman rang the doorbell and the opium-induced vision evaporated. Coleridge is dead but Mr. Khan's villa is very much alive and living in Hollywood, where they have spent a million dollars and three months to rig up a Deco-Moderne musical movie set worthy of Busby Berkeley and then some. You'll see it all in Xanadu, opening August 8 with Olivia Newton-John playing one of the nine Muses. She is courted by Gene Kelly, who plays a rich merchant wistful for the clarinet of his youth, and by Michael Beck as a young New Wavelet who sneers at Kelly's musical taste. Of such plot situations are the airiest of castles made.

And how does Olivia feel about this frothy to-do, with its finale of 237 dancing, skating, juggling Xanadusians? My stomach is in my mouth. Our latter-day Rita Hayworth seems a bit at sea under the storms of this megabuck musical, which Universal Pictures hopes will outgross Grease, the current musical movie champ. If Miss Newton-John isn't wonderful in Xanadu, Universal could lose something like the annual budget of Peru. You can do the best job possible, she said on the set, but it's not up to you. It's up to millions of other people and influences... I'm just as nervous as anybody would be, though I've probably learned to hide it rather well.

Her high-tea rather is no Tinseltown affectation, it's how people who were born in Cambridge, England, and brought up in Australia usually talk. Ever since her starring-guest days on the BBC-TV series It's Cliff Richard, she has piled up one recording award after another. Her successes as a pop singer led directly from a Metropolitan Opera House concert to landing the part opposite John Travolta in Grease, her first feature film. The soundtrack album fetched several platinum honors and left its female star with a problem: What to do next?

I knew I wanted to do another musical after seeing the pleasure Grease brought to so many people, she said. So this musical fantasy really appealed to me. I never thought I would get to sing and dance with Gene Kelly. I had great fear and trepidation at the thought of dancing with him. But on the first day of rehearsals he put me at ease completely.

For now, she honors the master-bopper Mr. Richard as the most influential man in her professional life, with Travolta coming in a close second. Miss Newton-John sings a duet with Richard in Xanadu. What is clear about this star is that she needs close and durable friendships to suffer the heat of fame: I live a humble life on a four-acre ranch, she says and then falls over laughing at the absurdity of her sentence. Her producer, John Farrar, is married to Pat Carroll, with whom she sang as a team early in their careers. And she is close to her sister and brother-in-law. We stick together... she says, cooking small dinners and staying at arm's length from the Hollywood hangouts. This daughter of a college dean takes her career seriously.

Meanwhile, back on the gigantic set of Xanadu, nothing but expensive frivolity is being taken seriously. The movie boasts two choreographers, Kenny Ortega and Jerry Trent, both seasoned soldiers in the night club extravaganza front. Ortega worked three years with the Tubes, a British New Wave group that appears in Xanadu. Trent comes from television, Broadway, movies and stage shows. And as though two choreographers weren't enough, the movie has two composers as well Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra and John Farrar, who produced most of Miss Newton-John's recordings.

Xanadu has heaps of special optical effects, without which no modern movie would dare show its face, and the press kit for the film goes a little berserk describing John Corso's sets Fountains surround the rotating platform below the stage... a curtain of mirrored panels rises and falls between numbers... the basic colors used: burgundy and gray... This hoopla does not even touch one fantasy sequence shot in the Fiorucci boutique on Rodeo Drive, a tribute to the muse of Shopping.

Credits grow curiouser upon the revelation that Director Robert Greenwald's movies for television bear the arresting titles Sharon: Portrait of a Mistress, Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold, and Flatbed Annie and Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers. Further, Producer Lawrence Gordon's last effort was The Warriors, a sleeper about gang warfare in New York; co-producer Joe Silver war Gordon's associate on that film. The romantic male in Xanadu, Michael Beck, was the star of Warriors.

Even so, Miss Newton-John was sold on Xanadu the minute she heard the outline. Her convictions have extended to canceling a big Japanese tour in protest over that government's fishing policies: I'm concerned and saddened by conditions in the world now, and I hope that seeing Xanadu will provide pleasure and a chance for people to get away from their problems. If only for a little while.

Young Michael Beck, Olivia Newton-John's romantic lead in Xanadu, grew up on a small farm in Arkansas and never dreamed he would costar with her and the venerable Gene Kelly. He plays a dreamer who, in Kelly's words, is always searching for something and who wants to build a place where people can enjoy themselves. Enter Xanadu, touted by Universal Pictures as the ultimate fantasy.

Says Beck: This Xanadu is my Xanadu. The dream I had in the nine years since I decided to act is really coming true. I only hope I can carry on to the next dream now. The role I play [Sonny] is near to my real self in many ways. But my strength, I believe, is in playing fairly intense dramatic roles. His first was Tybalt in a Millsap College version of Romeo and Juliet.

Beck was the lead in The Warriors, a gang-war feature that excited some attention when urban audiences began assaulting each other during the movie. He also appeared in the NBC-TV movie Holocaust and Voyage of the Mayflower with Anthony Hopkins. Getting though those roles meant ditching his Old Arkansanian speech habits. The answer for Beck was to live five years in London. Ah yews'd to tahlk kinda lak thayit, he said. But the English are very articulate people. Maybe some of their quality of speech rubbed off on me.

Years and miles away from Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, Beck mused over his unexpected success: I believe every human being has a realizeable dream. You may not want to admit, even to yourself, that you have such a thing. But I should hope all people have something they can aspire to. The hang up comes when they stop short of trying to fulfill their realizeable dream.