Peeling Away The Veneer To Reveal What Others Don't See
Ed - Olivia referred to this nasty article in her Parkinson TV interview in September 1980 - she said the woman had never met her but was attempting to analyse her.
By Lynda Lee-Potter
SHE was the television ingenue by Cliff Richard’s side on Saturday nights. The girl we all thought had drifted into showbusiness accidentally with moderate talents and the mildly appealing charm of a small - town carnival queen. She seemed terribly sweet, not over bright and wouldn’t go much further. A girl to waft out of showbusiness into marriage in a mock Georgian detached in Guildford having sex 2.9 times a week behind organdie curtains and washing her hands afterwards.
The squeaking obsessive cleanliness of our star has continually been commented on over the years as though she spends her waking hours bouncing around with unsullied innocence in a bubble bath. She’s never uttered an unkind word, an indiscretion, an oath and rarely a reality. Her voice was cruelly compared to white bread aligning her to a product which is synthetic, manufactured, long lasting and bland.
But blandness above all has been the image our dream girl has deliberately seemed to wish project. At times she’s looked like plastic Barbie doll. Prick her and she won’t bleed, insult her, she won’t row, and gosh, yonder, clap hands, now by chance she’s a superstar.
The engineered reality is more interesting. When her less than lustrous career faltered in England she went alone to America when nobody gave her a hope in hell of success. In a land where greater talents failed and wept, she conquered. She became the world’s top selling female vocalist. She beat Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton in their own world when she was voted Female Vocalist by the Country Music Association in Nashville, Tennessee.
She starred in Grease, dieting her naturally slim figure into a waist you could nearly slip a wristwatch round. She dyed her hair the colour of cream. She rehearsed with the relentlessly persistent strength of a top athlete until her dancing looked effortless.
Last week she swept into the premiere of her new film Xanadu which the critics have massacred.
Behind those wide-set ingenuous eyes lies implacable ambition and an iron will she’d never show. Ambition is vulgar, to use her favourite word. It’s `vulgar’ to talk about money, ‘kinda vulgar’ to talk about sex. The drive is deeply hidden and the facade so many veneers thick, it’s impenetrable.
She was 31 before she finally decided she might broaden her image a little. “I no longer want to be somebody else’s little girl,” she murmured. “I’m a woman now and want to do all the things real women do.” The nearest she’d got to being a woman, seemed the implication, was dating a beau who brought her chocolates and a nosegay. The older she got the more she sounded like a character in an early Cliff Richard movie.
When Olivia Newton-John spoke those absurd words, she’d already been cited in Bruce Welch’s divorce case, lived with him and left him resulting in the Shadows star ending up in hospital with an overdose. Perhaps in truth emotionally, she still wanted to be the ten-year old little girl who grew up overnight when her academic father and her mother separated, resulting in a traumatic divorce.
When marriages break up, children frequently feel it’s their fault. ‘If only I’d been good,’ they think, maybe ‘Daddy would have stayed.’ They put a lock on their emotions and their instincts. They sustain a conviction that if they ever show bad temper, laziness, dirtiness, they won’t be loved. She began to have terrible dreams, threatening nightmares about circus people with painted faces. ‘I was terrified of seeing them again and again.’ Fear has possibly been her greatest motivation. Fear of rejection, so she’s always been the one to walk away from a relationship. Fear of failure so she’s strived to achieve success beyond her talent.
Fear of being found out, so she surrounds herself with a non-critical entourage. Fear of vulgarity, so she talks in platitudes. Fear of growing up, so at 31 with faint lines that disturb her when she looks in the mirror she talks like a teenager.
She throws back her head and laughs, but there is no mirth. She smiles those wide, vivacious hypnotic grins, but the eyes are watchful and guarded.
And behind is the terror that somebody one day will look through those ostensibly frank and open beautiful eyes to see the powerful, ruthless self-will that just manages to curb the fears.