My Cancer battle's left me feeling stronger than ever
By Michael Cable
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN has never felt better, Not even jet lag or a hectic schedule of interviews and photocalls could dampen the spirits of the 46-year-old Grease star whose life became a nightmare three years ago.
After a string of personal traumas, culminating in an eight-month battle against cancer, Olivia could have been forgiven if she had allowed negative thoughts to crowd in on her. Instead, as she lay awake in the wee small hours, her mind was filled with the words and music to the sort of songs she had never had the confidence to write. With titles such as Why Me? and Not Gonna Give In To It, they formed the basis of her new album, Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, which stands as a testament to the power of positive thinking. It also signals the quiet rebirth of a career which Olivia had assumed was over.
As she recuperated from the chemotherapy and partial mastectomy that followed the diagnosis of breast cancer in 1992, she and husband Matt Lattanzi put their house in Malibu up for sale and retreated with daughter Chloe to Australia and their farm on the Emerald Coast of New South Wales. “I had no intention of ever working again,” she says cheerfully. “I was quite happy living down on the farm, taking my daughter to school every day and enjoying the luxury of lolling around doing nothing. I thought, This is great, I’ll simplify my life right down and that will be it from now on. And then the songs started coming. I would wake at three in the morning with them in my head. It was as if they had somehow found their way to me and were demanding to be put down.”
Even so, she hesitated before committing them to record, especially those relating directly to her illness. “I wrote them for myself, with no idea of making an album, and it was a big decision to go public,” she says. “But I felt that I needed to say something about my cancer because there was so much speculation about it. People want to know how I am and I want to say that I’m okay, that I’ve never felt stronger, physically or spiritually.”
In London this week to launch the album with an appearance on tonight’s Des O’Connor Show, Olivia’s relentlessly up-beat attitude and her refusal to give in to self-pity have impressed everyone who has watched her fight back.
Even in the song Why Me?, her message is actually the reverse why not me? She says she never felt bitter or that life had treated her unfairly even when she suffered a succession of devastating blows. Her showbusiness career was already in decline when her chain of 55 Koala Blue sportswear boutiques went bust. Her cancer was then diagnosed on the very day that her father died of the disease. “My reaction was almost to laugh like, what more can happen? What’s going on here? There must be a reason. But I was never angry or thinking that it wasn’t fair. Other people felt that for me but I never did. If anything, I came to see it as a challenge.”
But there were times when she was very frightened. “Especially in the beginning,” she says. “Cancer is such a horrible word. Everybody associates it with death. But it is not necessarily a death sentence and many people do survive. I quickly made up my mind to be positive about it after my dearest friend, who had been through it herself, told me, ‘Your attitude is going to set the mood for everybody around you’.” Olivia adds: “What scared me most was the prospect of chemotherapy because I’m somebody who doesn’t even like taking aspirin.”
Although the treatment made her feel very sick, she counts herself lucky, from a psychological point of view, that she didn’t lose her hair. “There are drugs that always cause you to lose your hair but I wasn’t on those,” she explains. “I also wore an ice cap a kind of tea-cosy filled with ice cubes which is supposed to help.” Yoga, meditation, homeopathy and acupuncture became part of her battle against the disease, all traces of which have now vanished, though it will be five years before she gets a final all-clear.
In the meantime, she is reactivating her career. As well as her album, she is also hosting an Australian television series, Human Nature, which deals with environmental issues. And, as if to underline the fact that her recovery is complete, she and Matt have taken their Malibu beach home off the market and are back in residence, dividing their time between California and Australia.
The one thing that brings a frown to Olivia’s face is any reference to reports last year that their 15-year marriage was on the rocks. “All that was complete rubbish,” she snorts, dismissing suggestions that her illness had put the relationship under strain and that Matt, 10 years her junior, was planning to move into a bachelor pad next door to the family home. “Matt has been a great support and, if anything, we’re even closer now as a result of what we’ve been through.”
Hollywood actor, Matt, always a rather reluctant star of series such as Paradise Beach, is currently making a series of outdoor documentaries for television.
As for her own future, she has no desperate desire to return to the glory days of grease - in which she starred with John Travolta - when she had topped the charts with such hits such as Summer Nights and Hopelessly Devoted To You.
“I was very lucky to be part of Grease because it was a phenomenon that will be remembered for ever, “ she says “But that was a pinnacle I would never expect to reach again. I haven’t had a major success since the album Physical - but that’s fine. I did all that and then I got married and had a baby and chose other things that are more important to me.”
She adds: “I would obviously like my new album to do well but I’m not desperate to be number 1. Since my cancer, I have different priorities. I have new values and perspectives. In that way, I have benefited from the experience.”