Survival of the Sweetest
By Corinna Honan
The old joke about Olivia Newton-John is that if white bread could sing, it would sound just like her. Certainly she has built a career on such saccharine sweetness that it virtually brought on national toothache. Here, she sprang to prominence singing on Cliff Richard’s BBC1 show and in the Eurovision Song Contest (she lost to Abba).
In America, she conquered a vast blue-collar country music audience and sold albums by the truckload. Even her most famous film role, as the high school cheerleader who dates John Travolta in Grease traded on her air of cute wholesomeness. And that, of course, is precisely what she was: A nice girl who tried desperately hard to please.
Then two-and-a-half years ago, she contracted breast cancer. And everything changed her marriage her attitudes her ambitions. For the first time, too, she found the confidence to write a whole album of highly personal songs of her own (Gaia: One Woman’s Journey), and it is probably the best thing she has ever done.
She is certainly no longer the eager-to-please, squeaky-clean pop star she once was. Even her air-hostessy good looks have gained strength from new character lines. More importantly, she has been forced to reassess herself through regular sessions with a psychiatrist. “I’ve started being able to express feelings I thought I shouldn’t have,” says Olivia, who is in Britain for an appearance on Des O’Connor’s ITV show tonight. “I’ve learned to express anger, to shout and bang doors, which I always found very hard before. I’ve learned not to feel guilty all the time about being so successful. I used to feel undeserving about having things handed to me on a platter when people around me didn’t.”
“I know I used to be a kind of victim, in that I allowed things to happen rather than taking control. I’d give in, when I didn’t really want to do something. It would often be little things like wanting to be alone but not saying so, or going somewhere when I was really tired. I was trying to do the right thing all the time, lest people thought I was too selfish. And there was just too much of that. I wouldn’t speak up. I was a very fearful person, and probably too scared to think deeply about myself. I didn’t have time to reflect until I got sick. But having cancer has freed me and helped me grow up. It has, in retrospect, been a very positive experience.”
She first suspected something was wrong when she began feeling uncharacteristically listless. Six months later, she discovered a lump in one of her breasts. A mammogram proved negative. A biopsy, likewise. So, to be absolutely certain, she underwent a lumpectomy.
Afterwards, she put it out of her mind and flew off with her husband Matt Lattanzi for the July 4 weekend. But just before take-off, there was a phone call for him at the airport. The news was bad; Olivia’s father, a retired college dean, had just died of liver cancer. And Olivia’s doctor in Los Angeles needed to see her again urgently. Matt told her about her father’s death later that evening, but said nothing about the doctor’s message. “I have always loved him for that. I was in such pain over my father, and Matt knew it was enough for me to deal with,” says Olivia.
The following Monday, her doctor told her she had cancer. “My way of coping with it was to crack jokes. I thought: What else can go wrong? I laughed a lot.” Only once did she falter, and that was later, after Matt had gone to sleep. “I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs. Then I just felt terror down to my boots. My knees and legs went weak and I thought the cancer must have spread right through my body.”
Mostly, she was relentlessly positive. She remembers signing a consent form for a double mastectomy, should it be found necessary, and making light of it all as she was prepared for surgery. “I didn’t want to upset the people around me,” she says. As always, she was concerned with doing the right thing. Later, she began wondering why she, of all people, had fallen ill with cancer. Was it a punishment? “It did cross my mind, that this was my pay-back for the good times.” But now, after talking to other women with breast cancer, she has come to believe she is probably quite a typical victim. “Most of us are a certain type who don’t know how to express ourselves. We try to be everything to everybody, we give, we don’t take care of ourselves emotionally. We do things for everybody else and repress our own desires and feelings.”
She believes the pattern was probably set in childhood (spent partly in Britain where she was born, and partly in Australia). Her father had never been able to express emotions, she says, even when she visited him for a week just before he died. “The closest he came then was by reading out some poems to my sister and I; he was trying to say something through the poetry because he couldn’t express himself. I loved him very much but he was not a person who spoke about his feelings, so I don’t feel I really knew the real him underneath.”
When she was ten, her parents separated. “I don’t think I had a happy childhood. My parents’ divorce made me feel insecure. I tried to blank out what was going on, and I was always the “happy” child trying to keep everyone else happy.” At 15, she won a singing contest, with the prize of a year in Britain, which her mother eagerly accepted on her behalf. But Olivia was madly in love with a teenage boy, and determined not to leave him. “I was still underage, so my mother tore me away from my boyfriend and kind of dragged me to England by my ear. When I got here, I kept booking return tickets to Australia but she would find out and cancel them. I even ran to a lawyer to see if I could be made a ward of court. I was in love and my hormones were going crazy. But my mother thought I was too young for romance. She was right, of course.”
That same year, she began singing in a small club. After that, she literally never stopped working. “I was quite naive then, and although people were doing drugs around me, I never seemed to notice. I floated through on this little cloud of everything being lovely. I’d have done better to play against my looks, maybe shave my head and wear grungey clothes. But that’s just not how I was; even my music was pretty wholesome.”
By the mid-Seventies, she had moved her act to the States and bought a home in Malibu where she collected a menagerie of dogs and horses. There were a couple of long relationships, but both fizzled out. “I was terrified of marriage,” she admits.
Her entire family, bar one aunt, had gone through divorces, and she had no intention of following suit. “If you’ve never seen a relationship that 1asts, you tend to believe it’s not possible. I think people give up on marriage too easily. It’s worth working through the hard times and sometimes getting through to the other side and finding it was worth hanging on. My own view is that six months of counselling should be part of the divorce process.”
Olivia speaks with such feeling that one wonders if she has been through marriage counselling herself? “Yes,” she admits hesitantly. “I’ve been to counselling and Matt has been involved, too. No marriage is without problems. But I wouldn’t call what we had marriage counselling per se.” Over the last year, she has had to deal with persistent rumours about a split with Matt. “Completely untrue,” she says firmly. She met Matt, an actor 11 years younger than herself, when she filmed Xanadu. “I was paranoid about the age difference at first,” she says. “Younger men with older women weren’t so common then, and of course I always wanted to do the right thing.” She laughs at the memory of prissy Miss Livvy.
They married in 1984. Matt seemed a good bet, she says, because he came from a family of nine in which there is only one divorce to date. They have not had an easy ride since. The birth of their daughter Chloe, now nine, was followed by three miscarriages, one at nearly five months. (“I grieved for them all,” she says simply.) Then Olivia’s sports clothing empire, Koala Blue, crashed amid debts and recriminations from franchise holders, while Matt’s own career lurched from one disappointing movie to the next. Finally, there was Olivia’s cancer. Her operation involved only a partial mastectomy and she had her breast reconstructed at the same time. Then she went through eight months of chemotherapy, supplemented by homeopathy.
There were times, she says, when she thought she would not survive and nights when she convinced herself she would die if she fell asleep. “I felt constantly nauseous, headachy, sleepy. I was in a fog, and my short-term memory, which can be affected by chemotherapy, became terrible.”
Matt remained buoyant and positive, thinking up weekend ‘treats’ such as camping trips after each chemotherapy session. When the treatment ended, they moved to New South Wales for six months, where Olivia owns a 200-acre avocado farm on the edge of a rain forest. She enjoyed the solitude, often getting up at three in the morning to compose songs for Gaia on her piano.
Then Matt, quite suddenly and spectacularly, had a nervous breakdown. He would shake, cry uncontrollably and scream into his pillow. “I felt so weak and helpless,”, he said later. “I just wanted to give up.” It took three months for him to recover. “I hadn’t been aware of his fear,” says Olivia, “And I don’t think even he was aware of it at the time. It’s very difficult for the people around you sometimes. They try to hold you up, but it’s frightening for them. Matt suffered from a kind of delayed shock.”
The marriage she insists remains fine. “But I think cancer changes a relationship. It has to. It puts stress on it, but it also makes the relationship more honest.”
Matt is now making documentaries and Olivia has been writing a film script and a children’s book. But she has no definite plans. “I’m not ambitious in the same way any more. I feel anything I achieve from now on is a blessing. You’re Never pronounced cured with cancer, though they say with each year, your chances get better. As far as I’m concerned I AM cured. Mental attitude is a great part of staying healthy, so I need to believe that. I simply must.”