Sex Life Star Tottie and Aunty Liv
“That’s only Aunty Liv,” an unimpressed Tottie Goldsmith would tell her teenage friends when Grease was hip and Olivia Newton-John was happening.
“She was just family, you know? I couldn’t understand what everyone was making a fuss about.” But she was the sort of aunty 13-year-old girls dreamed of Olivia was gorgeous, famous and kissing John Travolta.
Tottie, then a Melbourne private school girl, wasn’t going to be drawn into the hype. “What was exciting to me about Liv was that she was the link between me and my mother. She spent more time in Australia than my mum ever did.”
Even today Goldsmith, the singer turned host of TV’s Sex/Life, and Olivia, her mother’s younger sister, share a sibling like empathy. At one of their infrequent reunions last week, the two giggled and chatted like old friends.
“I’ve gone to her when I’ve needed the chick thing and she’s really good at putting things in perspective,” says Tottie. “She’s a very clear, very loving woman.”
Even at the peak of her fame in the 1970s, Olivia would make regular trips back to Australia where Tottie was growing up with her nightclub entrepreneur father, Brian Goldsmith. Her mother, Rona, lived in London and Los Angeles, where Tottie would occasionally visit.
“In some ways Olivia is like the older sister in their relationship, Mum’s the younger one,” says Tottie. Entertainment is in the blood of this celebrity family, which claims English comedian Ben Elton as a cousin.
Olivia and her 10-year-old daughter Chloe now split their time between Los Angeles and a farm near Byron Bay, where the singer is learning permaculture. She is still working on her singing career and recently travelled to Nashville looking for songs to record. Tottie and her daughter Layla, 3, are just back from a “bonding trip” to Bali during a break in Sex/Life filming.
Catching up with Olivia in Sydney was a great treat. “Doesn’t she look fabulous?” says Tottie of her aunt who, although heading for 50, looks decades younger. “I pray to God that’s a family thing.”