Olivia's personal miracle
Battling breast cancer, the singer found an inner strength she never knew she had. Now, at age 50, she's speaking out in hopes of saving other women-and maybe one day her daughter as well.
By Susan Littwin
We are in the bathroom of Olivia Newton-John’s very large Malibu house the only room where it’s quiet enough to talk. Old friends from Australia are hanging out upstairs; her housekeeper is cleaning up from lunch; her secretary is buzzing around with a schedule in hand; and a photographer is lurking nearby.
Newton-John seems unfazed, as if this is an ordinary day, which it is, The performer still beautiful, though perhaps more pensive and less perky than when she played Sandy in Grease some 20 years ago has been busy in recent months, promoting the re-release of the movie as well as her new album, Back With a Heart.
But all Newton-John’s Grammy awards, number-one hits and movies seem to have been eclipsed by her other role the one she is proudest of. The actress is a voice for breast cancer awareness, after battling the illness herself in 1992. She raises funds for research, appears at events and simply reassures thousands with her calm presence that says, “I survived. You can too.”
The most painful and meaningful period of Newton-John’s life began, as it does for many women, with a frightening discovery. One day she found a lump in her breast but tried to convince herself not to worry - she had had lumps before that turned out to be cysts, easily aspirated in her surgeon’s office. Before the test results were available, she flew to Australia to visit her father, who was ill with cancer.
When she returned home, her then husband, Matt Lattanzi, gave her the news that her father - who she thought had at least several months ahead of him - had suddenly died. Lattanzi also knew that Newton-John’s tests showed she too had cancer, but he withheld that information while she absorbed the first blow. Her reprieve was shattered when her doctor left a message that he needed to see her. She knew why immediately.
“It was all so overwhelming that I just laughed. It was too much.” she recalls. The fear didn’t hit until hours later. Scheduled to have a blood scan the next morning to determine whether the cancer had spread, Newton-John, terrified, woke up in the middle of the night. “It was just dread.” she recalls. “You know you have cancer of some kind, and you imagine it’s everywhere. Your imagination runs wild.”
Early the next morning her best friend, Nancy Chuda, arrived to take her to the hospital; Chuda knew exactly what Newton-John was going through because her own five-year-old daughter, Colette, had recently succumbed to a rare form of cancer. When the blood scan revealed that the illness had not spread to other parts of Newton-John’s body, the singer took a deep breath. “I decided then that I would be all right,” she remembers. “I needed to make that decision. I never thought, ‘Why me?” Why not me? Why should I be any different from anybody else?”
She had a modified radical mastectomy (although the breast and the underarm lymph nodes are removed, the chest muscles are left intact) and breast reconstruction at the same time.
But her biggest hurdle was the nine months of chemotherapy. A passionate environmentalist and advocate of natural foods and remedies, Newton-John now had to ingest poisons potent enough to kill cancer cells. “It was more frightening than the surgery,” she says. “I thought they would give me chemotherapy and I would die.”
Chuda accompanied her for the first treatment, and afterward the two met their husbands for dinner and a movie. Newton-John remembers sitting in the restaurant thinking. “I’m here. I didn’t die. I will survive this.”
She took what she calls an East-meets-West approach to her recovery, bolstering her medical treatment with herbs, homeopathy, acupuncture, meditation, yoga and simple prayer. “I covered all the bases,” she says. “You have to take care of yourself emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. Women with families sometimes have trouble putting themselves first, but this is a time when you need to spoil yourself.”
During the entire ordeal Newton-John hid her illness from her six-year-old daughter, Chloe. The little girl knew only that her mother was having surgery for a lump: her parents carefully screened all newspapers. magazines and television. But a year later, during a visit to Australia, someone accidentally told Chloe the truth. “She was very upset with me for not telling her.” Newton-John recalls. It is Chloe - now 12-who at urges her mother to be open about her illness. “She’s very grown-up,” Newton-John says, beaming. “She made me feel it was okay to talk about it.”
That candor has saved lives-as a celebrity spokesperson for breast cancer, Newton-John encourages women to educate themselves and perform self-exams. Hundreds have written and called with their thanks: They had lumps checked because of her.
She recently ran in a Race for the Cure, bonding with fellow survivors. “There were all these women wearing pink hats, like my little pink ladies in Grease. And everyone had to say how long [since their diagnosis]- six months, a year, five years, even 30 years they were cancer-free.”
Newton-John’s own number is now almost six years. “The doctors will never say the word clear. They use remission. I just don’t like that word. It has the connotation of something lurking somewhere. As far as I am concerned, it’s gone.”
Encouragement for Carly and others: "Cancer is not a death sentence"
Newton-John deals with breast cancer patients on a one-to-one basis as well. She recently spoke with singer Carly Simon, whose illness was diagnosed in October 1997. “Carly’s all the right tools in place and good advice to do what she needs to do to keep up her strength and heal. Cancer is not a death sentence,” she says.
She stresses that women must never ignore their health. “I realize how lucky I am,” she says. “It’s so important to let women know that the earlier you find out, the better.”
At this point her secretary buzzes through into the bathroom haven. It’s time to pick up Chloe at school. During the brief ride up the coast, cradling Rougie, her Pomeranian, in her lap, Newton-John makes it clear that she won’t discuss her 1995 divorce from Lattanzi, an actor and dancer 11 years her junior. The breakup, in the years following her diagnosis, must have been especially painful for the singer. “We’re friends now” is all she will say. “We’re raising Chloe together.”
Newton-John is a child of divorce herself, the youngest of three children of gifted parents who met at Cambridge University in England. Her Welsh father was Australia’s youngest university dean. Her mother is the daughter of Nobel prize-winning physicist Max Born. The Newton-Johns moved to Melbourne Australia, when Olivia was five and divorced when she was ten about the same age Chloe was when her parents split.
She remembers how that felt. “Children are always affected by their mother and father divorcing,” the singer reflects. “You’re a family one minute, and the next you’re living with one parent and the other moves away. It’s not an easy thing for a child to understand or to deal with.”
Now her own coltishly pretty daughter plops into the Explorer with a groan. “I’ve had a terrible day.” Chloe says, sounding very adult. Her clothes were stolen from her locker while she was in swim class, and she had to borrow an emergency outfit from a classmate. “Dad was supposed to buy me a lock, but he didn’t,” she sighs.
Newton-John reacts mildly. “Are you sure you told Dad that you needed a lock?” she asks. If she is angry at her former husband, she doesn’t show it. Nor does she use the incident as a wedge to alienate Chloe from her father, as many ex-wives might. “Well, we’ll make sure you have a lock,” she says soothingly and then admires the big A on Chloe’s science project, a demonstration of electricity that would have made Newton-John’s physicist grandpa proud.
Newton-John turned 50 in September, a milestone that has many women resetting the year of their birth. “I just feel how lucky I am to get there healthy,” she says. “I see it as a time in my life when I can be who I am. I don’t have to make excuses anymore, and I don’t have to meet other people’s expectations. I am who I am.”
Newton-John wants to act again, after her long time off for recovery, “I’d like a really good role,” she says eagerly. “It wouldn’t have to be the lead, though that would be nice.”
Her sister, Rhona Newton-John, an actress turned screenwriter, encourages her ambitions. “Olivia is a performer, and she draws from that sense of acceptance,” she says. “I think she could be a very good actress now. All that she has gone through has given her a new depth of feeling.”
The road ahead: How she'll face her future fearlessly-and single
And what about the private life of the woman who co-wrote and sang the come-hither lyric “I’ll be back with a heart and ready to love”? Sitting on a balcony at home with three of her dogs wrestling beneath her chair.
She looks out over the ocean. “I’m dating, but I’m not having marriage thoughts. I think marriage is great if it works,” she says softly, the roar of the waves and the growling of the dogs almost drowning out her words. “My mother has never remarried, and she’s very happy and she likes her life that way.”
And Chloe, she feels, is none the worse for her mother’s single status. “We have a wonderful support system here,” she says. The Chudas, who have lived in the guest house on the property since their daughter died, are like a next-door aunt and uncle for Chloe. The secretary and housekeeper have been with the family since Chloe was born. And Lattanzi and Aunt Rhona live close by.
“I’m not making plans now. I’m just enjoying all this,” Newton-John says, indicating the bluff sloping down to the beach and the ocean rolling beyond. “I believe that life is what happens while you’re busy making plans. I don’t know what my path is yet. I’m just walking on it.”