Atlantic city Inside Guide - Review
Breast cancer no match for Olivia Newton-John's spirit
By David J. Spats
When bad news strikes, one of the most frequent reactions is the rhetorical pleading, “Why me?”
So Olivia Newton-John was well within her rights as a human being to ask that penetrating question in 1992, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Perhaps she was even more entitled than the next person, because for this world-class singer who had previously led a charmed life the confirmation of her illness was delivered the same day her lather died. And not long after that her best friend’s five-year-old daughter died of a rare form of cancer. Which happened right around the same time Newton-John’s international chain of clothing boutiques was forced into bankruptcy.
“It was just one thing after another, after another, after another.” she says. “In a bizarre sort of way, it was almost laughable. It was like. ‘Okay, what’s next? What other horrible thing can happen to me today?”
But instead of asking “why me,” Newton-John’s approach was more down-to-earth. Considering 200,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year, the entertainer’s approach to her situation was more like. “Why not me?” “I mean, why should I have been different?” she asks. “I was never angry at the situation, though. I was just determined to deal with it.”
Dealing with it meant canceling a summer tour (which would have taken her to Atlantic City for her casino debut), undergoing a radical mastectomy, breast reconstruction and chemotherapy.
Today, seven years after the disease was discovered, Newton-John declares herself to be cancer-free.
“It’s not in remission or anything like that,” she says emphatically. “It’s been cured. I know, some doctors don’t like to use the word ‘clear’ because that implies the cancer might still he lurking about somewhere inside me. But my cancer is gone.”
Healthy again, Newton-John is on the road this summer with a greatest-hits tour that stops at the Trump Taj Mahal for her long-delayed Atlantic City debut engagement Aug. 26-27.
Since first cracking the country music charts in the early 1970s and then crossing over to the pop side, Olivia Newton-John, who turns 51 in September, has become both an icon and an artistic chameleon, able to easily change music styles and keep musically current.
Her earliest hits, like “Let Me Be There” and “If Not For You,” had established her as a country artist, and she won a Grammy Award in the early 70s as best female country vocalist. But Newton-John, who in 1960 won an Australian contest as the girl who looked most like British actress Hayley Mills, effortlessly switched gears and became a pop music star with “I Honestly Love You.”
Newton-John also tested the waters as an actress and co-starred with John Travolta in the smash motion picture musical “Grease,” which spawned the duet hit “You’re The One That I Want,” which she performed with Travolta and which stayed at the top of the pop charts for nine weeks. In rapid succession, she cranked out a pair of follow-up hits: “Summer Nights” and “Xanadu,” which she performed with the Electric Light Orchestra.
In the early 1980s, with the disco era fading, Newton-John re-invented herself again and adopted a persona that was far sexier than the wholesome, almost pixyish image she project during the previous decade. With a sweat band wrapped around her head and workout clothes that left little to the imagination, she inspired millions to exercise their bodies into shape with the song “Physical.”
The 1980s was also a time of personal growth for the artist. She married Matt Lattanzi, an actor and dancer 11 years her junior, and 13 years ago gave birth to her only child, Chloe. (Lattanzi and Newton-John divorced in 1995, but she insists they remain “great friends and great parents.”)
Although her music career is as important today as it was nearly 30 years ago, it occasionally takes a back seat to Newton-John’s work with cancer organizations, especially the “Race For the Cure” events held around America each year.
“The most important thing is education and early detection.” she says. “Early diagnosis is the key. Even today, there’s so much fear our there and so little information, and I want to do everything I can to change that.”
Ironically, Newton-John feels that in the absence of hit big records in the 1990s, she’s become known more as a cancer survivor. When Linda McCartney died of breast cancer last year and when Carly Simon was diagnosed with the disease, Newton-John was one of the first people contacted by the media to comment on the news.
Although initially uncomfortable serving as an “expert” on breast cancer, she says she’s grown used to the role and actually relishes it.
“I feel very proud when people say I have inspired them or helped them in some way,” she adds. “Perhaps that’s why this happened to me in the first place. Maybe that was supposed to be my job all along?”
When it comes to cancer, she says, the key is the will to survive and the desire to fight back.
“It was all so overwhelming to me at first,” she says of her diagnosis in 1992. “I decided I could either fight this thing or curl up in a ball and die. So I made the decision that I was going to survive, and somehow I found an inner strength and resolve I never knew I had.”
More from Olivia’s 1999 tour