Olivia Faces The Music
By Colin Dangaard
She’s not so terrified now
The feeling, for Olivia Newton-John starts high in the spine, moving down to settle like a block of ice in the pit of the stomach. She has learned over the years not to fight it, as she stands on stage, pretty as a picture, belting out hits with a voice that instantly converts sound to gold; she knows the more she worries, the worse her condition becomes. For as long as she has been singing, Olivia has worried she will forget her next line, her next move. Once the terror was so great she used to repeat lyrics a hundred times before she went on, and then, even when she was singing, she would be thinking three songs ahead. “And that,” she says, “was terrible.” In one concert her mind did go blank, during Pony Ride. “So I just made up words as I went along,” she recalls. “the audience wouldn’t have known, but I could feel the band breaking up behind me.”
Now “sheer terror” has been replaced simply by the “cold feeling”; Olivia at last is winning an inner war that has raged unseen and unreported. Born in England, and reared in Australia, she has at age 28 cornered a large section of the American pop record market. As she says: “I have grown beyond any point I would have thought possible.” Having just completed an extensive Asian tour, which she wound up as one of Japan’s top singing stars, she is now on a 22city tour of the United States, before leaving mid- May for a month in Europe.
A new confidence has allowed her to show more of her girl-next-door personality. “I used to try and tell jokes on stage,” says Olivia, “and I’d die a thousand deaths. They were terrible jokes. And I didn’t know how to deliver them anyhow. Then one day I was just fooling around, being myself, doing something stupid, and the audience laughed. So I quit trying to be slick. And it worked.” Unlike some other superstars who’ve come out of Australia, Olivia looks back and is thankful for the “great start” the country gave her in show business “At 15,” she says, “I was a regular on a teenage pop show in Melbourne. I was doing regular work, earning regular money and loving it. It was all so easy! Then I won a trip to England on Johnny O’Keefe’s Show, but mum had to talk me into taking it. I didn’t want to leave Australia.”
But leave Olivia did, to become a regular on Cliff Richard’s BBC-TV show, and to fall under the direction of Peter Gormley, his manager, and Bruce Walsh and John Farrar of The Shadows. It was these men who made it possible for her to record her first big hit, If Not For You, a song from Bob Dylan. Ever since Olivia has been collecting awards and charming fortunes from folk who consider themselves lucky if they find standing room. Despite the acclaim and the wealth, she remains a modest down-to-earth girl, who sits in an elegant office in Beverly Hills like she was perched on a corral fence; she sips her tea, laughs, slaps her jeans and talks very plain, you know. “Maybe,” she says, “I had dreams of one day reaching this point, but I would never have voiced them. In Australia, when I was growing up, girls didn’t say there were ambitious. It was very much the guys who were doing things. Girls went to watch football and that was all. But I must have had aspirations, or I would never have done it.” Certainly she thought about the United States, and the magic of Hollywood. “In school,” she says, “Americans were always considered special, like they had magical powers. The accent intrigued Australians. We considered it very romantic.”
Olivia grew up the youngest of three, in a family that has distinguished itself for brilliance. Her grandfather was Nobel prize winner, German physicist Max Born, and her father was head master of Ormond College in Melbourne. While her brother was busy becoming a physician and her sister talked of acting, Olivia was plugged solidly into music. So distracted was she from her school work that she had “terrible nightmares about going to exams, and not knowing the answers.”
A year before college, she had a conversation with her favorite teacher that went something like this: Teacher: “If you don’t want to concentrate, don’t come back. You’ll never get through the college entrance exams. Get into your music, if that’s what you want.” Olivia: “What a brilliant idea!”
And she never went back. Because of her popularity on the pop show, newspaper columnists discussed the merits of school versus stardom for Olivia. One writer, who insisted she continue school as “something to fall back on”, received a thank-you letter from Olivia’s mother. Later, Olivia would realize she was making a decision classic to her family all of whom ended up either intellectuals, or entertainers, or, in the case of her father, both! Today her brother is a physician in Melbourne, but also plays guitar and sings. Her sister is in London, still “dabbling in acting”, having just had a baby. She has an uncle who is also a doctor, with a son who acted in a Fellini movie. Olivia describes her mother as “very liberal, very intelligent”. Of her father she says: “He is a fine actor, very handsome, suave, extremely brilliant, and has this incredible operatic voice! “ For a while Olivia felt uncomfortable at her lack of higher education, but she soon realized there was a fine line between being an academic and being in showbusiness. As she says: “Academics are usually pretty creative, mentally creative. And they’re often eccentric. If you go into showbusiness, you need all of that.”
Rapid artistic development was accompanied by ever-increasing difficulties in keeping up a social life, however. Olivia had her first steady boyfriend when she was 15, and remembers him as “a great guy”, but says he “pushed me around”, adding: “I didn’t know how to fight back then, but I would now. It was always, ‘I’m going to football… I’ll pick you up later.’ Then, he’d never show. “Saturday nights he’d take me to parties, and spend the entire evening down the other end of the room, talking with boys, while I sat at the other. Then on Sunday, he’d play pool.” In London at age 17, she went to the other extreme. “The first man I met there sent me a dozen red roses, picked me up in a fancy car, took me out to dinner, then to a nightclub, and onto another club, I was terribly impressed. I drank champagne, but I drank too much. Outside, I sicked up all over his car. I was embarrassed. He was so suave. I thought he would never see me again.”
Four years ago, Olivia hit America with unbelievable impact three straight top records. Until recently, her companion and manager was British producer Lee Kramer. He was once in residence at Olivia’s luxurious Malibu home, set on several prime acres overlooking the Pacific. Now friends say the romance is over. Olivia has a new manager, but she does not have a new man in her life. Asked about the status of Kramer, she says simple: “Let’s say, I’m travelling a lot. Kramer himself does not talk as if it’s over, adding: “Olivia and I know where the relationship stands. It may be hard for the public to know, but we’ve always felt it’s not the public’s business.” He confirms he no longer has anything to do with her professionally, admitting they could not make the relationship work on so many levels. “Few people can,” he says. “Jon Peters and Barbra Streisand have been able to make it work. So have Helen Reddy and Jeff Wald. But - that’s two. Now I must say, I haven’t been able to find anything else that I can throw myse1f into with the same impetus and success as I did with Olivia. One must understand that when you really love somebody, the effort holds no bounds.” Kramer points to Olivia’s background, when asked how she has been able to retain an air of “country innocence”, while notching up record sales he insists outstrip any other woman singer in the world.
“She keeps her feet on the ground,” he says. “She is believable. You can reach out and touch her. It always amazes me how such a warm, fragile sensitive individual can muster the guts to stand before all those people and do anything at all.” For one so prominent on the sales chart, Olivia keeps a low profile in Hollywood, a town she sees mostly on the way to the airport. “When you think of Hollywood,” she says, “you think of men in Rolls Royces and living in tuxedos. But like everything, the dream is better than the reality.
“I go to parties, meet stars, and find they’re just people and that can be disappointing. I’m sure people are disappointed when they meet me too. It must be really shattering for kids when they see you on record covers, hear you on radio and then see you one day when you’re tired, looking dishevelled and you don’t really want to talk.” Olivia would like to socialize a little more but she is not overly impressed with the men she meets. She explains: “American men are a little too easy. If a guy tells you you’re terrific after two minutes, where do you go from there? I like a bit of challenge. American men might be aggressive in the office but when they get home there’s a total change.” She laughs, a joyous girl-laugh. “I like Australian men,” she says, “think they’re terrific as long as they’re not tough to a ridiculous degree.”
When she has time off, Olivia likes most to stay home and romp with her cat, four dogs and five horses all protected from the wilds by a 6ft chain-link fence that has become a point of controversy in her neighborhood. “Not in keeping with the tone of our environment,” said one matron of the luxury mountain-top settlement. Olivia handled the controversy with a shrug, insisting the coyotes would worry her livestock. She has a three-car fleet, including a Mercedes, but mostly drives a Jeep around Malibu, her dogs in the back licking the wind. Such is her devotion to animals she once considered becoming a veterinarian. “The first thing I wanted when I had the money was a place big enough to keep horses and dogs,” she says. “I could never afford horses as a kid, so I rode other people’s. I was far more excited about getting my first horse than I was about getting my first car.”
Now that she is on top, Olivia has no illusions about permanency, explaining: “There are many girl singers, and many successful ones, each with our own audience. But I know there’ll always be somebody new coming up, somebody the public wants to see more. That’s life. So what I’m doing is establishing myself now, so that I don’t have to end up working in some sleazy place. I want to stop when I wish, and not worry. I accept the fact I can’t always have No. 1 albums.”
Meanwhile, Olivia takes good care of her audience, being careful to give them all her hits, holding the theory that people who listen to her songs on record also want to see them delivered. Having achieved so much in song, she is now casting about for movie action. She’d like to do a musical, but hasn’t yet found the script. She’d like to also try drama, preferably something set in Australia, and has her mother looking for a story there. And she wants to build a house that runs on sunlight, with ecological support system that consumes waste. Explains Olivia: “I know I am perhaps one of the worst offenders, with a big house that uses a lot of water and electricity and stuff, but it concerns me that we are going to run out of these things. And I think people are really unaware of it. “What I might do is build a house that others might copy.”
There are no long range plans because. Try as she might, Olivia just can’t visualize herself as ever growing old.