Olivia We Love Ya
Editor - Olivia no longer wears fur
The full-page picture in the New York Times showed Olivia Newton-John standing smiling among the skyscrapers of the world’s most exciting city. Olivia Newton-John At The Met Sold Out… Standing Room Only, screamed the headline. And that was a week before the concert at New York’s famous Metropolitan Opera House last month.
Olivia is used to standing room only audiences. Down in America’s deep south, the blue-eyed, blonde, 28-year-old country music singer would merely have to hum on a comb to captivate her audience.
But New York is something else again. Until now Olivia cautiously avoided appearing there before the hardest audience in the world. “I think the audience will be very blasé,” she said nervously before the concert. “They have seen everything they can see everything and you really have to be good.”
She needn’t have worried. She killed them. Olivia, We Love Ya, cried the Daily News the morning after. The Met’s Pop Star - A Sensation, headlined the New York Post. And the audience gave her two standing ovations. Fresh from her triumph at the Met. and the celebrity studded party which followed at Fifth Avenue’s plush Pierre Hotel, Olivia jetted off to Europe to make a series of TV specials and personal appearances in England, Holland, Germany and France.
Her success is often attributed as much to the image she projects as to her voice. One critic wrote: “If brown bread could sing, it would sound like Olivia wholesome, enriched, soft and fresh.”
Yet, Olivia says, the clean image is nothing she has cultivated. “I don’t lead my life in such a way that people could come to that conclusion. I really don’t know how this image comes about. It’s what people see you as, I suppose. I don’t go around talking about clean living. I’m really terrible underneath, honestly. I do everything that most normal people do. I’m sure I have some vices, but if I have, I’m not pointing them out.”
Since 1973, with the release of Let Me Be There, Olivia’s clean image and beauty have aided the sales of more than 10 million records around the world. She has gained five gold singles, six gold and six platinum LPs, plus various Grammy Awards, including Best Country Vocal 1973, Record Of The Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance. Three of her albums and singles have also reached the number 1 position on all the American charts.
Probably the Country Music Association’s Award Female Vocalist two years ago brought her the most attention. A minor storm erupted. In the country music community, the Anglo-Australian girl who only sang other writers’ songs and did not compose her own was looked on as a carpetbagger with no base in the music market she had cornered. “When I went down to Nashville to record an album last year, people told me all that criticism had been forgotten that it was blown up out of all proportion,” Olivia said.
“I think it was understandable in a way. Someone new comes along who isn’t even American and steals an award that was theirs and it annoys them. But music has to expand. You can’t keep it in a bag you have got to open it out and I think this is happening.”
“Anyway, I never claimed to be a country singer and I certainly didn’t put myself up for the award or vote for myself. New people are listening to country music because of me. You can’t claim music. Just because you are not black doesn’t mean you don’t have soul.”
Olivia didn’t always want to be a singer. As a child she dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but found out soon enough that it takes more than a mere love of animals. “I didn’t work hard enough and I really wasn’t very good at science. So then I decided I would like to be a mounted policewoman, because I figured I could ride horses all day and get paid for it. “But Australia didn’t have mounted policewomen and by that time music had taken over my life.”
Olivia started her career by singing folk songs in the Melbourne coffee lounge run by her brother-in-law. Someone heard her and suggested she enter a talent contest she ended up winning first prize, a trip to England. She was not quite 17 when she arrived in England.
“I started work on my own for a bit and it was very lonely,” she said. ‘‘Then a girl friend, Pat Carroll, who was also a singer, came over from Australia and shared a flat with my mother and myself and we had a double act for two years. We went to Europe and sang at all the army bases and all the clubs around England and had our own television special. Then Pat had to go home and I stayed on and joined a group called Toomorrow, which was a disaster. It was three guys and me and we were going to be the new Monkees so we thought. We did a full-length feature film and it all fell apart.”
A break came with a TV appearance with Cliff Richard and in 1971 Olivia cut her first single, If Not For You, which was a hit. An even bigger hit, Banks Of The Ohio followed and this was picked up the disc jockeys in Nashville, Tennessee. Her career has been booming ever since.
With stardom - a word, incidentally that Olivia hates - has come difficulty in making friends - particularly in the United States. Olivia was engaged to a London musician before she struck it lucky in the United States, but that romance ended and she moved her headquarters to America. In 1975 her manager, Lee Kramer, a one-time shoe importer, took over both her personal and business life. Last year Kramer departed from the scene although they still occasionally see each other in Los Angeles, where Olivia lives on a 1.6 ha (4 acre) ranch in Malibu Hills with a housekeeper, six horses, four dogs and three cats.
“I don’t know if it’s just the people here, or maybe the position I’m in,”” Olivia said. “The more successful you get, the more you wonder why people want to be friendly with you. They tend not to treat you like a person they sort of put you on a pedestal.’I try to overcome this by letting people know that I am a person like they are, but generally I stick with people I have known for a long time.”
“I have so little free time that I like to spend it with the people closest to me. I need a man with me to help me,” she said. “I have always had somebody, so I guess I do! It’s very important to me, because I know that one person and trust that one person. I suppose, to a certain extent, he begins to live my life with me. It’s very difficult for a guy not to become involved in my career. The guys in my life have their own work, but they can’t help but get involved in what I do because it consumes so much of my time.”
“You just can’t get away from it. If I go out to a restaurant, nearly always someone will come up to me. Quite often they will say: ‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere. Haven’t we met? ‘ And then it clicks and they are embarrassed.”
“It’s amusing, but perhaps hard for an escort to accept as a regular thing. It’s ‘Mr Newton-John’ a lot of the time. Many men are intimidated by me, by what I represent and my success. It’s very difficult to have a relationship.”
In general, marriage frightens her. “My parents, my sister and so many of my friends have been divorced,” Olivia said. “I wouldn’t rule out marriage completely, because you never know. But if I get married, I want it to be forever, so I don’t want to make any mistakes. Right now it’s not a necessity for me. I am self-supporting, so I don’t need a man to look after me in that sense. And I don’t want to have children yet. If I have a family and I don’t know if I would I would want to devote time to them and not be flitting off somewhere all the time.”
“Some people could have kids and spend 30 days in a row on the road and do it well, but I wouldn’t want to. Also, I have become a bit selfish. I want to see a lot and do a lot more things things I haven’t explored yet, like making a film if the right script appears.”
Although she lives in America and travels on a British passport, Olivia still considers herself more of an Australian her family moved to Melbourne from England when she was five.
“Australians are very straightforward, outgoing people,” she said. “That’s why I like them. I feel comfortable with them. When I go home I see old friends I have had since I was at school. It’s like I never left. I don’t know, Australians are just good fun.”
It’s not hard to see why audiences go overboard for Olivia how can they resist her?