Olivia Newton-John Steps out of the Shower
‘Grease’ star Olivia mobbedfrom the news section, p5
BRITISH - born ‘Grease’ star Olivia Newton - John was mobbed and almost crushed by fans when the film opened in Chicago last weekend. The drama occurred as 28 - year - old Olivia arrived for the premiere with ‘Saturday Night Fever’ star John Travolta who also appears in ‘Grease’. As hundreds of fans converged on the couple Ms Newton-John’s dress was ripped, and Travolta battled to keep the crowd at bay Neither stayed to watch the film. Afterwards Olivia, who suffered bruising, said: “It was like being caught in a rugby scrum, except they wanted to use me as the ball. “It was the most frightening experience of my life”. Record Mirror caught up with Olivia Newton-John talking about that film in a more peaceful moment last week. exclusive interview starts on page 12.
How Olivia Newton-John made it into the movies without really trying By John Shearlaw
THE GLARING HOT morning sun bounced back off the bone white sands causing early morning joggers to narrow their eyes painfully as they hauled brightly coloured tracksuits towards the broiling surf. A slight cooling breeze picked at the rubbish strewn around the bins beside the sandy parking lot, piling it up against the wheels of the deserted vehicles. Over by the edge of the rocks skirting the beach a sleek dun labrador worried noisily at a half-buried object, its burrowing endeavours revealing a rusty Coke can.
In the hills behind the beach houses hidden by flowering acacia trees were coming to life. The first tentative bare-footed steps padding across flag-stoned patios. The electrical buzzes and clocks that signified automatic arousal as emphatically as their deployment eight hours previously had prefaced slumber. Cocooned and insular the residents prepared their first meal of the day in a way would have surprised them to know was being repeated in similar establishments the length and breadth of the valley. Malibu Beach, California, USA.
Further inland the vegetation stays lush, the valleys break into cracked and open chasms like ossified and ugly scars across the green sward. The white cool houses of the beach grow and spread into true pine complexes, only power lines and tarmac veins interrupting the natural vista. Big Rock Canyon, Malibu Beach, California, USA.
We’re getting closer all the time. Heat and horses, dogs and cats, black bubbling water in stainless steel kitchens. Breakfast radio, clean jeans and cold stark prestructured cement. INSIDE one house the telephone rings, quietly at first, and later with an alarming jangle as the answering service is switched off by an unseen hand. A swish of soft cotton across the room as the receiver is raised leaving silence, bar the distant sound of swiftly running water.
“Olivia Newton-John?”, enquires a crackly English voice, muffled and constricted through miles of intricately twisted cable. “Her sister speaking,” comes the reply. A pause. The sound of running water distinctly increasing, the lines clearing. “Olivia, she’s, she’s in the shower”. Sooner or later it would have happened. Just a question of carrying on trying. “Can you ring back in five minutes? Two minutes? Oh, she’s coming now.” . OLIVIA Newton-John is England’s forgotten rose. The girl with the golden hair and the toothpaste smile who shared our birthplace but seemed to carry the pristine qualities of distant nirvanas, as if on continuous assignment to demonstrate the health and vitality of fast clear rivers, glistening snow-covered peaks and verdant valleys densely populated with pine trees and palominos.
Born in Cambridge, that most English of cities, she made an early departure to Australia from whence the majority believe she hails only to win a teenage return with success in a talent contest, some 10 years later.
It was in 1965 that the “lovely Livvy”, as she was already known on Australian television, returned to England ready to dance, sing and do anything. Perhaps even be an actress. Perhaps indeed. Instead she made a single, toured as a duo with another teenage talent contest winner from down under, and at one point made an appearance on the BBC. Pat and Olivia kept it up for three years, forming an early liaison with the Shadows a group whose various personnel were to play no small part in her future career and “touring the clubs” until Pat returned to Australia.
For one ‘‘disastrous” year afterwards Olivia became the female lead in ‘Toomorrow’ a doomed attempt to launch a new Monkees concept via a film and group package. The film, the singles, and no doubt the souvenir posters remained largely ignored by an undiscerning public. “Livvy” was back on her own. Her face appealing, her career so far appalling. Rescue came with the Shadows, in the Marvin Welsh and Farrar incarnation, and friendship with Cliff Richard. Allied with the production talents of John Farrar, and the exposure granted by Cliff, Olivia at the turn of the decade became a successful solo singer almost overnight.
By 1971, you, the readers of this very music paper, accorded the fresh vocal charms of Olivia Newton-John the accolade of ‘Best British Girl Singer’. The honour was repeated a year later. Singles, tours and LPs appeared to back up the claim.
By 1974, however, the romance with the girl next door was due to end. Olivia represented Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Long Live Love’, came a terribly patriotic sixth in the year that Abba won, and controversy raged. Of which more later. One summer TV series later, those big blue eyes, hay-blonde hair and crisp cotton dresses firmly ingrained on the national consciousness, Ms Newton- John betook herself to America. Found success. And stayed.
Since then her career in America has literally taken off. TV shows, coast-to-coast SRO tours, film offers, best-selling albums. You name it. (Olivia normally names things after her animals). In England scarcely a peep.
“Whatever happened to that nice girl who used to be on television?” “The Australian with the big name? She was so pretty”. That girl became an actress this year. Danced with John Travolta! Sang with him! Hit the top of the British charts all over with ‘You’re The one That I Want’. She’ s still so pretty. And we hadn’t forgotten.
THE TWO minutes were up. She was here now. F-r-e-s-h out the shower. A voice you couldn’t pin down, East Anglia, Melbourne and Big Sur stirred, not shaken, into a semblance of dewy freshness. Olivia Newton-John still sounds delightfully teenage. She’ll be 30 this year.
Olivia I didn’t ask if I could call her ‘Livvy’ is a happy lady. A little gruff maybe, but. “I’m just getting over the flu out here,” she opens. “I’ve been in bed since the premiere.” The premiere. Of course, for ‘Grease’. The movie opened in Los Angeles two weeks ago, and by the time we talked John and Olivia’s mug shots were just making their way into the English dailies.
“The trade reviews, the ones that are important to us, were great”, she enthuses. “It was my first real premiere too, and my stomach’s still turning! Now I’ve got to do it all over again in New York.” It’s taken a while for the magic of the movies to claim Olivia, certainly, but she seems pretty sure of herself now. A long way indeed from the disaster that was ‘Toomorrow’.
“I’ve been looking at parts for some time but I wanted to be careful,” Olivia explains. A small laugh. ‘I haven’t forgotten ‘Toomorrow’ even if everybody else has! The last one, though, was in ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, as Strawberry Fields, and I didn’t think that was right. I wasn’t really nervous, it just wasn’t me.”
“Then the new ‘Grease’ script came along. The producer was sure I was the one long before I was! I sat reading it again and again, and after a lot (she emphasises the word) of hesitation I accepted it. I only rationalised it afterwards. Like, it was a suitable entrance into films and I’d been waiting a long time to broaden my scope, all those things. But what really swung it was that there were two parts for me. Sandra Dee, who I play, starts off as a pretty boring person really. Someone who doesn’t dance, a goody two-shoes character… which I suppose is what my image is, or was! “ She giggles at the observation.
“At the end though I’m the complete opposite. I’m a real greaser and (a deliberate pause) a tarty lady! It’s great! I think that my image after that is in for a bit of a shock, but that’s what so good about it.
“I’ve always been seen as a perpetual teenager, too good to be true, but I’ve grown up now. I just count myself extremely lucky to be able to do it.” ‘Grease’, it should be pointed out, is the screen adaptation of the stage show of the same name, one which had the distinction of being the “longest-running show on Broadway” or something like that. Heavily featuring Sha Na Na (remember Woodstock?) it’s a nostalgic whirl back to the heady days of sophomore sock hops “have you seen it?” Olivia interjects excitedly all through our conversation and drive-ins. A sort of thirties’ Judy Garland-style movie set in the fifties.
Contemporary appeal is assured with the inclusion of disco beefcake John Travolta, a stunning seventies disco title track from Frankie Valli, and of course the present interviewee, singing and dancing back 20 years.
The latter we’ve yet to see. The former, recorded in “between shooting over about three months”, leading - via her unlikely alliance with John Travolta - to Olivia’s English renaissance with ‘You’re The One That I Want’.
“The hit in Britain has really thrilled me, “she enthuses, coughing slightly with the flu remnants. “I was beginning to give up on England, but now the record might encourage things a little.” (In fact, as you and I and Olivia now know she has been resigned to EMI in England, of which more later) .
“It was a good balance between us, “says Olivia, as if to scotch the critics who were about to suggest that it was her voice, not Travolta’s, that carried the song. And again: “He doesn’t get lost at all, that’s unfair. It was great working with him, he gave me so much.”
Yet if Olivia hadn’t started working on ‘Grease’ before ‘Saturday Night Fever’ was released she might, just might, not have gone through with it. “It’s true. If John had been such a big star at the time I’m sure I would have felt intimidated. Especially as I didn’t know him firs . She means it. A slight pause (mine this time). The question really must be, ahem, what’s it like dancing with John Travolta?
A tinkling laugh, more refreshing than Californian orange juice. “Well, great! But it was different stuff you know! We all had dancing lessons for three weeks and the atmosphere was very fifties just like a school! “We ended up stiff every night.”
The expansion of Olivia’s career with ‘Grease’ has had other effects, not least the reawakening of her EMI contract. Scripts, meanwhile, are “pouring in” for the professor’s daughter’s scrutiny. While her singing career continues apace.
“I start a new album next month, “she tells me. “And I’ll be writing some of the songs myself. Besides that there’s a strong possibility of a British visit later this year maybe for the premiere, which I think is in September and some concerts which I’d really like to do at the end of the year. It’s been a long time since I was over there and I still really love England.”
“A long time since Eurovision in fact. Some people were really upset with me then”, she recalls. “I didn’t like the song, that was no secret, but I couldn’t understand the resentment I got. There were all sorts of stories about me storming out of the party and everything which were simply unfounded.”
“At the same time I had a country hit in America, believe me I didn’t know what a country hit was then, and coupled with Eurovision not being the happiest time for me professionally, I decided to go. It’s every entertainer’s dream to make it in America, I’ve no doubts about that.
“I remember Helen Reddy saying ‘you’ve really got to do it’. A few times in my life I’ve let things go, passed things up, but you can’t keep doing that. I had to do it. Everything was new, and I suppose I was a bit vulnerable, although it was really a case of the right records at the right time. “ I feel a smile. “They took to me”
Not ‘alf, to coin a phrase. Progressing from support to headliner she cropped up again and again on TV, usually in the company of the likes of John Denver and the Carpenters, steering a sweetly successful line between country the concept was coming clearer and pop.
Olivia Newton-John became an American personality, although still retaining the anti-personality tag of the fresh-faced backwoods blonde who still summed up in an instant smile every myth and legend about the delights of the colonies. Along with coast-to-coast tours she adopted a “cause” the protection of wild life and even fenced off questions regarding her desire to adopt American citizenship? ‘“I don’t intend to become one, all I said is you have to live here five years first.” And marriage? “My boyfriend is still the same one, Lee Kramer, my personal manager. It’s just never been the right time to get married, I’m not deliberately avoiding it by any means.” Just like a story, Lee himself appears, or at least the noises off indicate that he does, to present the recovering flu victim with, wait for it, ‘‘chocolate covered strawberries”. How sweet.
“I’ve already cancelled a trip to Japan in protest against the slaughter of the dolphin”, she continues, unabated. “It was my first real stand. A lot of Japanese fans said I should have gone and said something while I was there but I don’t believe the stage should be a platform for political beliefs.”
“In a way it worked too. This year I’m interested in the fate of the cheetah in Africa. They’re just killed for fun and there are experiments going on to see if extinct animals can be rebred in captivity and then put back into their natural environment. It s not working that well, but at least someone is trying. Those are causes I believe in.” But she confesses: “I did have fur coats once I admit; I don’t wear them any more.”
By now America wants its breakfast and England wants its dinner. She’s done enough already to prove that English roses bloom well enough in the hot Californian sun. The great English public, meanwhile, have proved that they can be just as successfully regrafted.
Olivia would have got that film role eventually, she will assure you. Who needed John Travolta, she’ll add. After all if he’d been that famous then she wouldn’t have done it all. The sun is climbing the sky, the shadows are shortening. The horses are in the paddock, the dogs and cats are in the kitchen. Olivia Newton-John is out of the shower. And the goody two-shoes are firmly locked away in the cupboard. They won’t be needed again. A blonde haired entertainer with very large blue eyes has - nearly arrived.