Olivia calling it quits?
By Jenny Cullen
Chloe Lattanzi has changed Olivia Newton- John’s life, and made one of Australia’s favorite daughters rethink her priorities. Olivia is one of the world’s most successful singers, but since baby Chloe arrived on January 16, Olivia’s career, ambitions and her plans to record and to travel have all been put on hold. She is too happy and too involved being a mother. Everything else is secondary.
Even her pre-birth promise of a trip to Australia this month, a month after Chloe’s due date, (she in fact arrived a month early) has been postponed for the moment. Olivia, according to her friends, has no plans to leave her ranch in Malibu, California. She is just too happy there with husband Matt Lattanzi, looking after and playing with what she considers her best- ever production little Chloe. At 37, Olivia, who has looked forward to children of her own for 20 years, is revelling in motherhood. She is determined her special joy in this new role will not be overshadowed by her celebrity status or overtaken by the demands of her career.
For this reason, she has refused interviews and will not pose for any publicity pictures with Chloe. Nor will she do any of the promotional work associated with a celebrity. Instead, she has tried to lead a normal life as a mother with her baby. She spends hours watching and enjoying Chloe, delighting in each new development the wide eyed recognition, the gurgles at bathtime, the fun Chloe has kicking on her blanket and her wobbly but determined attempts to grasp the multi-colored mobile over her crib. Olivia recounts every new thing Chloe does in detail, not only to Matt, but to her close friend Nancy Gould who had a baby at the same time, to her sister Rona and her mother Irene Newton- John, who flew to Los Angeles from Australia only weeks after the birth.
Reporters and photographers the world over have all met with Olivia’s charming but flat refusal for interviews and pictures, although she has promised that when she decides to talk about Chloe, Australia will certainly have precedence. According to Olivia’s close circle of friends, many of them Australians, she is too involved with motherhood to want to be on show. “She was so looking forward to this baby, but I think her joy at being a mother even surprises her,” says one friend. “She knew it would be good, but I don’t think she ever imagined she’d feel quite as happy and as maternal as she is. It surprised … and pleased… her.” A regular visitor to the ranch, and one of Chloe’s doting godparents, is Australian actress Chantal Contouri, who describes the baby as “just gorgeous”, but who won’t discuss Chloe publicly. “That is not my place,” Chantal says firmly. “It is Olivia’s baby and when Olivia is ready to talk about motherhood and what it means to her, she will.”
Another close friend says the baby is blonde, blue-eyed and very good. “I know people always say this baby or that baby is so good, it just sleeps and eats and plays and smiles, but really, with Chloe that’s true. It’s not just talk,” he says. Olivia, long before she married Matt, always made it clear there was a division between her professional and private lives. While she owed much to the public and her fans for their support, she did not owe them revelations about her personal life. For all her success since her teenage years in Australia, she has always wanted a happy marriage and children. Now she is finding just how fulfilling and wonderful motherhood can be, friends would not be surprised if she retired from full-time performing in favor of being a mother and wife.
Certainly, that seems the way Olivia is planning her life, and what career decisions she is now making are not those which will take her away from Matt and Chloe. She and Pat Farrar, her longtime friend from her Melbourne teenage days, are designing their own range of clothes for their Koala Blue store in Los Angeles and the franchised Koala Blue stores worldwide. And with Nancy Gould, Olivia has put together a treatment for a feature film she and Nancy will write for Paramount.
Olivia’s trip to Australia, while still planned, has been postponed because she now feels Chloe is too tiny to travel such a distance just yet. At the time of Chloe’s birth, Australia was swept by rumors that Olivia would move permanently to live on her farm near Ballina in northern NSW. There was also talk that Olivia, hounded in 1983 by a fan’s death- threat letters, might choose the safer surroundings of Australia. But her publicists and friends strongly deny this. “Olivia loves Australia. Her family and close friends live there, but her home is California. She’s been there more than 14 years, and there’s no way she’d leave the US” one friend says. At Malibu, with her animals, Matt and now Chloe, Olivia is happier than she has ever been. “I can’t imagine a life now without Chloe,” she tells friends.