A Devoted mum who puts her family before her business
By Janet Menzies
In Grease we saw her grow up from sugar candy queen to high school siren. Now Olivia Newton-John has matured a stage further. With a happy marriage, a young child and a successful chain of retail fashion stores, she’s enjoying the new role she shares with many women that of working mum, combining career and marriage.
It’s an image which sits happier on than the sexy look attempted in albums Physical and the little known follow-up Soul Kiss. Even now at 40, Livvy to her friends, looks too fresh and open for that, as she restlessly moves to the window of her apartment wanting to get outside and enjoy the September sunshine with her two-year-old daughter Chloe. Her new album, The Rumour, out next month, reflects the changed emphasis of her life. Songs cover subjects varying from ecology to AIDS, to single parenting to role reversal. They’re the sort of subjects working mums like Olivia are often concerned about but very few end up writing songs about!
So what is most important in Olivia’s life at the moment: motherhood, marriage, business or being a pop star. “Chloe definitely. My daughter is number one, and I try and fit everything else in around her and our family life. I waited a long time to have a child, and now I have she’s just too precious to waste. I haven’t recorded in more than three years, not since she was born. I looked after Chloe myself I refused to have a nanny or anything until this year when I had to have one for the travelling. I’ve brought Chloe here with me to London and I always stop work promptly in the afternoon so I can be with her.”
She’s being taken to the zoo in Regent’s Park this afternoon. Olivia breaks off to look wistfully out of the window, giving the firm impression that that is where she would much rather be too. I wondered whether this conflict would become even more difficult as her recording career goes on and her Koala Blue fashion chain expands further afield?
“I’m going to make sure it doesn’t. My husband Matt is doing a lot of film work, but we still see each other all the time - we scarcely ever spend more than a couple of weeks apart. Still, I know he would like to see me at home more but we will work it out, you can do when it is a priority.”
Olivia’s husband Matt Lattanzi is, several years her junior. They met during the filming of Xanadu where, he was a stand-in for Olivia’s co-star in the dancing sequences. There were inevitable snide remarks from the press when they got together. “They didn’t bother me so much as the fact that I had these rather conventional hang-ups about relationships, and my parents divorced when I was 10 so I really didn’t want to get married. We were friends first before romance ever came on the scene.”
“We lived together for about five years before we got married four years ago. It has been so much better being married though I couldn’t define exactly why! I wanted a child with Matt, so then I knew we were right together. The family is the priority. I have had the career. I’ve done it once and I’ve done it twice, but now I have something more important.”
Olivia has certainly been in show business a long time she was 15 when she first started singing in Australia and her stage persona is now on its way to its third incarnation. But it has been said that her various images have been stage-managed over the years. “I never personally felt I was part of the star-making system. The images spring from me you cannot create something that isn’t there. The down side is only coming along now because of my daughter. I want to be more anonymous now, because the whole star-treatment thing has changed what I perceive as being normal. All the fuss is not normal so I have to be very careful about that. You lose your privacy especially when you are travelling and when you are out there doing your stuff, you are putting your family in that position too.”
“It’s easier in Los Angeles where I live - they’re very blase about stars.” Perhaps that’s why she continues to live in America although she is Australian, but maybe one day Chloe will go back to Australia to go to school? “Never boarding school. But school is a problem I’m thinking about now. If I send her to an ordinary school she’ll have to cope being different but on the other hand those star schools tend to turn out brats, it’s a hard choice.” Olivia herself came from an ordinary background. Her mother was not really keen on her singing. “Mum wanted me to go to university, she was very protective really, though she was tremendously supportive when I got started. I came from a jolly good old English-German background which was very work oriented. It said you had to do your work first and then you could enjoy some pleasure and that has stayed with me.”
“I’m enjoying all the work involved with Koala Blue now, it’s very stimulating to do something so different.” Koala Blue started off with a single Los Angeles shop doubling as a milk bar and sports clothes outlet that Livvy started up with a very old friend and one-time stage partner, Pat Farrar. Now there are 19 outlets with a multi-million pound turnover and Olivia is very much the international businesswoman.
What of the future then? Which of her many facets will dominate? “Well, Koala Blue was nothing four years ago compared with now. And I get a tremendous kick out of that. I consider myself to have the opportunity of being a working and very happy mum!”