Olivia Sticks With Country Flavour
By Mary Campbell, AP Newsfeatures
Olivia Newton-John, wearing a bright green velour jogging outfit, her blonde hair in two pigtails, looks younger than 28, shorter than 5 feet 6 and smaller than 110 pounds. Twice during an interview she reacts to questions by rolling over on a couch and kicking her legs gleefully up in the air like an adored child. Her smile flashes frequently, as bright as Debbie Reynolds, making her face suddenly quite beautiful.
She’s in New York for her first ever performance in the city and it was her decision finally to play there. “I just didn’t think the time was right for New York for me. I was apprehensive. But nothing is decided without my okay.”
A classy hall was chosen for the concert - the Metropolitan Opera - and each person attending was handed a long-stemmed rose.
The New York Times review is headlined “Olivia Newton-John Conveys Her Niceness” and the review, thoughtful, with some flattering things to say, some not, describes her as blending “images of the crinolined antebellum South with the buoyancy of a modern-day Texas cheerleader.”
In her teens, Miss Newton-John just sang, naturally, without working at it. Later she had some good advice which steered her toward country-flavored songs and now she says she has the experience to know what’s best for herself. It’s still ballads and the country-flavored.
She was born in Cambridge, England, where her Welsh father taught in a college, moved to Melbourne, Australia, when he accepted a job there. She lived in Australia from 5 to 16. At 15 she won a talent contest, which led to offers to sing on TV. The prize was a trip to England, which she didn’t want. Her parents had been divorced when she was 10 and her German mother thought she should sample some of England’s culture.
“She encouraged my singing career and made me work hard and realize I wasn’t going to get anywhere being lazy. I was no different than any other kid of 15; you resent your mother. Now I look back, I see she was very important to me”.
“When I went to England I had a boyfriend in Australia. I intended to stay three months; all I wanted to do was go back and get married and settle down. Eventually I went home after a year and I heard myself saying, “No. I don’t want to get married. I want to go back to England.”
Miss Newton-John toured as a duo with Pat Carroll, another Australian, until Miss Carroll’s visa ran out and she had to go back. “I had an English passport. My mother again. I wanted to be like everyone else and have an Australian one but she said someday I’d be pleased to have an English one and she was right English one and she was right again.”
She now lives in Malibu, Calif., with a cat, dogs and horses which she rides in the hills behind her home. In New York she walks a friend’s dogs in Central Park.
The New York performance is the last of three weeks of one-nighters which followed a week each in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.
All six of Miss Newton-John’s albums on MCA Records and four singles have been certified gold. She also has received three Grammy awards, best country female vocal, in 1973, for “Let Me Be There,” and best pop female vocal and record of the year, in 1974, for “I Honestly Love You.”
After Pat Carroll went back to Australia, Miss Newton-John joined Toomorrow, “which looked like a sure shot. It was going to be the new Monkees, in a series of films rather than TV. There was a black guy, a Cockney boy, a handsome cowboy from Georgia and me. We made a film and it died. For two years we were being flown around and introduced to people and we didn’t work at all. I think we were a tax write-off, actually.”
Only after that did Miss Newton-John’s career get going. Her manager then, Peter Gormley, liked country music. He picked “If Not for You,” her first single, which became a hit in England. Some Nashville folk didn’t like this foreigner’s success with country music, a brouhaha which she says has blown over. “Anyway, you can’t put music in a suitcase and shut the lid.”
“I always wanted to be a ballad singer. My biggest record has been ‘I Honestly Love You.’ It’s the sort of ballad I always dreamed of finding. My producer rang me up and said he’d found this incredible song in a box of demos. I heard it and flipped. Helen Reddy tells me she’d heard it and told them to send it to me. I didn’t know that; it was just amongst a pile of junk. Now we listen to everything that comes in, just in case it happens again.”
The demo was sung by its composer Peter Allen, Australian, as is Miss Reddy.
She thinks she has always been ambitious, Miss Newton-John says, though that word meant ruthless when she was growing up, so she denied it in herself. But she thinks it’s probably what kept her going, through years like TooMorrow.
It hasn’t been difficult to keep her private life private, she says, because “I’ve been with one person for a long time until recently. There was nothing to write about.”
“Maybe one day I’ll marry. I’ve always looked after myself financially, so marriage doesn’t represent that kind of security to me. I still believe it should mean being with someone the rest of my life. To make that commitment is the hardest thing. I’ve seen so many negative things in marriage. I’m going to be 100 percent certain.”