Her Private Life Is Now A Big Deal
By Richard Lewin, Pop Scene Service
“The press isn’t always kind to me,” says Olivia Newton-John. “I’ve been referred to as being a ‘milkshake.’ What’s wrong with that? Lots of people like milkshakes.”
Olivia Newton-John is a genuinely nice person - no mistake about that - but the ‘milkshake’ label tells only half the story. Beneath that sweetness-and-light exterior is one very shrewd, level-headed person.
Livvy - as her friends call her-has always been known as a singer, but her co-starring role in “Grease” with John Travolta has edged her into the super-star category. The British-born Australian, a self-confessed “normal person,” has been turning up in the gossip columns lately, and much of the gossip centers around her relationship with co-star Travolta.
“When you’re a singer, people aren’t very concerned about your private life,” she explains. “As soon as I became a movie star my private life became a big deal. Everyone was interested in knowing who I was seeing.”
The logical choice was Travolta, and Olivia took on the role of Sandy fully expecting tongue-waggers to link her romantically with him. She denies any such romantic involvements.
“John and I were very fond of one another, but we didn’t have an affair. I’m not the type to get involved with more than one man at a time. I don’t play the field.”
The man in her life at the moment is the one she’s been seeing for the past five years, Lee Kramer. He gave up a thriving shoe business several years ago to become her manager and advisor.
Those Travolta rumors do make for very good publicity, though, and Olivia isn’t averse to that. Her Doris Day image remains intact, but Doris Day is another “clean-cut” type whose sunny exterior belies the toughness underneath. At one point, in fact, Olivia looked into the possibility of starring in a film version of Doris Day’s life.
Olivia seems to be very content with her career at this point - she says she passed up several movie offers before taking the role of Sandy in “Grease,” and it turned out to be a wise move for the beginning actress. She is nothing if not level-headed when it comes to career moves, although she wasn’t paid a spectacularly large amount for the role, she shrewdly insisted upon equal billing with John Travolta figuring that a film featuring the star of “Saturday Night Fever” had to be a hit, and she wanted to be right up there with him.
With her newfound movie stardom has come an intensity that Olivia never experienced during her singing career. At one “Grease” premiere she narrowly escaped serious injury when she was caught in a crush of fans. She came away from that premiere with a few cracked ribs and an awareness of just how chaotic a star’s life can be.
“Until that happened,” she says, “I never understood how movie stars could complain about the things that happen when they go out in public. It can be very scary, but I won’t let that sort of thing interfere with my life.”
Olivia’s Malibu, Calif., home is one place where the public never intrudes. She lives on several acres surrounded by a huge fence with her menagerie-half a dozen horses, some dogs and a couple of cats.
“I really love animals,” she says with a smile. “They’re very giving creatures.”
Her passion for animals goes back to when she was a child. “I picked strays up all the time, but my mother was afraid of them and wouldn’t let me keep them. As soon as I grew up, I began taking them in.”
The daughter of a Cambridge professor and the granddaughter of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Olivia comes by her practical attitude to show business naturally. She says that she was brought up strictly and well, and it shows in her immunity to many of the common show business pitfalls.
“I’m a very practical, level-headed, reasonably intelligent person,” she states. “I have no use for a lot of the things that go on in show business, like drink or drugs. I drink wine with meals, and that’s about the extent of my drinking. I won’t even take sleeping pills - I don’t like the effect they have on me.”
“I wouldn’t call myself a goody-goody about it. I’m very liberal, but I don’t like to see people doing things that aren’t good for them time and time again.”
She showed her tougher side at the end of “Grease,” when she came out to sing “You’re the One That I Want” with Travolta, her hair teased into a mass of golden curls and her body encased in a skin-tight pair of lame slacks.
It’s not the real Olivia, though, she hastens to point out, although she thinks it’s a lot of fun to do that sort of thing now and again.
“It’s great to let go sometimes, but it’s only wonderful if you know you’re just fooling around. I couldn’t make that tough girl image work for me in real