Profile In Courage
After a year fraught with personal and business loss, Olivia Newton-John now faces a battle with cancer
THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT WAS brief but nonetheless distressing: Singer-actress Olivia Newton-John disclosed she has breast cancer.
“I draw strength from the millions of women who have faced this challenge successfully,” she said in a July 14 statement released to the press. “This has been detected early because I’ve had regular examina-tions,” she added, “so I encourage other women to do the same.”
Within 24 hours of the announcement, Newton-John and her husband, actor Matt Lattanzi, 33, and their daughter, Chloe, 6, left their Malibu, California, home for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where surgery was performed. “She had the operation, and it is a big success,” Brian Goldsmith, a Melbourne night-club owner and ex-husband of Olivia’s sister, Rona, said later that day. “They’re all very confident and happy about it.”
The cancer was first detected during a standard examination. “She had always had regular breast check-ups, and it was a routine check-up when she heard the bad news,” says close friend Peter Hebbes, managing director of the Sydney-based Festival Music. Although the doctors have reportedly told her that her prognosis is good, Newton-John was understandably so shaken by the news that she could only comment, “Really, I’m too upset to say anything. I just want to get well.”
According to Prof Allan Langlands, a NSW Cancer Council medical spokesman, about 6,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in Australia each year. The overall survival rate is 78 per cent. Before operating, he says, “doctors attempt to find out if the cancer has spread”. If tests, such as liver and bone scans, prove negative, he adds, “then we can say the tumour is confined to the breast and treat it on its merits”. In California, the law requires a surgeon to give a woman a choice between mastectomy, lumpectomy and radiotherapy.
Newton-John’s operation was just the latest in a series of painfully difficult events that have plagued the winsome 43-year-old performer over the last year.
Late in ‘91, Colette Chuda, the young daughter of her best American friend, Nancy Chuda, died of cancer. Then in March, Newton-John’s Los Angeles-based Koala Blue company, a once-thriving chain of boutiques selling clothes and accessories with an Australian theme, began liquidation proceedings. She and her partner and long-time friend Pat Farrar had launched the company in 1982, but lawsuits initiated by irate licensees charging the partners with breach of contract could wind up costing them millions of dollars.
Only two weeks before her own medical crisis, Olivia’s father, Brinley Newton-John, 78, a former master at the University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of German literature at the University of Newcastle, succumbed to cancer. Olivia had flown to Sydney in late June and spent a week at his bedside along with her older siblings, sister Rona, a Los Angeles-based actress and interior decorator, and brother Hugh, a Melbourne physician, and their stepmother Gay. (Olivia’s father and mother, Irene, a Melbourne photographer, were divorced when Olivia was 10.) When it looked as if her dad was out of immediate danger, Olivia returned to Malibu. He died the next day.
Newton-John’s diagnosis meant the abrupt cancellation of an 8-week, 16-city US concert tour promoting her latest album, Back to Basics, which was scheduled to kick off Aug. 6 in Las Vegas. Although tickets were rumoured not to be selling well, it was viewed as a way for Olivia to revive the career she had put on hold for almost a decade and to earn some needed money. Her Koala Blue woes, she said recently, had persuaded her to “go back to focusing on what I do best”.
Of late that has included environmental activism (Newton-John was a United Nations representative at the June summit in Rio) and, of course, performing. Apologising to all those who had bought tickets to her con-certs, she said, “I look forward to rescheduling soon”.
Goldsmith predicts that Olivia will bounce back quickly. “She’ll handle this very well,” he says. “She is a gutsy woman.” He even sees a bright side to her ordeal. “Because she’s chosen to go public about her breast cancer, many thousands of women around the world will start looking at their breasts and having examinations,” he says. “It might save thou-sands of lives. That something good might come of something that’s awful for her I think will make her happy.”
By Bonnie Johnson Jane Nicholls And Larry Writer In Sydney, Todd Gold And Kristina Johnson in Los Angeles
Photo captions: "She's always been conscious of her health," says a friend of Newton-John (at the opening of a play in June 1991). "She doesn't drink or smoke."
Husband Matt Lattanzi and daughter Chloe joined Olivia at a charity walk in LA in March to benefit environmental projects, Liv's pet cause.
In April, Olivia and Rona (left) escorted their dad to a movie premiere in Los Angeles. After his death, said a friend, Olivia "went into hiding".</br>