Oliv and Kicking
Ed - Not the nicest of articles.
She was the girl with the smile in Grease, then she got Physical and now Olivia Newton-John has a daughter and only a few hours left to save the world…
If you imagine Kylie twenty years on, you’ll get Olivia Newton-John.
Still a golden girl with sand-coloured hair and sand-coloured skin. Still pussycat-eyed, beautiful really; still Australian-sounding despite the Malibu crack in the voice. But more amazingly, still deliberately vacuous. A sugar-spun evasiveness to every probing question leaves you unsure whether she is incredibly dumb or incredibly clever.
She looks frail, but she’s boot-leather tough - a survivor of some of the worst haircuts known to man, unattractive romances and critical appraisals like “If white bread could sing it would sound like Olivia Newton John”. Her career has swooped from saccharine success in the early days alongside Lord Cliff, through the rather obvious high octane sex sell of her Grease period, to the quiet “Let’s save the dolphins!” environment-friendly tunes that no-one has bought in recent years.
It’s all chronicled on Back To Basics: The Essential Collection 1971-1992, the Best Of Livvy compilation due for release on July 6.
Olivia had the greatest impact during the era of Grease and Physical (‘78-‘81) when she was a woman rediscovered, lithe lascivious limbs clad in whatever was the late 1970s equivalence of Lycra, the toothy grin replaced by the Spandex pout.
“It was an evolution. I became myself. I don’t think I knew who I was until I was 33. Meeting Matt (Lattanzi, former dance partner and now her husband) was certainly part of it. I felt lucky, 1 felt happier, less desperate.” Olivia, desperate?
“I was never comfortable with myself. Age brought confidence; I finally stopped making the same mistakes again and again. I was always confident singing, but never speaking… I left school at 15 and I always felt that everyone else in the class got it and I didn’t. Ambition was a dirty word. I would have been offended by it, although now it’s a compliment: it meant being grabby when I started off. I was such a different person. I came to England and TV shows happened by accident. All I thought of was going back to my boyfriend in Australia for that white picket fence.”
“Physical was a 1980s story: I like you, let’s go’. It’s not a very responsible message for now,” she says, suddenly bringing in the platitudes when she thinks she’s revealed too much. Now she wants to talk about environmental issues, because she wants to build a better world for her child - which is the “most important thing” in her life.
The right career moves and wrong men (including an affair with Shadow Bruce Welch of an intensity that almost devastated him when she broke it off) meant she waited a long time before conceiving. A couple of miscarriages since have added to the preciousness of sprog Chloe. However, it’s hard to believe that such a charming person as Olivia could produce this box-headed, American-mouthed, whining, mewling, little six-year-old brat. She objects to her mother doing an interview and she objects to my earrings - she pulls them off, tries them on, tells me they’re disgusting. She’s got a cough; the explosions into the handkerchief must be examined. She wants fruit, she wants chocolate - and Olivia wants to save the world for this?
Olivia’s own childhood was painful, which may go some way to explain her own over-attentiveness.
“It was one of those things that I didn’t realise until much later - well into my 30s - how unhappy I’d been. My parents divorced, and although that’s nothing now, in small town Australia it was looked down upon. My mother was shunned because she was beautiful and single, and the other women felt threatened. I only saw my father twice a year. It was a nice relationship but a distant one - looking back on my patterns with men I think it was the start of some problems, but I never acknowledged it at the time. It made me insecure. I felt their break-up was my fault. I felt guilty and very lonely.”
She talks in a whispery voice, except when she’s uttering platitudes. It’s a real struggle for her to say anything intimate, so when she does it makes you like her.
You don’t imagine Olivia as someone who has suffered; you imagine her full of pap and plastic. She’s always been quiet about what goes on in her inner sanctum, which has led one to suspect she had none. In fact, it is probably too murky and too deep. She touches on a recent experience, in which her best friend’s daughter-the same age as Chloe exactly, her best friend - died of cancer. With the other mother Olivia has set up a foundation to research possible causes of cancer brought on by environmental pollution. “I feel it’s my responsibility. For the first time I’m not afraid to speak out.”
Despite the fact that 1992 has been a very difficult year, in which her clothing empire Blue Koala was bitten into oblivion by the recession, the singer is not diminished by the experience.
“We worked really hard, put everything into it, did our best and we failed. Everything that has gone wrong I have learnt and evolved from. I’ve already told you too much; this is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
I’m really not sure if I should believe her - but then there is the possibility of Grease 3 to be considered. The story has been scripted several years on in the mid-‘70s, in a commune where there’s free love and free drugs and Olivia’s children rebel into responsibility.
“If John (Travolta) and I like the script we’ll definitely do it. Aha.”
She smiles Stepford-wife smug and I want to say to her: please Olivia, please don’t do it. But the brat is screaming that it wants to go on the swings, and although I’d really like to fetch it one round the ear, I notice that my face, too, is frozen in a creepy smile - and there’s just nothing I can do about it..
By Chrissy Iley