Please Olivia Please
Editor’s note - this interview was conducted at the same time as the author’s interview for UK magazine Vox and is similar.
UK, By Chrissy Iley
PLEASE, OLIVIA, PLEASE: If you imagine Kylie 20 years on, you get Olivia Newton-John. Still a golden girl with sand-colored skin. Still pussycat-eyed, beautiful really, still Australian-sounding, despite the Malibu crack in her voice. But more amazingly, still deliberately vacuous. She offers a sugar-spun evasiveness to every probing question, leaving you not knowing if she is incredibly dumb or incredibly clever.
She looks frail, but she is boot-leather tough, a survivor of terrible haircuts, unattractive romances and critical appraisals like, “If white bread could sing it would sound like Olivia Newton John.”
Her career has swooped from saccharin success in the early days, alongside Cliff Richard, to the rather obvious high octane sex sell of the Grease period, to the quiet “let’s save the dolphins” environment-friendly tunes of recent years that no one ever bought. It’s all chronicled on Back to Basics: The Essential Collection 1971-1992.
Olivia wants to talk about the new songs on the album penned by hired hitmakers Georgio Moroder and Diane Warren. She is reticent about casting her eye back to the songs of her youth and whatever it is they symbolize. And with that same embarrassed squidgy smile that we got from Kylie when she said, “I can’t bear to watch myself singing I Should Be So Lucky,” Olivia says, “I could never sing “Banks of the Ohio.’ It’s just not me.”
When pressed about why, and I mean really pressed, she says, “It has an innocence.”
Once the innocence was lost, she wanted to flaunt it. There’s a vague sense of transferring emotional hurt into sexual appetite. Olivia’s most high impact period was “Physical,” Grease, where she was a woman rediscoverd with lithe lascivious limbs clad in whatever was the late 70s equivalent of Lycra. The toothy grin was replaced by the Spandex pout.
Press clippings from the period says This is the real me, I have discovered myself. Rather like after Kylie met Hutchence, when she took drugs, borrowed Madonna’s image of corsetry and leather, and sang about sexual healing as if she was the world’s authority.
Livvy had an even more cossetted existence. And what might have looked to the world like a commercial move into another market was probably an inner volcano. A sexual awakening had gone on that became a sexual insomnia that strutted, pumped and grinded across the video screen.
“It was an evolution. I became myself. I don’t think I knew who I was until I was 33. Meeting Matt (her now husband and former dance partner, Matt Lattanzi) was certainly part of it. I felt lucky, I 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 1 always felt that everyone else in the class got it and I didn’t. I was in a dream world, I couldn’t concentrate. Not because I was driven, I didn’t become ambitious until much later. 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” is a 1980s story. I like you, let’s go. It’s not a very responsible image for now,” she says, suddenly bringing the platitudes in 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, the most important thing in her life.
The right career moves and the wrong men including an affair with Bruce Welch of an intensity that almost devastated him when she broke off meant that she waited a long time before conceiving. A couple of miscarriages since have added to the preciousness of Chloe.
Olivia’s own childhood was painful, which may go some way to explaining her over-attentiveness, “It was one of those things that I didn’t realize until much later, well into my thirties, 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 relation-ship, 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 talking platitudes. It’s a real struggle for her to say anything intimate. So when she does, it makes you really like her, and makes you think, who’d want to be Michelle Pfeiffer when you could be Olivia Newton-John?
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 led one to suspect she had none, when in fact it is probably too murky and deep.
She touches on a recent experience where her best friend’s daughter, the same age as Chloe exactly, Chloe’s best friend, died of cancer. Together they have set up a foundation to research possible cause of cancer brought on by environmental pollution. “Because I feel it’s my responsibility. For the first time, I’m not afraid to speak out.”
Despite the fact that it’s been a very difficult year, with her clothing empire, Blue Koala, bitten into oblivion by the recession, Olivia is not diminished by it. (In addition, since this interview, she has been diagnosed with breast cancer).
“We worked really hard, put everything into it, did our best, and we failed. But that doesn’t mean that I must carry on with a sense that I’m a failure. Everything that has gone wrong I have learned from and evolved. 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 consider. The story has been scripted: several years on, in the mid-‘70s, in a commune where there’s free love and free drugs, Olivia’s children rebel into responsibility. “If John 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 Chloe is screaming that she wants to go on the swings, and I notice that my face is frozen into a similar creepy smile and there’s nothing I can do about it.