“It’s over”

In a revealing interview, Olivia Newton-John claims victory in her battle with breast cancer. By Larry Schwartz.

THERE were nights when the moon shone hauntingly and she could not sleep a wink. She would lie awake, fighting back tears, fearing that if she dropped off she might not wake again.

“Then the morning comes,/ with its golden light,” Olivia Newton-John sings in a song she wrote after one of her first chemotherapy treatment sessions two years ago. “And I feel all right,/ and my heart beats again./ But the night is not my friend.”
The English-born entertainer who grew up in Melbourne, and found fame and fortune in music and film overseas, has been through her hell of cancer and back. She is determined that the long night is over.

Asked if she is in remission, she says: “I don’t like to use that term because `remission’ sounds like it’s going to come back. It’s not going to come back; it’s over.” Then she laughs.

Forty-six this month, the golden-haired Newton-John still has something of her youthful radiance. You see it as she sits on a sofa in the 10th-floor city hotel room, her blue-woollen-socked feet tucked girlishly beneath her.

In grey tracksuit pants and a loose grey cardigan over white shirt, she still has something of the ingenue Sandra in the late 1970s film Grease. Except that the unmade-up face betrays the concerns of recent years as much as the partying until the early hours after the Farm Hand concert the night before.

“Oh don’t ask `Why me? Why me?’ … Life does the strangest things./ You never know/ what each moment can bring.” These lines from a song on a new CD due out this week were penned two years ago, soon after doctors at Cedars Mount Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles performed a partial mastectomy to remove a malignant tumor in her right breast.

There is an engaging cheerfulness about her the morning we meet that belies her experience with a disease she says is now afflicting so many women it is reaching epidemic proportions.

“I was very healthy. I worked out. I exercise, I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. That’s why I think it was a shock to my friends because, of all people, you wouldn’t have thought me …

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN’s cancer was diagnosed on 3 July 1992, the day her father died. She had just returned from visiting him in Sydney.

Mindful of her grief, actor husband Matt Lattanzi decided to keep it from her for a few days. “He didn’t tell me the results of my biopsy because he thought it (her father’s death) was enough to deal with.

“It was a lot to carry around by yourself. I have a lot of love and respect for that because I don’t know if I could have held that in.

Knowing and not telling, anyway. It was a very powerful time.”
When she learnt of her plight, her biggest fears were not of surgery or the cancer itself. “I was more frightened of chemotherapy treatment than I was of anything,” says the singer-actress, who had come down to Melbourne from her second home – a farm at Byron Bay, where eight-year-old daughter Chloe is now attending school.

“I was really afraid of it …I had watched my best friend’s daughter. She got leukaemia and it was horrific. I was very lucky. I wasn’t on as strong chemicals as she was. But it just held a fear for me.

“I think, having seen her go through chemotherapy – and it wasn’t a pleasant one – that’s probably what made it frightening for me. But her mother, Nancy – a really, really dear friend – she was the one who guided me. She is an incredibly strong woman and I respect her greatly.

“She and her husband are Buddhists and they got through this with great dignity and strength … and she just told me that I was going to set the mood for this and it was up to me. And it was very positive from the beginning. There were lapses – there were nights now and again when I’d be afraid – but basically I was very positive.”
Despite misgivings, Newton-John chose to have chemotherapy. In addition, she tried, as she puts it, “a lot of alternative things”.

She had long been conscious of the importance of diet to general wellbeing. For years a vegetarian, she now occasionally and reluctantly eats meat because a doctor told her she was anaemic and needed more than the iron supplements she was taking could provide.

“I did meditation, I did acupuncture, I did yoga. I did all the alternative treatments and I had a wonderful homoeopathic doctor who gave me a lot of drops. I got special drops from Germany to keep my immune system strong.

“I was very much in the middle as to whether I should go with that or whether I should go with alternative type of medicine: I ended up going with both. I thought I would cover all my bases.”
BACK in Los Angeles, Newton-John lives in a world where women prize youthful beauty all the more because image can determine livelihood.

“What is it that men can look like slobs and no one cares?” she demands with a mischievous laugh.

In her late 20s she played a teenager in Grease. Was there pressure to hold on to her youthful looks? She seems to struggle for an answer.

“It’s a hard one because the adult woman – because I’m a woman now – wants to be able to age gracefully and accept it but, because of the business I’m in, it makes it hard.

“Because if you go into Hollywood most of the women there, over 40, who are working have had plastic surgery of some kind. The camera is cruel, you know … It’s a difficult one. I get torn between both because of my work and because of just wanting to be a normal person and accept life because that’s what happens. So, I haven’t done anything yet.”
THIS being so, you might think the partial mastectomy would have been particularly traumatic. But she says this is not so: her femininity was not undermined.

“For a lot of women it is. I had reconstruction. So that kind of helps and more women should look into that alternative. I think a lot of women focus on their figures and their bodies … and I guess it’s especially hard for some women. It wasn’t so hard for me. I was more concerned with just being well and the fact that they could do this really made it a lot easier.”
Husband Lattanzi’s supportiveness was crucial. Others also helped her endure: “A lot of women go through this alone and it must be really hard.” She believes that it is vital to be part of a mutual-help group.

“The doctor I was seeing for chemotherapy gave me a woman to call before I had my first, because I was afraid. So I spoke to her and she talked me through the first one. And then I met her and about four other women. We would meet every couple of months. We would all be at different stages of treatment and we would compare notes and have a good laugh.

“And then I helped, in turn. He would call me and say he had another patient. It was a really good idea.”
She is nevertheless frustrated that too little is being done to deal with the disease. “I think that maybe the general public isn’t aware of what an increasing epidemic breast cancer is. It used to be one in 12 (American women afflicted) Now I think it’s nearly one in eight.

There needs to be a lot more research.

“I think women historically have never had as strong a voice as men.

We’re getting better but we’re still in society the underdog in that way. The gay community, for instance, has banded together and put up an incredible stink about Aids and something has been done. I think women need to put up a stink about breast cancer. Maybe we should be more vocal.”
She sees a role for herself through her music. “This woman wrote to me and said that her daughter was really ill and she had lost hope and she was really worried about her. And she said, `I hear that you’ve got a song called I’m Not Gonna Give In To It. Where can I get it?’ “I thought: `Even that’s good.’ That’s one person but I know there are a lot of people out there who can maybe feel that they can listen to a song and realise they’re not alone. Instead of writing a book about it, I put it into my music.”
ALTHOUGH she had sold millions of records, Newton-John was never quite the darling of the critics. “She’s such a pro at dishing out the glop that it’s relatively painless and pleasant in a sugary sort of way” (Peter Reilly of Stereo Review).
“Music to go with your marshmallow sundaes” (Rolling Stone record guide). “If white bread could sing it would sound like Olivia” (anon).

To be released tomorrow, Gaia. One Woman’s Journey is a new departure for a singer once described as “a chameleon among vocalists”, and who has enjoyed success in three different singing styles: folk-tinged pop, middle-of-the-road country and harder-edged hits.

Newton-John, who apologises to friends in an early song on this CD for her failure to record, as intended, an album of songs penned by others, has financed, co-produced and written all 12 songs.

Gaia takes its title from a Greek mythological personification of the Earth. “There is a theory which I believe quite instinctively is true, that Gaia is a living breathing organism,” she says. “It’s not just a thing that we are sitting on. It has life and force and we’ve messed with it to a terrible extreme.”
She speaks of environmental and other issues in a way that would sound perilously close to the hollow hum of new-age jargon were it not for the knowledge that she has had to measure her insights against the harsh reality of cancer. “I believe that out of everything bad comes something good eventually, if you just trust the universe.”
For a CD that has much in it inspired by fear of death, chemotherapy and breast cancer, the sound is notably upbeat. Perhaps it says something of the courage with which she has endured hard times. Not just her own experience but the deaths of both a best friend’s daughter and her father.

Then there was the demise of her ambitious Koala Blue fashion business. In February, 1991 the business collapsed. In May the following year, receivers advised the singer to sell up the company’s assets, worth an estimated $US4million, and begin paying back the $8 million owed.

She had set up the business with former singing partner Pat Carroll.

“We imported everything and after a number of years we ended up licensing the name and manufacturing our own clothes, and people opened their own stores and we had around 40 stores around America and a couple here,” says Newton-John, who was named US celebrity business woman of the year in 1989 because of her role in the venture.

“Anyway, a very long story made short, the business side wasn’t really well handled and we went bankrupt. We tried to save it and I put a lot of money into the company. We lost a heck of a lot of money and everybody else (did) in the end.” Legal action by the storekeepers against the singer and her partner failed late last year.

Her new CD was recorded in Byron Bay with some local musicians. She says she financed it herself, partly because she did not want to be locked into record company expectations and demands. There is no certainty of success.

“It might do well; it might not do anything. But, really, it was important for me to do it: I’ve never done anything totally by myself that way.”
THE youngest of three children, Olivia Newton-John was born in England in September 1948. Of Welsh descent, her father, Bryn, taught German at King’s College, Cambridge University. Her mother’s father was the late Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Max Born.

She was just five when Professor Newton-John was appointed master at Ormond College, Melbourne University, and the family emigrated to Australia. Although she travels on an Australian passport and maintains close ties with this country, she lived here only until her mid-teens.

“When I was first in Australia, they always referred to me as `that Pommy’ because I was born in England,” she says. Pursuing a musical and film career in England and America, she has been considered Australian “because of my accent, I guess. You are what you sound like”.

Her attachment to this country is intensified by the fact that she spent her formative years here. Not yet in her teens – about the time she won a Hayley Mills lookalike contest – her parents divorced and she was given into the custody of her mother.

Though she would later marry, she once told an interviewer marriage was “a thing which frightens me” because her parents, sister and friends had divorced. Changes, one of her early songs, describes the trauma for a child where the parents have separated.

Perhaps this is what makes her wary of career pressures that undermine motherhood. “When I’m with my daughter, I just want to be in the Mummy mode sometimes … because it’s hard for the children of celebrities.

“She did say to me recently … `Why can’t you be something normal? Why can’t you become a vet or something? So that you can be like other mums.”‘ Bryn Newton-John had considered a career as an opera singer. By the age of 14, his youngest daughter had formed a singing group with three friends and was performing at a Melbourne coffeehouse owned by a family friend. At 16, she won a talent contest judged by Johnny O’Keefe – the prize a free trip to England.

For a year, she agonised over whether to complete her schooling or embark on a singing career, eventually taking the trip. “I didn’t want to leave. My mum insisted I went to England and I didn’t want to at the time. I was very much: `I want to stay in Australia.’ She wanted me to widen my horizons because she was European, my mum. At that time, she wanted me to go to Rada, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I was furious at the time, but I thank her very much now.”
While she never made it to the academy, hers has been an extraordinarily successful career. There was a short-lived pop group, Toomorrow; a screen debut in a science fiction movie of the same name; British top 10 hits in the early 1970s with a cover of Bob Dylan’s If Not For You and the traditional Banks of the Ohio; crossover country- pop hits with songs such as Let Me Be There, I Honestly Love You and Please Mr Please.

Then there was the female lead, opposite John Travolta, in Grease, and a solo hit with Hopelessly Devoted To You, a leading role in Xanadu, and the aerobics song Physical. There have been duets with Cliff Richard and Andy Gibb. She also wrote a children’s book, called A Pig’s Tale.

“I asked for the keys to paradise, and there you were.” (from I Never Knew Love). I had assumed this song was addressed to her husband but Newton-John says it has to do with a “spiritual opening” she had experienced.

IN a busy schedule commuting between homes in Los Angeles and Byron Bay, between the hard knocks of business and personal losses, Olivia Newton-John has found time in recent years to embark on a personal voyage to which she alludes in the title of her new CD.

The singer has never quite been comfortable with organised religion.

She describes her mother as “pretty much agnostic” and says her father became disenchanted with the Presbyterian Church over an unsympathetic attitude he perceived towards his failed marriage. She says she became disillusioned when a priest rejected her childhood questioning with the suggestion that she was challenging authority.

“There are some things that are private,” she says. “But I have my own belief system, my spiritual path that I’m on.”
Confronting her fears of cancer and chemotherapy, she gained a depth and insight at odds with the petite-blonde-blue-eyed-soft-voiced “cotton-candy” image that once dogged her.

“You can’t put into words an experience because it changes your whole being. Your essence. I think it made me grow up. I think it made me face a lot of things. And I’m still growing … you don’t get cancer and the next day you’re changed.

“It’s an evolution, an ongoing process, and it opened me up to talk about these kinds of things that I probably wouldn’t have done. A couple of years ago, I would have been much more introverted about these things.”

THE SUNDAY AGE, 18-Sep-1994