This longtime admirer and journalist of Olivia Newton-John (Grease, Sordid Lives, Xanadu, Two of a Kind, Summer Nights) read her new memoir, published this week, with intense interest.
The co-written memoir, Don’t Stop Believin’, which is both personal and light in substance and tone, contains many surprises, details and insights. The 70-year-old singer, whose career is marked by several movie performances, cultural milestones and an inspiring musical catalog and personal life, writes in the easy, natural and restrained but relaxed manner with which she performs. The woman knows her ability.
Olivia writes about every part of her life and career. Though the reader may be disappointed that she stresses people’s names at the expense of examining the songs, albums and songwriting for which she’s become a pop star, there’s also no chapter of her life untold. In this sense, Don’t Stop Believin’ is, like memoirs by Fred Astaire and Doris Day, a classic Hollywood memoir.
Buy Olivia’s Memoir
In short, it offers quality, light reading from a rare, telling perspective. Don’t Stop Believin’ is loaded with clinical and treatment details about Olivia’s cancer (she’s recently been diagnosed again, as I wrote about here) which alone makes the book worth reading. Olivia spares no detail yet she never lets herself, her values or her privacy go.
Among ONJ’s disclosures: she was injured in a car crash on LA’s 101 freeway, experienced debilitating pain during her three-year residency in Las Vegas, has a tattoo, failed music and math and became self-educated, was propositioned by a movie star during her first visit to America at LA’s Universal City Hilton and faced Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman during a contract dispute which she ultimately won — in court — gaining ownership of her master recordings.
Olivia traverses everything from her first marriage and divorce to miscarriage, pregnancy and parenting and neither goes deep nor shallow on any one topic. I think the Don’t Stop Believin’ reader will find himself wanting more or less of any given topic. The result, however, satisfies.
Olivia’s lifelong general advocacy for animals and the environment gets particular attention. Introspection comes in glimpses and fragments, with only an occasional indulgence from the disciplined performer. Whether recalling someone’s early career observation, which Olivia took as criticism, that she’s “ambitious” or her late sister or mother, the singer sails through the remembrances.
I adored my father and think more about him now than ever before, especially when I hear classical music, which was always playing loudly in our house. I close my eyes and see my father busily conducting each note as he smiled and drank his evening sherry.”
Some tales may surprise those who don’t know that Olivia Newton-John’s part of an extremely brave, intelligent family that, among other achievements, includes those who were awarded a Nobel prize for physics, helped to decode Nazi messages and invented the first portable iron lung.
Other tidbits include that Olivia sought emancipation from her mother after her parents’ divorce, recorded her first album while the Beatles were recording an album in the same studio and admires Andy Williams, Bob Hope and Dean Martin — with whom she made her first American appearance on television — all of whom she performed with during her youth. You’ll learn about Olivia spending the day with Dustin Hoffman (Kramer Vs. Kramer) during an audition for Tootsie and partying while vacationing with Sammy Davis Jr., Totie Fields, Carol Burnett, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé and Helen Reddy.
In a memorable encounter, Olivia remembers seeing Gloria Swanson at a waterfront hotel during a film festival, recalling that:
I spooned sugar into my [tea]cup at the exact moment, in the South of France, the iconic film star … swooped up those stairs. There she stood in full makeup with a bright silk scarf around her hair and wearing a long, flowing robe with bangles on her wrist. She was absolutely gorgeous, and looking right at me . . . and the tray filled with treats. “Darling,” Ms. Swanson said as she approached. “Don’t eat sugar. It’s poison.” It’s amazing that she was aware of the health risks of sugar back then, and I should have listened to her. Now, it’s forty years later and I’m finally on a no-sugar diet. I’m a slower learner!
Imagine watching Elvis Presley cover your song live in concert at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1974 while sitting next to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice — and then meeting Doris Day backstage. Or suggesting that a new fellow Australian actor named Mel Gibson co-star in your movie Xanadu with Gene Kelly, who’d give you advice for living before rehearsing a dance with you and doing all of his own skating for the movie because he said he loved skating when he was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh. In Don’t Stop Believin’, Olivia puts the reader there.
As noted, Olivia’s admirers (and I am one of them) are likely to be disappointed with a lack of depth and detail. She calls almost everyone she mentions her friend, drawing few distinctions. There’s an abundance of material on her spiritual beliefs but nothing substantial about certain seminal albums such as Have You Never Been Mellow,Physical, Soul Kiss and The Rumour. The memoir lacks an index and discography. When she does write about her music, such as the Nashville-tinged Back with a Heart, the perfect “Right Here With You” or Grace and Gratitude, it’s with a chapter title or brief reference. There are exceptions, such as her thoughts on Grease and “I Honestly Love You”. Olivia proves to be a good observer and storyteller though there is more material about her travels and various plants, animals and exotic voyages — with snakes, rhinos and Magic the Chinese kitten — than about herself and those she values.
Few are as strong — a word Olivia says she likes — as Olivia Newton-John, which I think astute readers, admirers and cultural observers will come to realize, know and appreciate. Olivia captures the wider scope of her life.
“Time is a wonderful healer,” she notes on the topic of losing her sister Rona to brain cancer, “but grief is like an ocean. I found it comes in waves and there are times when you are lost at sea. …” The woman who recorded Liv On, a trio album on grief recovery, also recalls what a friend who lost a child once told her: “grief is just proof that you loved.”
So, read Don’t Stop Believin’ to discover why Olivia declines to use the word remission — why she admires the late motivational author Louise Hay — and why she enjoys vodka in good measure. Reading this memoir helps one to know that Olivia wants everyone interested in her blend of innocence, sweetness, lightness, strength and harmony to know that she honestly loves (especially her husband) and is loved and that you should strive to find the comfort from inside, too.
And ONJ’s sense of play — including having a whipped cream fight with composer Paul Williams in a private jet — comes through. As she describes her first encounter with the late Joan Rivers when the comedienne came to help during a grueling charity walk along the Great Wall of China:
You’ve got your heels on, Joan!” I said in an amazed voice. I’ll never forget her words to me. Joan said, “Olivia, when you invited me, I thought you said the Great Mall of China!” She followed this by walking up a few stairs, turning around and asking, “Where’s the ladies’ room?” Later she told Martha Stewart on her show, “There was so much wind on the wall, I could have skipped my last two face lifts.” She also remarked, “The wall was built and rebuilt over the centuries. It’s had more work done on it than I’ve had on my face.” God love her.”
For sharing some of what is personal and for 50 years of good humor, grace and performing arts, may God bless the thriving and triumphant Olivia Newton-John.
Recent reports that cancer has returned in Olivia Newton-John for the third time are unfortunate. But I know that Olivia, who turns 70 this month and whose mother and sister died of cancer, intends on thriving, as against merely surviving, as she once told me during one of our interviews.
The singer, whose work I’ve long covered and admired, released a statement that she is currently undergoing treatment, emphasizing her use of natural healing methods and cannabis oil for the pain. Olivia founded the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness and Research Centre in Australia.
Buy the Album
So, letting her own idea of “love and light” guide her, Olivia continues to live large, brave and graceful by example. And I continue to draw from her strength, encouragement and balanced, peaceful reality checks, in her appearances, statements, movies, performances and music. When one in my own family was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, I turned to Olivia Newton-John’s positive-themed 2008 duets album, A Celebration in Song, as both a source of clarity and as a gift for the loved one. The impact and gratitude for her album is now a cherished memory.
A Celebration in Song, as well as ONJ’s other softer, more personal albums since the height of her popularity, inspires. I listen to and appreciate every tune, though I consider “Courageous” the perfect song for summoning one’s innermost abilities to thrive in the face of hardship.
I first met and interviewed ONJ nearly 20 years ago and mine was her premier Las Vegas headliner show’s first review. I would love to meet Olivia again for an interview to discuss the publication for her forthcoming memoir. Once again, I wish Olivia a speedy recovery and the best of everything…with love for this phenomenal woman.
Grease revels in the pure enjoyment of contrasting clean-cut and raunchy un-seriousness. It brings both into alignment and this is its enduring charm. Forty years after Grease debuted in movie theaters to major blockbuster success, the 1978 Allan Carr musical adaptation of the Broadway show deserves closer examination.
Opening with romantic pictures of oceanfront sunsets and sand castles and a handsome boy’s pledge to his pretty new girlfriend that “it’s only the beginning”, Grease gets going with an upswell of title music from the 1955 William Holden film Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. More than a melodramatic means of introducing a tale set in the 1950s, the song signals a stroke of unabashed romanticism, which director Randal Kleiser expertly captures and mixes with its blue origins.
As superficial as Grease is and continues to be, the opening orchestration from that other movie’s title theme also cues a streak of defying the status quo. This is easy to overlook but it’s in almost every sumptuous frame of what at first blush might seem like a movie musical accompaniment to TV’s 1974 Happy Days, Elton John’s 1973 “Crocodile Rock”, American Graffiti (1973) and other 1970s-era nostalgia for the 1950s.
Thanks to the creative team, especially Kleiser, songwriter John Farrar and Farrar’s collaborator, pop star Olivia Newton-John, and those in charge of casting, cinematography, music, choreography and costumes, Grease skates along.
For example, animated opening credits feature caricatures of every major Fifties figure from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to You Bet Your Life‘s Groucho Marx. Barry Gibb’s title theme song, “Grease”, perfectly blending Seventies pop into a Fifties attitude and vigorously sung by Frankie Valli over the opening credits, bounds through the speakers as an animated deer and rabbit snuggle up to the cartoon version of leading lady Olivia Newton-John in character at her vanity mirror. This knowing wink with its burst of joy sets the tone for a smart and deviously good sendup. During its 40-year existence, Grease usually gets credit for being fun. Rarely does it get credit for also being sharp.
It’s cutting on multiple counts, if not as raunchy as the original Chicago stage production at Kingston Mines. One of the characters, who’s part of the leathery high school gang led by John Travolta’s Danny Zuko (that boy at the beach as the film opens), lays on his back for an indulgence in what today would be called upskirting. He gets busted and chided instead of being tagged as a “sex offender” for the rest of his life. Such is the picture’s context that any act of sexuality or rock-n-roll rebellion, and the two do go together, amounts here to a dig at the repressed status quo.
The female counterparts, the girl gang Pink Ladies, led by Stockard Channing’s cynical, black-clad Betty Rizzo, suggest that they too, do what they ought not to do, singing in “Summer Nights” about shallow exploits such as golddigging. It’s worth noting that Rizzo’s decked in black before Sandy goes that route. So, there’s a real thread in Grease about reclaiming one’s rebelliousness within the pack of one’s choosing.
This happens amid numerous nods to Lucky Strike cigarettes, an anti-gay gag, a famous adult TV star spiking a precocious child’s drink, jokes about stolen auto parts, a broken condom and the line that “men are rats, fleas on rats, amoebas on fleas on rats”.
There’s also the song “Born to Hand Jive” and a dance scene that puts West Side Story in the dust with nearly every girl hiking her skirt or having it lifted by boys. Then, there’s this exchange between a high school student who hops into a hot rod and a group of boys: “You think this is a gang bang?” One of the boys’ reply? “You wish”.
Carefully, in full color, with vibrant costumes, lush photography and loose, improvised dance movements by Patricia Birch, Grease unleashes and unspools the teenaged anxiety and sexual liberation with cartoonish awkwardness. The kids’ lingo rhymes. The plot skips and moves. Thus, Grease memorably expresses the ethos of the Fifties. Primary colors, simplicity in functional clothing designed to accentuate the human body, wind caressing tousled hair as the American flag waves in the background — Grease puts us on with polish and shine. It’s a movie which is inviting to watch.
This is the Randal Kleiser touch. The director that John Travolta had worked with on ABC’s 1976 telefilm The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, whom Travolta would insist be part of his studio deal, adds depth to every candy-coated scene in Grease. Where there’s raunch, Kleiser delivers warmth. Where there’s sugar, he adds bitterness. Bringing each contrast of the conformist, only partly fabulous Fifties into balance with a winking, buoyant sense of life, Kleiser sunkisses every scene and shuttles between dark and light themes. When the Scorpions come to rumble, Jeff Conaway’s Kenickie flips a switchblade. But Doody’s in the frame with a squirt gun. The gloom of Rebel Without a Cause slips into the youthful energy of West Side Story, always in color.
Grease endures as a film with a reputation which unfortunately gets reduced to the second-to-last scene, in which Newton-John’s Sandy enlists her friend Frenchy (Didi Conn) to turn her into a vamp.
However, judging Grease primarily, let alone solely, by this scene ignores the power of Sandy’s choice. For starters, her display happens only after she witnesses Danny’s brave and magnanimous demonstration of loyalty at the drag race. Also, Sandy’s makeover helps and vindicates Frenchy, her friend and Pink Lady sponsor. Sandy’s sexual coming out follows Danny’s mea culpa and willingness to improve and earn back Sandy’s trust. Danny proves this again and again — with Travolta basically playing his ABC character Vinnie Barbarino from Welcome Back, Kotter — in a series of sports vignettes with Sid Caesar as Coach Calhoun.
Sandy is hardly a feminist. Her origins are as a wholesome girl who prefers a pedicure to pierced ears. She makes Travolta’s Zuko the focus of her most concentrated efforts (and he reciprocates her intensity of romantic interest). But, bearing in mind this is Grease, not Shakespeare, Sandy is also relatively dimensional, openly flirting without shame with the athlete played by Lorenzo Lamas, asserting herself with Danny as they enter the Frosty Palace, where she judges and snubs nasty Rizzo, proving that, like Doris Day and Sandra Dee, it’s a mistake to underestimate the good girl. After all, John Farrar’s “Hopelessly Devoted to You” is the movie’s moral center, complete with a reflection of her beloved dreamboat in the pool. So, it’s a male to whom Sandy, pre and post-makeover, pledges her devotion.
With great casting, especially Eve Arden, and an old-fashioned, Technicolor flair for a sense of the cinematic, Grease gels at a summer carnival, where the nerd, too, is uplifted and transformed. Even hardened, jaded Rizzo softens and becomes human. One of the film’s happiest moments comes when it’s disclosed that the girl rumored to be in trouble isn’t pregnant after all, as if to prove its radical status, whether for 1978 or the Fifties context (making it even more radical more today). ,
That someone won’t be forced to raise an unwanted child is a fact which is cheered, even celebrated. All of this comes in the afterglow of John Farrar’s two-minute-plus declaration of desire, “You’re the One That I Want”, with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John back in black, shaking, dancing and dominating the screen against a yellow backdrop with a sign warning Danger Ahead.
Everything ends with not a hint of doom as Grease lifts the audience and glides into the air to the cast’s climactic song and dance to “We Go Together”. There’s a reason why Grease, sharp and slick as it is, still connects with audiences. It’s not necessarily the best or the brightest musical in movies. But — thanks to the stellar cast and crew and Randal Kleiser’s direction — its blend of nice and naughty, reflecting the Fifties’ innocence, goodness and liberation, shines.
I was sorry to learn today that Olivia Newton-John is “reluctantly postponing her June U.S. and Canadian concert tour dates”, according to an authorized statement on her behalf, as the back pain the singer initially attributed to her sciatica “has turned out to be breast cancer that has metastasized to the sacrum.” Olivia pledged in the announcement to pursue natural wellness therapies, complete a short course of photon radiation therapy and is “confident she will be back [on tour] later in the year, better than ever…”
I decided on my direction of therapies after consultation with my doctors and natural therapists and the medical team at my Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness and Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia,” says Olivia Newton-John.
I have long admired her work as an actress, songwriter and singer—since the 1970s, when I first heard Olivia’s hit songs on AM radio during family road trips to Wisconsin and soon discovered Olivia’s albums in record stores. I had the pleasure to meet and interview Olivia at her home in Malibu and, years later, backstage at her shows at the Greek and in Las Vegas, where I attended a preview concert which was the basis for her Vegas show’s first review.
Buy the Album
I know firsthand that Olivia, whose 2008 duets album, A Celebration in Song, provides some of the best music for those with cancer, is a thriver, as she once told me. This outstanding artist is a leading champion for finding a cure for cancer and she does so with grit, grace and strength. As I wrote of her collection of inspirational songs on this blog in 2009, Olivia makes music “for anyone battling cancer or any of life’s difficulties.” From the opening anthem, “Right Here with You” to the last track, Belinda Emmett’s (1974-2006) “Beautiful Thing,” it’s one of her best. “Courageous” is the perfect tune for summoning one’s innermost abilities to thrive in life. I’m wishing courageous Olivia a speedy recovery and the best of everything with love.
Rescheduled concert dates will be posted on her official Web site “in the coming weeks”, according to the statement.
Look for a new, live album from Olivia Newton-John sooner than later.
The singer and actress recently announced that she’s making a two-disc album based on her first headline residency in Las Vegas, which premiered last spring (read my review here). The live album, Summer Nights: Live in Las Vegas and pictured here, will presumably include songs from her set list for the Flamingo Las Vegas show. This means it’s essentially a greatest hits live album, though a track listing has not yet been disclosed.
Olivia recorded an extended play record last year, Hotel Sessions, with her nephew, Brett Goldsmith, which I discussed with Brett in an exclusive interview. Previously, her last new recording to go on sale was This Christmas with John Travolta (read my review here) in 2012.
I write fiction and non-fiction. Read my blog at left for informal posts on news, ideas and the culture. I am available for contracting, so if you're interested, please start here.
I welcome feedback. To let me know your thoughts, please feel free to contact me.
Look for a new, live album from Olivia Newton-John sooner than later.