Olivia (11 page)

Then one night, at the end of March 1972, Olivia arrived home, unusually past midnight, after appearing in concert, and coolly announced to Bruce she was breaking off their engagement and that their five-year love affair was over. Bruce was not only devastated, but also nonplussed. He’d had no inkling that anything was amiss between them. He pleaded with Olivia to give him some sort of explanation. According to Bruce, she was unable to do so, and the more he tried to prise the reason out of her, the more she clammed up. All she made clear was that they were finished. Olivia was adamant it was over, a fait accompli.

Faced with an unyielding Olivia, the following morning Bruce felt he had no option but to move out of the house at Hadley Common that had been such a happy home for them both. He never went back. With a heavy heart and still shell-shocked by such an abrupt, unforeseen ending to his relationship with Olivia, he moved into a flat he had bought some years before in the middle of Soho, just a stone’s throw from the London Palladium.

Bruce was still very much in love with Olivia and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. At home in his flat he played her records just so he could hear her voice, and at night he found he couldn’t stop his feet from taking him to the Prince of Wales Theatre where Olivia was appearing in concert. There he would forlornly watch her on stage and mourn the love he had lost. He was in complete torment. ‘I went haywire,’ he said. ‘I had nothing to live for.’

Having never had a drink until he was twenty-one, Bruce now started hitting the bottle in a big way to drown his sorrows. ‘My world just fell apart,’ he recalled. ‘It took me two full years to get over it. After a while I would sit at home and drink a bottle of brandy a day on my own - not just once, but day after day, so I put on weight.’

And when the house at Hadley Common was sold, he increasingly felt desperately alone and that he had nobody to turn to - no parents, no grandparents, no relations; his ex-wife Anne had moved away to Majorca with their son Dwayne after the divorce.

‘Having no family hits hardest when things are really bad, like when Olivia and I broke up,’ he said. ‘The sense of isolation and loneliness can be overwhelming. Sometimes I sat and talked to myself because there was simply no one else.’

Bruce’s misery was complete when he discovered towards the end of May that Olivia had been having an affair with a famous singer, believed to be Sacha Distel, and he was unfortunate to find them together at the flat Olivia had moved into in St John’s Wood, round the corner from her sister Rona.

The break-up for Bruce was painful enough, but on a professional level it could hardly have come at a more inopportune time either. He was in the middle of producing an album for Olivia and was also scheduled to go on a Marvin, Welch and Farrar tour. He felt that in the circumstances he could hardly continue to work on Olivia’s album and handed over production duties to John Farrar. And given the amount he was drinking, Bruce felt he wouldn’t be in any fit state to undertake any sort of a tour with John and Hank. He says that at his lowest point he was downing two bottles of brandy a day as well as wine.

In July, heartbroken and at the end of his tether, Bruce decided life no longer held anything for him, and he was ready to end it all. With typical precision, he informed friends that he was going away for the weekend and cancelled his milk and newspaper orders before swallowing some barbiturates and drinking copious amounts of brandy. The last thing he remembers, he says, was the view from the window of his flat, high up above Soho, of a vivid red evening sky stretching across London’s rooftops. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in the Middlesex hospital after coming out of a coma.

For all Bruce’s meticulous planning, he had forgotten one small thing - to cancel the window cleaner. The caretaker of Bruce’s block had let the cleaner into his flat with a master key and, after finding Bruce comatose on the floor, he had called an ambulance in the nick of time.

Bruce remained in hospital for several weeks, during which time Olivia visited him twice. She had career commitments she could not break, including the filming for the BBC of a Cliff Richard comedy thriller called
The Case
, and a tour with Cliff of the Far East in which Hank Marvin and John Farrar would also feature, but augmented by former Shadows bassist John Rostill and drummer Brian Bennett.

For Olivia, the tour of Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan was a welcome change of scenery from the pressures that had been building up around her in London. Her career was moving at a hectic pace and her private life had been in turmoil, but now she was touring with a twelve-strong group she regarded almost as family and she felt relaxed in their company.

The Japanese, in particular, were bowled over by Olivia’s blonde beauty and radiant smile, and she easily charmed the hotel managers into granting her request that all the musicians in her party should sample the delights of staying in authentic Japanese suites. As a tight-knit group of friends as well as British musicians far away from home, they all tended to stick together, sightseeing, going out to eat or playing cards or charades while drinking saki. On one window-shopping expedition, a fabulous Japanese wedding gown in white satin and beautifully embroidered in gold caught Olivia’s eye. Cliff Richard spotted Olivia pausing to stop and stare at the beautiful dress in the window. It had no price tag on it; just a note to say it was secondhand.

Olivia’s twenty-fourth birthday was approaching and Cliff resolved to secretly buy the gown for her as a present. Back at the hotel, he told the others of his plan and swore them to secrecy. He also told them that Olivia must be escorted by at least one of them on any future shopping expeditions to steer her away from that particular shop. He felt that Olivia had been so taken by the dress she was certain to go back for another look and possibly try to buy it.

Cliff’s plan worked like a charm and, as Olivia’s birthday fell on a day when they would all be flying home, he also arranged for a large birthday cake to be smuggled on to the aeroplane along with bottles of champagne - and the dress.

The airline took steps to make sure all twelve in the party were seated together and, at the appointed moment, the captain made a special birthday announcement to all the passengers, who broke into applause. ‘Poor Olivia!’ said Cliff. ‘She was in one big, happy, tearful state when I sprung my special surprise - the wedding gown. She was too thrilled even to speak for a while. Finally she collected herself, thanked us and we toasted her with champagne and each had a slice of birthday cake.’

During the Far East tour, Cliff, who has never married, frequently found himself in interviews having to deny, quite truthfully, that he had any romantic interest in Olivia. From day one he had had a soft spot for her, but he was at pains to point out that his gift of a wedding dress was not a gigantic hint. ‘It was for Olivia to wear on stage and not in church,’ he stressed.

Olivia and Cliff never had a romance as such, but there’s no doubt that he was exceptionally fond of her. ‘She has more sex appeal in her little finger than the whole of Madonna,’ he once said, and he remains to this day a very close friend. There was a time when Cliff kept framed photographs of Olivia both at home and in his office, and Cliff’s late mother Dorothy maintained that Olivia could have been the perfect girl for the bachelor boy. ‘There was only one girl we thought had a chance with Cliff,’ Dorothy once said. ‘That was Olivia. Knowing all the girls he’s been out with and knowing him, I think that was his chance. If he was going to marry, she would have been the girl.’

That may just have been wishful thinking on Dorothy’s part. Setting the record straight, Olivia stated on TV that the possibility of an affair never arose. ‘It was just never the right time, the appropriate time,’ she said of Cliff. ‘He was my friend, and I think sometimes when you work with someone a long time and they become your friend, that’s how it stays. There’ll always be a chemistry between us and we always really liked each other and still do. There’ll always be that closeness, but it just wasn’t meant to be, I guess, in that way.’

 

 

Once back in England, Olivia spoke to Bruce on the phone from time to time and, since Peter Gormley was manager of them both, it was inevitable their paths would cross in Peter’s office. It made for some awkward moments. ‘Our careers were really entwined at that time,’ says Bruce. ‘We had the same office, the same manager and I was producing her records. I couldn’t get away from it. She always seemed to be in the office if I came in.’

A determined Bruce, however, was winning his battle with the brandy after being discharged from hospital in October, and he was happy for Olivia when, towards the end of the year, she found herself with a big hit record in America. ‘Let Me Be There’, written by John Rostill, was a song that Bruce found for Olivia, and it represented a major breakthrough for her in the US when it reached number six in the American singles chart. Olivia could hardly believe it, especially as ‘Let Me Be There’ proved to be a failure in Britain. While it soared up the America charts, curiously it sold only around 8,000 copies in the UK.

As a seasonal goodwill gesture, Olivia invited Bruce to spend Christmas with her. And although the festive reunion was not enough to effect a lasting reconciliation, Bruce now felt more positive about the future. He bought himself a house in Hampstead High Street, in north London, and he was looking forward to working again and getting his life back on track.

Olivia began the new year by taking her cover version of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ into the UK charts. At first it looked as though the record was not going to be a hit and Olivia despaired of it making even the Top Fifty. But it turned out to be what the record industry calls a sleeper. ‘It started selling slowly, over Christmas it did well but compared to everybody else not well enough. Then all the rush on everything else died down and it took off, which was just great,’ she said.

‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ was Olivia’s fourth UK hit in the space of twenty months and, coupled with her growing reputation in America, it was obvious to Bruce that, given the right US management of her career, she could be on the brink of becoming a very big star. When John Denver heard she’d covered his ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, he invited her over to America to appear on his TV special. Olivia filmed her segment in an igloo specially built in the snow in Colorado in the depths of winter. But thanks to the magic of filming it was warm enough within the igloo for dozens of butterflies to be introduced to flit around inside. Steve Martin, yet to become a top comedy actor, played the banjo on one number with a butterfly inadvertently perched on his nose throughout.

Bruce still harboured hopes that Olivia would return to his arms and in April, while they were enjoying a friendly tête-à-tête together at a Hampstead teashop, Bruce was overjoyed when Olivia suggested they should get back together and try again. Bruce says he didn’t ask what had happened to her lover. He really didn’t want to know. All he cared about was that Olivia was happy to have him back. ‘Olivia’s lover was a married man,’ Bruce has revealed, ‘and I believe that she always hoped he would leave his wife to be with her one day.’ Bruce surmised that when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, Olivia had ended the affair.

One year after Olivia had dropped her bombshell on Bruce that their relationship was over, she moved back in with him and they made every effort to make it a loving reconciliation and to pick up the pieces. But it was in vain. They lasted together just eight weeks. ‘Every time we made love, all I could focus on was Olivia in the arms of her lover,’ Bruce revealed in his autobiography. ‘No matter how hard I tried, I still kept seeing the two of them together. When I told Olivia about it, we both broke down and cried together. There was nothing I could do about it.’

The end finally came in June 1973, when Olivia went off to the south of France for a holiday with a girl friend, Greek-born actress Chantal Contouri, whose family, like Olivia’s, had moved to Melbourne when she was a little girl. Bruce later flew out to join Olivia for one last-ditch attempt at a lasting reunion, but within a couple of days they both knew it was over. The spark between them was no longer there and he flew back to London leaving Olivia to continue her holiday with her good friend Chantal. This time the break-up was final.

 

 

Many years later, Bruce was to say:

 

Despite their parting of the ways on a personal level, Bruce Welch would continue to play a significant professional role in Olivia’s burgeoning recording career over the next eighteen months, both as producer, song-finder and songwriter. Olivia even recorded Bruce’s ‘Please, Mister, Please’, which was inspired by the couple’s painful break-up. Bruce co-wrote it with John Rostill and developed the song’s theme about a song on a jukebox that brings back too many painful memories of a lost love. ‘Please, Mister, Please’ would go on to provide Olivia with yet another million-selling Top Ten hit in America in the summer of 1975, peaking at number three.