Olivia (21 page)

 

Olivia’s next album,
Totally Hot
, a mixture of soft rock and light disco and released a few months after
Grease
, proved the point. Olivia smouldered in black leather in the cover photos and the album included a cover version of the Spencer Davis Group’s international hit ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ as well as a couple of disco numbers. The album was another big seller for her, reaching number seven in the US charts, while the single taken from it, ‘A Little More Love’, peaked at number three in the US and at number four in the UK.

Chapter 9

Hell on Wheels

MATT LATTANZI

 

 

EVER SINCE
GREASE
had proved to the movie industry and, more importantly, to Olivia Newton-John herself that she could be a success in Hollywood, a search began to find another screen vehicle for her. In the movie echelons that mattered, Olivia was now considered to be ‘box office’. Major Hollywood players were knocking at her door and she, in turn, was ready to build on the status she had acquired from co-starring with John Travolta in such a massive international mega-hit as
Grease
. Success gave Olivia the confidence to take her movie career one step up from co-star to fully fledged movie star. And the feeling in Hollywood was that Olivia was now capable of carrying a film commercially on the strength of her name, provided she had a strong supporting cast and some decent song-and-dance numbers to perform.

Olivia had seen what pleasure
Grease
had given to so many people, and fittingly, of all the movie projects inevitably sent her way after
Grease
, the two that came up for serious consideration by Olivia and her management were both new musicals -
Can’t Stop The Music
and
Xanadu
.

The former was another Allan Carr enterprise and was basically designed to be a pseudo-biography of the chart-topping disco group The Village People. They were a colourfully camp, all-male vocal group formed after Frenchman Jacques Morali saw a young man called Felipe Rose dressed in Indian tribal regalia in a New York gay discotheque, and then one week later spotted him in another gay club with other costumed characters. It gave Jacques an idea: ‘I say to myself: you know - this is fantastic - to see the cowboy, the Indian, the construction worker with other men around,’ he explained. ‘And also, I think to myself that the gay people have no group, nobody to personalise the gay people, you know?’

To anyone hip to the New York scene, such flamboyantly garbed clubbers in gay discos was not unusual. But in the eyes of a visiting Frenchman this became a showbiz fantasy: why not put together a pop group comprising young men dressed up as stereotypical American males? Morali then set about recruiting six good-looking young men, mostly models, to front a selection of catchy songs and gave them the name The Village People as a nod to the men of Greenwich Village in New York.

When their first album sold 100,000 copies and their single ‘San Francisco (You’ve Got Me)’ even made the British Top Twenty, Morali put together a Village People group, including Felipe, who could actually sing as well as look macho. Soon The Village People had an international smash hit on their hands with ‘YMCA’, and a camp dance routine to go with it. The concept caught on like wildfire. The single even reached number one in the UK early in January 1979. It had sold 150,000 copies in just one day over the Christmas period. The group’s follow-up single ‘In The Navy’ reached number two in the UK charts and a third single ‘Go West’ was a Top Twenty hit.

Such was the group’s worldwide popularity that Allan Carr was prompted to write a movie around The Village People which would be a thinly disguised version of the group’s rise to fame. Carr also wrote in a part for an actress to play Samantha, a retired top model who uses her connections to gain the group the recording contract that launches them to fame.

Naturally, after persuading Olivia to star in
Grease
, Carr was confident he would have little difficulty in securing Olivia for the role of Samantha. But by now she was the one who could call the shots and Carr needed her more than she needed him. ‘Don’t be fooled by Livvy’s doll-like appearance,’ Carr remarked. ‘Behind that virginal look is a very full-blooded woman. And she is very smart too. Nothing has happened in her career by accident.’

The alternative project Olivia was seriously considering was
Xanadu
, a movie envisaged as a slice of celestial whimsy with music, a light fantasy in which Olivia would play a muse who comes down from her father Zeus’s mythological Mount Helacon to inspire two earthlings, an ageing ex-jazz musician and a struggling artist, to fulfil their dreams of creating a roller-skating disco palace. This nightclub would be called
Xanadu
after the nineteenth-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’.

Of the two projects,
Xanadu
clearly had the more obvious appeal to Olivia. She would be the undisputed star of the movie as its central character, whereas she would be a more peripheral figure in
Can’t Stop The Music
, which was essentially all about the six men who comprised The Village People.

The driving force behind the attempt to bring
Xanadu
to the screen was a young movie executive called Joel Silver. He was working in Hollywood for producer Lawrence Gordon with the job of developing film projects, and
Xanadu
was the one he had set his heart on getting off the ground. Silver was a movie buff and he was determined to produce a disco-flavoured remake of the 1947 film
Down To Earth
, which starred Rita Hayworth as the muse Terpsichore who comes down to Earth to help a Broadway producer fix a stage show in which she is featured.

Silver was so keen on the project that he once claimed that he was ‘prepared to stab myself in the back’ to bring it to fruition. And the circumstances surrounding Silver’s eventual involvement with
Xanadu
were extraordinary in themselves, even by Hollywood standards. Universal’s head Ted Nanen had fired Silver, whereupon he promptly went to work for his friend and mentor Lawrence Gordon. Since Gordon was also a producer on
Xanadu
, Joel Silver therefore found himself back on the project as co-producer.

With Gordon, Silver developed the story for Warner Brothers but, to their disappointment, the studio eventually passed on it. ‘Maybe they were right to do so,’ Gordon later reflected. ‘A musical fantasy is chancy, and at that time we didn’t have Olivia or Gene Kelly, the eventual stars. But Joel and I still believed in the project. We took it to Universal and they decided to do the film.’

Faced with playing either a heavenly muse in
Xanadu
or a retired model in
Can’t Stop The Musi
c, the choice for Olivia became increasingly obvious, particularly when Universal agreed to Lee Kramer coming on board as
Xanadu
’s executive producer. Besides,
Xanadu
would be an Olivia Newton-John movie, they assured her, whereas in
Can’t Stop The Music
she would be playing second fiddle to half a dozen men dressed up respectively as an Indian, a construction worker, a cowboy, a cop, a GI and a leatherman.

When Jeff Lynne, a prolific and talented composer for the pop group Electric Light Orchestra, was hired to write the score for
Xanadu
, and an assurance given that John Farrar would in addition contribute five new songs for Olivia, the key components for a commercially successful movie venture appeared to be falling into place for her.

The icing on the cake was the signing of Gene Kelly, the legendary dancing star from the golden age of Hollywood musicals. It was a shrewd piece of casting. Although well past his prime as a hoofer, Kelly retained an aura as one of the most innovative and respected figures in the history of the screen musical. Already behind him was a body of work that was equalled only by that other master of dance, Fred Astaire. Kelly’s
Singin’ In The Rain
was arguably still the most popular Hollywood musical of them all and it was thought that his very presence would broaden
Xanadu
’s appeal and draw in a very different generation of cinema-goers from those whom Olivia appealed to.

Olivia was genuinely thrilled when Gene Kelly signed up for
Xanadu
. She was the envy of millions for dancing with John Travolta in
Grease
and now she would get to partner arguably the greatest dance star of them all. Kelly was sixty-eight years old but, given his remarkable track record, it was nonetheless a coup for Olivia when she secured top billing in a musical over such a giant of the genre.

Carr was disappointed and frustrated when Olivia chose
Xanadu
rather than his own project. His negotiations with her over
Can’t Stop The Music
had not been as cordial as he might have hoped. When he finally lost her to
Xanadu
, he attempted to save face by indicating it was he who had eliminated her from his plans rather than the other way round. ‘I’ve just thrown her off my next twelve-million-dollar picture because of her excessive demands,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘Her demands now are what Barbra Streisand’s were after
Funny Girl
, and she ain’t no Streisand,’ he added.

Olivia’s demands could hardly have been construed as excessive. All she wanted was a starring vehicle and
Can’t Stop The Music
quite clearly offered her a subsidiary role to that of The Village People.

Carr eventually wished her luck through gritted teeth and gave the part of Samantha in
Can’t Stop The Music
to Valerine Perrine, a blonde former Las Vegas showgirl-turned-actress, who had made a big impression playing Lenny Bruce’s wife opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1974 movie
Lenny
.

As with
Grease
, there would be a director making his feature-film debut on
Xanadu
. Robert Greenwald was hired on the strength of his work on several TV movies as well as his stage experience.
Xanadu
, he decided, would be fun, bursting with vitality, colourful, full of music and dance. For this he would need to hire a top troupe of liquid-limbed dancers and a casting call went out to find them. One of the hopefuls who answered the call turned out to be a handsome young man by the name of Matt Lattanzi. He was a total unknown at that point - but he would soon come to be known as Mr Olivia Newton-John.

 

 

Matt was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy living in Portland, Oregon, a small town situated some seventy miles from America’s west coast, when he was first struck by the radiant golden beauty of a girl gazing back at him from a photograph in the pages of a magazine.

Underneath the picture of the blonde who had caught his eye in
Billboard
, America’s music-trade publication, was a one-word caption. It simply said: ‘Sam’, and Matt presumed Sam must be short for the girl’s full name, Samantha - he was unaware that the picture was, in fact, of Olivia Newton-John and that the page was part of a marketing campaign for the singer’s new single, ‘Sam’.

Matt gazed admiringly at the photo then ripped the page from the magazine. This Sam was his perfect fantasy girl, he decided, and he duly pasted her picture on his bedroom wall. Like thousands of other teenage boys, Matt regularly went to bed dreaming that one day he might just meet his beautiful pin-up and they would fall in love and live happily ever after.

Born the son of an Italian immigrant who worked as a petrol-pump attendant, Matt was one of an unusually large family comprising ten brothers and sisters. When he left school, the obvious local employment option beckoned: working in one of the town’s sawmills. But Matt never looked to a future as a lumberjack. Like most of his teenage pals, he was interested in music, the movies and the theatre. But, unlike the rest of his friends, Matt wanted to get into showbusiness and he was prepared to work hard to gain an entry.

There were no drama classes at Matt’s school, so he chose to travel to an all-girls school for lessons every day. ‘The first time I went into class must have been the most horrifying experience of my life,’ he remembered. ‘But it broke my inhibitions with girls completely. When you’ve done that, you can do anything. I was very happy there because I didn’t get on very well with the macho locker-room types at my school.’

From school Matt went on to Portland Community College to learn dance and drama. He worked hard at his dance classes seven days a week, and was so conscientious and single-minded that he ended up not just training to be a dancer but also teaching dance as well. ‘It was only when I was using tracks on the album
Totally Hot
for teaching dance classes that I realised my bedroom picture was of Livvy,’ he later revealed. ‘I’d never bought any of her albums or tapes before - despite the fact she was one of the biggest-selling acts at the time, alongside Elton John.’

Matt proved to be so diligent and dedicated at his dance classes that he managed to cram three years of learning into just twelve months. He was fired with ambition and the drive instilled in him by his father who, from his modest beginnings pumping petrol, worked his way up to become a draughtsman and technical engineer.