Olivia (28 page)

There was many a misty eye among the guests as they caught a glimpse of Olivia in her beautiful dress and hip-length veil for the first time. Matt’s parents shed tears of joy as they watched Olivia, escorted by her father Brin, take the short walk to meet Matt and stand alongside him to the accompaniment of ‘Here Comes The Bride’ played by a string quartet.

Jackson caused some amusement by doing his best to join in the ceremony. The dog chose to stand close to his mistress when Olivia and Matt, dressed in a black Armani tuxedo, exchanged their vows and wedding rings before Judge Jerry Pacht of the Santa Monica Superior Court pronounced them man and wife.

The ink barely had time to dry on the marriage register before Olivia’s new in-laws, Charles and Jeanette, were talking excitedly of the prospect of the newlyweds producing grandchildren for them. ‘It was beautiful, fun and exciting,’ Jeanette said of the ceremony. ‘Livvy was just like any other bride would be, giggly and happy. We’re just hoping she gets pregnant very soon. She does want a family. They didn’t really say when they were going to start trying, but I’m sure it will be soon.’

After the couple cut the three-tiered chocolate wedding cake covered with fresh flowers, Charles Lattanzi expressed confidence for their lasting happiness. ‘They both have a lot in common,’ he said. ‘They are both very caring and very considerate of everyone around them. That’s something I think will keep them together. They both have very sound qualities which will enable the marriage to prevail through the hectic conditions they both have to work in.’

Olivia and Matt flew to Paris for their honeymoon, where Matt belatedly bought his new wife a pearl and diamond engagement ring, and they carried on by train to the fashionable Swiss skiing resort of Gstaad. Adventurous as ever, Matt booked a hot-air balloon flight over the Alps, which might have been the romantic highlight of their honeymoon but for Olivia’s fear of heights.

‘It was all fantastic,’ she later recalled, ‘but my most enduring memory is of being absolutely freezing and utterly terrified. My fear wasn’t helped by the fact that the balloonist had the most dreadful hangover and didn’t seem to know what he was doing.’

Aside from her jitters, Olivia’s abiding memory of the flight was a magical moment when the balloon swooped low over a forest and she was able to lean out of the basket and pluck a snow-covered pine cone from a tree. ‘Apart from that, I just remember wishing the whole thing would be over!’ she recalls.

Having waited for so long before taking the plunge, Olivia wasted little time in starting a family. She suspected she might be pregnant one day in the spring of 1985 when she developed a craving for avocados, and a pregnancy test bought from a chemist confirmed it. Matt was away visiting his family in Oregon at the time and she broke the happy news to him over the telephone. His very large family were overjoyed - especially his mother and father. They had ten children, but Olivia’s as yet unborn child would be their first grandchild to bear the Lattanzi name.

On 17 January 1986, without knowing the sex of her baby in advance, Olivia gave birth to a baby girl with Matt filming for posterity on a video camera the arrival into the world of Chloe Rose Lattanzi.

Olivia had always looked forward to becoming a mother one day, but the experience was much more rewarding for her than she had ever imagined and, after recording
The Rumour
while she was pregnant, she was determined that her career would take a back seat for the foreseeable future so she could devote her time to raising her little girl. She even considered retiring, but instead she was so enamoured with the joys of motherhood that she forsook mainstream pop to record an album in 1989 called
Warm And Tender
, which was essentially a selection of classic lullabies and children’s songs.

Olivia persuaded the record company to package the record with recycled paper, and the album also included 120 tips on how to improve the environment - something she felt more keenly was necessary now she had a child of her own. ‘When Chloe was born, she totally changed my life,’ she said. ‘I knew then that I owed her a safe environment to be brought up in, with clean air, clean water and clean food. Having a baby changed my life completely. Suddenly there was someone more important than me. I was transformed. My daughter opened up a world that went beyond me: her world.’

 

 

For the first few years of her life, Chloe’s world invariably included another little girl, Colette Chuda, daughter of Jim and Nancy Chuda who lived close by. Nancy, a broadcaster, was one of Olivia’s dearest friends, and the two women had planned their pregnancies together, become pregnant at the same time and then both gave birth to daughters. The bond between Olivia and Nancy could have hardly have been closer after Colette and Chloe were born just six weeks apart. Olivia became Colette’s godmother, and inevitably the two little girls saw plenty of each other and became the very best of friends, sharing so many of their fun times together.

But when Colette was four, tragedy struck. She was diagnosed with Wilm’s Tumour, a rare form of childhood cancer and, after a courageous battle for life, she died in April 1991, when she was just five years old. It was a devastating blow for the Chuda family, and Olivia felt Colette’s tragic loss very deeply having regarded her almost as one of her own. The cover of her
Warm And Tender
album featured a picture of Colette kissing Olivia while Chloe looked on.

For Chloe, the death of her best friend was especially traumatic. At the age of five, it was so difficult for her to comprehend what had happened and why, and it was just as hard for Olivia to try to begin to explain: ‘I said Colette had gone to heaven to be with God.’

When Colette’s cancer was later proven to be non-hereditary, the Chudas sought to discover any contributory factors. Their research eventually pointed towards environmental toxics, such as pesticides, as the probable cause of the illness that had cost Colette her life. Nothing was going to bring back Colette, but now the Chudas selflessly set out to try and raise awareness and prevent other families from suffering the same heartbreak.

With Olivia’s help, the couple launched the Colette Chuda Environmental Fund to support scientific research on the risks to children from environmental toxics. This later evolved into the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition to inform parents about preventable childhood health problems caused by exposure to toxic substances. Olivia became CHEC’s spokesperson.

Not long after Colette’s untimely death came another bitter blow for Olivia - the collapse of Koala Blue, the chain of stores specialising in merchandise with an Aussie theme that Olivia had launched with Pat Farrar.

The idea for Koala Blue had come to Olivia during conversations with her manager Roger Davies while they were out on the road on a concert tour. They frequently talked about things they missed from Australia and Olivia thought it would be fun to open a bar and a shop where California’s Aussie community could wander in and buy all things Australian, from newspapers to Vegemite, to books, clothing, jewellery and artwork.

The Santa Monica area of Los Angeles, in particular, at that time had a sizeable number of Aussie ex-pats and Olivia envisaged an Aussie-flavoured store where the down under brigade could watch videos of Aussie Rules footie games while eating Aussie sandwiches and cakes and drinking Aussie beers as well as buy typical Aussie gear. The quaint Tudor House on 2nd Street in Santa Monica successfully offered British ex-pats all things British, so why not a similar operation for Aussies?

Pat Farrar was eager to team up with Olivia. She had been thinking of opening a boutique anyway and they decided to go into business together. The two long-standing friends were advised at the start to have separate lawyers because they were warned they were likely to fall out. But they declined, and their friendship never wavered even when their business venture ultimately suffered a catastrophic slide.

All sorts of names were considered for the new business but one day, while she was out driving on her own, Olivia spotted a licence plate that spelled out KOALA and she turned it in her mind into Korner Of Australia Los Angeles. It was, she decided, the perfect name for the company, particularly as the Koala bear is unique to Australia and such a recognisable symbol.

The first shop opened amid much fanfare in 1983 on trendy Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, and the business grew within a few years at an impressive rate to include nearly sixty stores, either company owned or franchised, around the world. By 1989, Koala Blue claimed revenues of $25million and Olivia was named celebrity businesswoman of the year by the US National Association of Women Business Owners. But a combination of too fast an expansion, an economic slowdown and recession, and management decisions that turned out to be wrong, led to Koala Blue’s collapse. In 1991 with huge debts and amid lawsuits and recriminations, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Koala Blue had started out as a fun idea, and Olivia had worked hard to promote it. But now what had appeared to be a thriving business empire was in ruins. It was a bitter blow and a thoroughly stressful time for Olivia. She hated failure. But, as a disaster, it was as nothing compared with what fate had in store for her around the corner.

Chapter 13

From a Curse to a Blessing

DR DEEPAK CHOPRA

 

 

THE SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO off the north-west corner of the United States has long been a favourite holiday destination for Olivia Newton-John. A couple of hundred miles north of Seattle, these pine-scented islands are noted for their outstanding natural beauty, and Olivia has always felt there is something almost magical about the glorious views across the ocean to snow-capped mountains in the distance, and in the foreground the occasional sight of orca whales rising majestically out of the water.

The islands therefore beckoned as the ideal spot for a relaxing, peaceful, back-to-nature few days of holiday over the Fourth of July weekend in 1992 prior to Olivia embarking on her first major American tour in a decade. She had admitted that her financial troubles with Koala Blue had persuaded her to ‘go back to focusing on what I do best’. And the tour would help promote her latest album
Back To Basics: The Essential Collection
, which was a retrospective plus four new tracks.

The start of the tour was now but a month away, and Olivia was grateful to be able to get away to the charming San Juan islands because she had been rehearsing hard. She was anxious to be both physically and mentally attuned for the upcoming tour because ahead of her stretched an eagerly awaited opening night in front of a sell-out crowd at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, on 6 August, followed by sixteen regional concert dates at major venues. Olivia was both excited and nervous at the prospect, and she knew a holiday with friends would do her the world of good.

But just as Olivia, Matt and her great friends John and Pat Farrar were about to board a seaplane to Seattle, Matt took a telephone call. There were two important messages: one telling Olivia that her father had died, and the second from her doctor telling her he needed to see her urgently. The first message was bad enough, but the second rang alarm bells for Matt because he was aware that Olivia had been undergoing a series of medical tests.

Matt was in a quandary. He knew Brin’s death would be devastating news for Olivia, and he wondered how his wife would cope with the additional worry of the call from her doctor and all the implications that went with it. He feared it would be too much for her to bear all at once, so he decided he would pass on the sad news about Brin but withhold the doctor’s message until after their holiday weekend was over. ‘I’ve always been grateful to Matt for that,’ she says. ‘I was in such pain over my father, and Matt knew it was enough for me to deal with.’

That evening, Olivia sat with her friends overlooking the sea at sunset and, as their group were all well acquainted with Brin, they drank a toast to her father, shared their memories of him and recounted affectionate stories about him.

Olivia had known her father was very ill, and she had recently flown back to Australia to be with him as he fought liver cancer. After her visit, she had then flown back to America to continue her rehearsals for the tour. But she had told her father she had every intention of returning to Australia to spend more time with him as soon as her schedule permitted. The news of his unexpected death therefore hit her exceptionally hard. ‘It was an incredible shock because I thought I was going to go back and see him. So it was very sudden.’

On the Monday, Olivia was given the grim news by her doctor that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. A surgical biopsy carried out shortly before she had flown out to Australia to see her father had confirmed it. ‘I’d always had regular checkups and had lumps checked out before and they were benign.’ she said. ‘But with this particular one, I didn’t feel right in myself. This time something felt different. I don’t say this to alarm women, but my mammogram was clear and my needle biopsy was clear, but my intuition said I wasn’t right. So I insisted on a surgical biopsy and we found the cancer.

‘The following week was a bit of a blur. I can remember being in denial and laughing a lot. What else could go wrong? I never had a thought “Why me?” because “Why not me?” I had such a feeling that I’d never felt before nor since. What if the cancer was throughout my body? What if I was going to die? It was that night I made the decision that I would be well, that I would not give in to it.’

Still reeling from hearing of the death of her father, Olivia was now only too glad that he had not been aware of her worries for her own health when she had seen him for the last few times. ‘I’m very glad my father didn’t know as he was suffering enough on his own,’ she said.