Olivia (3 page)

On her recent trip to Wales to find out more about her father’s family, Olivia’s visit to the Canton High School in Cardiff provided her with a clearer understanding as to why her father imposed boundaries of behaviour upon his children. The school her father attended is now Chapter Arts Centre, and enough of the original architecture remained for Olivia to see that there used to be separate entrances for boys and girls. And, in records kept by a former pupil, it emerged that using the wrong entrance or walking past litter and not picking it up was punishable by a caning. ‘So that’s why he was a disciplinarian,’ said Olivia of her father as she was shown round her dad’s old classroom.

Tall and slim, there was an imposing, aristocratic air about Brin that warranted respect, and Olivia says she was even quite frightened of her father when she was a child, particularly when she’d be daydreaming and he suddenly called out to her with his penetrating voice. Nonetheless, he was a tremendous source of security.

Olivia was ten when her world was shaken to its foundations by the break-up of her parents’ marriage and subsequent divorce. It not only had an immediate and profound impact upon her, but it scarred her for life and had a major bearing on her attitude towards marriage and commitment in relationships for decades to come.

Six years after her parents’ divorce, her sister Rona was divorced as well and Olivia said many years later: ‘It left me afraid of marriage because I’d seen so much divorce. There’s hardly a member of my family who hasn’t been through it and I guess I’ve been affected by all that. If you’ve never seen a relationship that lasts for ever, you tend to believe it’s not possible.’

In years to come, Olivia would come close to marriage more than once but she was always fearful of such a step and only finally married at the age of thirty-six. ‘Of course nobody ever wants divorce to happen to them,’ she explained, ‘but I became a bit hung up on it. I was so determined to make the right choice in marriage.’

As her fame grew throughout her twenties and early thirties, Olivia gave countless interviews to the press and it was a rare interviewer who did not ask her when she was going to get married and settle down. Olivia never ducked the question and generally cited her parents’ divorce as the reason why she was remaining resolutely single.

Olivia was very close to her father and she suffered a tremendous sense of loss when it became clear that her parents could no longer go on living together and that their marriage was coming to an end. ‘I can still remember the terrible shock I felt when my father said he was moving away,’ she recalled in a recent interview. ‘He was very upset when he told me.’

The shock Olivia felt was compounded by the realisation that her father was moving not to somewhere close by but to a new home many hundreds of miles away and in another state in Australia. He was to take a new post as a university vice-chancellor in Newcastle, a coastal town some two hours’ drive north of Sydney in New South Wales. ‘After that I saw my father maybe once or twice a year during vacations,’ Olivia remembers sadly.

Olivia’s outwardly sunny nature hid her true feelings, as inside she felt wounded, hurt and insecure. She tried to blank out the ensuing upheaval in her family life. ‘I was always the happy child trying to keep everyone else happy,’ she said.

Divorce in the mid-1950s in Australia was viewed in a very different way from how it’s regarded today. In some sections of Australian society it was still frowned upon as not the done thing, scandalous even, and Brin’s high-ranking university position unfortunately made his separation and divorce from Irene more of a talking point locally than most.

The large majority of Olivia’s friends had happily married parents and it made her feel she was the odd one out. ‘I kept hoping they would get back together again,’ Olivia says.

Following the divorce, Irene stayed put in Melbourne and moved with her children into a small flat. ‘I had to go with my mother but didn’t want to leave my father,’ Olivia would later explain. ‘But I had to cope with my feelings quietly. I kept things to myself. I didn’t want my mother to know that I was disappointed. I guess it must have shown because teachers used to take me out. One of my English teachers used to take me to the zoo so that I would not have to go home to an empty house. My mum couldn’t help it. She had to be out at work all day.’

In an era when it was far from usual for women to work by choice, Irene was forced to take a job as a public relations consultant. She was by now over forty and was having to go out and work for the first time since her marriage. It was a financial necessity if she was to pay the bills, but she resented the fact that her job meant her youngest child was often forced to let herself into an empty flat with her own key when she came home from school. She hated the very idea of Olivia as a latchkey kid but it was case of needs must.

Although Olivia has written some fine songs in her time, it is only comparatively recently that she has become a prolific songwriter. But some twenty years after being hit so hard by her parents’ separation, she was moved to put her feelings about divorce into words in the song ‘Changes’, which she wrote for her album
If You Love Me Let Me Know
. She wrote of weekly outings, gifts and picture shows which could not make up for the absence of a father, his voice, his touch, his manly sound. Olivia actually wrote the song for a friend but the sentiments she expressed in ‘Changes’ welled up from her own memories.

When Olivia’s brother Hugh went off to university and Rona dropped out of school early at fifteen to follow her dream of becoming an actress and then soon got married, Olivia felt her father’s absence ever more keenly. ‘Being alone is hard to cope with,’ she noted. ‘Maybe that’s why I channelled all my energies into music. It helped me not to feel so alone and to accept what had happened.’

 

 

With her keen ear for music, Olivia enjoyed tuning in to the radio in Australia to listen out for her favourite singers, who included Joan Baez, Dionne Warwick, Ray Charles and Nina Simone. ‘More than anyone else they were the people I listened to in Australia. I listened to the radio and I knew every pop song. I sang all the time for my family and friends, but if they asked me at school to get up and sing, I was always too shy.’

Olivia’s reluctance to push herself forward was partly due to her embarrassment over having a double-barrelled surname. It made her feel self-conscious and it automatically set her apart from the other girls. Many was the time she dearly wished she was simply called Claire Smith or had some other surname less fanciful than her own. Her natural shyness, however, coexisted with a strong innate desire to perform.

The first tangible signs that Olivia might be destined for a career in the public eye came when she was twelve. Rona entered Olivia for a local cinema’s contest to find a Hayley Mills lookalike, a girl who resembled the young British actress who was then making a name for herself as a child star in films like
Tiger Bay
,
Pollyanna
and
The Parent Trap
. Olivia duly won but, although she went on to become president of drama at her school and take part in many school productions, she was never going to be Australia’s answer to Hayley - in her heart she was much keener on music than acting.

The Hayley Mills experience did, however, lead to an appearance at the local Melbourne theatre as a cherub in the religious play
Green Pastures
, but music took on a new meaning for her when her mother bought her an acoustic guitar when she was thirteen. She began to learn a few basic chords and soon mastered enough to accompany herself on ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’. Olivia even managed to write her first song at thirteen, called ‘Why Does It Have To Be?’.

By the following year, Olivia was interested enough in singing to form a folk group with three other girls, two of whom, she later laughingly recalled, were tone deaf. They called themselves the Sol Four, a name they all agreed sounded ultra-sophisticated and avant-garde because it included the French word for ‘sun’.

‘We were awful!’ Olivia later conceded. Dressed in hessian jackets, black polo necks and desert boots, the girls thought they were the epitome of beatnik cool as they trilled the folksy favourites of the day like ‘Down By The Riverside’, ‘Tom Dooley’ and ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’.

The Sol Four made time to rehearse after school and at the weekends Olivia sneaked out to join the other three for appearances at local folk and trad jazz clubs. But audiences were often distinctly underwhelmed by Sol Four’s vocal efforts (unsurprising given half of them were tone deaf). Olivia remembers it was not uncommon for the group’s performances to be greeted by derisory boos or a shower of coins. The quartet eventually disbanded, but not through lack of vocal talent. Irene decided that Olivia was spending far too much time on Sol Four because her homework was starting to suffer.

Olivia remained undaunted and looked ahead to the day when she might perhaps become a singer full-time. Both Irene and Olivia’s father had mixed feelings about her leanings towards a singing career. Both harboured hopes that she would eventually go on to university, though she was not a pupil who stood out academically. ‘I don’t think I was very noticeable. I was always the youngest in my class and felt that everyone knew what was going on and I didn’t.’ Irene was also shrewd enough to appreciate that Olivia’s burgeoning talent for singing needed nurturing, so she packed her off to the best vocal coach in Melbourne for lessons.

Olivia went along just to please her mother. She returned home after the first lesson unimpressed and complaining that the coach had put her through some scales and then asked her to project her voice in a way she felt was unnatural. The teacher was of the opinion that Olivia had the right vocal range for opera but felt she needed to sing out more forcefully. Olivia herself was unhappy that he was trying to change the soft and gentle manner in which she sang and she returned home disconsolate. Olivia never went back for a second lesson. ‘I always had a mind of my own,’ she says.

Apart from music, animals continued to be an abiding passion in Olivia’s life. ‘There was a period when I considered being a vet. But when it came to the point I found I just couldn’t discipline myself to the necessary studies,’ she said. Much to her disappointment, the size of her mother’s flat meant it was impractical to keep a pet. Instead, Olivia started saving up for a horse and even considered becoming a mounted policewoman once her schooldays were behind her. With a child’s logic, she reasoned it would at least be a job in which she would get to have a horse she could call her own and go riding every day as well as get paid for it.

But there were no mounted policewomen in Australia at that point, and by the time Olivia was fourteen, she was becoming more interested in boys than spending all her spare time riding, though her shyness continued to manifest itself. She was so self-conscious about wearing a swimming suit in front of boys that she refused to be on the school swimming team. She had innocent crushes on a couple of boys, including the captain of the football team, but was too reticent to do anything about it.

High school dances, she remembers, were torture because she wasn’t a natural dancer and felt she might fall over at any moment. She was too self-conscious about her gangly frame to enjoy herself on the dance floor. Boys did not figure in Olivia’s life with any real significance until indirectly through Rona she met a handsome young man called Ian Turpie. Then she knew this would be something very different.

Born in Melbourne in 1943, Ian was some five years older than Olivia and considerably more mature. He had been destined for a career in showbusiness from the moment he was given a place at the age of ten at the highly rated Hector Crawford Drama School. Soon he was catching the eye as a juvenile actor in theatre and in radio drama productions. By the age of sixteen he had already built up an impressive body of work in musicals and in Australia’s National Theatre Productions, which included a production of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. Additionally, Ian had developed a passion for music and became a decent singer-songwriter who could be found accompanying himself on guitar in trendy Melbourne circles.

One day a friend told Ian he should check out ‘this chick singer in this coffee lounge’, referring to Olivia who was appearing occasionally at an establishment run by the boyfriend of her sister Rona. He did so, and his reaction was: ‘Pure voice. Perfect pitch. Exceptionally good-looking.’ She looked as though butter would not melt in her mouth, but he was astonished to hear that Olivia included in her repertoire a thoroughly bawdy song that ran:
Just a reminder of this coarse ditty is enough to make Olivia blush still.

As well as her occasional appearances, Olivia would sit by the stage to listen to other folkies singing and strumming and she was thrilled when one day Ian invited her up on stage to join him. The union proved to be harmonious in every way and Ian lost no time in asking Olivia out. Much to Irene’s disapproval he took her to a drive-in movie for their first date and Olivia says that predictably she saw nothing of the movie.

Ian was something of a celebrity at the point where he met Olivia, and when romance blossomed between them she could not help but be flattered that someone so well known could be interested in her, particularly as she was just fifteen and still at school. She recognised, too, that she could learn much about the world of showbusiness from this man, her first serious boyfriend, and she was eager for him to teach her more of the guitar. Together their voices blended well when they sang their favourite folk and country songs made popular by the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and The Springfields.