Olivia (31 page)

Matt concluded that the down-scaling of his lifestyle with Olivia, the letting go of possessions and even his mental breakdown had ultimately been good for him.

‘I had everything I wanted. You name it, I had it. I could travel, have a new car if I wanted it. A boat? I could have a new one of those too. I had that power. But by having it all, I realised that having everything isn’t happiness. It was like a ball and chain around our neck - all this stuff that we couldn’t get rid of.’

Referring to his breakdown, Matt said:

 

 

It was while Olivia was in recovery at the farm that Chloe discovered the seriousness of her mother’s illness. She knew, of course, that Olivia had been unwell but it came as a shock to her when a pupil at her school remarked to Chloe that she’d read in the paper that her famous mother had cancer. That was the first Chloe had heard of it, and she came running home to confront Olivia on the subject.

Olivia and Matt had deliberately chosen not to tell Chloe that her mother’s illness was cancer. As Chloe’s best friend Colette Chuda had succumbed to the disease, Matt and Olivia were worried that the word ‘cancer’ would lead Chloe to assume it meant that her mother was going to die too.

Olivia was never totally convinced she had made the right choice in not telling Chloe, but once her daughter demanded to know the truth Olivia didn’t duck the issue. ‘We sat her down and told her the truth,’ said Matt, ‘and she took it very well. She said: “Why did you lie to me?” We’d told her Mummy was sick but we never went into details. It was too difficult, and we knew kids would get on to her. She took what we said for what it was worth, but now we had to explain it all to her - and we had to explain it very intelligently as well.’

Chloe was now seven years old and Olivia remembers her daughter’s touching reaction to her decision not to tell the whole truth. ‘It’s hard to explain to a little girl why you did that. She said: “But I could have taken care of you.” She was so sweet. But I did what was right at the time.’

 

 

While Matt was fighting his own demons and managing to continue with his role in the short-lived
Paradise Beach
, Olivia’s spurt of therapeutic creative activity resulted in the release in 1994 of a new album called
Gaia: One Woman’s Journey
. It emerged as an intensely personal but upbeat collection of Olivia’s own songs on an album that she also co-produced.

Olivia laid bare her soul in her lyrics and, for anyone still unclear of each song’s message, she included clarification on the sleeve notes. ‘Gaia’, she explained, is the spirit of Mother Earth, the giver of dreams and the nourisher of plants and young children. ‘This song came to me at 3am on a cold winter’s morning in Byron Bay and I was compelled to write and finish it. I feel the spirit of Mother Earth spoke to me.’

‘Not Going To Give In To It’ was a song she wrote after chemotherapy. And just as self-evident was ‘Why Me’, which she composed the night after her surgery. On the album, Olivia dedicated ‘Why Me’ to her father who, she said, died of cancer with dignity ‘and he never complained for a moment’.

‘Don’t Cut Me Down’ was a number which, Olivia explained, she had started to write in the late 1980s and later found in a drawer full of tapes. She went on to complete it to reflect her feelings about forests threatened with being cut down. ‘No Other Love’, Olivia told her fans, was: ‘For the loves of my life, Matt and Chloe.’

It was a declaration from the heart and no one doubted the sincerity, but one year on Olivia and Matt agreed to separate, and the following year they were divorced.

Even before they had uprooted for Australia, there were rumours that their marriage was in trouble. Olivia’s illness and the domino effect of all the other setbacks of the past few years had taken their toll on the relationship. While Matt pursued work in documentaries, he and Olivia agreed on what Matt described as a ‘tentative separation’. ‘It was a separation just in the geographical sense,’ he said. But towards the end of 1995 they decided to separate emotionally as well.

By then Matt, through his love of mountain biking, had met a beautiful young New Zealand girl by the name of Cindy Jessup, who was a member of the local cycle club at Lismore, close to Olivia’s farm.

They met in October 1993, and Matt struck up a friendship with the blonde sports science student, who had a steady boyfriend at the time. Matt didn’t really expect to see Cindy again, but in 1994 their paths crossed once more through a mutual love of biking. And when Cindy told Matt of her plan to go on a bicycle ride across Australia for charity, Olivia agreed to give her support. Cindy was duly invited to the farm and was photographed with Olivia to add impetus to her charity ride.

The gossips, of course, had a field day about Matt and the cute Kiwi, but he and Cindy have insisted their friendship didn’t develop into something more until Matt and Olivia had finally agreed to part. By then, Cindy was also single, having broken up with her boyfriend, and she and Matt were both free to embark on a new romance, which they chose to keep low key.

Olivia and Matt announced they were to separate in 1995, and they were divorced in December 1996, after eleven years of marriage. As divorces go, it was an amicable split. ‘I think I was about nine, and both were very civil with each other and kind,’ is Chloe’s recollection. ‘There was no malicious childlike behaviour.’

Olivia had delayed marrying until the age of thirty-six because she was desperate to get it right after being scarred since the age of ten by her own parents’ divorce. She had married Matt full of hope for a lasting union, but after a golden few years where they seemed to live in a perfect world, their marriage had been buffeted by events and circumstances often beyond their control. Inevitably, they had both changed.

At the age of forty-eight, Olivia was alone again but, as she was quick to acknowledge, the greatest gift from the marriage was her daughter. ‘Having Chloe was the greatest pleasure and achievement of my life.’

Chloe was especially precious to Olivia because she had hoped for more children but suffered three miscarriages, one at nearly five months. ‘I grieved for them all,’ she said simply.

Matt and Cindy eventually set up home together in Malibu so that he could continue to be an attentive father to Chloe and see as much of his daughter as possible. And in June 1999, Cindy became Matt’s second wife. They were quietly wed in Malibu in the simplest of civil ceremonies, without either friends or family in attendance, and with only Olivia and Chloe in on the secret. After tying the knot, the couple went off to celebrate by themselves with a meal at a Mexican restaurant.

While Matt had found new happiness, the good news for Olivia was that she had continued to make a strong recovery from her illness. With an attitude as positive as ever, she refused to use the phrase ‘in remission’ because it sounded as though the cancer was waiting to come back. Instead, she preferred to say it had gone. And she received an unexpected and welcome shot of optimism during a birthday lunch with her mother one year after her treatment had finished when she went to the ladies’ room and a woman approached her to say: ‘I read all about you in the paper, and I want you to know that I had cancer twenty years ago and I’m fine.’

‘That was amazing,’ said Olivia, ‘a living beacon, and it was a wonderful moment for me and gave me encouragement.’

As a breast cancer survivor, Olivia knew how fortunate she was. ‘I was lucky it wasn’t the most aggressive cancer,’ she pointed out, and her good fortune spurred her on to set about raising funds for cancer research and to speak openly about what she had been through in a bid to help others.

At the 1995 Fire and Ice Ball, to raise awareness and encourage more research, Olivia happily admitted in a moving speech: ‘If you had told me a few years ago that I would talk about something so intimate, I would have cringed. I really felt when I discovered that I had breast cancer that I owed it to myself and to other women to be open about it, and to talk about it and show that if it can happen to me it can happen to anybody.’

Olivia stressed the importance for women of listening to their own bodies because neither her own mammogram nor a needle biopsy showed anything to worry about. She also emphasised that the right mental approach was vital. She said of her cancer: ‘I began to think of it not as a poison but a healing white light.’

She added: ‘It’s vitally important that we do this research to find out what we can about genetics and the environmental effect on our bodies so that when my daughter Chloe asks me, as she has many times: “Mummy, will I get breast cancer?” I can look her in the eye and say no.’

Olivia willingly volunteered to give a number of TV interviews on the subject and she was keen to talk about the importance to women of self-examination. She explained: ‘Rather than be frightened of finding it early, you’re going to be lucky finding it early and not be scared in getting it seen to. Cancer’s not necessarily a death sentence. They have a very high cure rate right now. You think you can’t cope, but you do, and you come out stronger at the other end.’

One of Olivia’s first public appearances since winning her own battle with breast cancer was hosting a two-hour TV special taped at a theatre in Los Angeles to raise awareness and funds. She was given a standing ovation and went on to sing ‘Why Me’ and ‘I’m Not Going To Give In To It’, before inviting breast cancer survivors in the audience to join her on stage. ‘There were probably seventy women on the stage of all different ages, sizes and races,’ she remembers. ‘It was amazing. It was tragic that all of us had had it, but the fact we were survivors was tremendously uplifting.’

During the evening Olivia spoke candidly about her own experiences with breast cancer and recounted how the esteemed American talk-show host Larry King had asked her whether she felt any less of a woman after losing a breast. ‘Pretty tactful, huh?’ she asked of her audience, and added: ‘To anyone thinking of asking that question, losing a breast doesn’t make us any less of a woman. It’s our spirit and soul that define us as women.’

Olivia’s determination to help others didn’t stop with speeches and appearances. In a bid to encourage self-examination, she devised the Liv Kit, a simple appliance which looks like a plastic bag with a special gel inside which acts like a magnifying glass and makes any changes in a breast show up more clearly. The Liv Kit was designed not as a replacement for a mammogram nor for a doctor’s examination but as an additional aid to early detection and Olivia worked tirelessly to promote it.

She also followed up with a remarkable new CD entitled
Grace And Gratitude
, a spiritual collection of comforting, healing songs which combined Tibetan chanting, Japanese Buddhism, some Islam and some Hebrew. The last song, ‘The Poem’, is attributed to St Francis of Assisi. Olivia wrote the songs on the album with Amy Sky and freely admitted:

 

In America,
Grace And Gratitude
was a CD exclusive to Walgreen’s where Olivia’s Liv Kit and other wellness products of hers were available. ‘I had the idea that we should put them together with the CD,’ she explained to
Billboard
. ‘I went to the Walgreen offices at nine in the morning with my computer under fluorescent lights and sang with a track to the head of the company. And he went: “Yes, I like this.” He got together the head of the music department and the women’s health department and said: “I don’t know how you’re going to make this happen, but do.” He got what I was trying to do. It was amazing.’

Chapter 15

A Candle of Light

‘If someone had said to me all those years ago when I made
Grease
that one day I’d open a retreat and spa I’d have said they must be crazy’

OLIVIA

 

 

IN MID-AUGUST 2003, Olivia was in Las Vegas when word reached her that that her mother’s health was fast failing. Irene had not been well for some time and Olivia immediately cancelled a concert she was due to give in Albuquerque and another scheduled for the same week at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in order to fly to Irene’s bedside in Melbourne.