Olivia (34 page)

In 2007, Chloe bravely went on TV’s
Entertainment Tonight
to speak about her problem and to say: ‘I felt like I hit rock bottom.’

In the face of speculation about her health, Chloe told
ET
’s Mary Hart about her struggle with an eating disorder and said: ‘For two years of my life I went through it, and I’ve come out of it now.’ Chloe, whose health has recovered, added that at her lowest point her anorexic crisis was so severe that she couldn’t remember most of the time she was starving herself.

It was another desperately difficult time for Olivia, who admitted that for a while she was in denial about her daughter’s problem. ‘I have to admit that,’ she said, ‘because you don’t want to think that anything could be wrong - not to say I wasn’t frightened, and nervous, and anxious for her.’

Olivia and Matt both rallied round to help Chloe through her problems with the aid of a specialist therapist and a nutritionist. And, like Olivia, Chloe was greatly aided in her recovery by creating music. Perhaps inevitably, Chloe had always wanted to follow in the footsteps of her parents and pursue a career in showbusiness, and her voice was good enough for Olivia occasionally to invite her up on stage to join her at concerts. She has since launched off on a singing career.

Chloe made her film debut when she was seven in the 1994 film
A Christmas Romance
. Fittingly, Olivia played Chloe’s mother and it marked Olivia’s return to the screen for the first time since recovering from cancer. Olivia played a penurious widow with two daughters who lives in a rented house in the mountains surrounded by farm animals and decent, caring neighbours. But her happy existence is threatened when a banker arrives to tell her she faces eviction unless she can pay the rent. A snowstorm unexpectedly traps the banker into having to spend a few days with the family and he begins not only to enjoy their life but to fall for Olivia’s character Julia.

As Chloe’s thoughts increasingly turned to following in Olivia’s footsteps, mother and daughter teamed up again in a new family film called
The Wilde Girls
, shot on Queensland’s Gold Coast in 2001 and directed by Olivia’s long-time friend Del Shores. In a plot which had undertones of her own life, Olivia played a single mother living in Georgia and doing her best to raise her daughter in the most normal fashion while trying to keep secret her past as a famous singer.

The occasional forays into movies that took her fancy was a direct result of a new freedom Olivia felt after her recovery from illness. She was financially secure, she had nothing to prove and now she could make the records she wanted to, often away from the mainstream and without commercial pressures, and appear in the films she thought worthwhile. One of these had been the film
It’s My Party
with Eric Roberts, released in 1996.

Another, in 2000, was
Sordid Lives
, in which Olivia’s enviable position of being able to pick and choose drew her to playing totally against type. ‘A black comedy about white trash’, as the film came to be billed,
Sordid Lives
, written and directed by Del Shores, had been a successful play. After seeing it, Olivia told Del that if he ever turned it into a movie, then she would love to play the role of Bitsy-Mae -a gum-chewing, tattooed, foul-mouthed, leather-clad, lesbian ex-con biker who has an affair with a Texas granny.

Del thought she was simply being flippant until Olivia called him on his birthday to pass on her good wishes and ask him what he was up to. Del explained he was chasing big names in a bid to get financial backing to turn
Sordid Lives
into a movie.

Again Olivia suggested that she would like the role of Bitsy-Mae, and again Del wondered if she was joking. But she wasn’t - and by signing a letter to confirm she would be in the film, she provided the clout needed for Del to secure the necessary backing.

Sordid Lives
was not only a marked change for Olivia, it gave her enormous fun to play the trashy Bitsy-Mae Harling. It allowed her to bleach her hair, but deliberately leave the roots showing, before cutting off clumps of it herself in order to make it spiky. Then she was able to slap on the make-up, apply tattoos to her chest, strut around in the shortest of skirts and cowboy boots, and even play guitar on screen. It was hardly the wholesome Olivia Newton-John image of yesteryear, but she enjoyed herself so much she jumped at the chance to reprise the role of Bitsy-Mae in a spin-off TV series.

During Olivia Newton-John’s early career, a joke went the rounds that if white bread could sing it would sound like Olivia Newton-John. Olivia was somewhat irritated, but not overly so, by the squeaky clean, goody-goody image she seemed to have been saddled with. She was only irritated when she was made out to be less than human, which she rightly thought was absurd. Otherwise, she was grateful for any sort of an image - it meant that at least people were sitting up and taking notice of her.

What did irritate her enormously was being assessed as a singer by her looks. She resented anyone who didn’t take her singing seriously because they seemed to think she was a model playing at having a musical career. ‘Some people don’t even bother to listen to you because they assume you can’t be pretty and be a good singer at the same time,’ she protested.

But undoubtedly Olivia’s fresh-faced looks, her winning smile, her pretty appearance, her general ‘niceness’, her clear voice and her absence from lurid headlines in Sunday newspapers led some to believe that she was uninteresting and bland. Like Cliff Richard, Olivia couldn’t, and still can’t, understand what is wrong with being nice.

Thirty years ago, Olivia’s father Brin was moved to say precisely that in defence of his younger daughter. He told
Woman’s Day
: ‘It makes me so angry to read in newspapers that because she is not into drugs, alcohol and other people’s beds, then she must be dull and stupid. She is a modest, decent, sensible and terribly nice girl. Why can’t they accept that? She is also tough, inwardly tough. She’s a professional.’

These days the snide critics have been silenced. They accept and applaud Olivia as a woman on a very different journey from the girl who was expected to turn out hit record after hit record in the 1970s and 1980s. The hits may have dried up but no one believed the Women’s Guild of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles got it wrong in 1999 when they gave Olivia the Woman of the 21st Century Award for her devotion to charity work.

Olivia is not a singer who craves the spotlight and needs the applause. She has thought about retiring so many times, but something has always come along to persuade her otherwise. She no longer needs to sell records by the million. Instead she can content herself by recording a Christmas album or release a CD like 2005’s
Indigo: Women Of Song
as a salute to singers she’s admired. For Olivia,
Indigo
was the fulfilment of an ambition harboured for fifteen years to record an album of oldies. She’d planned such an album back in 1990 but Linda Ronstadt beat her to it and so she shelved the project.

When she eventually felt the time was right to resurrect the idea, Olivia included on the album a cover version of Minnie Riperton’s smash hit ‘Loving You’ because Minnie was the first woman Olivia knew who had died of cancer. The inclusion of ‘Rainy Days And Mondays’ was a poignant reminder of Olivia’s friendship with Karen Carpenter.

As Olivia approached her sixtieth birthday, she revealed that she had fallen in love again. A friendship with handsome Australian health guru John Easterling stretching back fifteen years had blossomed into a romance and friends believe she has finally found the ideal partner.

The two certainly have much in common. Like Olivia, John went through a remarkable life-changing experience following a brush with death through illness. Like Olivia he subsequently regained his health thanks largely to natural medicine. Almost overnight he turned from a dedicated treasure hunter in South America to committed environmentalist and champion of herbal health.

Easterling goes by the nickname of Amazon John, and with good reason. He was a born adventurer, his thirst for exploration and travel fired at school by a story he read about a young boy living in the show-capped mountains of the Andes. After college he sold his car to buy a ticket to Ecuador and set off in search of treasures.

He subsequently made more than a hundred and fifty trips to South America, criss-crossing the Andes many times armed with a machete and some provisions, looking for lost cities and pre-Colombian civilisations. For several years he made a good living dealing in his finds, which ranged from gemstones to ancient artefacts.

But his life changed for ever on a journey of exploration up a tributary of the Amazon in the Peruvian jungle when, desperately weak and stricken with fever, he ditched his dugout canoe on a riverbank and stumbled into a Shipibo village, where he collapsed. Too weak to get up, he was cared for by the villagers, who fed him herbal tea and other local botanical preparations, which broke the fever overnight. Ten years earlier John had encountered a near-death experience in a north Carolina hospital after contracting hepatitis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which left him, he says, operating at only 60 per cent of his health capacity.

But after ten days of using the herbal mixtures the natives gave him, John’s fever had not only long gone but he felt a flow of energy and a mental clarity he had never experienced in his entire life. ‘This life-changing experience in my own health using Amazonian herbs was the watershed experience of my life,’ he said. ‘After all these years of treasure-hunting in the jungle, I finally realised the real treasure of the rainforest was the life-giving properties of the rainforest itself. I was standing in the highest concentration of life energy on the planet.’

Easterling later met Nicole Maxwell, the author and explorer who spent forty years in the Amazon conducting research into medicinal plants. At the age of eighty-three, Nicole accompanied Easterling back into the Peruvian jungle to help him further his knowledge of the healing potential of rainforest plants. ‘I found the purpose and meaning of my life - to bring these life-saving herbals to people throughout the world,’ he says.

Since then, Easterling has established the Amazon Herb Company, a thriving business in which the herbs are ecologically harvested from the jungle by hired tribal members. The company’s financial support of the tribes has enabled them to cancel some of the logging contracts that otherwise would have resulted in rainforest destruction. A portion of the money from each product sold goes back to the native Indians to support their culture and help save the rainforest.

With a mutual concern for the planet, it is easy to see why Olivia was so drawn to John Easterling. And despite past disappointments in her love life and no closure on the mysterious disappearance of Patrick McDermott, she claimed she felt perfectly at ease in taking her friendship with John to another level.

‘It just felt very natural with John,’ she explained. ‘And if I’ve learned anything, it’s that you have to open your heart. It’s easy to shut down after disappointments, but love is the most important thing out there, and always will be, whether you choose to be open to it or not.’

In April 2008, five months before her sixtieth birthday, Olivia set off to walk the Great Wall of China to raise money for the Wellness cancer centre in Melbourne due to open in her name in 2010. Olivia has long advocated that treatment of cancer should focus on the whole person not just the disease itself. The plan, therefore, is for the new centre to provide patients with complementary therapies and to support them by treating the mind and spirit as well as the body.

The idea of a sponsored walk along the wall to Beijing was first mooted four years before and involved months of precise planning as well as lengthy negotiations with the Chinese government before permission was granted. Olivia’s trek represented a million steps towards finding a cure for cancer, and she completed the 228km walk in just over three weeks. It involved striding across rough terrain, up steep gradients and camping out often in freezing temperatures.

Olivia spent several months building up her fitness and regularly raising her heartbeat before setting out. She was accompanied on various stages of the walk by a number of celebrities including Sir Cliff Richard, Danii Minogue and Didi Conn, who played Frenchy in
Grease
and who had recently lost both her parents to cancer. Comedienne Joan Rivers turned up for the walk in red high heels and announced Olivia had lured her to China under false pretences. Joan humorously complained that she thought she was being invited to the Great Mall of China and had brought with her a number of credit cards only to find there wasn’t a single shop in sight.

In addition to the celebrities, Olivia was joined by a number of cancer survivors or ‘thrivers,’ as she prefers to call them. The mood of the walkers was upbeat and positive. They wore wristbands bearing the words Hope, Courage and Faith, and at night they all gathered round and sang songs together from
Grease
led by its female star.

Typically, Olivia even managed to save the life of a kitten along the way. She found the tiny little animal, thought to be just one day old, in a freezing pond where it had been left to die. Olivia rescued it and helped nurse it back to life by feeding it milk from a syringe. She named it Magic after her own hit song and spent several sleepless nights getting up every two hours to feed it. ‘I was sure it would die when I found it,’ she said. ‘It was freezing cold and very weak. But with constant love and care we helped him grow.’ Magic became the walkers’ mascot and even attracted its own sponsors.

To swell the funds for her cancer centre, Olivia also released the CD
The Great Walk to Beijing: A Celebration in Song
, which featured duets with various artists including Keith Urban, Richard Marx, and Barry Gibb. Fittingly, Olivia recorded one of the duets with Cliff Richard, the British pop idol who had given her such an important break almost forty years before, right at the start of her career. It was a further reminder of how far she had come.