Olivia (8 page)

Olivia’s joy was apparent to all who knew her. She radiated contentment. She was living in a lovely home with a lover who adored her, and her happiness was complete when Bruce, knowing her fondness for animals, bought her a red setter she named Geordie, followed by another they called Murphy. She had dreamed of the house with a picket fence, a garden and pets to pamper, and this was just about it.

The couple were still getting to know each other, however, and to spend more time with Olivia, Bruce decided he would leave The Shadows in the not too distant future. The band’s ten-year association with Cliff was coming to an end. Bruce planned to take on the job of looking after The Shadows’ music publishing interests. That would entail regular trips into the West End of London to the group’s Savile Row office, but it would free up his evenings and weekends for quality time to be enjoyed with Olivia, rather than him asking her to traipse around the country or abroad on tour whenever The Shadows’ schedule demanded. As a member of such a famous group with a devoted female fan following, Bruce had enjoyed some wild times, but now he wanted to nurture the love he and Olivia had for each other.

Bruce had been touring or recording more or less continuously for ten years and he had seen what frequent and long separations, coupled with female temptations on the road, could do to relationships. He and Olivia were madly in love and he wasn’t going jeopardise their relationship.

As luck would have it, some months before he left the band The Shadows were booked to tour Australia, and Olivia accompanied Bruce down under for the duration. She was able to introduce her boyfriend to family and friends and show him the sights of her hometown. At one of the Melbourne concerts, Olivia’s old friends The Strangers from
The Go!! Show
were the support act, and Bruce was particularly impressed by the brilliant musicianship and vocals of the band’s lead guitarist John Farrar, especially his falsetto.

Pat and Olivia had always liked and admired John, and Olivia was pleased Bruce held him in such high esteem after watching and hearing him at work. Olivia had often talked to Pat in glowing terms about John back in the days when they were in England. In fact she’d frequently said that Pat ought to marry him. She reckoned Pat and John would be just perfect for each other.

 

 

On 24 June 1968, shortly after Bruce and Olivia got back home to England after their trip to Australia, Bruce’s divorce came through. His adultery was cited as the cause and Olivia was named as ‘the other woman’, which inevitably made headlines in the newspapers both in England and Australia. ‘My divorce was because of her,’ Bruce has said, ‘although she didn’t wreck the marriage. I fell in love with her, but there had been lots of women before her.’ Bruce revealed in his autobiography that they had to arrange for a private detective to observe Olivia and him together in order to speed up the divorce process. ‘Looking back it was very seedy,’ he commented.

The outcome was, of course, that Bruce was now free to wed Olivia, but although the couple had every intention of marrying at some future date, Bruce was all too aware that she was still only nineteen. He felt it would be a mistake to rush her into marriage - and that suited Olivia, not to mention her mother Irene. Olivia was in love with Bruce but she would have been an extremely reluctant bride if Bruce had pressured her. Olivia had seen enough of broken relationships in her family to know that it would be wiser to wait.

Bruce’s divorce, piquantly, came through just as he was finalising his plans to leave his bandmates. He wanted to get the timing of his departure right, with the least inconvenience to the other members of the group. The Shadows were committed to one more major winter season at the London Palladium at the back end of 1968 and he felt that would be a fitting time for him to exit. In the event, Bruce and the other members of the band all agreed they would call it a day as The Shadows when the season’s allotted run came to an end.

At the London Palladium on Saturday, 19 December 1968, with great fanfare, Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, drummer Brian Bennett and bass guitarist John Rostill played together as The Shadows for the last time. For Bruce and Hank, the two original members who had been Shadows all the way through for a decade, it was an emotional moment when they took their final bow and bade farewell. They were given a thunderous ovation, and it would be two years before Bruce would appear on a stage again.

 

 

The year 1969 found Olivia and Bruce happily devoting time to decorating their nest in Hadley Common. And when Bruce made his regular forays into town to spend time in The Shadows’ office listening to new songs, Olivia had Geordie and Murphy to keep her playful company or to accompany her on long walks.

There was even time for the couple to take a winter break together and travel up to Edinburgh by train. Olivia insisted on taking the dogs with them and they all enjoyed a pleasant uneventful stay until their return journey. With Geordie and Murphy safely locked up in the guard’s van, Bruce took off his jacket and settled back in his seat next to Olivia in the heated carriage. When the train slowed down to pull into Newcastle, Bruce began looking out of the window and pointing out various buildings he recognised and recounting to Olivia some of his teenage escapades in the city where he was brought up. But after the train had finally come to a stop in Newcastle Central Station, Bruce got the shock of his life. Through the window he saw Geordie and Murphy haring past along the platform. Obviously they had somehow managed to get out of the guard’s van.

Bruce was out of his seat in a flash. He leaped out of the train on to the platform, leaving Olivia wondering what all the kerfuffle was about. Bruce was horrified to find there appeared to be no sign of the dogs and in a panic he grabbed a porter and asked if he’d spotted them. The porter pointed in the direction of the front of the train, and Bruce, in his shirt sleeves, raced off. His heart was in his mouth when he realised the dogs must have run down the slope at the end of the platform on to the track and across the Tyne railway bridge. With no thoughts to his own safety, Bruce jumped down on to the track and raced along it, calling out the names of Olivia’s beloved pets. Olivia meanwhile was still sitting in her seat, largely oblivious to all the drama that was unfolding.

Bruce’s pursuit took him some 250 yards across the bridge into Gateshead, where he paused to catch his breath in the freezing cold. There was no sign of the pets anywhere. The dogs had simply disappeared and he was totally distraught. He was turning disconsolately to make his way back up the track to rejoin the train and dreading telling Olivia the awful news when he looked up to see that the train had started to resume its journey south. It was pulling out of the station and heading straight towards him, with the startled driver sounding his hooter as a warning for the trespasser on the tracks to get out of the way immediately.

Bruce was forced to press himself flat up against the bridge to allow the train to pass him by safely. As each carriage rumbled slowly past him he scanned its every window for signs of Olivia, only to catch sight of her finally, still sitting comfortably in her seat . . . with Geordie and Murphy happily reclined in her arms. Bruce didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. One thing he did know was that he was going to have an extremely difficult time making his way home. He had no money on him, it was bitterly cold and his jacket was still on the train that was rapidly disappearing into the distance on its way to King’s Cross. After explaining his predicament to station staff, he later managed to catch a slow train back to London and a reunion with Geordie and Murphy, with Olivia asking: ‘What happened to you?’ Bruce could have cheerfully throttled all three of them.

The Newcastle nightmare was but a blip in the cosy domestic existence the couple were enjoying. In her contentment, Olivia was not overly bothered that her own musical aspirations as a singer were taking second place to Bruce’s career, until Cliff Richard came through with his promise to ask her to provide some background vocals on the B-side of one of his singles.

Both Cliff and The Shadows had been managed very shrewdly by Peter Gormley, an Australian who had arrived in England in 1959 to launch the career of a singer by the name of Frank Ifield. Ifield was born in Coventry, but after the war he moved with his parents to Australia where he began his singing career. Tall, fair-haired and good-looking, Ifield arrived back in the UK in 1959 and Gormley steered him to major stardom three years later with the help of a million-selling chart-topper, ‘I Remember You’.

Olivia’s own Australian background meant there was an obvious affinity with Gormley, and after hearing her sing he believed she had what it takes to be a successful recording artist. He was prepared to offer her his expertise in management, and Olivia gratefully accepted. Gormley’s alliance with Cliff and The Shadows would turn out to be hugely beneficial for Olivia. As a first step she would be invited to duet with Cliff on a song called ‘Don’t Move Away’, to be recorded as the B-side of Cliff’s single ‘Sunny Honey Girl’. It would be the first time Cliff duetted with a female singer on record, but by the time the single was released in January 1971, Olivia had bigger fish to fry.

Not long after Gormley had signed up Olivia, one of America’s most successful and powerful hotshots in the music business got in touch with him to enquire about a girl he had vaguely heard about on the UK music scene called Olivia Newton-John. His name was Don Kirshner. He was putting together ‘a dynamite film and music’ concept and was on the lookout for a pretty girl who could sing. Olivia was most certainly good-looking and she had a lovely voice, Gormley told him. ‘Right,’ said Kirshner, ‘when can I meet her?’

Chapter 4

Toomorrow Never Comes

MUSIC MOGUL DON KIRSHNER

 

 

BACK IN THE SPRING of 1969, the cream of America’s pop music and showbiz journalists were invited to a party at the Rockefeller Centre’s plush Rainbow Grill in New York. Don Kirshner and Harry Saltzman had something important they wished to announce to the world’s press: the formation of a new Anglo-American pop group called Toomorrow - and Olivia Newton-John would be its lead singer.

The very names Kirshner and Saltzman were enough to guarantee a good turnout of writers for the press conference, and they were eager to hear what the two men had to say. As co-producer of the series of James Bond films, Canadian-born filmmaker Saltzman’s stock could hardly have been higher in the movie business, and Kirshner’s pedigree in the music industry was equally impressive.

A native New Yorker, born the son of a Bronx tailor, Kirshner had first attempted to engineer an entrée for himself into the music business during a spell working as a bellhop at a hotel. While carrying the bags of Frankie Laine, he cheekily attempted to sell a song he had written to the then hugely popular singer. Laine turned it down but told him how he could go about getting the song made into a demo disc. Kirshner was on his way.

In 1957 he met and befriended a budding singer and musician called Robert Cassotto, later to change his name to Bobby Darin. Kirshner helped Darin secure his first recording contract, which paved the way eventually for great international success. Then, still in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, Kirshner formed Aldon Music with musician Al Nevins, and in May 1958 they opened an office on Broadway which became a phenomenal hit factory.

Realising that the people writing songs were all too often grown-ups taking a random guess at what teenagers wanted to hear, Kirshner signed up young, unknown songwriters he believed in, and who were willing to work for him for $150 dollars a week or less, and coaxed from them hit after hit about teenage love. Kirshner’s talented team of songwriters included the husband and wife duos Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Gerry Goffin and Carole King, as well as Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield.

By 1962 Aldon Music had no less than eighteen songwriters on its staff and new songs flowed by the hour from the keys of upright pianos installed in cubicles in their offices on the fifth floor of 1650 Broadway. During this four-year period of frenzied creativity, Kirshner’s team composed and published dozens of big hits. They included ‘Up On The Roof’ for The Drifters, ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do’ for Neil Sedaka, ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ for The Shirelles, and one of the most played radio songs of all time, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” for The Righteous Brothers. On their first album The Beatles even covered ‘Chains’, a catchy Aldon song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, which had originally been a hit for The Cookies.

The emergence, however, of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership in The Beatles, Jagger and Richards in The Rolling Stones and the general trend towards singer-songwriters composing their own material, persuaded Kirshner to diversify. He sold Aldon’s back catalogue of songs to Columbia Pictures in a multi-million-dollar deal and Columbia also installed him as musical director of Screen Gems, a division of the company producing television and films.

In this capacity, Kirshner’s next move was to mastermind the music for a new band called The Monkees, a rock quartet brought together specifically for the creation of a television series chronicling the zany life of a pop group. The TV series was inspired by the antics of The Beatles in their first movie
A Hard Day’s Night
, and the plan for The Monkees’ TV programme was to follow that simple formula - the music would sell the show and the show would sell the records.

The plan worked like a charm. Audiences instantly warmed to the group as they got into all sorts of bizarre scrapes, rescuing maidens in distress, falling foul of dastardly villains and playing pranks on themselves and the world while pausing every now and then for a song.