SIMPLE PLEASURES

https://www.julienslive.com/m/view-auctions/catalog/id/315/

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Joyful Newton-John discusses simple pleasures and why she doesn’t view cancer as a ‘battle’

The Daily Press (Timmins)

2 Nov 2019
Celia Walden

“These things brought me joy,” says Olivia Newton-John, surrounded by mementoes from her career at Julien’s Auctions house, “but I’m letting them go.”


Olivia Newton-John was going to turn down Grease.
“There were a couple of reasons why I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “I’d just made a movie that was a total disaster, and didn’t want to jeopardize a musical career that was taking off by making another bad film. Oh, and I was worried that I was too old.”

The Australian actress, 71, bursts out laughing. “I was 29 — and convinced I was way too old to be playing a 17-year-old. Of course, now I look back and think, ‘What was I worried about?’”

Joyous incredulity seems to be Newton-John’s default emotion today. Which makes sense. After all, we’re sitting in the Julien’s Auctions house in Beverly Hills, surrounded by more than 40 years’ worth of her own memorabilia.

In pride of place is the black leather jacket and skin-tight black pants combo from Grease’s closing scene (expected to fetch US$200,000) and Sandy’s Pink Ladies jacket. There’s the custom-made 1950s-style lace gown she wore to the 1978 Los Angeles opening of Grease, costumes from Newton-John’s cult-classic Xanadu, her Physical tour dress and a wall of music awards the four-time Grammy-winning singer has collected over the years.

If all that weren’t enough to feel joyously incredulous about, there’s the memory of her old friend John Travolta “coming to see me and convincing me to do (Grease) — because I honestly didn’t think I was going to. And when I asked for a screen test to see if we had the chemistry needed, that test cemented it.” A gurgle of laughter starts up again, “because we did have it. Lots of it.”

She still can’t quite believe Randal Kleiser’s raunchy teen homage to the ’50s went on to make US$400 million at the box office — one of the highest-grossing musical films of all time — and Newton-John an overnight global sensation.

But, perhaps most of all, she is joyous and incredulous that she’s here now “and doing great,” despite the stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis she was given in May 2017, when the illness she started battling in 1992 metastasized.

“I don’t like that word ‘battling,’” she frowns. “I’ve never seen cancer as a fight or a battle. In fact, over the decades I’ve kind of befriended it — and right now I’m asking it to leave. Because instead of picking a fight with my body, I would rather keep calm and thank it for everything it has done for me.”

She shakes her head. “I’m sure that sounds strange to someone who isn’t in my position. But I’ve had this since 1992, on and off, and been through all these different stages. I’ve been vegan and macrobiotic and I went for many months without sugar ...” But a lot of those things felt like punishments? “Yes! And I’m not saying they don’t work, but everybody has to choose their own path.”

The Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre she founded in Melbourne in 2008 explores every one of those paths, from wellness programs to breakthrough therapies. But in terms of pain relief, one thing has worked above all else for Newton-John, and that’s medicinal marijuana.

Were it not for the tincture that John Easterling, her herbalist husband of 11 years, makes for her, the actress would have found it impossible to wean herself off the morphine she was forced to take when she fractured her sacrum. “And it was hard. But the tinctures really help. Nobody has ever died of cannabis, but opiates are killing people every day.”

Then there’s the attitude she has chosen to adopt in so many areas of her life.

“Right now, I do things that give me pleasure and joy,” she shrugs. “I eat healthily, but if I want a piece of chocolate or a cookie, I’ll have one — because it makes me happy. Have you read that wonderful book, Spark Joy, by Marie Kondo?” she asks of the bestselling decluttering bible. “You could extend it to all of life, really. These things brought me joy,” she says, gesturing to the 500-odd pieces of history around her, “but I’m letting them go. I can’t take them with me, and my daughter is not going to want all this.”

Growing up in her mother’s shadow hasn’t been easy for 33-year-old Chloe Rose Lattanzi — Newton-John’s only child from her first marriage to actor Matt Lattanzi. And the actress and singer, who had a hit with You Have to Believe — which she co-wrote with her mom in 2016 — has spoken out about the deep-seated issues she has suffered over the years: anorexia, depression and substance abuse. “Fame messes you up,” she told one interviewer in 2013.

Newton-John is the first to acknowledge how hard it must have been for her daughter.

“Having a mother who is famous, and having this image that nothing goes wrong (for her), but also feeling you’re having to share (her) with the rest of the world ... that must have been tough. And the teenage years were not easy,” she says. “But now Chloe’s got me to herself — and we’re very close. Actually, I think this,” she says, not willing to give her diagnosis the weight of its name, “has brought us even closer together.”

Knowing what you would and wouldn’t do for the sake of your career is something she has always urged her daughter to keep in mind. “As a woman, we’ve all had issues on sets ...” she says. #MeToo issues? “Well, I don’t want to go there,” she says. “But it is so difficult being a young actress and starting out in this business, because it’s all about boundaries and knowing what those are.”

She pauses. “The casting couch thing was real in my life, too. I think I always managed to make light of things and let it go — but also I would never put myself in certain positions. That disastrous movie I had done just before Grease,” she goes on, “it was called Toomorrow ... I was there when the director said, ‘There’s a scene in the movie when you go up into space and your clothes come off and you’re just going to be in a bra and panties.’ And I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that.’ My career was important to me, but so were my boundaries.”