Olivia (4 page)

Around the time she was falling for Ian, Olivia was already making her first appearances on television, spurred on by both Ian and Rona. Her TV debut came as an amateur singer appearing on a show called
Kevin Dennis Auditions
, a forerunner of shows like
New Faces
and, more recently,
The X Factor
.

The programme owed not a little to America’s TV hit
The Gong Show
in which amateur acts went through their paces until they were sent packing by the sounding of a gong. Some of the entrants on the US show barely got to sing a note before they were humiliatingly gonged off, but
Kevin Dennis Auditions
turned the tables by allowing performers to showcase their talents long enough to collect gongs according to their entertainment value before they were hooked off. To her delight, Olivia, accompanied by Ian Turpie on guitar, managed the maximum three gongs for her rendition of ‘Summertime’, and Evie Hayes, a local actress and TV and vaudeville star who was one of the judges, was impressed enough to phone up Olivia’s mother, offering to manage Olivia’s career. Irene rejected the idea and said that Olivia was still at school and still far too young to consider being a professional singer. And besides, she said, if anyone was going to manage Olivia it would be her mother.

But there was no doubting that Olivia’s ability to sing was now starting to point her towards a professional career. She made her first paid-for appearance on a TV show called
Sunny Side Up
and sang ‘Melody d’Amour’ wearing an outfit made for her by her mother.

Before long she was being offered a wide variety of work in television and the odd film despite still being at school, and Irene effectively became her manager. She fielded the offers in a thoroughly supportive but protective manner, once turning down a movie role in New Zealand for her daughter mainly because she could not accompany Olivia as her chaperone.

A turning point for Olivia came after Ian Turpie took over as host of
The Go!! Show
, a programme that had been successfully launched to court a youth audience and which was loosely modelled on pop shows like
Oh Boy!
and
Ready, Steady, Go!
, which had proved so successful in the UK.

Olivia became a regular guest singer on
The Go!! Show
, usually miming to two numbers per programme, which she had pre-recorded at the TV studios in Melbourne. She sang the occasional duet with her MC boyfriend but largely performed solo cover versions of the hits of the day by American and British artists, backed by a house band called The Strangers, who performed in smart matching suits. The band included a young guitarist and lead singer by the name of John Farrar, who would later play a significant role, as songwriter and arranger as well as record producer, in shooting Olivia to stardom.

The Go!! Show
featured almost exclusively local singers and performers and among them was another promising young songstress, called Pat Carroll, who was also destined to play an important role in Olivia’s early career as well as eventually becoming her business partner, treasured lifelong friend and, initially, dance teacher. ‘When Olivia came along the first time Ian Turpie put her on, she couldn’t dance,’ Pat remembers. ‘So the producer came to me and said: “You’ve got to help her learn to dance. She can’t move.”’

Another TV break presented itself when Olivia was asked to fill in on the kids programme
The Happy Show
, replacing one of the presenters, known as Lovely Anne, who was leaving to get married. For the show’s younger viewers Olivia took on the mantle of Lovely Livvy for two months over the Christmas school holidays. The show went out live five afternoons a week and Olivia’s job was to present items, sing and give away toys to kids. She acquitted herself well and proved popular.

Soon she found herself working, again with Ian Turpie, on
Time For Terry
, which gave her an early grounding in the discipline needed for performing on television. She had to learn songs quickly and go on to perform them, sometimes live, to a tight schedule. While Irene shrewdly handled Olivia’s fledgling career, Ian Turpie was equally supportive. He believed in his pretty young girlfriend and felt she had an exceptional singing voice which could take her a long way in showbusiness.

He encouraged her at every turn, and at the urging of her sister Rona, Olivia went in for the local heat of Johnny O’Keefe’s talent contest
Sing, Sing, Sing
, and, again accompanied by Ian Turpie on guitar, went on to win the entire competition. Olivia clinched victory by singing ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’, the Burt Bacharach-Hal David ballad which had been a hit for Dionne Warwick in America and a number 1 for Cilla Black in the UK. The song has always been a favourite of Olivia’s and she would record her own version for her 2005 CD
Indigo: Women Of Song
some forty years later.

Olivia’s triumph in the
Sing, Sing, Sing
talent show carried with it the prize of $300 and a return trip to England. It also presented her with a dilemma. ‘I entered that contest for fun. I never thought I’d win. But before I knew it, I had indeed won and I was still at school with choices to make.’ Because of her schooling and other commitments, Olivia could not take up the offer of the trip immediately.

Now, however, it was time to choose between finishing her schooling or pursuing her career. The dilemma prompted a local paper to print two pictures of Olivia, one in her school uniform and the other in a party dress, under the heading ‘School Or Stardom?’.

Olivia chose the latter. She sought advice from one of her teachers at University High, Mr Hogan, who told her that if she was thinking about singing then she was not going to concentrate on her work in the classroom and wouldn’t pass her matriculation. If she really was serious about going for a career as a singer and her heart was in it, then she would be better off leaving. Olivia has thanked him ever since for encouraging her. Olivia’s gut feeling was that it was time to put her schooldays behind her. Latterly she had had to cope with a fair amount of teasing from fellow pupils jealous of her increasingly frequent television appearances.

Olivia’s father was disappointed at Olivia quitting school at such a young age. Her brother Hugh had studied hard to go on and become a brilliant doctor, which was what the family had hoped for. But Rona had broken the family’s academic pattern by leaving school at fifteen to become an actress, and now Olivia was following a similar path.

Among the work coming her way was a small part in a film called
Funny Things Happen Down Under
. It was essentially a children’s musical about a group of kids in the small village of Wallaby Creek in the outback who face losing the barn in which they play and sing. To save it, they must raise two hundred dollars before Christmas Day and, in an effort to find the money, they accidentally invent a formula that will make sheep grow coloured wool, which they try to sell to foreign wool buyers.

The film gave Olivia the chance to sing one song, ‘Christmas Time Down Under’, and to work alongside her first love once more. Ian Turpie landed a part in the movie playing the movie’s bad boy Lennie, out to impress with his sports car.

By the spring of 1965 Olivia’s profile was such that cosmetic company Pond’s snapped her up to promote a new skincare range. ‘Exciting young beauty, Olivia Newton-John, has the fresh, natural look of Angel Face,’ proclaimed one promotion, accompanied by photographs of Olivia at a record shop looking immaculate with flawless skin, at an ice-cream parlour, window-shopping, performing with guitar in hand at a club and heading home after a dinner dance.

Having made the important decision to finish her schooling, Olivia was having to face another of even greater consequence. Time was running out for her to take up the offer of the trip to England she had won. Her heart told her to stay in Australia with Ian. She was a teenager madly in love for the first time and the thought of leaving Ian, even temporarily, was too much for her to bear. But Irene, who would accompany her to England, had other ideas.

Irene was concerned that Olivia’s romance with ‘Turps’, as he was known to his friends, was intensifying too fast. Olivia was still so very young and, although Irene liked Ian very much and could see how fond Olivia was of him, she was determined that her youngest daughter would not make the mistake of marrying anyone at such a tender age. Irene felt Olivia still had a lot of growing up to do and she insisted that going back to England would expand her outlook on life. She pointed out to Olivia that she was fresh out of school and there was a whole new world ready for her to explore.

Olivia fought against it. All her friends were in Australia, she argued, and not being at all ambitious, she couldn’t see how going to England would further her career. She simply wasn’t interested. To her, singing was just something she happened to do quite well and which she thoroughly enjoyed. Success had come so easily to her that she didn’t have the drive to want to try her luck in another country.

But Irene was adamant. She was a strong woman, she would not be swayed and she prevailed. To Irene’s relief there was never any question of Ian Turpie joining Olivia on the trip as his own TV commitments prevented it.

At the end of January 1966, after a tearful farewell in which Ian and Olivia swore undying love to each other, mother and daughter packed their bags and prepared to leave Australia and board the ship bound for England. Olivia was heartbroken. But, as she has openly conceded in the fullness of time, Mother really did know best.

Irene was a proud guest among a large and cheering audience in October 2002 when Olivia was given a lifetime achievement award and inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame at ARIA’s sixteenth awards ceremony in Sydney. In her speech at the event, Olivia graciously thanked her mother from the stage for encouraging her to see the world and to leave Australia to make her mark. ‘You needed to do that in those days to be accepted here,’ she said.

Chapter 2

London

ROCK WRITER NIK COHN

 

 

EVER SINCE they had left England for Australia nearly twelve years before, Brin and Irene Newton-John had often talked about returning one day. And while Olivia may have been seething on the voyage over at her mother’s insistence on dragging her away from Ian Turpie, Irene was looking forward to spending time in London.

Mother and daughter arrived in February 1966 to find an England in which Harold Wilson was calling for a general election which was to return him to power, Watney’s was putting a penny on a pint of beer increasing the cost to 1s 8d, and the BBC was announcing plans to broadcast television programmes in colour the following year.
Doctor Zhivago
was the big hit at the cinema, and the rising star of the modelling scene was a six-and-a-half-stone Cockney called Lesley Hornby, whose waif-like appearance earned her the name of Twiggy and a fee of ten guineas an hour. Top of the UK singles charts was Nancy Sinatra with the witty ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’.

On arrival in the capital, Irene rented a small flat for £9 a week for herself and Olivia in Perons Court, Hampstead village, north London. Irene quickly adjusted to their new surroundings but Olivia found it desperately hard to settle. She missed the sunshine of Australia, moaned that England was rainy and cold and, much to her embarrassment in later life, she naively complained that London’s buildings were so old! ‘I was completely horrified by Britain. I love it now, but as a teenager who’d grown up in Australia, I thought it was the greyest, dingiest place I’d ever seen, and that everything in it was old and dismal.’

Olivia spent nights crying into her pillow, pining for Ian and trying to figure out a way to escape back to his arms. She felt miserable without him and spent anxious moments wondering whether her faraway lover boy was staying faithful.

Back in Melbourne, Ian was doing his best to prove that their romance could stand the 10,000-mile separation. ‘Turps wants to Go!! down the aisle’ was the provocative headline in the
TV Times
issue of April 1966, above a photograph of Olivia nestling cosily in Ian’s arms by the banks of a river. The gist of the article was that Ian wanted to marry Olivia before the year was out. He was quoted as saying: ‘I don’t know how Olivia feels, she hasn’t really said. But I’m genuine when I say I’d like to become engaged to her as soon as she comes home.’

Ian’s public declaration of his love for Olivia was music to her ears when news of it reached her after eight weeks away from her boyfriend. But it also made her miss him even more, and on more than one occasion she sneaked out of the flat for a surreptitious visit to a travel agent and managed to book herself an air ticket back to Melbourne. But with a mother’s intuition, Irene guessed what she was up to, and went round to the travel agent to ask if her daughter had called in. When they confirmed Olivia had indeed booked a flight to Australia, Irene promptly cancelled the ticket each time. ‘I thanked her many years after, but at the time I was furious,’ says Olivia.

This booking and un-booking procedure went on for two months until Olivia realised it was pointless to continue. Irene was insisting absolutely that she stay. ‘I even ran to a lawyer,’ Olivia says, ‘to see if I could be made a ward of court. I was very angry, I was in love and my hormones were going crazy. But my mother thought I was too young for romance. She was right, of course.’

Olivia may have been too preoccupied at that point with nursing her teenage heartaches to appreciate fully the golden opportunity her trip to London was presenting. But Irene was European, she was well travelled and worldly, and she recognised full well the benefits of travel, particularly in a city like London, which was steeped in history and bursting with culture. Irene kept telling Olivia she didn’t know how lucky she was to be there. ‘Again, she was right, of course,’ Olivia said, on adult reflection. ‘I think she wanted to get me away from my boyfriend, but she also wanted to broaden my horizons.’