IF NOT FOR YOU (My Tribute to Olivia Newton-John)

Well, this is a post I don’t want to be writing. Dear Olivia. She was such an influence in my life. Such a lovely human being in so many ways. 

 

She’d already released several albums before I started listening to pop music on AM radio stations at the age of twelve. In fact, my first purchase of her music was “Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits,” a cassette bought at the long-defunct Sam the Record Man in Hamilton, Ontario in 1977. I never tired of hearing her sing “Have You Never Been Mellow” or “I Honestly Love You” or even lesser tracks like “Something Better to Do” or “Sam.” It endured longer than so many of the tapes I bought in subsequent years, many succumbing to tangled tragedies in cassette decks that suddenly turned from playing to eating my precious music. 

 

Years later, while I spent a weekend undergoing volunteer training at AIDS Project Los Angeles in 1991, my Chrysler LeBaron convertible passenger side window was smashed, the thief unsuccessful in removing my car stereo, having to settle with making off with the dozens of cassettes I stowed in the vehicle as a makeshift soundtrack for all the times I was stuck in traffic on the 405 or the 10. I was both relieved and insulted that the culprit made a point of rejecting a single item: Olivia’s hits collection was tossed back in the car, resting on the shotgun-side floormat. The criminal was clearly unworthy of Olivia.  

 

In time, I tracked down every single one of Olivia’s albums, finally stopping after acquiring 1989’s “Warm and Tender,” a pet project of hers. I figured after an artist releases a collection of lullabies for her daughter (and I buy it!), it’s okay to walk away. Fourteen studio albums, three soundtracks and two greatest hits collections—I don’t think I’ve ever owned more music from another artist.

 

I loved Olivia’s voice. It oozed warmth and sweetness. No doubt, the producers of “Grease” recognized the same thing in her—along with her natural beauty—when casting her in the lead role of Sandy. First time I saw the movie, I was a sheltered kid who was slightly disturbed to see her go from the goody two-shoes singer of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” to a permed-out vixen in tight leather pants—and smoking!—crooning “You’re the One that I Want” alongside John Travolta’s dumb jock Danny. I kept reminding myself it was just a role. Olivia wasn’t that way. If the film makeover seemed scandalous, it was on account of her acting. Such range! A singer AND a thespian! No Oscar nomination? Even more scandalous…to thirteen-year-old me. 

 

Exactly forty-two years prior to her death, Universal Pictures released “Xanadu” which critics savagely panned. A roller-skating musical with Olivia playing a muse and getting to dance and sing with Gene Kelly was perhaps an acquired taste. Most likely, sourpuss critics hadn’t rushed out like I did six weeks earlier to buy the soundtrack album, Side One consisting of Olivia’s songs and Side Two representing the contributions of the Electric Light Orchestra. I knew every song by heart before hitting the box office. My friends and I watched the movie twice on opening day. That’s the first and only time I’ve ever done that. Needless to say, we LOVED it!

    

Olivia offered more than just a soundtrack to my adolescence. She was my beard, particularly during my first year in college. Living in a dorm, I was a pimply, dorky sixteen-year-old whose only prior dating experience involved taking Lori Blakely to prom and feeling much relieved when she dumped me midway through the event, flitting off with equally dorky Jeff Hill whom I couldn’t compete with being as he’d been voted Most Likely to Succeed. Kudos, Lori! You saw your opportunity to socially climb and you seized it. I hadn’t yet come to terms with being gay, but I knew I didn’t want to date girls. I suppose I held out hope I’d suddenly wake up one day and realize the alluring appeal of breasts which had been eluding me. I wished for this almost as much as I wished my zits would disappear. 

 

Let me state the obvious: Wishing wells suck. I wasted so many coins!

 

My closest friends in the dorm were girl-crazy. Butch, who lived across the hall, was homesick for his high school sweetheart back in Peoria and dropped out after the first semester to be back with her. Herbert, one floor below me, was a pre-med student from Colombia, who fell hard for a girl from Montana and stopped going to classes to spend all his time with her. He got Fs in all classes except his P.E. course, tennis, and didn’t return in January. Michael, down the hall from me, was another pre-med student who kept falling hard for different girls each weekend and clearing his guilty conscience on Mondays by going to confession and being assigned a number of Hail Marys by the campus priest. I stayed loyal to Olivia. 

 

It goes without saying that I never dated my icon. Never even met her. But I talked incessantly about her the way my friend Laurie from Boston would bring every conversation round to Michael Jackson (and co-opt his one-glove fashion statement). I went to the record store at Fort Worth’s Hulen Mall and begged the manager to let me have the wall-sized Herb Ritts-photographed poster of her “Physical” album—a well spent $10!—which I tacked to the wall above my giant stereo system. I bought a ficus plant to green up my half of the dorm room I shared with an always smelly midwestern frat boy who regularly left me in the hallway as he messed around with his sorority girlfriend. (Did she not have the sense of smell?) I named the plant Aivilo…Olivia backwards. The message to all my dormmates: I wasn’t into dating girls majoring in interior design or economics; I was gaga for Olivia. Hopelessly Devoted to her, indeed. 

 

All through this time and beyond, I came to respect Olivia for her love of animals and her conviction to protect the environment. When she hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1982, she insisted on doing a dead-serious political commentary on Weekend Update, railing against President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. It was an awkward piece, so earnest yet so out of place on a show devoted to comedy. This was Olivia’s own moment to seize the opportunity and attempt to create awareness in a young, captive audience. Chutzpah!

 

In 2019, I bought her hardcover memoir, Don’t Stop Believin’. I looked forward to having her by my side again, in a new incarnation of my old dorm, this time my single room in the eating disorder wing at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. I knew I would face six or seven difficult weeks there, arguing with dietitians, fretting over being force-fed peanut butter and stressing over a coed bathroom where we weren’t allowed to close the door because the space was constantly supervised in an attempt to thwart the bulimics. (It didn’t matter that I’m anorexic and have never ever thrown up as a means of controlling my weight. The door had to stay open. It was mortifying.) I needed the comfort of Olivia once again, even if I felt the cover photo of the book was less than flattering. 

 

The book proved to be jarringly disappointing. It was a light read in the worst way. Olivia didn’t have much to say. There was no depth, no insightful commentary about her life’s experiences and most certainly no bite about any difficulties she experienced as a woman in the music and film business. I concluded that Olivia really was pure sweetness, through and through. She apparently ascribed to the belief, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Great for life, not so great for creating a compelling read. She was a woman of principle, her heart consistently in the right place—love of family, of animals, of the environment plus a strong desire to fund cancer research and care—but her passions were expressed at a basic level. Dear, Olivia. Sweet yet simple. Lovely but perhaps not an interesting invitee to include at a hypothetical dinner party. Still, the world would be a gentler, kinder place with more Olivias.

 

Over the years, I read with great concern each time Olivia had a bout of cancer. She always came through, her sunshiny outlook seemingly keeping her in the right frame of mind to battle on. Only a week ago, a friend and I talked about Olivia while on a hike, noting that we hadn’t heard anything about her recently. I reminded myself of the adage, “No news is good news,” but I felt jitters inside. The adage has no application in the world of celebrities. Was she still having to bear down and fight or was she simply recovering and allowing herself quiet times with friends and family to appreciate life? As it turns out, maybe it was both.