We HAD to Believe She Was MAGIC

 As winter digs in and we bid farewell to another year, let’s pause to remember….

THE GIRL OF SUMMER

Summer ended early this year, when Olivia Newton-John left us on August 8^th, more than 30 years after first being diagnosed with breast cancer. 

Olivia was the ultimate summer girl.  We felt it the moment she burst onto the scene in the early 1970s, with a blond beauty and an effervescent personality that both seemed to be made of sunbeams.  We knew it after her legendary turn as Sandy, the teen who comes of age at a new school following a summer fling with John Travolta in 1978’s Grease.  And we are reminded of it now.   Another Grease alum, Stockard Channing, said it best among the countless tributes that poured in from around the globe: “Olivia was the essence of summer – her sunniness, her warmth, and her grace are what always come to mind when I think of her.”  So it made sense that when I first learned the sad news, I experienced the same sinking feeling that accompanies the end of summer; a regret for lost time mixed with a fear that I hadn’t made the most of it or properly appreciated and enjoyed it.

I had loved Olivia, but had I properly appreciated her?  Had we?    
 
Grease was such a phenomenon that it often gets mistakenly remembered as what made Olivia a star.  Olivia was already a huge star, with multiple Grammys, number one albums, and number one songs to her credit by then.  The movie certainly elevated her stardom, but hardly launched it.  So anxious were the film’s producers to cast her that they rewrote Sandy’s character as an Australian to accommodate Olivia’s accent.  It would be just as accurate to say that Olivia elevated Grease and helped make it the phenomenon it became.   
 
From 1971 (when her first major international hit, “If Not for You,” entered the charts) until 1984 (when her last, “Twist of Fate,” would exit them), Olivia was among the biggest stars in music – and for several of those years she was just the biggest.  Not the biggest female star, the biggest star.  Period.  Consider this: Three years before Grease, Olivia was on the heels of back-to-back number one albums and won Record of the Year at the 1975 Grammys (beating out Elton John and Joni Mitchell among others).  Three years after Grease, she released a record that what would become the biggest song of the 1980s.         
 
Despite these achievements, Olivia gets left out of the ‘diva diagram’ in which we tend to relegate our great female singers.  A place in that subjective diagram has become based on several stereotypical criteria, none of which apply to Olivia.  She was a world-class vocalist but did not often choose to belt out showy vocal acrobatics.  She was a shrewd businesswoman but did not have a reputation for dramatic or unreasonably demanding behavior.  And she was a consummate performer but did not have an ego-driven craving for audience adulation.  When she cut back her touring commitments at the height of her career to start a family, a television interviewer noted that other stars compared performing to a drug and asked how she couldn’t miss the rush of hearing crowded concert audiences scream her name.  You can see Olivia choosing her words carefully as not to disregard her fans or disrespect her contemporaries, but her answer is classic Olivia: “Oh of course I appreciate that,” she says gratefully before adding with a slight laugh, “But I just keep it in perspective because I also know that the next night or the next week there will be someone else playing there and it will be their name people are screaming and not mine.”  Can you imagine anyone you would put near the top of your diva diagram saying that? 
 
Olivia also does not fit neatly into any of the ‘diva-adjacent’ categories.  She mostly did not write her own material and so she wasn’t a singer-songwriter.  Despite her early success in the genre, she couldn’t be a country star because Nashville resented her as an outsider. She incorporated elements of disco and rock into some of her biggest later hits, but she was neither a dancing queen nor a riot girl.  Olivia was the Jill of all trades who mastered them all but also never fit quite neatly enough into any of them to really belong.  That incredible versatility is part of what makes her so special but also what sometimes causes her to slip between the cracks of our collective memory.  I am ashamed to admit I had let her slip between the cracks of my own.  When I heard the news of her death, I couldn’t remember the last time I had thought about her or played one of her songs.  Like my childhood-self who didn’t pay attention to summer until the last night of vacation, I didn’t realize until that moment how much I had already been missing Olivia.    
 
The common tendency to judge a female singer solely on the merits of vocal runs or octave-scaling pyrotechnics is both reductive and myopic.  Anyone familiar with Olivia’s catalogue knows there were few notes beyond her reach when she felt they were called for.  Moreover, Olivia was a passionate interpreter of lyrics who could wrap her emotive voice around seemingly any song in any genre.  In that Record of the Year winner, “I Honestly Love You,” Olivia navigates between a soaring soprano and a breathless whisper to literally walk the listener through both the highs and lows of a love that is eternally unrequited.  In “Have You Never Been Mellow,” another multi-format smash, Olivia sings nearly the entire song in her upper register and when her voice occasionally and inevitably breaks (as we are way before auto-tune here), she didn’t try to hide it by adding overlapping background vocals in post-production.  The song’s lyrics urge a distressed friend to practice self-kindness, and those vocal breaks only add to the emotional earnestness of her plea; a perfectly imperfect performance. 
 
Equally reductive is the habit of justifying, even glamorizing, temperamental behavior by our chosen divas as if such conduct were somehow a proxy for being ‘tough businesswomen.’  There were never stories about Olivia firing assistants for making eye contact, or demanding certain temperatures on set before she would come out of her dressing room, or having microphones repainted to match her wardrobe.  Olivia flexed real business muscle when she took on her record label in the late seventies after they allegedly refused to relax her contract’s unreasonably demanding recording schedule, including a stipulation that they could extend the contract’s term for any album she delivered late.  She vaguely skirted over the conflict in interviews, and it’s hard to imagine her storming out of a studio and cursing at label execs that she’d see them in court.  It’s more likely she just sighed and said, ‘Yeah, sorry I won’t be killing myself like this anymore, guys; let’s just let the lawyers sort it out, alright?’  

The courts would mostly side with the label in the lawsuits and countersuits that followed, as the contract was apparently clear if unfair.  But in a classic example of losing a battle and winning a war, the courts agreed with Olivia on one critical point.  In her final appeal, she had shrewdly asked the courts to clearly assert the relevance of a law that is best known for another great Olivia – the so-called de Havilland Law, which prevents employment contracts from being binding beyond seven years, but which had never previously been tested with respect to recording contracts.  The appeal ruling conceded this almost as an afterthought, continuing to side with the label on most other points and asserting that any late albums could likely be made up during the five-year period noted in the contract.  But it did ultimately affirm the seven-year limitation.  
 
This was all playing out as Grease was exploding at the box office and its soundtrack flying out of record stores.  By simply invoking the de Havilland Law, Olivia gave her label what they may have needed most – a healthy dose of fear.  They knew it was foolish to continue tormenting one of their most valuable assets for a couple of more years only to lose her completely a couple of years after that.  They filed their court victory away but promptly backed off Olivia, giving her free reign to complete her promotional commitments for Grease (despite its soundtrack being on another label), and then welcoming her back with open arms when she ultimately returned a bigger star than ever. 
 
And that she was.  She had already proven herself in the country and adult contemporary formats, and with Grease she managed to maintain the retro vibe of 50s-influenced pop while still making the songs fresh and contemporary.  It may have been a period piece as a movie, but the songs needed to live independently if they were going to get played on late-70s radio and Olivia gave them that life.  And when even Olivia’s star wattage couldn’t salvage her next film, the now-cult-favorite Xanadu, at the 1980 box office, all was not lost.  Unlike other infamous film failures that similarly doomed their soundtracks, Olivia’s worldwide influence on popular music was still in full force.  “Magic” and the film’s title song would become two of the biggest international hits of her career, while adding roller-disco to the list of genres she had conquered.  
 
Her studio recordings would logically build on the more adult image she had cultivated following Sandy’s iconic transformation at the end of Grease.  Before and after Xanadu, she released a string of major hits that became increasingly sensual and aggressive, both lyrically and musically, including “A Little More Love,” “Deeper than the Night,” “Physical,” “Make a Move on Me,” “Heart Attack,” and “Twist of Fate.”  Musically, these songs transitioned Olivia from a post-disco groove to a harder sound informed by the growing synth-rock trends of the eighties.  Lyrically, there is a more adult approach to love and sex in these songs than in her previous material and that Olivia would often try to offset with knowing winks at the camera during her videos or proclamations of innocence during her interviews (such as apologetically claiming, with more winks and nods, that she may not have fully grasped the suggestiveness of the lyrics while she was recording them).   
 
“Physical” was of course the peak, and not just for Olivia.  The song was essentially to 1980s singles what Michael Jackson’s Thriller was to 1980’s albums: a decade-defining, lightning-in-a-bottle smash.  Its rhythmic appeal was so irresistible that it even crossed over to become a top 40 hit on the R&B charts, making Olivia one of the rare white artists at that time to be embraced by urban radio and perhaps truly leaving no major contemporary music genre in the English language where she had not scored success.  While the song seems incredibly mild by today’s standards, it was controversial in 1981 and many radio stations initially banned it from their playlists.  Olivia astutely countered with a playful video that framed “Physical” as a workout anthem, and in doing so made the song safe for conservative listeners who now had a reason to overlook the suggestive lyrics, embrace the beat, and work out (or at least buy work-out clothes).  

What some people still don’t realize is that Olivia had one more trick up her sleeve when she delivered the video to MTV.  Knowing its executives were already nervous about the song and might still be concerned even with the playful workout angle, Olivia subversively gave them something she knew they would have to cut; not unlike a film director who inserts a gratuitous scene in hopes of distracting the ratings board from the rest of their movie.  Olivia added a quick twist in the very final moment of the video, when two of the men who had been working out with her are briefly shown holding hands.  In truth the entire video is comically homoerotic, but it was 1981 and there was a fine line between implications of homosexuality and clear demonstrations of it.  For all its focus on youth culture and rock & roll rebellion, MTV was still in its first year and Olivia knew even they weren’t likely to cross that line.  As expected, MTV (at the time) snipped off that final moment, claimed a moral victory, and put the video into heavy rotation which helped launch and sustain the song’s phenomenal success. 

But while fans loved “Physical” and those other increasingly provocative songs, they kept hoping the singer would find her way back to being their summer girl; their girl next door.  1985’s “Soul Kiss” was perhaps a step too far for what the world could accept from and for Olivia.  The single, its video, and the photography that accompanied the parent album of the same name, created an overload of sonic and visual imagery that was directly, assertively sexual.  Gone were the winks and sly, ironic smiles to offset the aggression of her other recent hits.  And why not?  Why should she have to continue making excuses for being a complete, fully formed woman in control of her body and her sexuality?  It didn’t seem to matter to the record-buying public that Olivia was over 35 years old by then and had earned the right to unapologetically be and do whatever she wanted.  Nor did anyone seem to care that by then Madonna was already pushing the envelope even further; the very envelope Olivia had first opened.  But Madonna never had to carry the baggage of being ‘both Sandys.’  She was always just the one who shows up in tight leather in the last five minutes of the movie.  Olivia meanwhile was expected to be everything to everyone all the time, and nobody can be that.  But nobody ever came closer. 
 
It is incredibly ironic that the iconic transformation Olivia delivered so vividly onscreen in Grease, taking Sandy from innocent girl to aggressive woman, was precisely what the world couldn’t accept for Olivia the real person.  In real life, we don’t want the girl next door to grow up.  Because if the girl next door grows up, that means we’re getting older too.  It means summer is ending again, and what could be more unbearable than that?
 
There would be an answer to that question with a first cancer diagnosis in 1992.  Sadly, that’s what it took for us to let Olivia grow up.  She became an articulate spokesperson for cancer awareness and a generous benefactor for its research.  Olivia did not like to say that she was fighting cancer; she spoke of finding balance and being healthy in her choices and her search for solutions.  For Olivia, this included exploring plant-based remedies and other natural treatments that were outside the practice of western medicine.  These are subjects that can be divisive, eliciting eyerolls from cynics and non-believers like me.  But nothing Olivia said ever sounded kooky or hippy-dippy.  She was so genuine and so sincere that even I opened an admittedly closed mind about the importance of at least exploring non-traditional paths forward in cancer research and treatments.  Who was I to doubt her anyway?  I had endured a far less severe brush with cancer myself, but she was the one who survived it for more than three decades.  And she put her money where her mouth was, endowing her foundation with millions more of her own fortune in her last will and testament; which could also be described as the last testament of her will.    
 
Part of Olivia solving cancer for so long was her refusal to be defined by it, and so she also continued to work as an entertainer.  She may not have scaled the towering international heights of Grease or Physical again, but she continued to have best-selling albums in Australia as recently as 2016.  In the U.S. she made successful television movies, where she often got to play the mother of the girl next door.  In Sordid Lives, both the indie film and the subsequent series it spawned, she played as far against type as possible as a lesbian in a small Texas town with a love of honkey-tonk music and arson.  I’ve always felt Sordid Lives was one of her last sly winks and knowing nods at the camera, this time aimed straight at her LGBTQ+ fans.  Olivia had years earlier accepted a small role in It’s My Party, which holds a special place in the gay cinematic cannon as one of the first feature films to portray an AIDS patient dying with dignity, and she also performed at several Pride events throughout the world.  While mainly and understandably focusing her public platform on cancer awareness, she was also an ally who openly embraced what she knew to be a loyal fanbase.    
 
After all, Olivia also knew what it was like to be an outsider; to not fit neatly in a box or on a chart.  Others can debate who belongs where on the diva diagram, who is the queen of this or the princess of that, or whatever other hyperbolic honorifics get invented to deify female stars.  We could never figure out where to put Olivia above us because she was always among us, and that’s exactly how she wanted it.  It’s what makes her so easy to overlook but so important to remember.  Olivia was the outsider who went about as far as anyone can go, but who also never left anyone behind.  It still hurts when summer ends.  But somewhere inside of us is the emotional knowledge that it will come back around if we just hold on.  And Olivia’s loss reminded me that her tremendous musical and personal legacy is still there to help me do just that.   Olivia’s voice on the radio is more like the distant crash of a wave on the shore; Her videos and films more like moving photographs from an old yearbook.  She is both nostalgia and promise.   
 
Olivia Newton-John lives on in a special place in the subconscious of my entire generation, alongside our memories of every sun-kissed vacation, every hand-held walk on the beach, every secret love, and every sad goodbye.  Olivia left us in summer because that is precisely, and eternally, where she belongs.