Olivia (17 page)

 

Normal Hollywood procedure would entail the producer and the director demanding a screen test for an artist of Olivia’s limited acting experience. But to the surprise of both Carr and Randal Kleiser, a director who would be at the helm of a feature film for the very first time, Olivia was pre-empting their request. Kleiser recalled:

 

Carr and Kleiser readily agreed to Olivia’s request for a screen test, but in case she wasn’t satisfied with the results and turned the role down, producer and director decided they must line up another actress too.

On the Hollywood grapevine there were favourable reports of Carrie Fisher emanating from the
Star Wars
production where the young actress was playing Princess Leia. The movie’s director George Lucas had been room-mates with Kleiser at college and obligingly invited him to come and watch him working on the mixing of one of the movie’s space battles so he could gauge Carrie’s potential. But Kleiser remembers it proved fruitless: ‘I watched a fast-cut sequence with lasers and explosions. Every once in a while there was a quick cut of a girl with big hair buns turning to watch a ship whiz by. “That’s her,” George pointed out. But there was no way to tell if she could carry a musical.’ Kleiser left the editing room hoping ever more fervently that Olivia’s test would work out.

At this point Olivia had yet to meet John Travolta. She had seen him on TV in
Welcome Back, Kotter
and had occasionally recognised him when she caught sight of him driving around Los Angeles. Now an arrangement was made for the two to be introduced, and John drove out to Olivia’s home in Malibu. The actor was then still living in his modest one-bedroom apartment at 100 South Doheny in Beverly Hills above Santa Monica Boulevard, and the splendour and setting of Olivia’s home took his breath away. ‘I was awestruck because she was an established star and I was working my way up,’ he says. Olivia remembers Travolta was wide-eyed at the framed gold records on her walls, her swimming pool and the amount of land she owned. There were even telephones in the bathroom, John noted with amazement.

Olivia found John engaging and easy to talk to from the start. ‘John was playing this supposedly tough guy but he has this sweetness which comes through no matter what he plays,’ said Olivia. ‘The first time I met him was that time he came to my house and he was so cute. That was my first impression, but I wasn’t sure about working with him.’ She was, however, prepared to go ahead with the screen test.

In a town where every waitress and bellhop wants to be a film star, there was a time in Hollywood when aspiring actors and actresses could walk in off the street and buy a screen test for $25. It was said that a Hollywood career hung upon the result, and now it would be no different for Olivia, except that Allan Carr was not prepared to arrange just a simple straightforward no-frills screen test. He set out to give Olivia every chance to shine.

Carr put the call out for full lighting and full crew, as well as the presence of the co-star. Additionally, he arranged for Olivia to have full make-up and hairstyling and a complete wardrobe. The instruction went out that unlimited retakes would be allowed and, on the appointed day of Olivia’s test, John Travolta was briefed about her anxieties and was encouraged to do his utmost to set her at her ease. Gamely he proceeded to make the experience as painless for her as he could. ‘I knew my job was to coerce her into doing the movie,’ he remembers. Kleiser and Carr watched nervously as their leading man took Olivia under his wing, cracked jokes, encouraged her and made her feel relaxed before the cameras started turning.

 

 

The scene in which Danny takes Sandy to a drive-in movie and offers her his high school ring was selected as the best opportunity for assessment of Olivia’s potential, but she emerged not overly impressed with the outcome. She found the test to be something of an ordeal, describing it as ‘a very nervous thing, at least for me, and I wasn’t thrilled with my own performance. I kept thinking: here I am, a singer wanting to be an actress, working with an actor who sings. I was very mixed up and frightened.’

She later explained: ‘Well I had no training, really, and as much as I loved the idea, all I could do on such short notice was hope that some natural ability would come through. I was never sure it would work.’

Kleiser, however, felt her test could hardly have gone better. ‘Olivia came across naturally and she was able to handle the comedy beats,’ he said. ‘She looked great.’ Crucially, there was an obvious rapport with Travolta.

Olivia still needed some convincing. ‘I didn’t want to go into something I couldn’t handle or have something to say about,’ she later explained. ‘I was playing a naive girl but I didn’t want her to be sickly.’

After the test, a forty-eight-hour breather was agreed for considered reflection. Allan Carr did not need two days in which to decide whether he wanted Olivia or not. He knew at once that Olivia was right for Sandy. He liked the chemistry with John, who had been pushing for Olivia to get the role as soon as he was told she was up for consideration. ‘She was America’s sweetheart,’ Travolta remembers.

Olivia similarly had forty-eight hours in which to decide whether she liked the look of herself on the big screen. One day later, on 8 May 1977, she was to be found pacing up and down the sitting room of her suite at Central Park’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, with good reason to be nervous. In a few hours she would make her much-heralded New York concert debut at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House, a venue that had attracted some of the world’s greatest singers over its illustrious ninety-five-year history.

Among those whose voices had graced the Met had been Dame Nellie Melba, Australia’s superstar soprano from Olivia’s hometown, Melbourne. For Olivia, the prospect of following in Dame Nellie’s footsteps to sing pop and country hits in front of a sell-out crowd of 4,000 people at the Met was nerve-wracking enough, but she also now needed to make the decision about
Grease
.

In the corner of Olivia’s luxury hotel suite stood a stereo system she’d had installed so she could listen to the Broadway-cast album of the musical and familiarise herself with some of the songs she might be expected to sing. On a nearby table was a well-thumbed copy of a film script for the show’s proposed screen adaptation. Olivia had read it and reread it and yet she was still undecided whether the role was suitable for her.

The film called for her to play Sandy as the sweet, pony-tailed high school cheerleader who falls for the greasy hood every mother warns her daughter about. Sandy’s demure innocence was akin to Olivia’s own public image, and she was certainly comfortable enough with that, but she was not sure whether her fans would take to her transformation at the end of the movie into a sexy, gum-chewing, leather-jacketed biker’s moll. ‘The role appealed to me because I got to play very sweet Sandy One, as I called her, and really bad Sandy Two, but I was really nervous about that because it was something I’d never done before.’

Equally worrying for Olivia was still the question of whether she was too old for the part. She was then twenty-eight; she would be twenty-nine by the time the film was released. Would cinema audiences accept her as a teenager at high school?

The one certainty for Olivia was John Travolta, who, at that point, was filming
Saturday Night Fever
. ‘I’m just not sure of this,’ Olivia fretted. ‘Maybe if I talk to John I’ll feel better. I know he’s in New York here shooting the movie.’

Arrangements were made for Olivia to speak to John on the telephone in between takes for
Saturday Night Fever
and during their conversation the young actor finally won her round. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her with genuine enthusiasm, ‘you’re absolutely right for it and we’ll make a great team.’

After weeks of indecision, Olivia’s fears had finally been allayed by Travolta’s youthful confidence and optimism, and his sincere belief in her. And for that, Olivia would remain profoundly grateful to him for decades to come.

Travolta later said: ‘It was Olivia I wanted from the start. I’d heard her songs, I’d seen one of her TV specials and, bearing in mind I really knew
Grease
from having been in the Broadway show, I thought: there’s the definitive Sandy. We had to get her. There was only one person on this planet who could be Sandy and I was hell-bent to get her in the movie.’

In truth, John had fallen a little in love with Olivia long before he met her. ‘At that time Olivia had been a star for about five years and every guy’s dream was to have Olivia as their girlfriend,’ he said. ‘And, I tell you, I was the same way.’

John’s crush on Olivia stemmed from the moment he had seen her photograph on the sleeve of her album
If You Love Me Let Me Know
. In the cover photo, she was wearing a blue denim shirt and staring straight at the camera with her arms folded. John was so captivated that he even went so far as to wear a similar denim shirt and strike a similar arms-folded pose for the cover of his own album
Let Me Be
, released in 1976.

‘I was mesmerised by that LP cover,’ he admitted. ‘When my record company asked me what image I wanted to portray on the cover, I didn’t say I wanted to mimic Olivia’s cover but something like it. When I got cast in
Grease
I showed everyone that cover of Olivia and I said: “You see this girl, it’s not just because she’s had a hundred hits and she’s America’s sweetheart, this girl belongs in the movie
Grease
as Sandy.”’

There were still some contractual hurdles to be overcome concerning the star billing and her fee, but now Olivia’s mind was made up: she would sign up to play Sandy in
Grease
. ‘But that’s when the anxiety really got bad,’ Olivia revealed in an interview, ‘because then it wasn’t so much a matter of whether I liked myself on screen or my manager or agent or accountant or my friends did, it all of a sudden changed to the big question: will the public like me and accept me in a new sphere, in a new career really?’

It was, she knew, a huge gamble. Her seven albums and sixteen singles had sold around 25 million copies and now she was stepping out of her comfort zone as a singer to try to become a film star.

The enormity of her decision coupled with her usual pre-concert nerves weighed heavily upon her as she prepared for the huge challenge of the Met. Olivia was frightened that New York’s super-sophisticated critics were getting ready to dip their pens deep in vitriol. ‘I’m expecting to get knocked in New York,’ she said just before the concert. ‘An artist with my image is up for knocking from the so-called heavy critics. Basically, I know that I please other people but you can’t always please everybody all the time. The audience in New York will be blasé. They’ve seen everything - they can see everything - so I’ve got to be really good. It’s a hard audience.’

Olivia became so agitated that she broke down in tears just before she was due to walk out on to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. As her tears flowed, John Farrar seriously wondered whether she had reached the point where she would not be able to go on. ‘But then she went out and did the best show she had ever done,’ he said.

Terrified she might forget the words of a song, Olivia wrote the first lines on the palm of her hand as a failsafe, then went out in a strikingly sexy gown and gave a performance that earned her two standing ovations. Even before Olivia had uttered a single note, every single member of the audience had already warmed to her after being presented with a long-stemmed rose that had thoughtfully been dethorned.

The enthusiastic ovation from the packed audience added to the general feeling of relief Olivia felt inside now that her mind was made up over
Grease
, and she was in buoyant mood at the star-studded after-show celebrations. Olivia’s triumph was topped off by celebrity parties held in her honour, and the New York papers carried pictures of her on their front pages.

The next day’s reviews showed she had won over the critics with her performance at the Met. Even the
New York Times
decided that Olivia had a soprano ‘not so negligible as some think. There’s a nice husky quiver to it, and only at full volume does it become shrill.’ The
Daily News
declared: ‘Olivia, We Love Ya’ the following morning, and the
New York Post
went one better with the headline ‘The Met’s Pop Star - A Sensation’.

 

 

Contemplating her new movie venture, Olivia could take confidence from the fact that Paramount was the studio preparing to take the risk with her and with
Grease
. The studio had a long, proud history as well as a recent reputation for turning out hit musicals. Elvis Presley had made most of his early rock ’n’ roll movie hits at Paramount, including
King Creole
,
GI Blues
and
Blue Hawaii
, before moving on to MGM. And since 1968, Paramount could list among their output musicals like
Half A Sixpence
with Tommy Steele,
Darling Lili
with Julie Andrews,
On A Clear Day You Can See Forever
with Barbra Streisand, and the Billie Holiday bio-pic
Lady Sings The Blues
with Diana Ross - a shining example of a singer with virtually no acting experience stretching herself to become a credible movie star.