Olivia (18 page)

Despite Olivia’s suitability for the role of Sandy, John Travolta was still somewhat surprised when she took on
Grease
. ‘Musicians generally aren’t interested in being on film,’ he commented. ‘But she was. I was thrilled and relieved, because I thought she was so perfect for the role.’

Carr and Kleiser were convinced they now had the right lead pairing and set about assembling a supporting cast. They weren’t overly worried if the girls who would form the Pink Ladies college gang and the boys who would form the T-Birds looked as if their student years were well behind them. But they introduced a crow’s feet test to ensure it wouldn’t be glaringly obvious.

The rest of the supporting cast was cannily designed to appeal to the baby boomers who had been teenagers in the 1950s. They included Frankie Avalon, a genuine pop star from the 1950s who had enjoyed seven US Top Ten hits, including two chart-toppers, before diversifying into an acting career in films, notably a series of teen beach movies. Avalon would be given a cameo role appearing in a fantasy sequence singing a song called ‘Beauty School Dropout’.

Another shrewd piece of casting was Eve Arden from one of the period’s most popular TV situation comedies,
Our Miss Brooks
. For four years in the mid-1950s, Eve was American television’s best-loved schoolteacher playing Connie Brooks, a wisecracking English mistress at Madison High School. Now, in
Grease
, she was given the role of Rydell High’s harassed and wearied Principal McGee, a head despairing of her pupils with comedic lines like: ‘If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.’

Also drafted in was Edd Byrnes, who had become a firm TV favourite in the late 1950s playing a gangling, jive-talking young parking attendant nicknamed Kookie who longed to be a private detective in the cop series
77 Sunset Strip
. As Kookie, Edd had a habit of constantly combing his hair. In 1959 he recorded a novelty song called ‘Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)’ as a duet with Connie Stevens and it became a smash hit. Fondly remembered by 1950s TV audiences, Edd was given the role in
Grease
of a lecherous, narcissistic, smooth-talking TV presenter who visits Rydell High to host the National Bandstand dance competition.

To complement the Broadway score, there would be versions of golden oldies as well as some original songs by the rock ’n’ roll revivalist doo-wop comedy group Sha Na Na, who would also be given cameo roles performing on stage at the dance-off.

For Randal Kleiser,
Grease
could hardly have been a more challenging project. Here he was at the age of twenty-nine directing his first major feature movie and it was a musical to boot. Any fears he may have had about his ability to pull it off were heightened even before principal photography began. His former university instructor, Nina Foch, obligingly threw a dinner party to bring him together with Robert Wise, the director whose expertise had made such a resounding success of the musicals
West Side Story
and
The Sound Of Music
. The hostess was trying to be helpful, and Wise for his part was happy to be quizzed for any tips or advice he could pass on from his own experiences.

‘How much prep time do you have?’ Wise began by asking of Kleiser. ‘Five weeks,’ came the reply, and Wise’s follow-up shocked him. ‘He told me to get out of the assignment right away, it was going to be a disaster,’ Kleiser recalled. ‘That terrorised me, but luckily I decided not to quit.’

Kleiser may have been raw but he had plenty going for him. While studying filmmaking in the late 1960s, he had also simultaneously worked as an extra on several movie musicals. ‘By being on the set of
Camelot
,
Hello Dolly
,
Thoroughly Modern Millie
and
Double Trouble
with Elvis Presley, I was able to observe different ways musical numbers can be staged,’ he pointed out. ‘I learned how songs are broken down into short phrases of lyric and shot in sections. I watched directors yell “Play back!” instead of “Action!” So when I showed up on the set of
Grease
, I didn’t feel completely lost.’

Kleiser, who had originally been set to direct
Saturday Night Fever
before being switched to
Grease
, also had the advantage of having already worked both harmoniously and to critical acclaim with John Travolta in a made-for-TV movie drama called
The Boy In The Plastic Bubble
. The director handled with great sensitivity the story of a boy born without a natural immune system who is forced to live in an artificial germ-free environment. From inside a sealed plastic bubble he can only watch the world go by.

By the time
Grease
was ready to go, Kleiser was presented, however, with a very different John Travolta from the one he had worked with before. Previously, Travolta was simply a fledgling actor. Now he was older, more assured with a real sense of who he was, and he was on the brink of superstardom. John was literally flying high. Instead of buying himself a house with the $1million fee for his three-picture deal, John had preferred to splash out on a twenty-three-seater DC3 aeroplane after using his time away from filming
Welcome Back, Kotter
to gain a solo pilot’s licence.

By now John had also become a major TV heartthrob in
Welcome Back, Kotter
, attracting 10,000 fan letters a week - a mailbag that was costing ABC an incredible $30,000 a week to deal with. Travolta was also brimming with confidence as an actor from having set the screen alight while filming his role of the finger-snapping, hip-grinding disco dance king Tony Manero in
Saturday Night Fever
. He recalled:

 

Everyone in the movie industry predicted John would be a sensation in the movie, and so it proved. ‘Move over, Elvis. There’s a new pelvis in town,’ wrote one celebrated showbiz observer, who went on to describe John as the hottest thing in Teenybopper Heaven since peanut butter. The good vibes rubbed off on John. ‘The first thing I did when I got to New York to promote
Saturday Night Fever
was walk down Fifth Avenue,’ he said, ‘and every fifth person would recognise me and yell, “Hey, there’s John Travolta!” It was great. I got off on it.’

By the time filming was under way on
Grease
, word was getting round that
Saturday Night Fever
had created a major new Hollywood star. Wherever the
Grease
filming took him, John was increasingly greeted with female hysteria and, as his co-star and love interest on screen, Olivia received envious looks from jealous teenage girls, notably when it was eventually, and inevitably, rumoured that she and John had become romantically entwined off screen as well as on.

John had come to the
Grease
set toned, fit, reed thin, perfectly attuned to the role ahead and ready to dance his colourful socks off. An early glance at the script had told Olivia she would not have to match him step for step. In fact, there were no plans for the couple to dance together at all. But once choreographer Pat Birch realised Olivia was more than capable of putting one foot in front of the other, the script was altered to include a major dancing sequence for her with John. Pat was impressed with the way Olivia could move and arranged for her and John to team up in a scene where Rydell’s students pair off for the televised dance-off competition. Olivia found the prospect daunting. ‘Boy, can he dance!’ she marvelled after seeing John’s electrifying, liquid-limbed moves for the first time in
Saturday Night Fever
.

For the movie that was to make him a superstar, John had gone into training for five months with a strict regime that included dancing for three hours a day and running for a further two. ‘I had to lose twenty pounds to get what you see on the screen,’ he explained, ‘and so I hired the boxer who trained Sylvester Stallone for
Rocky
. When I started I couldn’t even do one of the knee bends I do in the film. By the end I had a whole new body.’

Olivia knew she could not hope to match John’s dynamism in their dance sequences, but she willingly subjected herself to rigorous training under Pat, who had been hired after choreographing the original Broadway
Grease
stage production, winning herself a Tony award in the process. Olivia was up to speed by the time she had to film her hand-jiving rock ’n’ roll dance sequence with John. The scene was not made easy by being shot in sweltering high summer heat in a gymnasium with no air conditioning, and it was made all the more uncomfortable by the malodorous smell of a nearby pork processing plant wafting in through the windows.

 

 

From day one, Randal Kleiser and Allan Carr set out to create a fun element to filming
Grease
. ‘Making this movie was like being president of the class at high school,’ quipped Allan Carr. ‘The first day we started, we didn’t have a rehearsal or a read-through, we had a sock-hop. It was magical times for everyone. Everybody was coming up - it was my first really big movie, and John’s really big movie and Olivia’s first big movie and it was joyous. It was one big party from the very first day till it ended.’

Indeed,
Grease
became known to everyone at Paramount as ‘the Allan Carr Party’. Everyone on the Paramount lot, from the highest executives to the lowliest studio workers, was granted automatic entry to the set-side parties. The filming of every big production number became an excuse for the champagne to flow, seen by major stars like Warren Beatty who was making
Heaven Can Wait
next door.

Ever mindful of an opportunity to generate publicity, Carr announced he would throw a big
Grease
party to celebrate his moving into a new beach house. Word soon got around that an invite to his bash was the hottest ticket in town and the guest list grew to such unmanageable proportions that he was forced to divide the guests into two separate groups. Those with surnames A to K were invited for the Friday night, and L to Z for the Saturday. The two parties added to the feel-good factor surrounding the movie, which rubbed off on the cast. ‘There was a high school sensibility about the whole production,’ Kleiser noted. ‘The cast was always joking around and playing tricks. There was a very upbeat atmosphere about making the film.

‘We had a soundstage on the Paramount lot where all the dancers and the actors would meet every day. I’d be working with the actors on the dialogue while Pat would work with the dancers. There was such an energy and enthusiasm among the cast.’

Didi Conn, who played Frenchy, one of the Pink Ladies, remembers that they threw themselves into their roles with such gusto that they chose to remain in character all day. They called each other by their character’s name and passed the time during film breaks by singing old songs to each other from the 1950s. ‘We took all our high school experiences and put them together in this one fun-filled summer,’ she said.

‘
Grease
had this really fun feeling,’ Olivia agreed, ‘right from the beginning, from going to costume fittings and trying on these poodle skirts. I was living the school experience I never had. It was the opposite of the school I’d been to in Australia where we all had uniforms, skirts below the knees, socks and shoes, gloves and hats, and the school had separate entrances for boys and girls, separate stairs even. Rydell High was just the opposite, the fantasy I never had.

‘I particularly remember filming the “Summer Nights” number. It was with all the girls and it was really girlie and then the boys were doing their bits separately and we went over and watched them. It was really like being in high school.’

The noisy exuberance displayed by the cast in rehearsals and during breaks proved infectious. But one particular rehearsal aroused the wrath of Jack Nicholson, who was working just across the way on his movie
Goin’ South
. Increasingly irritated by the
Grease
girls and boys singing away in full voice, Jack threw open the window of his editing room and yelled to Carr: ‘Either close that door or put me in your goddamn movie!’ Quick as a flash, Carr shouted back: ‘We’ll close the door, Jack - I remember your singing in
Tommy
!’

 

 

Carr and Kleiser were especially anxious to make filming fun for John Travolta’s sake as the actor was still emotionally raw from the untimely death of his lover, actress Diana Hyland, just three months before. While filming
The Boy In The Plastic Bubble
, John had fallen in love with Diana, who was playing his mother. Diana was then forty and John rising twenty-three and one month after first meeting they embarked on a passionate affair - once John was convinced Diana appreciated him as a person and not just as a young stud.

But over Christmas 1976, Diana felt increasingly unwell and early in the new year she was diagnosed with cancer. By the end of March she was desperately ill and she died in John’s arms. They had been together for just seven months. John was devastated. ‘Diana was seventeen years older than I was, but we never knew the difference,’ he said. ‘We talked all day and all night about everything. I’ve never been so fulfilled in my life and when she died I felt like I lost my centre.’

Under very different circumstances both Olivia and John thus came to
Grease
newly single - Olivia was on what later proved to be a temporary personal break from Lee, although he had been continuing to manage her career.

Like every couple, Olivia and Lee had had arguments but Lee stated it was his own insecurity that undid him more than anything that was said. The couple tried to split up professionally but, when that didn’t work, they tried to split up personally. They discovered that wasn’t the answer either and after the filming of
Grease
they got back together again.