Olivia (24 page)

One of the problems facing
Xanadu
was that by the time it hit cinema screens, roller discos were passé. Youth culture and its taste in music had moved on. Punk bands, not disco, were in. In the week when
Xanadu
was premiered in Los Angeles, the city’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was hosting the first Urgh! two-day festival of local national and international punk and new wave rock bands, featuring The Dead Boys and The Dead Kennedys. Anything further from the roller-skating romp on screen at the cinema round the corner was hard to imagine.

In retrospect, the omens for a disco-themed movie like
Xanadu
had not been entirely favourable from the start. By the time the film went into production, the disco-dancing craze generated by
Saturday Night Fever
had cooled considerably. A sign of the times and of changing moods and musical tastes came on 12 July 1979, just a matter of weeks before the
Xanadu
cameras started rolling, when a Disco Demolition Derby was held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. More than 10,000 dance-floor-flavoured records were blown up with explosives, accompanied by rousing cheers from a watching crowd including a large percentage of teenagers. Now
Xanadu
, released in 1980 as a roller-skating disco extravaganza, looked instantly dated. Word of mouth coupled with the terrible reviews condemned the movie to failure.

For the most part Olivia herself escaped direct savaging from the critics. It was the film as a whole that took a critical hammering. But she was nevertheless devastated at the reaction. She hated being linked with failure.

Olivia’s dialogue in the special effects-laden movie was minimal, but at times Kira the Muse noticeably spoke with an Aussie accent. Olivia was not helped by cringeworthy exchanges with Michael Beck. ‘I’m a Muse,’ she tells him at one point, which prompts his reply: ‘I’m glad somebody’s having a good time.’ Then, to explain to the dumbest in the audience what a muse is, the couple hamfistedly look up the word in a dictionary together. Another corny line had Gene Kelly exclaiming on opening his club: ‘I’m back in showbusiness!’ All that was missing was a wink to the camera.

‘The film did fall a little short in the dialogue stakes,’ Olivia finally conceded two years after
Xanadu
’s release. ‘The script used to change daily and I was really embarrassed with some of the lines I had to say. We even came back from a Christmas break to find the whole story had changed.’

Apart from a few awkward wobbles, Olivia coped competently enough with her roller-skating sequences and never appeared to be anything less than enjoying herself. She looked alternatively heavenly, alluring, stylish, raunchy or beautifully groomed in 1940s fashion, as the scenes and clothes demanded.

The Xanadu club’s opening-night extravaganza, which formed the film’s spectacular finale, took three weeks to shoot and involved no less than 237 roller-skaters, dancers, jugglers, gymnasts, tightrope walkers, acrobats and other speciality acts. It also offered the extraordinary sight of the great Gene Kelly getting his skates on and leading a veritable army of dancers in a wild spin on wheels around the club’s outer circle.

This fast-moving vibrant sequence also gave Olivia the chance to shine in a variety of eye-catching costumes. She tap-danced in a 1940’s halterneck sun-suit with her hair teased into a Betty Grable-style, and rocked up a storm in a tiny tiger-print mini-skirt with matching waistcoat and knee-high black leather boots. For a country-tinged number Olivia switched to a white-tasselled buckskin cowgirl outfit, then later she glided up a ramp in an exquisitely elegant Erté-style gown.

As the enchanting Kira, Olivia was mostly dressed in simple, off-the-shoulder dresses slashed to the thigh and teamed with . . . leg-warmers! Asked in 2007 to comment on this wardrobe oddity, director Robert Greenwald said with his tongue tucked very firmly in his cheek: ‘One of the points I think it’s important to make is the hidden political meaning in the film. I want people to look carefully for the politics in the leg-warmers.’

 

 

Nearly three decades after its original release,
Xanadu
still divides opinion. It’s easy to spot its failings and yet it has acquired a passionate cult following who revel in its gloriously camp approach.

Xanadu
the movie may have been a commercial and critical dud, but the soundtrack LP was a huge hit for both Olivia and Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra. Issued as a single, the movie’s title song reached number eight in the US charts and was number one for two weeks in the UK. Jeff Lynne has said that he was asked to include the word
Xanadu
in the song as many times as possible. He managed a total of twenty-one.

In all, five tracks from the movie became hits in both Britain and the United States. Olivia’s solo ‘Magic’ topped the US charts to notch up her third number one in America. ‘Suddenly’, a lovely John Farrar romantic ballad on which Olivia duetted with Cliff Richard vocally but not on screen, peaked at number twenty.

The appalling reviews may have enveloped the movie with an atmosphere of calamitous failure, but the fact remains that the gloriously awful
Xanadu
made $22million at the US box office alone, almost double its outlay. The soundtrack album sold two million copies, and some tracks still feature on radio playlists around the world to this day. Olivia took one of its songs to the top of the US charts for a month and another to the top of the UK charts. The film also yielded one of Olivia’s own personal favourites, ‘Suspended In Time’, another beautiful ballad written by John Farrar.

The DVD of
Xanadu
has sold surprisingly well for a film given such a panning and the highly dubious honour of being largely responsible for the creation of Hollywood’s Golden Raspberry Awards. This is an annual awards event held pre-Oscars night to celebrate the year’s worst dross to reach the cinema screen. The Razzies, as they have become known, were created in 1981 by a certain John Wilson after he had paid the sum of 99 cents to see a double bill of
Xanadu
and
Can’t Stop The Music
. He was so appalled at what he had seen that he demanded a refund for his ticket but was flatly refused. At the inaugural Golden Raspberry Awards, held among friends in Wilson’s sitting room,
Xanadu
picked up seven nominations - Olivia was nominated as Worst Actress - and ‘won’ one award for worst director.
Can’t Stop The Music
, the film Olivia had almost taken as her follow-up to
Grease
, was named Worst Picture.

Like
Xanadu
,
Can’t Stop The Music
was released some time after the disco craze had peaked and Allan Carr’s let’s-form-a-group-right-now movie with The Village People received much the same butchering from the critics.
Newsweek
said: ‘
Can’t Stop the Music
ushers in a whole new concept in entertainment - it’s the first all-singing, all-dancing horror film;
The Dawn Of The Dead
of the disco era.’
Film Review
called it: ‘The most conspicuous box office calamity of the summer.’

Some twenty-seven years on, John Wilson’s opinion of
Xanadu
had not changed. ‘
Xanadu
is a touchstone of movie wretchedness,’ he seethed. ‘Seeing Gene Kelly, who did
Singin’ In The Rain
, doing those clunky roller-disco moves with people throwing bowling pins over his head - it’s almost like he had gone to hell before he died.’

Three years on from the release of
Xanadu
, Olivia experienced one totally unexpected, unwanted and alarming side effect from the movie which so terrified her that she felt compelled to leave the country temporarily for her own safety. She found herself named as a potential victim on the hit list of a violent killer by the name of Michael Owen Perry, a dangerously disturbed young man who had escaped from a mental institution. Perry was living in the summer of 1983 in a trailer behind his parents’ house in Port Arthur and, after watching
Xanadu
, he became convinced that Olivia really was a Greek goddess and that she was responsible for the corpses Perry hallucinated were coming up through his floorboards. He also came to believe that she communicated with him by changing the colour of her eyes.

Perry went so far as to write a letter to Olivia in which he explained: ‘I heard voices and the voices said to me that you are a muse and trapped under Lake Arthur.’

Strange letters from oddballs are an occupational hazard for the famous. Most are harmless but there was something sinister about this one and so it proved. On 17 July 1983, Perry armed himself with guns, including a 357 magnum and a Beretta pistol, and embarked on an horrific orgy of killing which left two of his cousins, a two-year-old nephew and his parents all dead. He shot both of his parents through the eyes. Then Perry vanished, leaving behind in his parents’ house a number of names on a death list. One of them was ‘Olivia’.

While a massive police manhunt got under way, the threat was enough for Olivia to leave the country for a while. ‘She was so worried she packed her bags and stayed in a hotel before getting a plane to fly out here,’ Olivia’s father told reporters from his Manly home in Sydney.

But on 31 July, two weeks after his sickening shooting spree, Perry was tracked down to the Annex Hotel in Washington DC and apprehended. There in his room police discovered nine television sets all switched to static. On some of the screens there were eyes drawn with a felt-tip pen. Perry was convicted of the murders in 1985 and remains on death row to this day.

‘I guess because I was playing this ethereal character, he got reality and showbusiness confused,’ commented Olivia. ‘I left the country for a while. That was a very scary time.’

 

 

Xanadu
achieved and has held on to cult movie status, particularly among women and the gay community. It refuses to fade away. In 2001, a stage parody
Xanadu Live!
ran in Los Angeles - its director Annie Dorsen described the film as ‘the queerest movie that’s not actually about being gay’. And the following year, a ‘
Xanadu
singalong’ took place at Hollywood’s John Anson Ford Amphitheatre as part of Outfest, LA’s annual gay and lesbian film festival. The 1,200-capacity venue was a sell-out.

In 2007 a new $4million stage production of
Xanadu
opened on Broadway to favourable reviews, which surprised many. The
New York Times
called it ‘outlandishly enjoyable’. Broadway was used to staging productions adapted from big-screen hits but rarely from a screen flop. According to its writer, Douglas Carter Beane, however, he was given carte blanche with his pen and retained only a handful of lines from the movie. Beane says when he saw the film, he could not believe how bad the dialogue was and how the plotting was abandoned. ‘The first time I saw it I thought they had misplaced a reel,’ he commented.

Bravely, Olivia has described
Xanadu
as a ‘character-building’ bomb, and is honest enough to admit: ‘When I was really close to it, when we made it, I thought: why did I do that?’

She was later able to joke: ‘I certainly wouldn’t die of overexposure. Not enough people saw it. I don’t regret it or anything I’ve done. I learned a lot and the music was successful. I would have been upset if the music had flopped.’

It’s to Olivia’s credit that these days she can look back fondly at the cinematic calamity. For a long time after the film was initially released, mention of
Xanadu
was quietly avoided in connection with Olivia’s career. But on 10 July 2007, she joined the New York cast of the Broadway production for the opening-night curtain call and was given an enthusiastic reception.

Gene Kelly was professional enough not to say in public at the time precisely what he thought of the last movie in which he danced. After such an illustrious career, he must have been disheartened to be associated with such a bomb. Much later he did go on record as saying he thought
Xanadu
was a bad film but chivalrously noted that working with Olivia had been a joy. Suffice to say that after
Xanadu
, Kelly never took on another acting role in a feature film. It was a sad finale to a glittering career. He died on 2 February 1996.

After
Xanadu
, producer Larry Gordon went on to make the Bruce Willis hit
Die Hard
, co-produced by Joel Silver. Robert Greenwald in recent years has been directing documentaries, but Michael Beck lamented: ‘
The Warriors
opened a lot of doors in film for me, which
Xanadu
then closed.’

For Olivia’s ambitions as an actress,
Xanadu
was a body blow. It severely damaged her standing as a bankable box office movie star. But there were consolations: two chart-topping hits and a dream achieved of partnering a true legend on the dance floor. ‘I never thought I’d ever get the chance to dance with Gene Kelly,’ she said. ‘I had great fear and trepidation at the thought of dancing with him. But on the first day of rehearsals he put me at my ease completely.’

 

 

On a personal level, the greatest benefit for Olivia from her
Xanadu
experience was her blossoming love affair with Matt. She had found the man she would eventually marry. She had always been drawn to confident men with a touch of arrogance about them, but in Matt she had found for the first time a lover she felt was not competing with her.

Olivia and her young lover kept their affair secret right to the very end of the production. Even at the party after the Los Angeles premiere of
Xanadu
, the couple took care to distance themselves from each other. ‘It was very tough,’ said Matt. ‘I wanted to dance with Livvy and couldn’t, which was silly really because she danced with lots of other guys from the set. But it was something we had agreed before going.’

Inevitably, when Olivia gave interviews to promote the film in various countries, one question continually cropped up: ‘When are you going to settle down?’ She successfully continued to conceal from journalists, and therefore the public, her romantic involvement with Matt. But anyone reading very carefully between the lines might have realised there was now someone special in her life. ‘Lately I’ve found myself doodling little pictures of cottages with whitewashed walls and picket fences,’ she told Australia’s
Women’s Weekly
on the eve of the Aussie premiere of
Xanadu
. ‘Very old-fashioned, isn’t that?’ she asked. ‘Inside the cottage I see a happy family, children.’