Olivia (25 page)

One reason why it took the press so long to cotton on to Olivia’s love affair was that she deliberately altered her appearance. ‘After I’d finished filming
Xanadu
I just decided to cut all my hair off,’ she revealed. ‘It had been ruined by filming anyway and I decided not to dye it any more either.

‘It was wonderful. I felt like a whole new person. Nobody recognised me on the streets of LA for months. I was just a girl with short dark hair who looked a little like Olivia Newton-John.’

A year after Matt and Olivia shared their first kiss on their hike in Will Rogers State Park, Matt went out to Olivia’s ranch house in Malibu with its own swimming pool, riding stables, floodlit tennis court and jacuzzi. For a boy used to sharing a small house with eleven others back in Portland, Oregon, it took his breath away. This was the sort of luxury celebrity home he had only read about in glossy magazines. The contrast with his own humble rented apartment in Los Angeles and the frugal way his large family lived back in Portland could hardly have been more marked. ‘It was such a weird experience,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. My family wasn’t poor. We always had plenty of good food, but when you’re one of ten kids, there’s not much left for luxuries. There was one small black and white TV for all twelve of us.’

By February of 1981, Matt and Olivia were a solidly entwined couple who were in love and planning a future together. When they began living together, they resolved the time had come to be perfectly open about their relationship. ‘That’s when we started hitting the town together, the cameras started clicking and the press started talking about us,’ said Matt.

The press of course made much of the fact that Olivia was a millionaire and Matt was a hard-up actor ten years her junior who still had to sign on the dole in between film parts. Matt told the world that they intended to marry at some point in the future. ‘I want to wait until I am financially able to contribute,’ he said. ‘We are very much in love. We do everything together. But I refuse to take anything from Olivia. I insist that I must earn my own money.’

As for the ten years between them, Matt said:

 

While relieved that he and Olivia no longer had to preserve their secrecy, Matt had to face up to a new reality.
Xanadu
had given him a foothold in movies, but as far as his career was concerned, essentially he was just another dancer in Hollywood. The fact that he was the lover of a very famous singer was what set him apart from his peers. ‘The trouble was, I was becoming better known as Livvy’s guy than as an actor,’ he lamented. ‘That was very worrying, but I couldn’t do much about it.’

Grease
had done wonders for Olivia’s image, and the emergence into the public eye of Matt on Olivia’s arm added further spice to it. ‘People had to revise their view of her,’ said a member of the
Xanadu
crew. ‘She looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And then suddenly it turns out she’s secretly been making out with this much younger guy who looks like a sexy hot young stud. And what’s more, you could tell she was really into him, and once the secret was out she wasn’t afraid to show it. It made you wonder which was the real Olivia Newton-John - white bread or a white-hot cookie?’

Matt fanned the flames of debate by giving an interview to an American magazine in which he was quoted as saying of Olivia: ‘She’s not just white bread any more, and she’s showing it. I think I’ve brought out the female animal in her.’

Ironically, Olivia’s passionate affair with Matt coincided with her emergence as a gay icon thanks to the camp appeal of
Xanadu
. The movie gave her an unexpected following among the gay community and, thanks to a totally innocent remark Olivia had made on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
many years before, whispers resurfaced about her being a lesbian.

Olivia had been a guest on Carson’s chat show at a time when she was first enjoying success in America with her smash hit ‘I Honestly Love You’. After performing the song on his programme, she was asked by Carson about the friends she kept and Olivia had replied that she had lots of girl friends. She meant that she had a supportive network of friends who were female, but Carson’s raised eyebrows and quizzical expression at the singer’s answer gave entirely the wrong impression about Olivia’s sexual preferences to the millions of viewers who watched his top-rated TV show.

Del Shores, the gay writer-director with whom Olivia became a long-standing friend and whom she would eventually work for on his 1999 movie
Sordid Lives
, liked to joke that he stayed straight for two decades because whenever he questioned his sexuality, he felt he must be straight because he was attracted to Olivia Newton-John. ‘Then I found a lot of gay men are attracted to Olivia Newton-John,’ he said. Matt was most certainly not one of them.

Chapter 10

Getting Physical

STEVE KIPNER, CO-WRITER OF ‘PHYSICAL’

 

 

GREASE
MAY HAVE hinted that there was a great deal more to Olivia Newton-John than met the eye. And her perceived image as the eternal ingénue certainly required a radical rethink after she moved a hot young lover in the virile shape of Matt Lattanzi into her Malibu home.

To those who knew Olivia well, she had never seemed happier. She and Matt were madly in love and Matt clearly adored her. ‘I love her because she’s a woman, a very mature woman who, apart from being beautiful, I find tremendously inspiring,’ he said. ‘She lives life instinctively, she seems to do everything right.’

Matt maintained the age difference between them was meaningless, but he nevertheless had to put up with critics predicting their relationship wouldn’t last. ‘People said “It will never work out” so many times I gave up giving them a reply,’ he said, and added: ‘I was never really aware of being known as her toy boy. We were so happy I didn’t think of anything else. In fact, I was blind with happiness.’

Once Matt had moved into Olivia’s ranch and the couple were living openly together, they spent happy days walking the dogs by the sea, going out riding together, hiking and making love. Neither of them was interested in the Hollywood party scene, and they preferred to live privately and quietly enjoying each other’s company.

Matt’s unspoiled youthful exuberance, his sense of fun, his love of the outdoors and his boyish spirit of adventure rubbed off on Olivia. She found Matt’s easygoing sense of freedom to be infectious and it was something she had to some extent missed out on when she was younger. From the age of fifteen she had pursued her career as a singer, and there was always the next song, the next record, the next TV show and the next concert to consider and plan. Olivia was a career woman who had become accustomed to signing autographs from the age of fourteen, and by the time she fell for Matt, she had been working pretty much solidly for nigh on fifteen years, almost half her life. Matt loved nothing better than going off on a long hike to explore some new remote area with a backpack and a fishing rod and a willingness to pitch a tent by a river or sleep out under the stars. He was, he said, a man for the wilderness and every year he’d cheerfully take off for a week on his own in Death Valley.

Matt also liked to go running regularly, up to seven miles a day, by the sea, or hit the beach to go surfing, scuba diving and sailing, and he showed Olivia that there was more to sport than playing a couple of sets of tennis, which seemed to be the obligatory game of the Hollywood elite.

Olivia was pleased to follow her young lover’s energetic lead. ‘She has such a youthful manner, she runs around with me all the time,’ Matt said approvingly. Some of Olivia’s happiest days off were spent on camping trips with Matt in California or in Matt’s home state of Oregon. Other times they’d simply drive out in a van together to destinations unknown and sleep in the back of the van or pitch a tent by a lake and get up in the morning and catch fish for breakfast.

Some cynics unkindly hinted that Matt’s hitching himself to a superstar was no bad career move for a budding young actor like him. But he showed he was serious in his ambitions by conscientiously attending acting school and asking Olivia for advice rather than favours. With her considerable experience of the showbiz scene and knowledge of the Hollywood rat race, Olivia was determined to help her boyfriend avoid the pitfalls of Tinseltown. ‘Hollywood is terribly rough on kids who come here all by themselves with no friends and nobody to talk to,’ she said.

‘I tell Matt that if you have good people working for you and friends to encourage you, and if you have talent, you’ll be fine. I give him advice and encouragement, but that’s about all. I advise him to be picky, and not believe the flattery or his own publicity, and to keep his feet on the ground.’

In 1981, the year after
Xanadu
’s release, Matt secured a role in what turned out to be legendary Hollywood director George Cukor’s last film,
Rich And Famous
, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen as two women whose long-standing friendship is tested when one rises from obscurity to success as a novelist.

Matt played a hustler who has a one-afternoon stand with Jackie Bisset, a role that included some rear-view nudity for the young actor. Outwardly Olivia appeared unconcerned about her lover filming his romp in the buff with an actress as alluring as Jackie Bisset. Olivia was professional enough to know that Matt and Jackie had a job to do when the script called for it but inwardly she was not best pleased, as Matt found out - but not until two years later. He recalled:

 

Rich And Famous
, with its starry cast and illustrious director, should have presented Matt with a terrific opportunity to show what he could do but, looking back, he felt he failed to capitalise on it. ‘I used to wonder at all the talk about how tough it was to get started. But I was living in the comfort zone. No one pushed me to make something of my part. The result was that I wasn’t great. It didn’t do my career any good.’

In 1983, Matt starred in a new movie called
My Tutor
, a coming-of-age comedy in which he played a teenager who learns a lot more than French when his father hires an older but beautiful blonde as his son’s private tutor for the summer. Caren Kaye starred as the teacher who preferred to take her pupil out of the classroom and give him lessons in the more worldly setting of the bedroom.

Matt was required to film a tasteful love scene with Caren, as well as a much more risquéscene with a lissom young brunette called Jewel Shepard. Olivia chose to be on set for the latter, but Jewel is on record as saying that the singer kept her cool when the cameras rolled as she watched Jewel get to grips with her beau.

‘I played a fantasy girl,’ Jewel reported. ‘I was in a phone booth when lead actor Matt Lattanzi sees me and dreams of having sex with me. In the fantasy sequence, he pulls me out of the phone booth, throws me into a limousine, rips off my top and starts to have sex with me. Come to think of it, that was the first limo I was ever in. Olivia Newton-John, who was Matt’s girlfriend, was on the set to make sure that everything was kosher. She was a nice woman who didn’t seem to be jealous or anything.’

‘She isn’t unhappy about me doing those sorts of films as long as I don’t flash myself around,’ Matt said of Olivia when promoting the movie. ‘And I’m not seen nude in
My Tutor
. One of the good things about our relationship is that neither of us are jealous people. Livvy wasn’t upset or jealous that I was in bed with another woman, that was part of the job. It was just a stepping stone.’

Years later he reflected ruefully: ‘I got caught up in a treadmill of work I didn’t want to do. I had no control over my career and the roles were superficial.’

But as he pursued his own career, Matt was able to say: ‘There were never any ego problems between Livvy and me. It was no use me looking at her success and thinking: “When’s it going to happen for me?” I don’t understand that sort of attitude. I was glad every time Livvy had something good coming along and supported her in it.’ And one of Olivia’s projects he gave his backing to was a single and an album, which showed Olivia in a very new and controversial light.

 

 

Given Matt’s heartthrob good looks, it was perhaps only to be expected that casting directors saw him as a prime candidate for sexy screen roles. What was totally unexpected one year on from
Xanadu
was that it would be Olivia who would find herself embroiled in a controversy about sex. It was all because she made a record containing such blatantly sexual connotations that she landed herself in hot water with broadcasting authorities and caused ructions that were felt as far away as South Africa.