Olivia (32 page)

Olivia flew out that same night and arrived in time to be with Irene in the last few days of her life. She had brought with her a candle, which she placed in the sitting room and lit when loved ones came to visit Irene in her final days.

And, as Olivia recounted to Andrew Denton in the most revealing TV interview she’s ever given, the candle proved to be of comfort to her in the most extraordinary way just after Irene passed away. Olivia explained: ‘I had always said to her: “Please give me a sign after you’ve gone that you’re OK,” because my mother had always told me that when her mother died, a photograph of her fell off the wall and she had always felt this was a sign from her mother. I said: “Please give me a sign.”

‘My mother was not particularly religious - in fact I would say she was probably agnostic - but she said she would try, with a slight smile on her face. I’m not quite sure if she really believed it but I always hoped she would.’

Olivia says that about an hour after Irene had died, she went in to sit with her and felt an incredible presence in the room, an energy she had never felt before. ‘So I said to her: “Mum, please let me know you’re OK.” I looked around the room and thought: what can we ask her to do? There was nothing in there except some candles going under the window.

‘I said: “Can you make the candles move, make them flicker, something.” The candles moved. That was enough for me - great, she’s OK.’

But just then, there was a shout from the sitting room where Rona and other relatives and close friends were gathered.

 

Some ten days after Irene’s death, Olivia had further reason to believe her mother’s spirit lived on. Together with a friend, Gregg Cave, Olivia had gone over to Irene’s house in Melbourne to fetch some of Irene’s belongings which she wanted to keep as treasured reminders of her mother.

Gregg was a former actor whom Olivia had first met when he moved to Melbourne to work on the TV series
Carson’s Law
in the 1980s, and he had subsequently become a long-standing friend of the Newton-John family. At twenty-seven Gregg had completely changed his life and become an art dealer and hotel designer and now, as they set off together to drive to Olivia’s farm near Lismore, the topic of conversation during the journey came around to lifestyle, and Gregg declared that he was looking to buy a small house in New South Wales far away from the hustle and bustle of life in the city to which he was accustomed.

They were just half an hour’s drive from completing their journey to Olivia’s farm when a For Sale sign caught their eye outside a small house in Brooklet, in the subtropical Byron Bay hinterland near the town of Bangalow. They decided to stop to investigate, and it turned out that they had stumbled across a semi-derelict former health retreat called the Sanctuary, which had originally opened as the Bangalow Palms Health Farm twenty years before, the first of its kind in the area.

The minute Olivia stepped out of the car to inspect the property she was struck by the energy of the place, and her initial curiosity began to take on a new relevance when they started to explore its twenty acres of natural surroundings. She remembers that when she and Gregg reached the highest point on the plot and gazed out over rolling green hills, orchards and vineyards all around them and took in the glorious views to the mountains on one side and the ocean to the other, they both fell in love with it instantly.

That night Olivia couldn’t stop thinking about the property and its glorious setting, so much so that she even dreamed that she had bought it and called it Gaia, the title of the spiritual album she had recorded nine years before. When she recounted her dream to Gregg next morning, he was stunned because he said that he, too, had dreamed they had bought it - but named it Bella Vista because of its breathtaking views. The coincidence of their dreams persuaded them that there was nothing they could do except buy it. They knew that the property, a fifteen-minute drive inland from the popular seaside resort of Byron Bay, would need a lot of work to turn it from a rundown and neglected retreat into the kind of haven of health, peace and tranquillity that Olivia envisaged.

To their disappointment they discovered another prospective purchaser was already in negotiations, but when that sale fell through Gregg and Olivia were able to buy the retreat with the help of some financial partners. And they called it Gaia.

Olivia, who dedicated
2
, her 2002 album of duets, to Irene, firmly believes it was all meant to be and that her mother led her there. ‘You might think I’m nuts - but she was part of it,’ she said. ‘My mum gave me my love of nature and beauty and it was almost as if she had guided us to this breathtaking tranquil place in the middle of the countryside.

‘If someone had said to me all those years ago when I made
Grease
that one day I’d open a retreat and spa I’d have said they must be crazy.’

Olivia and her partners took ownership in 2004 and Gregg gave up his job as an art dealer to oversee the nine-month transformation of the building into a beautiful retreat.

As a tribute to Irene, who was a fine photographer, and as a thank-you to her mother for leading her to the oasis of calm that is Gaia, the retreat has many of Irene’s nature photos processed on to canvas with copies for sale and the profits going to the funding of the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Centre in Melbourne.

Chapter 16

Missing

FRANK LIVERSEDGE, LANDING MANAGER FOR SAN PEDRO’S 22ND STREET MARINA

 

 

ON 30 JUNE 2005, a chartered boat by the name of
Freedom
cast off from its moorings at 22nd Street marina in San Pedro, a seaside suburb south of Los Angeles, and nosed its way out of the picturesque port to sea on an overnight fishing trip off the coast of California. On board the 27-metre-long vessel equipped with state-of-the-art electronics were a full crew and a group of twenty-three enthusiastic anglers, all eagerly looking forward to a few hours of sport-fishing. They had each paid $105 for the trip and were hoping for an abundance of sea bass and yellowtail in the waters around San Clemente Island, a hundred kilometres to the south.

It should have been a routine trip, one of dozens regularly taken by the
Freedom
from the San Pedro landing area, which is home to the largest privately owned diving and fishing fleets on America’s west coast.

Instead, the
Freedom
’s voyage evolved into the most baffling and, for Olivia, most agonising of missing-persons mysteries. For on board the
Freedom
that night was Patrick McDermott, Olivia’s on-off boyfriend of the past nine years. And on the ship’s return to port, there was no sign of him. He had vanished.

Olivia had first met Patrick, an American cameraman eight years her junior, on the set of a commercial and there was an instant spark between them. ‘I hadn’t met her before, I never had a crush on her or enjoyed her music,’ said Patrick, even confessing that he had never seen
Grease
. ‘But when I got to speak with her and make true eye contact for the first time, we were locked as if we had known each other for years in past lives.’

Both had recently been through divorces, and Olivia found Patrick to be amusing, thoughtful and considerate, handsome, and the most romantic person she said she had ever met. One Valentine’s Day, in the most quixotic of gestures, Patrick designed a ‘magical mystery tour’ for Olivia to follow which led her via a trail of loving notes, cards and signs around Malibu to a tent where he was waiting for her with outstretched arms and a bottle of champagne.

Patrick was never the most visible of Olivia’s boyfriends. He was not often photographed by her side over the next few years, but there was no doubt that he felt tremendous love and affection for Olivia, and she for him. Olivia notably referred to him as her special man when she was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame in 2002.

But now, on a fateful June night, Patrick had inexplicably gone missing, and his disappearance, and the investigations and revelations that followed, proved to be so distressing for Olivia it led her to state: ‘I’ve been through cancer and divorce. Nothing compares to this.’

Fellow anglers and crew confirmed Patrick had definitely been aboard the vessel on the night of 30 June and yet, when the
Freedom
returned to San Pedro, there was apparently no trace of him. Patrick seemed to have completely disappeared and the only solid evidence that he had been on board was a small bag found in his bunk and his fishing tackle. The bag was later found to contain his passport, wallet, an organiser, his car keys, credit cards and some loose coins.

Patrick’s car was later discovered in the car park where he was presumed to have left it before boarding the
Freedom
.

Patrick’s was an utterly perplexing disappearance which, in time, as investigations got under way, gave rise to theories that he had fallen overboard into the Pacific and drowned, that he had committed suicide, that he had faked his own death and even that he had been murdered.

Olivia was in Australia when she received the terrible news that Patrick was missing and she was shocked to the core. She had been enjoying a break at her Gaia retreat while firming up plans for an Australian tour for the following year. On 7 July she put in an appearance at a Planet Ark tree-planting ceremony and, like everyone else at that point, she was unaware that Patrick had disappeared. Particularly heartbreaking for Olivia on hearing the shocking news was that she and Patrick had been going through a brief separation at the time. They had previously parted more than once but got back together again each time and they were always a couple who gave each other space.

The unknown fate of a man Olivia described as ‘the most romantic person I’ve ever known’ was worrying enough for the singer. But her anxiety for his safety was compounded by wild press speculation, fuelled by supposed sightings of Patrick in Mexico. The strain was to take a heavy toll on Olivia and plunge her into a deep depression.

Patrick had originally booked himself a ticket on the
Freedom
as a relaxing treat to himself while Olivia was away on a working holiday in Australia, where she was preparing to promote her new album
Stronger Than Before
, a part-charity CD she had recorded with several friends in the music business in her continuing campaign to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer.

What is beyond dispute is that Patrick was on the
Freedom
that night. Fisherman Tony Mayo, who befriended Patrick on the trip before he vanished, reported: ‘He was a cool cat. I remember he made a couple of good jokes during the safety speech and just seemed a nice guy.’

Mayo went on to say that at 1.45am on 1 July, he was on deck fixing a new line on his fishing reel and there was no sign of Patrick. He added that when he looked for him later that morning he was nowhere to be seen. ‘I kept an eye out for him all day long but never saw him again,’ Mayo said. ‘I just figured he was sick or something.’

Several crew members said they remembered Patrick as being amiably chatty as the anglers spent a pleasant few hours enjoying a beer or two and some good fishing. Patrick was also said to have eaten a light meal on his own in the galley as the
Freedom
headed back to port.

Early on the evening of Friday, 1 July, the boat came to a routine stop at a marker buoy five kilometres from San Pedro harbour as it neared the end of its twenty-four-hour round trip. At this point the twenty-three passengers assembled in the boat’s galley to settle up for the incidental costs they had accrued on their trip. This included food, drinks, and the services of the two deckhands, who cleaned and gutted the catch of the day, which mostly comprised yellowtail. Patrick’s tab for hot dogs and Cokes was settled up, and the payment of $10 recorded by the crew.

The
Freedom
then began to dock and the passengers disembarked. But no one seemed to remember Patrick actually getting off the boat when it returned to San Pedro. His fishing-tackle box and bag were found in the galley by crew members after the passengers had all disembarked. They were duly handed in as lost property to Frank Liversedge, San Pedro’s 22nd Street marina’s landing manager, who later said he did not open the bag.

What made the mystery all the more puzzling was that the alarm wasn’t raised for fully eleven days. The authorities weren’t alerted until 11 July when Patrick’s ex-wife, actress Yvette Nipar, called the police after he had failed to turn up for a family get-together for their teenage son, Chance, on 6 July.

Yvette had called Frank Liversedge to ask if any lost property had been handed in. She then gave the marina manager permission to open the bag that Patrick had left behind and to examine its contents. Soon afterwards Patrick’s silver Hyundai saloon car was discovered parked in the lot near the San Pedro marina. It was only then that police and coastguard investigations began to get under way.

All the members of the crew and the other anglers were interviewed but none could shed any light on the mystery. No one could actually recall Patrick disembarking from the
Freedom
, thus sparking initial fears that he had fallen overboard. The case began to attract headlines as soon as it became known that the missing man was Olivia’s long-standing boyfriend. And the theory that he had possibly faked his own death took wing when it emerged that Patrick was facing a series of problems in a messy personal life.