Olivia (9 page)

Under Kirshner’s guidance, The Monkees simultaneously had a hugely successful career on record. Their discs, heavily promoted and carefully co-ordinated with the TV series, resulted in massive hits for ‘The Prefab Four’, as The Monkees were known because they were so obviously a manufactured group. Kirshner was able to give The Monkees songs like ‘I’m A Believer’ written by such an established songwriter as Neil Diamond.

Thanks to Kirshner’s influence, Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz as The Monkees enjoyed hit singles and two number-one albums. But when rifts opened up between the group’s four young Monkee-men and Kirshner over the style of music they were recording, Kirshner switched his musical attention to a cartoon group called The Archies. He had made millions from The Monkees, but two-dimensional characters, he now reasoned, would be far easier to manipulate. For a start, they would not answer him back.

The Archies
was an animated TV show about the comic book adventures of a teenager called Archie and his pals, and Kirshner, as musical supervisor, found the perfect slice of bubblegum pop to match the cartoon creation. It was a song called ‘Sugar, Sugar’, and he put together a studio group and issued their record as by The Archies. ‘Sugar Sugar’ proceeded to sell an incredible ten million copies, topping the charts in America and in the UK where it stayed at number one for eight weeks. Kirshner, known as ‘the man with the golden ear’, had done it again.

Now, in 1969, Don Kirshner had joined forces with Harry Saltzman on yet another project combining movies and music. To the world’s music press gathered at the Rockefeller’s Rainbow Grill, they announced with great confidence the formation of a four-member ‘multi-media’ rock band called, with the deliberate mis-spelling, Toomorrow.

Covering the event,
Rolling Stone
magazine caustically reported: ‘The clichés were as plentiful and as expensive as the hors d’oeuvres. Should Tomorrow ever come, the complete package would eventually include three “musical adventure” films for United Artists, a series of records on the Calendar label to be distributed by RCA Victor, numerous TV appearances, and the usual Licensing Corporation of America plastic product tie-ins.’

It was not hard to understand
Rolling Stone
’s scepticism. Unveiled as the members of Toomorrow were four youngsters almost totally unknown in either the film or the music business. They comprised Olivia Newton-John, Karl Chambers, Vic Cooper and Ben Thomas, and all were trumpeted as the chosen ones after a ‘six-month worldwide talent hunt’. They were four very different personalities with four very different backgrounds and chosen specifically to appeal to four different audiences.

They were, Kirshner enthused, ‘a smorgasbord . . . the best-looking total group that ever existed’. And, he claimed, Toomorrow ‘can be the biggest thing in the history of the business’. As for Olivia, Kirshner dubbed her ‘the Julie Andrews of the future, the girl next door . . . only groovier’.

The three boys had already been chosen and signed when Saltzman’s and Kirshner’s search for a girl singer to complete the group reached London. Initially the hot favourite was Susan George, a stunning, sexy, blonde young English girl with a promising career as an actress ahead of her. Susan was primarily an actress but she could also sing, and she was on course to be the female face of Toomorrow until one of Krishner’s many music industry contacts in London tipped him off about a girl called Olivia Newton-John.

Kirshner says he knew as soon as he met Olivia that she was right for the new group he had in mind. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he said. ‘I walked into Peter Gormley’s London office one day and there was this kewpie doll in knee socks. I knew she could be the darling of millions!’

Once he had heard her sing, Kirshner realised she also had a decent voice to go with her good looks. ‘I knew with some double-tracking that we could get a great, sweet sound out of her,’ he said, and arranged for Olivia to go for an audition with Saltzman at his Mayfair office in London. Saltzman proved to be as enthusiastic about Olivia as Kirshner. He took such an instant liking to her that she walked out of his office with a firm offer of the leading female role in the Toomorrow project. She was informed this would start with a film to be released worldwide the following year with a soundtrack album to accompany it. After that, the world could be her oyster, Kirshner kept telling her.

‘I walked the streets of London with Olivia just telling her how incredible she was gonna be,’ he recalled. ‘Talent is the key to her success,’ he declared, ‘but there’s a powerful magnetic quality about her, something that immediately gets under your skin and you can’t shake it. And I loved her three names. Unusual, it sticks with you, and the bit about her grandfather winning the Nobel thing; very marketable press stuff.’

Kirshner says he knew for sure Olivia possessed a rare magnetism when, just to please her, he found himself spending an entire afternoon visiting a string of pet shops across London searching for a special kind of dog food as a gift for Olivia’s red setter Geordie. Kirshner had been invited to dinner with Olivia and Bruce and he wanted to present Olivia with a special treat for her pooch. ‘Funny way to spend an afternoon,’ Kirshner mused, ‘but I finally found it. It’s crazy, but that’s the kind of effect she has on you.’

 

 

The hyperbole for Toomorrow soared to extraordinary heights. Harry Saltzman said the whole concept was to ‘fill a void for fourteen-yearolds to thirties’ left by the break-up of The Beatles. Ben Thomas, a Georgia-born singer-guitarist, was described as ‘what you might get if you crossed Paul McCartney with Gary Cooper’. It was hoped that he would generate ‘the same kind of excitement as James Dean’. Karl, a former drummer with Gladys Knight and The Pips from Philadelphia, admitted that he was chosen because he was seen as a combination of Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier. And Vic, who had played backing keyboards for Tom Jones among others, apparently won his berth in Toomorrow on the strength of being not only a fine keyboards player but English, handsome, funny and able to do impressions of James Cagney and James Stewart.

‘When you see the Toomorrow group, it’s impossible to dislike them,’ Kirshner enthused. ‘They’re young, with-it, and have the looks and appeal of “today” . . . and tomorrow. They are undoubtedly the best-looking pop group ever brought together.’

According to Kirshner, the Toomorrow project was principally going ahead because The Beatles had ‘become big business, leaving behind their image as exciting, real people’, and because ‘the world of pop was facing a tedious and vacuous future’.

It was little wonder that
Rolling Stone
magazine labelled the launching of Toomorrow as ‘. . . the greatest barrage of bullshit in many years’, particularly as the quartet of untried unknowns had yet to produce a single note together.

As the only girl in the group and its lead singer, much of the attention inevitably focused on Olivia. Naturally she was flattered by Kirshner’s confidence in her and the big build-up he kept giving her to the press. In view of Don Kirshner’s remarkable track record in the music business, and Harry Saltzman’s equally notable movie achievements as co-producer of the James Bond films, she had no reason to doubt that the Toomorrow project would be anything other than an unqualified success. Kirshner and Saltzman thought so too. They were confident enough to offer their principal stars exclusive five-year contracts. With solid financial investment from the two moguls, Olivia could look forward to five years of guaranteed work from Toomorrow.

Bruce Welch was thrilled for his young girlfriend. She had passed up the opportunity to star with Cliff Richard in
Cinderella
, but this one looked too good to miss. Toomorrow appeared to be a wonderful break for her, and lucrative too.

Money seemed to be no object with the Kirshner-Saltzman partnership - a budget of around £1million was to be allocated to the first film - and Olivia was to be paid an annual Toomorrow retainer of £10,000, a huge sum back in 1969. The duo also paid for her to have singing lessons as well as general pampering. She was sent to leading London hair salon Leonard’s in smart Upper Grosvenor Street in London to have blonde streaks put in her hair. And when she turned twenty-one, the birthday gift from Kirshner and the Toomorrow team was an expensive gold key to wear around her neck - a nod to the traditional twenty-first birthday notion of gaining the key to the door. Thirty-eight years later Olivia would present the key to her own daughter Chloe on her twenty-first birthday. Bruce and Olivia’s relationship was strengthened by the announcement of their engagement that same night. Bruce bought Olivia a large pearl engagement ring set in silver with diamond chips, to add to a black opal ring set in diamonds that he had given her as a token of his love.

When Olivia flew to the United States for the very first time for preliminary Toomorrow meetings, she took her sister Rona along as chaperone. But on arrival in New York, they discovered they had arrived too early. Due to a mix-up, the Toomorrow team weren’t expecting Olivia for another week. No problem, the girls were told, just take off for a week’s holiday in Florida together and all expenses would be paid. Kirshner and Saltzman duly picked up the bill without a murmur for their young star’s unscheduled vacation with her sister in the sunshine state. For Olivia and Rona, it was in every respect the warmest of welcomes to America.

Soon Olivia was making regular trips with Bruce across the Atlantic to New York in connection with the Toomorrow project. They travelled first class, stayed in the very best hotels and were given the red carpet treatment, all at the film company’s expense.

Olivia insisted Bruce travelled with her as often as his own work allowed. Now they were fully committed to each other and officially engaged she was determined the extraordinary showbiz break that had come out of the blue would not jeopardise their relationship. For his part, Bruce had been fully supportive of her leap into Toomorrow, even though nothing quite so unexpected had ever figured in their plans for cosy domestic bliss together. He found it ironic that after giving up touring with The Shadows as a way of spending more time at home with Olivia, she was now the one flying off, often leaving him behind on his own.

First up for Olivia and the other three members of Kirshner’s hot new showbiz property was a sci-fi musical called, of course,
Toomorrow
, written and directed by Val Guest, a distinguished and experienced British filmmaker. He seemed a perfect choice for such a vehicle, having directed the sci-fi hit
The Day The Earth Caught Fire
as well as Cliff Richard’s first movie musical
Expresso Bongo
.

The
Toomorrow
movie would be made at Pinewood Studios in England, and Olivia and the three boys would portray four students attending the London College of Arts and living in Chelsea with Olivia as the ‘den mother’. To pay their way through college they form a pop band, and together they create a stimulating and original musical sound, thanks to the invention by organist Vic of a new instrument called a ‘tonaliser’. This instrument has the unexpected consequence of bringing them into contact with visitors from another world. Its sonic vibrations cause an extra-terrestrial, played by established British character actor Roy Dotrice, to beam the group up into space to entertain the Alphoid population. It transpires that the Alphoid inhabitants need Toomorrow’s vibrant beat to cure them of a mysterious malady - sterility of sound. But when the Alphoids realise their environment is wrong for the group, they allow them to escape back to Earth.

One huge sound stage at Pinewood was given over to the Alphoid space ship, and Olivia had the satisfaction of singing at the famous Roundhouse music venue in north London for a pop festival scene. But filming was anything but a smooth ride for her. She struggled to overcome her Australian accent, and it didn’t take her long to realise that she was in the movie to look pretty as much as for her voice. The wardrobe she was allocated indicated she would be expected to show plenty of leg as often as possible. The boys in the group would attract a female audience and Olivia was expected to look cute and sexy to redress the balance.

Tight little shorts or micro-skirts were the order of the day, and Olivia burst into floods of tears when she learned that at one point the script called for her to seen in her underwear. She refused and, rather than argue the point, Val Guest relented. On the whole it seemed that Val Guest handled Olivia’s inexperience on a film set as sensitively as possible. Indeed, dealing with Olivia’s anxiety and modesty were the least of Guest’s problems. As he later outlined during a
Guardian
lecture he gave at the National Film Theatre in London in 2005, the veteran director had far more important things to worry about.

He explained to the NFI audience that the film’s production was beset with fundamental difficulties. Harry Saltzman had put up the money for the movie, but he had also put his interest in the Bond films up as collateral. ‘Then halfway through the film, we realised this was chaos,’ Guest told his audience, ‘because Cubby Broccoli [Saltzman’s partner on the Bond films] had broken with him and was suing him because part of their contract was that they couldn’t put up the Bond films as collateral for anything. So, Harry’s bank went, the film went. We finally finished it somehow, and then I put a clamp on it being shown. And then we lifted the clamp so it could be shown at the London Pavilion. It just had an opening there. And that really was almost the end of
Toomorrow
.’

Prior to the film’s release, Bruce Welch got to see an early preview and was utterly dismayed at what he saw and heard. ‘The film was a disgrace,’ he said in his autobiography,
Rock ’n’ Roll I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life
. ‘It was reminiscent of so many of the low budget pictures that were made during the early sixties, and the biggest letdown of all was the music. It was all so lightweight. There were no hit songs - the numbers were naive and instantly forgettable.’ Instead of going for songwriters with a proven track record as hit-makers, Kirshner handed the job to some relatively inexperienced writers signed to his publishing company and, of course, the chances of success were not so good.