EXCLUSIVE: “She gave with her heart”: How Olivia Newton-John’s closest family and friends are honouring her legacy

News of her passing travelled across the Pacific in the cold, starry, early morning skies of August 9 this year. Her husband, John Easterling, broke the news. Dame Olivia Newton-John had passed away peacefully, surrounded by much-loved family and friends, at her ranch in California.

It was not a shock – Olivia had embarked on a life-changing journey with cancer 30 years earlier – but it was heartbreaking for those who loved her, and here in Australia, perhaps that was all of us.

At The Weekly, many of us had personal memories to share. Chrissy Iley, who had interviewed her for the magazine in 2018, remembered arriving at the ranch to find Olivia in the kitchen, whipping up a batch of pancakes for them to share, made with gluten-free flour and freshly laid eggs that she’d collected from her hens that morning. “She was so lovely,” Chrissy said.

Later, Mattie Cronan, The Weekly’s style director, was invited to stay for dinner because the shoot had run over time and Olivia was worried there would be no restaurants open late in town. “She was so welcoming,” Mattie says, “wonderfully warm, exactly as you would expect.”

The Australian Women’s Weekly nurtured a career-long friendship with Olivia. When Chrissy’s 2018 story ran (with the cover price including a donation to the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre), Olivia sent a note to our editor-in-chief, saying, “You have redeemed my faith in journalism.”

The first mention of Olivia I can find in the magazine is in our February 1966 Teenagers’ Weekly supplement. Young Aussie pop stars were captured celebrating the 16th birthday of one of their number, Lynne Randell. And right beside the birthday girl is a wide-eyed 17-year-old Olivia (in a sleeveless, white go-go dress) with then boyfriend Ian Turpie.

In 1971, we celebrated her first album, If Not For You, with her first cover. And she was back on the cover a year later, with French heart-throb Sacha Distel, with whom she was sharing a West End stage. By then she’d transformed somewhat from Melbourne girl-next-door to London dolly bird, zipping along cobbled streets in a canary yellow sports car and flatting in St John’s Wood around the corner from her sister, Rona.

Olivia had been born just north of London, in Cambridge, daughter of Brinley Newton-John, a former British intelligence officer and wartime Enigma code breaker, and Irene Born, whose father was the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Max Born.

The family moved in 1953 to Australia, where Brinley was master of the University of Melbourne’s Ormond College. Her parents divorced when she was nine and after that, she told The Weekly, “I would wait for my father in the afternoons under this gorgeous tree in the middle of the driveway, and I used to write stories and poems about birds and trees and the sky.” Thus began both her songwriting and a deep, personal connection with nature.

Barely 14 years old when her career began, Olivia was gifted with a crystal-clear soprano voice. Her great talent, however, was to inhabit a song and deliver its emotional message authentically – we completely believed her whether she was hunting lovers in the gym, murdering them on the banks of the Ohio or pouring out her heart to Danny Zuko. She was not just a singer but a storyteller.

The key to Olivia’s longevity was her versatility. Early appearances on Australian TV have her singing everything from cheesy music hall standards to pop, folk and easy-listening versions of Beatles hits.

On the TV circuit she met long-time friend and singing partner Pat Carroll and her husband, session guitarist John Farrar, who became her closest collaborator. Olivia’s career took off when she teamed up with John and Bruce Welch (formerly with Cliff Richard’s band the Shadows).

The team chose Bob Dylan’s If Not For You as Olivia’s calling card. To everyone’s amazement, it went to number one on the US easy-listening charts. The sequel, Banks of the Ohio, was more folk than pop and a smash in the UK.

In 1973, Olivia went country. Let Me Be There bounded up the US country charts and reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100. The Nashville purists were outraged that an Australian could effortlessly invade their territory but that single won her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Performer and an Academy of Country Music award for Most Promising Female Vocalist.

Over the next five years Olivia dominated country/pop with songs like the million-selling I Honestly Love You (co-written by friend and fellow Aussie Peter Allen). Her next six singles also topped the adult-contemporary chart, a feat that’s never been equalled. Then, at the height of her popularity, Olivia ditched the country girl-next-door image for the “sexy Sandy” look of her Grease character.

She brought John Farrar onto the film as music producer and his songs, Hopelessly Devoted to You and You’re the One That I Want, were among her biggest hits.

Olivia doubled down on her new image with Physical, co-written by another Australian pal, Steve Kipner. Physical, the album, was danceable, romantic, and introduced themes of ecology and animal rights that she’d return to throughout her life. Olivia closed the LP with one of her own compositions, The Promise (The Dolphin Song).

She had been writing ever since her first album and wrote and co-produced every track on her 1994 album, Gaia: One Woman’s Journey, made in the wake of her initial cancer diagnosis.

It is sometimes forgotten that, beyond the causes she championed and the upheavals of her life, Olivia was a significant artist. For 45 years, she held the Guinness World Record for the shortest gap (154 days) by a female musician between new number one albums.

Olivia’s career includes four Grammys (eight nominations), an Academy of Country Music Most Promising Female Vocalist Award, 10 American Music Awards, induction in the ARIA Hall of Fame, a Daytime Emmy, a Golden Globe nomination and Totally Devoted to You was nominated for an Oscar. She has sold close to 100 million albums and her music is woven into the fabric of our lives.

WATCH: Olivia Newton-John’s incredible life story in pictures. Article continues after video

Perhaps it was because her music meant so much to us that we felt drawn to follow so closely the triumphs and tragedies of Olivia’s life.

We watched as she fell in love with dancer Matt Lattanzi on the set of Xanadu and the couple welcomed Olivia’s only child, Chloe Rose, in January, 1986. Olivia teamed up with her old singing partner, Pat Carroll, to ride the wave of Australiana in Hollywood with their shop, Koala Blue. Olivia was our golden girl.

Meanwhile, alongside her own new family, Olivia kept an eye out for her nieces and nephews back in Melbourne. “Our mother had left when we were very young,” says her niece, Tottie Goldsmith. “And Olivia filled that void. You can never replace a mother, but you can step into a role that’s feminine and maternal, and Olivia did that. She was very conscious of making sure we always felt important to her.”

“She was an angel, that one,” says her close friend of 40 years, Gregg Cave. “She was a giver, and she gave with her heart.”

However, no life is secured against misfortune, and the courage, the compassion, and the spirit with which Olivia faced her own trials also won our hearts. As Gregg told The Weekly: “Olivia never once said, ‘Why me?’ She said, ‘Why not me?'”

Chloe was only six when her mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer. The family was living in the NSW Northern Rivers and Chloe learnt about it from a child at her little bush school.

“Some kid ran up to me and said, ‘I read your mum’s got cancer and she’s going to die’,” Chloe told The Weekly. She wished her mum had told her first. She went home and said, “I would have taken care of you, Mummy.”

Chloe would grow up to become a singer, but also to battle anxiety and eating disorders. To Olivia she was the most important person in the world and her proudest achievement. In 2019 she shared with The Weekly all the things she admired about her girl.

“She has a huge heart,” she began, “and is very sensitive to people and their feelings. She is very wise. She surprises me because she comes out with these things that are way beyond her years. She always has. Her sensitivity, her kindness, her sweetness and her loyalty. She is a good person … And she is incredibly strong. She seems to be fragile, but she has an iron core because of all these things she’s been through in her life.”

And of Olivia, Chloe said: “I admire her strength. She’s a warrior. She chooses to be positive. That’s so hard. Most people choose the easy way, which is being negative. She sees the beauty in everything. The way she feels about my heart, that’s the way I feel about her heart … She is so thoughtful and loyal and generous. I respect my mother and respect is a big one.”

Olivia’s generous heart saw her through the end of her marriage to Matt in 1995. The pair remained lifelong friends and maintained a close family relationship for Chloe. Right up until her death, they still shared Christmases and birthdays. Olivia found love again with cameraman Patrick McDermott, but their nine-year relationship ended in tragedy when he disappeared from a fishing trip at sea in 2005.

Then, sometime around 2007, Olivia found her “soulmate” hiding in plain sight. She and “plant medicine man” John Easterling had been friends for 20 years before they fell in love. When they did, there was some cultural sharing on both sides. He watched Grease and she sampled the plant-based psychedelic, ayahuasca. The following year they married twice – once on a mountain peak in Peru, marking the winter solstice (June 21, 2008) and again nine days later at a beach in Florida.

“He’s a very special human being,” Olivia told The Weekly just last year. “He’s honest, loving, creative, funny. He’s incredibly intelligent. I’ve learnt so much from him. He’s wonderful, he is. I’ve lucked out.”

It was 20 years ago that Olivia was approached by the Austin Hospital in Melbourne to be patron of its new cancer centre. She had been in remission for a decade and was immediately drawn to the idea, but only if she could have real input into the centre’s core philosophy and the nitty-gritty of its design.

“You can see her in everything,” says Debbie Shiell, Austin Health Foundation Director, “in the way we deliver our programs, the textures on the walls, the light that fills the rooms. She was involved in the design of the building, in choosing the colours – everything. And she was only prepared to put her name on the building if we incorporated wellness. What was most important to her was that there was a wellness centre, separate from the hospital but in the hospital grounds and completely accessible. She called it a sanctuary, a place of healing.”

Ten years ago, the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre opened its doors, with cutting-edge research and treatment facilities, as well as a wellness centre that today provides massage, acupuncture, exercise physiology, art therapy, music therapy, meditation, counselling, pet therapy, and so much more.

“It still gives me goosebumps when I talk about it,” says the centre’s Director of Cancer and Neurosciences, Cherie Cheshire. “It’s a special place.”

The first time Cherie met Olivia she’d been asked to accompany her on a walk around the wards, which she made a point of doing, many times, whenever she was in Australia.

“It was a spine-tingling experience,” she remembers. “To see her give so much of herself, to listen to stories, to see her make such a difference. It was a really long day. She’d start off with a breakfast meeting and I remember seeing her, still wandering the wards, at seven at night. But nothing was going to stop her from catching up with everyone. She was determined that nobody would miss out.”

In 2013 Olivia secretly battled a recurrence of cancer after nearly 21 years in complete remission. It was discovered by chance in her shoulder following a car accident. Then, in 2017, she fractured her sacrum, apparently as a result of the weakening of her bones brought about by the treatment for stage four cancer. Unstoppable, she learned to walk again while being cared for at her own centre in Melbourne.

Through it all Olivia stayed strong and spread a message of hope. Losing loved ones (her sister, Rona, her five-year-old goddaughter, Colette Chuda, John Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, and others) only made her more determined to encourage the development of kinder, more effective cancer treatments and ultimately, hopefully a cure.

It was a quiet Wednesday morning in 2017, and Loredana Crupi and her partner, Jo Hogan, were splashing paint around in the ONJ centre’s art room. A year earlier, Loredana (or Lori) had been diagnosed with myelodysplasia (a blood cancer) and she credits the gym in the wellness centre with helping her grow strong enough to withstand the stem cell transplant that saved her life.

She and Jo also adored the music therapy and art therapy, which is what they were engrossed in that morning when Olivia walked in.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Lori with a bright-eyed smile. “I dropped my brush and she walked towards me and we hugged. She was just lovely. At the time I had no idea she was actually a patient in the hospital. I know now she was in quite a lot of pain, but she’d come down from her ward to spend time with us. I thought it was pretty special.”

When I first met Olivia in 2019 she was still recovering her strength from that most recent scrape with broken bones and cancer. We spent a day together – along with Chloe, John, her friend Gregg and The Weekly’s camera crew – creating what are probably the most beautiful photos that were taken of Olivia in her life.

We wandered across the rolling, green hills of her Gaia Retreat in the Byron Bay hinterland, looking out to the Pacific where whales breached on their way south for summer. Olivia walked slowly, sometimes tentatively but determinedly, lifting a voluminous white skirt. John delivered herbal smoothies and perhaps there was some pain as the day wore on. We heard her say, very softly, as if to herself alone: “This could be my last photo shoot,” but she was endlessly patient, generous, kind.

That night, the sun set behind thunderheads and a double rainbow arced across the sky. Rainbows were special talismans to Olivia – they lit up significant moments in her life and offered her hope, and this one stopped her in her tracks. She gave it a welcoming smile and snapped a photo on her phone before we moved on to a cosy, candle-lit nook in the lobby where we chatted about everything under the sun, from motherhood to marijuana to religion.

She told me that she meditated with her Buddhist friends, prayed with her Christian friends and in her heart she had a spirituality all her own. “Chloe’s father once said to me that nature was his church,” she added, “and I thought that was a beautiful description.”

She also spoke about the end of life. She told me she wasn’t afraid because “I’ve had the icing on the cake and the candles on top of that and the icing on top of that and more candles and hundreds and thousands on top of that. I’ve had the most wonderful career and the most wonderful life.” She said she believed in life after death, and that sometimes she sensed close friends and family who had passed away.

“I had a close friend, Audrey, die recently,” she explained, “and I hear her voice. Things happen all the time and I go, ‘Oh, that’s Audrey’.”

Which is interesting because there has been quite a bit of “Oh, that’s Olivia” of late amongst her family and close friends.

“My brother, Brett, and I were at the ONJ Centre last week,” Tottie tells me. “I hadn’t been there since she’d passed and I felt really quite anxious walking in without her … But then I was in the wellness centre and I felt her come in like this beautiful – breeze is the only word I can find – she was like a light, warm breeze … I was a bit choked up for a minute, then that feeling passed and we had the most wonderful meeting.”

Tottie had stopped by to begin planning for this year’s Wellness Walk. It is the ONJ Centre’s biggest event of the year, raising the funds that make all those complementary therapies possible. In the past, it’s been held on Olivia’s birthday but this year it will be on October 9. Tottie will be there – walking for the first time without her auntie – and she hopes that she, and all the centre’s supporters, can make Olivia proud.

“I worked with her from before this centre was even a hole in the ground,” Tottie says tearfully. “I’ve been on the ground for her. I’ve fulfilled things for her when she couldn’t be here. We’ve worked together, looking at colours for the walls, textures for the floors, imprints of leaves for the glass.

“Sometimes she would turn and look at me and say, ‘You know, I’m passing you the baton, Plonka’. That was my nickname. And I’d say, ‘I know’. It’s very important to me that this place survives and her legacy lives on.”

The Olivia Newton-John Cancer, Wellness & Research Centre’s Walk for Wellness is on October 9 this year. Join the walk from anywhere in the world at walkforwellness.com.au.

Learn more about the ONJ centre and donate at onjcancercentre.org.

And donate to the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, which supports scientific research into plant-based medicine, at onjfoundationfund.org.

You can read this story and many others in the October issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly – on sale now