Olivia (2 page)

Irene, who was German, and Welshman Brin, who was a master at King’s College, already had a son, Hugh, and a daughter, Rona, but Olivia was very much a wanted addition to their family.

Irene, then in her early thirties, and her husband had both decided a third child would complete their family after eleven years of marriage. And for Brin, Olivia’s arrival was a very special birth because he had been away in the war when his first two children had been born. He was posted to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire where his brilliant talent for languages was put to good use helping to crack the Germans’ Enigma Code, which comprised a series of five-letter technical words detailing messages about Hitler’s battle plans. Brin was also the man who interrogated Hitler’s right-hand man Rudolf Hess after he parachuted into Scotland in 1941.

Olivia was born at a time when Britain was still struggling to come to terms with the stark realisation that the end of World War Two had brought peace but not plenty. The England that welcomed Olivia into the world was a country of rationed food, clothes, petrol and tobacco. Rationing had been in force for many years as part of the war effort and, during that summer of 1948, facing a mounting financial crisis, the British government announced additional austerity measures, including a halt to motoring for pleasure and foreign holidays.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The country rejoiced in the news that Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh were looking forward to the birth of their first child in November, and British cinema was revelling in the success of
The Red Shoes
, featuring the beautiful ballet-star-turned-actress Moira Shearer in a tale of a dancer torn between two men and her career. On the radio, the hit tune of the day was ‘Buttons and Bows’ from Bob Hope’s first colour movie,
The Paleface
, co-starring a gun-toting Jane Russell as Calamity Jane.

Olivia arrived at the end of an eventful English summer largely dominated by sport. London had just successfully hosted the Olympic games despite the strictures of post-war austerity. And, fittingly for Olivia as events were to turn out, it was a group of Australians who were making their mark around the country that summer. Don Bradman’s all-conquering Aussie cricketers earned the accolade of the finest team ever to play the game as they toured the English counties.

 

 

Olivia’s Welsh bloodline on her father’s side can be traced back to 1728; in the thirteenth-century church in St Mary Hill, a little village some twenty miles west of Cardiff, there is a 200-year-old memorial plaque commemorating several generations of the Johns who lived in the village in the late 1700s. Until very recently, Olivia’s knowledge of her father’s side of her family was very limited. To put that right she visited Wales in 2007 with the express purpose of discovering her Welsh roots and learning more about her ancestors.

The trip provided her with a host of surprises, not least that her great-grandfather James Newton, born in 1856, was a publican, that her prim and thoroughly puritanical grandmother Daisy had been a barmaid. Olivia also learned that her own father had been born above the family pub.

James Newton had married Elizabeth on Christmas day in 1880 in the Bethany Chapel in Cardiff, and they subsequently had a daughter, Daisy, who married a cellar boy. And it was Daisy, Olivia’s grandmother, who founded the Newton-John name by adding her surname to that of her husband, Oliver John.

Although Olivia’s ancestors had largely gravitated to the city of Cardiff after the late 1700s, their link with the village of St Mary Hill remained strong. Daisy’s new husband was also a carpenter and he set to work converting the family’s cottage and a former church into the Bell pub, which became a favourite watering hole for visitors to the horse fair held annually in the village. It was the largest fair of its kind in Wales.

During her emotional journey to Cardiff to trace her Welsh family tree, Olivia was amazed to find that Grandma Daisy gave birth to her father Brinley in 1914 over the family’s new pub, the New Market Tavern, situated in a then unsavoury area of the city. The pub, in Church Street, is now part of the O’Neill’s pub chain, and Olivia was further astonished to discover that she had a fourth cousin, Paul Thomas, currently working there as the manager.

Olivia discovered her musical heritage could be traced back to Daisy, who played hymns at the family piano and enjoyed singing lustily in church, which she was wont to visit as many as five times on Sundays. Olivia’s sister Rona, who accompanied her on the trip to Cardiff to examine their past, remembers Grandma Daisy as thoroughly righteous, very proper, and a strict disciplinarian who stood no nonsense from her son. She was a stickler for decorum and good manners, particularly when it came to bad language.

Daisy instilled her love of music into her son Brinley, who went to Cardiff’s Canton High School, where he shone in singing and music and became an accomplished violinist, as well as taking part in several of the school’s stage productions. In the classroom, Brin excelled at languages and won a scholarship to Cambridge in 1933, where he gained a double first. And it was while he was a university student that he met and fell in love with Olivia’s mother, Irene.

According to Irene, Olivia was a contented baby who showed an early aptitude for music. ‘She was a very happy little girl, full of health and vitality. She started singing as soon as she could talk.’

Olivia’s infant ears became accustomed to the sound of music ringing around her home almost from the day she was born. Brin and Irene would regularly take it in turns to sing to her, often in different languages, as they held her in their arms. She would be lulled to sleep by ballads soothingly sung by one or other of her multi-lingual parents, or sometimes both, in English, German or French.

By the time she was fifteen months old, Olivia was capable of recognising a musical note sung to her and was able to imitate it accurately. Furthermore, by the age of two, she could vocally echo every note of a musical phrase with seemingly perfect pitch and true clarity. Such a precocious feel for music gave early hints of a life to come and Irene felt sure, even at that tender age, that Olivia would become a singer. ‘But it never occurred to me she would be the kind of singer she is,’ she once said. ‘When I thought of singers, I thought of opera. My husband had a beautiful voice and he used to sing with my father.’

Brin had originally trained to become an opera singer, an ambition that met with the approval of Irene’s father, the German Nobel prize-winning physicist Professor Max Born, who had long had a passion for opera. In fact, the professor, Olivia’s maternal grandfather, just happened to have been the best of friends with Albert Einstein, whose favourite pastime apart from sailing was classical music, especially the works of Bach and Mozart. Einstein was a more than proficient violinist and he and Max Born would rope in other music-loving scientists and play string quartets together for their personal enjoyment. It was Einstein who nominated Born for the Nobel Prize in 1954, and it was in a letter to Olivia’s grandfather in 1926 that Einstein made his famous remark that ‘The Old One does not play dice’, meaning that God does not play with the universe.

Although he was Christian, Professor Born was forced to flee the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage. He moved his family to Cambridge, where he had studied as a young man. There, his daughter Irene met Olivia’s father, who was by now an honours student at Cambridge and spoke excellent German. Irene and Brin were married in 1937, soon after he had completed his studies.

Olivia never had the good fortune to meet her illustrious grandfather Max, who returned to Germany several years after the war had ended and died in 1970. Irene, who had studied mathematics at the university where he was the director, spoke fondly of him to her often, and made sure Olivia understood that she was immensely proud of him and his achievements, and that her daughter should be too.

In years to come, Irene often urged Olivia to find the time to go to Germany to see him. For one reason or another she never managed it, but she did travel to Germany in 2007 to sing at a dinner to mark the 125th anniversary of her grandfather’s birth. ‘He was kind, a good person, as well as a wonderful mind,’ Olivia reflected. ‘He helped many Jews leave Germany during World War Two.’

Brin’s early ambitions of becoming an opera singer may have been ultimately unfulfilled, but his passion for music nevertheless endured. It was ever present in the Newton-John household while his children were growing up. Although Brin never achieved his personal dream, he came close to it by making a record. Unfortunately he was his own severest critic, and was mortified to discover on the playback of the recording that he had sung a wrong note. It was just one error, but being something of a perfectionist, Brin viewed this solitary vocal inaccuracy as enough of a blemish for him to shatter the record into a dozen pieces in disgust.

When he decided his bass baritone lacked the range to warrant a place among the top ranks of the world’s opera singers, Brin abandoned his ambitions. He was not content simply to be one of the forty best in his field, and he chose to become an academic instead. It must have been a difficult decision for him to make, but Olivia never once heard him express any regrets. Instead, she has fond memories of her father regularly singing along to and enthusiastically ‘conducting’ selections from his vast collection of 78rpm opera records, stacked near the family gramophone. To young Olivia it seemed her father was familiar with every opera known to man and that he knew every note. Brin’s record collection comprised mainly, but not entirely, classical music, but there was room for the odd lighter musical genre, including Tennessee Ernie Ford, best known for his 1955 US chart-topper ‘Sixteen Tons’.

In church on Sundays, Olivia soon came to realise what a beautiful, strong and deep voice her father possessed when ranged against the vocal efforts of the rest of the choir and congregation. His powerful singing far outshone anyone else’s, she noted, even if it caused her a little embarrassment to think that perhaps he sang too loudly for everyone’s liking.

Olivia’s main memories of early childhood are of walking around the Cambridge colleges and of family boat trips punting down the river Cam. Her early years were uneventful apart from a worrying few hours for her parents when she contrived at the age of eighteen months to swallow several medicine tablets she had spied on a bedroom table. When she rapidly became ill, she was rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped.

 

 

Olivia was five years old when Irene and Brin decided to move their family to Australia, after Brin accepted a new post as dean of Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Olivia’s only recollection of the boat trip over from England is of her sadness and tears at somehow losing her favourite soft toy animal comforter, called Fluffy, somewhere along the way.

A large lodge house went with Brin’s new post in Melbourne, and the family settled quickly and comfortably into their new life down under. From Olivia’s point of view, all that was missing from their new home was a few pets. From a very early age she had developed a love of animals and, after falling in love with a neighbour’s red setter she called Pauly-Orly, she was forever trying to bring home any stray four-legged animal she came across. ‘It was a big campus where we lived,’ she says, ‘and people used to dump unwanted animals there, half-drowned cats in sacks, greyhounds that couldn’t race. It was criminal.’ Unfortunately for Olivia, keeping pets wasn’t permitted on the university grounds and Olivia’s mother had little option other than to make her take the strays straight off to the ASPCA.

When she was seven, Olivia showed an early determination to stand up for animal rights in the face of anything she perceived as cruelty. She was stung into action when she witnessed a man with a horse-drawn cart, which was used to pick up rubbish, beating his nag far too zealously. Without a thought, she shouted at him to stop and stepped forward and managed to wrench the whip out of the offender’s hand. She even threatened to report him if he didn’t leave the horse alone.

Such a courageous stand on behalf of a dumb animal was a sign of steely resolve to come. In future years, Olivia would put her name, her time and her energy behind anti-cruelty campaigns on behalf of creatures great and small, from dolphins to cheetahs.

Most notably, while at the peak of her post-
Grease
fame in 1978, she threatened to cancel a month-long tour of Japan unless Japanese fishermen agreed to stop slaughtering dolphins inadvertently caught in their tuna nets. Olivia was appalled that 1,500 dolphins had met their deaths in what she perceived to be such a callous and needless manner. ‘Thank goodness I didn’t see any of the pictures on television,’ she would shudder. ‘They would have made me ill.

‘Animals need some kind of protection whatever and wherever they are. I’m hoping that in Japan those who were looking forward to attending my concerts might be so disappointed that they will look at the reason I cancelled and try to do something about the slaughter of dolphins in their country.’

The Japanese fishermen claimed that the dolphins were eating too many fish, reducing the size of their catches and therefore their income. But Olivia was by then the most popular singer, male or female, in Japan and so her threat had precisely the impact she hoped for. The slaughter ceased and Olivia’s threat was rescinded. It was a resounding victory for the singer and made her realise just what she could achieve on behalf of God’s defenceless creatures.

While Olivia was growing up, Brin and Irene proved to be loving but firm parents. Irene was meticulous about tidiness and cleanliness and brought the family up on health foods long before it was fashionable - yoghurt, sour cream, and a plentiful supply of fruit and vegetables were staple fare. None of the children was allowed comics, and they learned that work came first, and only when it was done was there time for pleasure. It was a work ethic instilled into Olivia at an early age and that stayed with her throughout her life.