We would have just called her ONJ now. But part of the appeal, I think, was that whole name, the possible royalty of it. No one wanted to lose a syllable. Olivier Newatnot–John. Just saying it could bestow a crown. The rest of her looks flowed from that class: she wasn’t queen or first lady of anything, but she looked, after all, like…a lady. And it was something she could have fun with, a category she could smudge. Ultimately. I mean, he was a person who, at the height of funk, disco and glam rock, recorded six country albums, pillows for your ears. And most of their singles topped what was once known as Billboard’s easy ratings chart. (So maybe she was the queen of it.)
By the late 1970s, however, she had figured out the whole “woman” thing and spent 90% of her first Hollywood movie dressed up that way, as a princess. There’s a lot going on in “Grease.” Most are bizarre and have to do with gender and a kind of sheer whiteness, particularly how in both cases Newton-John, who died Monday at 73, held his. Not for John Travolta, per se, but for “You’re the One That I Want”, the duo with Travolta (and a triple-X bassline) that ends the film. The virginal bobby-soxer that Newton-John had played now wore pumps and tight black pants. Her hair had gone from Sandra Dee to Sophia Loren. You could see his shoulders.
This transformation unlocked something new that propelled her to the top of the pop Olympus: the vestal vamp. Nothing about presenting a four-minute pop song would be the same. Or anyone who’s been to a dozen screenings of “Grease.” The only reason my 5, 6, and 10 year olds put up with it is because we would soon be at the amusement park where Olivia Newton-John transforms into ONJ.
I didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. Only that his existence was there to be implied and winked at. Granted, his pelvis was, finally, affixed to Travolta’s toward the end of “Grease,” but on a redundant ride called the Shake Shack. And, yes, she’s playing that goofy video for “Physical” in a disco spa strewn with Adonic gym rats, but when the tanned, fat-less men walk away hand-in-hand, she happily locks arms with one of the most tubbier customers of the spa. They are the ones she wants – and, therefore, the ones I wanted too.
The videos, the hit songs, her lip-syncing on “Solid Gold”: I also wanted Olivia Newton-John. And one of my parents must have known because we had a copy of his second greatest album from 1982 in our house. And knowing what my parents were not listening, the only reason he would have been there is for me; I was not even 7 years old. The thing about this album – more than any I’ve ever studied except Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” (you could see his shoulders) – is the gatefold, the second of a good strongest intoxicating album. And this one was just Newton-John in a horizontal display, head to thighs, short hair and typically a feather. White knit top, tight white pants, some gold jewelry. Was she really on her back or just shot to look that way? I’d have to wait two whole months, for the gatefold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (not a different pose but with a little tiger), to see something bewitchingly erotic.
Newton-John was renewed at the dawn of the music video era. She knew the power of the art form – her 1982 Grammy-winning video album, “Olivia Physical,” was the “Lemonade” of its day, inspiring a prime-time TV event. She just had to play with going too far. His real thing was limits. She seemed to know what hers was – as a singer, as a dancer, as an actress. And she reveled in it. There was nothing inherently subversive about her. Still, she was a tongue-in-cheek – the person one would least expect to see, say, mount a fat dude onto a massage table and ride him like a mechanical bull. Even when she was looking for eros — as she was in the “Tied Up” video, in a red leather vest, her mouth seemingly out of water — you were watching an angel chasing a filthy face.
That’s why she survived “Xanadu” – the musical burp, from 1980, with her like a Greek muse on roller skates: sealing off the surrounding absurdity. That’s why she came to embody the stripped-down fantasies of pleasure, painlessness and profit of the 1980s. Nothing bothered her. She didn’t bother anyone. Even this gatefold: She’s fully clothed! The skates and the spandex were an accessory and a metaphor. And “Physical” remained the longest running No. 1 song of the decade.
But at some point, she stopped cheering us up. Well, we stopped letting her. Madonna had arrived and threatened to put her out of business. I swore she was a parody of Newton-John’s seductive, cheerful, heavenly personality; of her being staunchly white while being adjacent to a wealth of black and Latin music. What would it mean to mean that, not only to get dirty but to be dirty, to mix some of this blackness and this brownness? “Like a Virgin”, for example, is Newton-John but more richly ironic, authentically, imaginatively obscene. Even if Newton-John’s success machine was still working in 1985, it was already becoming the memory of a kind of innocence. Suffice to say that she has never been forgotten. It’s a place where pop music has tried to come back: Stacey Q’s and Cathy Dennises, Carly Rae Jepsens and Dua Lipas; the one and only Kylie Minogue.
What I like to find with Olivia Newton-John is not her body at all. It is his song. There’s always more than I remember. I put it in sundresses and leotards. But, boy, that voice could also function as a singlet: it learned to flex its soprano to lean, bark, yelp, and squeal. 1978’s “Totally Hot” sometimes features more typical Sea World sounds. Yet any deficiency in the soul was repaid in the spirit.
She also developed a great trick: layering. Instead of just one of her, suddenly, in a pre-chorus or a chorus-chorus, there was a fleet, of lilting melodies, undulating, rainbow, puffy, Bee Gee-ing, on “Have You Never Been Mellow”, on “A Little More Love”, on “Magic”. She only had one body, but on a record she could become a multitude. The warmth of this sound; the glorious blue skies of this one are always deserving of an exclamation – like “oh my lord” but alternatively divine. I like “ONJ”.