A golden sun sets behind thunderheads and rolling hills. To the east, a double rainbow arcs across a darkening sky. It feels like a blessing. Rainbows are special talismans for Olivia Newton-John. They’ve lit up significant moments of her life and offered her hope.
“Rainbows are special to me,” she says simply, stopping to look up, acknowledge the beauty in the sky and snap a picture on her phone.
This is an extraordinary time in Olivia’s life. Last night, she celebrated her 70th birthday. Some of the people she holds dearest partied on the patio and by the pool at friend Gregg Cave’s house, nestled in farmland and forest just west of Byron Bay and across the valley from the Gaia Retreat & Spa, which he, Olivia and friends founded 14 years ago.
Gregg, who calls her “Blondie”, has known Olivia for 37 years and plainly adores her. He went shopping at the local markets for her birthday and came back with a brooch and a shawl, but he insists (in the words of reggae star Peter Tosh) that she needs “nothing but love”. Another dear friend created a birthday pavlova filled with lemon curd and cream and decorated with mauve and violet flowers. And, most crucially, Olivia’s husband, John Easterling, and her daughter, Chloe Lattanzi, who is 33 and also a singer and an actor, were here to celebrate with her. There’s a lot of love in the air.
But the party is 12 months late. Last year, when Olivia really turned 70, she spent her birthday in her own Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne, recovering from a fractured sacrum brought about by a weakening of her bones associated with treatment for stage-four cancer. Her hospital stay triggered tabloid reports of her death, to which Olivia responded with an online video in which she laughed that “rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. But the rumours did hurt.
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