Sadly for John Rostill, he would not live to see Olivia succeed so spectacularly in the USA with three of his songs: ‘Let Me Be There’, ‘Please, Mister, Please’ and ‘If You Love Me (Let Me Know)’. Just a few months after Olivia’s holiday in France, on 26 November 1973, Bruce turned up at John’s home in Radlett, Hertfordshire, ready to join him for a music session at the eight-track studio John had built on the first floor of his house. But when he went upstairs to the studio, Bruce found that the door appeared to be jammed by something on the inside and he was unable to open it.
Bruce fetched a ladder from the garage and from the top he peered through the studio window. There he could see that the door was blocked by John’s piano, but he was shocked to see that John himself was lying motionless at an odd angle with his bass guitar still in his hands. It transpired his good friend had been electrocuted; he had been dead for several hours. John’s death at the tragically young age of thirty came as a huge shock to Bruce, and to Olivia who had got to know him well. She was deeply saddened; she had much to be grateful to him for, and Bruce had lost not only a writing partner, but a treasured friend.
Within days of Bruce flying back to London from the south of France, Olivia had continued her holiday by moving on to Monte Carlo to spend some time exploring the principality, swimming in the Mediterranean and topping up her tan. She was ready to put the recent emotionally turbulent few weeks behind her and simply relax and enjoy the Riviera’s balmy climate. She hit the beach every day with Chantal to laze in the sun and, as she stretched out on the sand relishing the peace and quiet and enjoying the warmth, the last thing the very newly single Olivia Newton-John was prepared for was a new love to surface, quite literally, from the waves rolling in towards the shore.
The man in question was a wealthy, young English businessman and self-confessed playboy who went by the name of Lee Kramer. Striding athletically out of the shallows, he walked up the beach and directly into Olivia’s life. Gazing admiringly at the beautiful blonde girl soaking up the sun in her bikini, he was immediately smitten. ‘We just looked at each other and there was this lightning flash,’ said Lee of the moment he fell for Olivia Newton-John. ‘It was a classic romance on the French Riviera!’
Chapter 6
Atlantic Crossing
‘We think Olivia is beautiful and a lovely singer. We hope we can be as successful as her in the UK’
ABBA’S AGNETHA FALTSKOG AFTER WINNING THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST IN 1974
OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN wouldn’t be the first or the last pretty young girl to fall giddily in love with a rich and handsome playboy on the shores of the French Riviera. But when she met Lee Kramer in Monte Carlo in the summer of 1973, it was the start of a very great deal more than just a holiday romance.
Lee was tall, blond and blessed with good looks and, although at twenty-one he was three years younger than Olivia, he exuded a worldly self-assurance and a confident maturity. Olivia found him enormously attractive from the outset. And the attraction was mutual.
Already wealthy from a shoe import business he had started up when he was just a street-smart seventeen-year-old, Lee regularly spent long weekends in the south of France, where he kept a boat in order to cruise the Med in style and call in at the many resorts and lively hotspots that dotted the coastline.
He first set eyes on Olivia after dropping anchor several hundred yards offshore because there was no pier available at Monte Carlo where he could tie up his speedboat. A strong swimmer, Lee dived overboard to swim to the beach and he emerged from the sea where Olivia was sunbathing with Chantal. It was no chance meeting - Lee was a cousin of Chantal’s fiancé - but fate was certainly playing a hand.
‘As I was coming out of the water, there was this beautiful, tanned, blonde-haired girl with the biggest eyes I have ever seen in my entire life,’ Lee recounted to
Crawdaddy
magazine. It was the start not of a holiday fling but a romance that was to blossom and endure with far-reaching repercussions for them both.
Up to this point in his life, and by his own admission, Lee had never taken any girl very seriously. But Olivia was different from the kind of girls he had dated thus far. He was instantly smitten.
Lee’s only disappointment was to learn that Olivia had just a couple of days left of her holiday before she was due to fly back to England. But they made the most of their time together and he left Olivia in no doubt about his strength of feelings for her, even after such a short time, when he cut short his own stay and wangled a seat next to Olivia on the plane. Olivia could not fail but to be impressed.
They chatted happily all the way during the flight and, once back in London, Lee took her out for a meal at a little-known Chelsea restaurant, tactfully chosen in an area well away from the kind of places Olivia used to frequent with Bruce. Soon Lee and Olivia were a couple madly in love and inseparable.
Lee’s background could hardly have been more different from her former boyfriend Bruce Welch’s. Lee had enjoyed a privileged upbringing with a father who had become wealthy through owning shops, flats and other property in London. As a lad, he was sent to good schools to gain a decent education, but at fifteen, with a thirst for adventure, Lee decided to leave school to see something of the world. He spent time on a kibbutz in Israel before travelling around Africa and ending up getting a job as a lifeguard in Durban in South Africa.
On returning to England, determined to be his own boss, he launched a shoe company with a brother and business boomed in highly lucrative fashion when he began importing cowboy boots into Europe. Lee’s business acumen would eventually prove a major asset to Olivia’s progress as a singer in America.
Lee arrived in Olivia’s life just at a time when her singing career was taking off in a major way, particularly in the USA. By the time the couple were due to spend their first Christmas together, ‘Let Me Be There’ was becoming a huge hit in America. They decided to fly over to spend Christmas in Miami, where they met up with singer Helen Reddy and her then husband Jeff Wald.
Helen and Olivia had a natural affinity. They were both from Melbourne and, like Olivia, Helen had earned her big break as a singer through a talent contest sponsored by an Australian television station. She beat 1,358 contestants to win the prize of a trip to New York, $400 cash and an audition with Mercury Records. Like Olivia’s start in London, Helen sang where she could, even at a veterans’ hospital for a fee of $25. But it all paid off when she topped the US charts in 1972 with ‘I Am Woman’ and went on to become a major singing star, astutely managed by her husband Jeff Wald.
Jeff had been a talent agent for the powerful William Morris agency and therefore had a firm grasp of the way singers were groomed for stardom in the US and the steps that needed to be taken to achieve it. An engaging and persuasive man, Wald told Olivia that if she was serious about building upon the chart success of ‘Let Me Be There’ and her other hits in the US, then it was imperative she base herself in America. By moving to America she would be on the spot and readily available for guest TV appearances, concerts, chat shows, personal appearances and radio interviews to promote her records. America’s entertainment industry dwarfed Britain’s, he pointed out, and Olivia would be crazy not to make the transition to cash in on the way America was now embracing her records.
Wald’s reasoning made sense. As Cliff Richard had already discovered to his dismay, out of sight frequently meant out of mind for English stars as far as the American public were concerned. For all his many UK hits, Cliff was still a little-known artiste in the United States. Had he chosen to make a concerted effort to spend six months at a time in America, Cliff might well have achieved his dearest wish of establishing himself in the land that gave the world rock ’n’ roll.
After Christmas, Olivia flew back to England with major decisions to make. Any long-term uprooting to America would have to wait at least until the spring of 1974 because she had been nominated by the BBC as the UK’s contestant for the Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in mid-April. That was one commitment she simply could not break. She was also intent on buying herself a house in London, and just before the Eurovision contest she purchased a detached three-bedroom house in Hampstead, north London, with a large garden.
Ever since its inception, the UK has enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest. Launched in 1956 to find a song for Europe, the competition was won in its inaugural year by Switzerland with ‘Refrains’. It was a fitting title as the UK, or
Royaume-Uni
as the UK was to become known annually at the contest, actually refrained from entering.
Over the years the contest has gone on to give the world such memorable lyrical masterpieces as songs entitled ‘Ding Ding A Dong’, ‘A-Ba-Ni-Ba’, ‘La La La’ and the UK’s own ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’, which, incredibly, spurred Lulu to a shared winner’s spot in 1969. Eurovision has always attracted ridicule on many counts: its poor quality of songwriting, Norway’s propensity for garnering ‘
nul points
’, its oddball, often strangely garbed performers singing utterly unfathomable words for international juries, and voting that has frequently proved utterly illogical or blatantly tactical politically.
But despite the Eurovision Song Contest being regarded in some quarters as a joke, Olivia’s manager Peter Gormley recognised that the contest could be a wonderful international showcase for an artiste of real talent and worth. Despite the stigma attached to it, the programme always pulled in a huge TV audience in Britain, and Gormley had had no hesitation in putting Cliff Richard forward to sing for the UK twice in previous years.
In 1973, Cliff had come third in the contest with a song called ‘Power To All Our Friends’ and he was seen performing the song by a TV audience of more than three hundred million in thirty-two countries. Even though Cliff didn’t win, massive record sales in a dozen different countries was the end result. Gormley hoped it would be the same for Olivia at the concert in 1974, to be held in Brighton on the Sussex coast, after she was selected by the BBC.
As in previous years, the nation’s songwriters were invited to submit their offerings and a BBC panel whittled the four hundred entries down to a final half-dozen. The pre-selection process then involved Olivia performing a different song each week for six weeks on Jimmy Savile’s
Clunk Click
TV show. The nation was finally invited to vote for the song Olivia would take forward into the Eurovision Song Contest itself.
Each week Olivia was allowed to choose a different outfit to wear for each song - trouser suits in satin, jersey and crepe for the faster numbers, and dresses, two in jersey and one in organza, for the ballads. Her personal song favourite was a ballad called ‘Angel Eyes’ and she was secretly hoping it would win the public’s vote. Instead, a singalong, oompah-oompah song called ‘Long Live Love’ about the Salvation Army band was the one the nation plumped for. Disappointingly for Olivia, ‘Angel Eyes’ was beaten into second place by some 7,000 votes.
Putting her heart and soul into a song she didn’t much care for was never going to be easy. But Olivia gave a decent enough performance on the night of 16 April at Brighton’s Dome Theatre. She looked pretty enough, too, in a long, flowing baby-blue dress, but she appeared somewhat old-fashioned compared with the two sexily dressed girls who fronted an unknown Swedish group - they were called Abba, and went on to win. Olivia had studied Abba in rehearsals and had no doubt they would emerge as winners: ‘Of course they were going to win,’ she said. ‘Their song was so different and so terrific and they were so bright and alive.’
Abba’s colourful and joyful rendering of ‘Waterloo’ romped home as the 1974 song for Europe and Olivia tied for fourth place. The press tried to make out that Olivia had snubbed the official BBC after-party and that she was sobbing over her failure to win - neither of which was true. She was certainly disappointed not to have won but honest enough to admit: ‘I was never really happy with the song I had to sing. It’s not the one I’d have chosen. I’d have preferred a nice ballad.’
By making no secret of her lukewarm feelings towards ‘Long Live Love’, Olivia came in for a good deal of resentment and criticism from the press and the British public. Record sales indicated, however, that she had a valid point. Despite choosing ‘Long Live Love’ as the UK’s entry, the nation didn’t back up its choice of song for Europe by rushing out to buy the record. ‘Long Live Love’ managed to finish up no higher than number eleven in the UK charts, hardly the runaway hit that Eurovision habitually produced as a matter of course for the UK’s contestant. A song about the Sally Annie band may not have provided Olivia with the success she hoped for, but she never forgot the organisation’s good work. Twenty-five years later she recorded the carol ‘The First Noel’ for a CD called
Spirit of Christmas
, whose profits went to the Salvation Army.
With the certainty of hindsight, Olivia’s losing out to Abba was a blessing in disguise. If she had won the Eurovision Song Contest, she might have concentrated on furthering her career in Europe rather than in America, which was beginning to beckon ever more warmly and invitingly.
One month after Eurovision, Olivia found herself with a Top Five US hit on her hands with John Rostill’s composition ‘If You Love Me (Let Me Know)’. It was her highest Stateside chart position to date, and when she was flown to America to make a guest TV appearance on a Dean Martin show, Olivia had a glimpse of what could lie in store for her on the other side of the Atlantic.
This latest US chart success now posed her a difficult dilemma. It came at a time when she had just acquired a new lover in Lee, who was London-based, and a new house to go home to in the capital, and yet the lure of America was becoming impossible to ignore. One major concern for Olivia when she considered any move to America was who would manage her career in the US. Peter Gormley had guided her successfully thus far in England. But he was also skilfully handling Cliff Richard’s career from his London office, and it was inconceivable that he would switch his management operation base across the Atlantic just to launch a lesser artiste in a country whose entertainment scene he was much less familiar with.