Olivia (16 page)

Now, with the film rights to
Grease
in his pocket, Carr was ready to hawk his hot Broadway property to the major movie studios. Their initial response was far from encouraging. Hollywood experts told him he had made a big mistake. The studio sceptics pointed out he had bought what they considered to be an out-of-date property. Nostalgia for the 1950s had been and gone, they said, and it was such a flimsy story to boot - high school tough boy meets high school goody-goody girl, boy loses girl, girl wins boy back. Furthermore, the major film studios asked: ‘How can you cast a song-and-dance romance between a hip greasy rocker and a squeaky clean high school virgin?’

Carr ignored the negative reaction to his purchase. Not for nothing had he acquired the nickname Caftan Courageous. He was not to be deterred. He had absolute faith in the project and he was determined to prove the pessimists wrong. He knew, in any case, that he had time to spend. The producers of the Broadway show would not immediately sanction a movie while their stage production was continuing to do such incredible business. By reaching a mass audience, a
Grease
movie would have jeopardised not just the Broadway box office but the profitability of touring franchises for
Grease
in theatres all over the world. Carr had no option but to accept the terms of the stage producers and postpone his film plans for a year. In the end, a release date of spring 1978 was negotiated for the movie.

Among the number of stars Carr personally managed at the time was the versatile actress-singer-dancer Ann-Margret, and initially he ambitiously envisaged her teamed with Elvis Presley in the lead roles for
Grease
. Elvis and the ultra-glamorous Ann-Margret had already proved an exciting pairing in the movie
Viva Las Vegas
.

Later, more realistically, Carr’s choice came down to two TV favourites: Henry Winkler from TV’s
Happy Days
, and Susan Dey, a pretty young actress from another TV hit,
The Partridge Family
, who later went on to make her mark in
LA Law.

Winkler had become a massive star playing the cool but narcissistic, greasy-haired motorcycling kid Fonzie in the sit-com
Happy Days
, an updated version of teenage life in America in the mid-1950s. He had started out in the series as a supporting actor, but once the programme centred itself round Winkler as the Fonz,
Happy Days
became a bigger and bigger hit until it was America’s number-one show. Accordingly, from fifth billing, Winkler rapidly rose to become US TV’s most popular actor, and his character’s thumbs-up gesture accompanied by a laconic ‘aaaayyh’ became trademarks.

The prospect of the Winkler-Dey pairing evaporated, however, when Winkler decided his career would be better served if he avoided for a while any more projects set in the 1950s.
Happy Days
had made him an international star and now he feared being typecast.
Grease
would have pinned him still further to the 1950s. ‘He just felt the role of Danny Zuko in
Grease
was too much like the Fonzie,’ said a disappointed Carr. ‘I could understand that.’

Carr eventually found his leading man for
Grease
one uncomfortably hot late summer’s night in 1975 when he switched on the TV in his hotel room in New York to see a hitherto largely unknown young actor called John Travolta in a new series called
Welcome Back, Kotter
. Newly launched by ABC, this was a sit-com about a Brooklyn-born teacher, played by Gabriel Kaplan, who returns to the inner-city high school from which he had graduated ten years earlier to take up a post teaching the toughest cases - a remedial academics group.

His ‘sweathogs’, as they were known, were the dregs of the academic system, streetwise kids unable or unwilling to make it in normal classes. They were also the roughest, and funniest, kids in school, and the coolest and toughest of all the ‘sweathogs’ was blue-collar punk Vinnie Barbarino, played by Travolta. ‘I thought he was terrific,’ Carr said of Travolta, ‘and he showed up just at a time when Henry Winkler was out of the running.’

After spotting Travolta on his TV screen, Carr immediately telephoned the international impresario Robert Stigwood, who had become his co-producing partner in the
Grease
movie project. He told him to switch on his television and take a look at the young man playing Vinnie. Carr felt he was clearly destined to become the heartthrob of the TV series and had the potential to become a perfect Danny Zuko.

Once he had also tuned in to
Welcome Back, Kotter
and spent five minutes assessing Travolta’s onscreen presence for himself, Stigwood agreed with Carr that the young actor was well worth pursuing. On meeting Travolta, they were heartened to find he was thoroughly familiar with
Grease
because he had appeared as Danny Zuko’s young sidekick, Doody, in the show’s first national touring company before he signed up for
Welcome Back, Kotter
. John professed to loving the show. He said he could identify with the coolness of the greasers, and he had longed to play the lead role of Danny. In no time Carr and Stigwood had secured Travolta’s signature for a $1million three-film package deal with the Robert Stigwood Organisation.

Carr never doubted that they could turn Travolta into a big movie star. For many years afterwards, whenever
Saturday Night Fever
or
Grease
cropped up in any conversation within his earshot, the colourful Carr would say of Travolta: ‘I was the one who said, “Put him in the movie!”’

Stigwood’s input for
Grease
was crucial. He had the showbiz clout to persuade the major Hollywood film studio Paramount to adapt the stage show into a movie. The Australian-born entrepreneur was by now one of the most successful figures in the entertainment industry, heading up a group of companies encompassing theatre, film and TV, records, concert tours, personal management and music publishing.

As a music mogul, Stigwood had founded RSO Records and had managed, and brought to lucrative prominence, the prolific and hugely successful songwriting pop group The Bee Gees, as well as Eric Clapton’s supergroup Cream. At one point Stigwood had even joined forces with Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, to become co-manager of Nems Enterprises.

Never averse to backing fresh talent, Stigwood could also number among his stage shows the musicals
Hair
, which he produced in 1968 and which ran for five years in London’s West End, and
Jesus Christ Superstar
, by young co-writing team Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice. He made a first foray into movie musicals as producer of the film version of
Jesus Christ Superstar
, and followed up with
Tommy
, a rock opera written by Pete Townshend of the British pop group The Who.

It was after Carr proved himself so adept and imaginative in promoting and partying
Tommy
for the Stigwood Organisation that Stigwood joined forces with him in a creative business partnership. And
Tommy
’s success prompted Stigwood to use his dominance in the pop field to develop further movie musical projects, and the first of his three productions for Travolta would be
Saturday Night Fever
, a musical to cash in on the new disco dance craze.

The movie had been inspired by an article by writer Nik Cohn in the June 1976 issue of
New York Magazine
, headlined ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’. It focused on kids in Brooklyn who got through their mundane lives Monday to Friday ready to ‘explode’ on Saturday nights in the disco clubs. There, they stepped into a different world with its own codes of hierarchy, dress, dance moves and courtship. ‘The new generation takes few risks: it graduates, looks for a job, endures. And once a week on a Saturday night it explodes,’ wrote Cohn.

The plan was for Travolta to play the king of the disco dancefloor in
Saturday Night Fever
then move swiftly on to star in
Grease
. Both movies would be made by Paramount and
Grease
would be allocated a budget of $6million.

While Travolta was now locked into the movie’s lead role of Danny Zuko in
Grease
, the search continued for an actress to play his teenage sweetheart Sandy. Travolta as yet was untried as a box office attraction so Paramount required a bona fide star to play opposite him. Several were considered, fewer still were auditioned and only three came anywhere near to clinching the role. They were Marie Osmond, primarily a singer rather than an actress, and Deborah Raffin and Cheryl Ladd, both primarily actresses rather than singers.

Marie, a strict Mormon, reportedly baulked at having to portray Sandy’s makeover from innocent student to schoolyard siren at the end of the movie. It was claimed she was unhappy at the idea that prim and proper Sandy in the end had to resort to exuding come-hither sex appeal in order to get her man.

Deborah Raffin was a slender young blonde actress who had won good notices in a charming film called
The Dov
e. In it she had convincingly played a love-struck young girl faithfully following her round-the-world yachtsman boyfriend to various romantic stop-off points across the globe to find true love with him at the end of his voyage. There was an undeniably sweet, virtuous look about Deborah, and she would have been a better bet than Marie to play Sandy. But by the time
Grease
was ready to roll, Deborah had moved on to other projects.

Cheryl Ladd had made her name in the mega-hit TV show
Charlie’s Angels
when she replaced Farrah Fawcett-Majors as one of the three sexy police-trained detectives working for an unseen boss. Cheryl had enough of a voice to warrant making an album, but her
Charlie’s Angel
image as a capable undercover cop was hardly conducive to playing a high school student.

Carr was still without his ideal Sandy when he was invited to a dinner party hosted by the singer Helen Reddy and her then husband Jeff Wald. Also at the dinner was Olivia, who had been befriended and loyally championed by the hosts ever since she had chosen to base herself in California. Theirs was a natural friendship since Helen had been the first Australian female popular singer to make it big in America and she’d become something of a social godmother for Aussies in the entertainment business who happened to pitch up in Los Angeles.

In Hollywood circles, it’s frequently said that it’s the deal not the meal that really counts at dinner parties. And by a stroke of good fortune, Olivia happened to be at the right dinner party with the right person at the right time. Among the other invited guests was California Governor Jerry Brown, but he was late in arriving and the dinner went ahead without him, leaving the colourful Carr free to radiate his customary enthusiasm for all things showbiz.

Carr was, of course, familiar with Olivia’s successes as a singer. But gazing across the table at her in the flesh for the first time, Carr was struck by Olivia’s natural fresh-faced beauty and her soft, feminine appeal. And then he saw something more. ‘At first she was her usual self, almost a waxen figurine,’ Carr later recalled of that first meeting. ‘But then all of a sudden she started telling a joke, screwing up that perfect face in some cute but hilarious contortions.’ Now he was captivated, and his mind was racing. Could Olivia produce the same range of expressions in front of a camera?

When Carr was moved to come out with the tried and tested Hollywood line ‘You ought to be in pictures’, he meant it, absolutely. Olivia had, of course, heard that line many times before, but Carr seemed deadly serious when he told Olivia about his
Grease
movie project and suggested she would make a good Sandy. She was a proven singer, she looked very young for her age, and she could be made to look younger still, he said. And, despite her inexperience when it came to movies, Carr was confident she could make a good job of it.

Next day Carr arranged for a script to be sent to Olivia. In the original
Grease
stage show Sandy Dumbrowski was an all-American girl, but Carr assured Olivia this was a minor problem. He explained she could either take dialect classes or the script could be adapted to accommodate her Australian accent. Sandy could be an Aussie student on a foreign-exchange placement.

Although she was first and foremost a singer and enjoying huge success, Olivia had been keeping an eye out for a suitable movie vehicle for some time. In all her contracts a clause was included that would allow her to take time out to star in a movie as soon as the right script came her way. She had been offered films before, of course, but she’d never found one that suited her. She had flatly rejected several scripts because of their violent content, and her movie ambitions in general were clouded by the less than happy memories of making
Toomorrow
. Almost ten years had passed since then, but she feared that another film flop might seriously damage her standing as a singer and her recording career.

Olivia had come close to taking the role of Strawberry Fields in
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, a movie presented in rock opera form and starring The Bee Gees, with music from The Beatles’ landmark LP woven into a story about a pop band’s struggles within the music industry. But in a multiple cast of characters, Strawberry Fields would have given Olivia little scope to shine and she felt it failed to offer enough of an opportunity to broaden her scope.

A major role in
Grease
, however, was a very different proposition, but although Olivia was flattered by Carr’s approach, she didn’t take it all that seriously. She shrugged off the very idea of playing a teenager on screen, much to Jeff Wald’s chagrin. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he berated her at one point. He kept urging her not to dismiss it so lightly. He could see it was a golden opportunity that deserved her proper attention.

Olivia had been to see a stage production of
Grease
in London in 1973 with a young and, back then, virtually unknown Richard Gere in the lead role. Bruce Welch had taken her to see the show and they had come away from the theatre having enjoyed a fun night out. That was some years ago, but now, at Wald’s urging, she began to give some serious thought to the prospect of starring in a movie version. It did sound promising, she finally acknowledged, but she told Carr she had reservations. Recalling years later the dinner party that was to change her life, Olivia said: