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Authors: Tim Ewbank

Olivia (30 page)

BOOK: Olivia
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Matt was signed to play Cooper Hart, an American photographer on assignment, in
Paradise Beach
, a light drama series aimed at the youth market and set in Surfers Paradise, a stunning stretch of coastline around fifty miles from Brisbane on Australia’s Gold Coast in Queensland. The series intended to follow the fortunes of a group of good-looking suburban youngsters who find romance and adventure by the sea in an endless summer.
The prospects for the series looked exceptionally good. Beach shows on television tended to succeed,
Baywatch
being an obvious example, and even before
Paradise Beach
went fully into production, it was snapped up by 220 stations in the US on the strength of a glossy pilot alone.
With its staple mix of gorgeous girls flaunting their curves in skimpy, fluorescent bikinis, hunky guys doing press-ups on the beach in their Speedos, big waves rolling in as a challenge to surfers and sun-drenched beaches, it was never going to be Shakespeare. ‘It’s boards, bodies, boobs and babes,’ one of the production team unashamedly remarked. But Matt was prepared to put up with attaching his name to such undemanding material because it meant that together with Chloe, he and Olivia could temporarily relocate to the 200-acre custard apple and avocado farm she owned near Byron Bay.
Olivia had purchased the farm some twelve years before after flying into nearby Lismore with Matt with the specific idea of looking for a rural retreat to buy. She fell in love with the farm on the spot, and after buying it she came back every year to enjoy the view and the energy of the land, and she always planned that one day she would build a little house on the property. But around six years later the adjoining farm, which had a little house on it, came up for sale and Olivia was able to buy it and do it up.
‘Basically this was a retreat for Olivia,’ Matt said of the added agenda of his new acting project. ‘I wanted to get Livvy to relax. It was just luck and fate that I would be able to work while she relaxed.’
The arrangement suited Olivia perfectly. Their house in California was invariably a hive of activity, but the tranquillity of the farm offered her a much quieter existence and the chance to paint, write music and read, all of which she felt she never really found the time for in Malibu.
The uprooting from California signalled not just a change of scenery for the family but, very significantly, a complete change of lifestyle. Chloe was enrolled at a one-room school for sixty children near to the farm, Matt took an apartment to be on the spot for work on
Paradise Beach
while returning to the farm at weekends, and Olivia embraced a back-to-nature, simple, healthy, recuperative lifestyle in the countryside surrounding her farm.
There were ugly rumours that she had come back to Australia for the last few months of her life. But they simply were not true. She had finished her treatment in February 1993 and she wanted everyone to know that she was fine. The setting of the cosy little farm dwelling was so peaceful, and she delighted in seeing wallabies and kookaburras hopping about on the lawn. The farmhouse was surrounded by rainforest, lush red soil and palm trees, and offered glorious views of green rolling countryside dotted with old Moreton Bay fig trees and stretching many acres into the distance. Matt said:
 
We had a wonderful home in Malibu, but it was easy to leave it. Our home, and all the things we had acquired over the past ten years, had grown to be a barrier between family life. Our private life had been sacrificed by things. When you walk into a place like ours, you see expense - there’s a tennis court, a swimming pool and a horse-riding ring, and then you go inside and there’s the theatre and the stereo and the cars and the trucks and the things we’ve acquired. Things have distracted us.
When I came to Australia this time, I had nothing, just a Land Rover to get me around. We reduced our lifestyle and we live in a very small house the size of our living-dining area in the States. I always know where Chloe is, we can talk to each other and I can go to a little corner of the house to study my lines.
Here we have a chance to go out on picnics, we collect rainwater and experience real life and sit on the lawn. And although I am working five days a week and at weekends I have to study, the time we do have together is so precious and valuable and I’m like a different person. I’ve changed over the last six months. I’ve lost a lot of my attachments. The Tibetans call it
samsara
, and it’s our ability as the human race to invent all of these things that distract us from what we are used to being - hunters and gatherers. Man was always inventing ways to distract oneself from oneself - computers and telephones and the like.
How many fathers spend much time with their children? It’s not that much. I’ve changed that, and now spend a goodly amount of time with my daughter and my wife. You only get this realisation when you leave your comfort zone.
Livvy and I were both living in our comfort zone and going about our daily routines. It was time to spend the time with family and get away from the things, or involve family in things that we do. We can’t take all of our things with us, so we’ve been letting go of everything.
 
For Olivia, Matt and Chloe, the transfer to Australia was therefore as much an enlightening spiritual journey for them as a geographical one. ‘It was an incredibly emotional time for us,’ said Matt.
Olivia’s illness, moving house, leaving the US - all three things happening to us was stressful.
Olivia and I have been meditating. We’ve been studying a lot of different philosophies. We take from the best of every one - Tibetan, Christianity, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, American Indians, Aborigines. We’ve been reading extracts from books of masters throughout the world.
Meditation is prayer, and we do it before we eat, before we sleep. I have a couple of prayers and we do the Lord’s prayer, too. Chloe is very interested in the Bible and she reads it and we read to her. I was raised as a Catholic but my truth doesn’t lie there. I’ve found the greatest truth within the whole spectrum of Middle Eastern religions and beliefs, all of them. I find great fulfilment in educating myself.
 
The change of scenery clearly did Olivia the world of good. After the first few months in Australia, Matt was able to say:
 
She’s unbelievable. She could run a marathon. She’s out in the garden digging the earth, carrying in the wood for the fireplace. It took her three months to find her sea legs again and now she’s blossomed. We have 200 acres and we go hiking and climbing across rolling grassy hills, dense thick wood, waterfalls and creeks, and she keeps right up with me. I told her: ‘My God, Livvy, where do you get such energy from?’ She was getting it from the land. We both know she’s fine. But she’ll probably never tour again, maybe smaller venues.
 
Olivia’s breathtaking surroundings and the feeling of recovery from her illness produced a burst of creative activity. She had seriously thought about retiring but, while revelling in the peaceful solitude of the farm, she found new songs were flowing quite naturally into her brain. Often in the middle of winter at the dead of night she’d wake up with a new idea in her head and feel compelled to get out of bed and go into the living room where she’d light a fire in the little pot-belly stove and softly sing her ideas into a tape recorder, taking care not to wake either Matt or Chloe.
‘She’s inspired,’ said Matt in admiration. ‘She wrote ten songs in a week. She’d wake up at three in the morning and write. On our walks she’d pull out a pad and pencil - she never goes anywhere without them - and write. Her lyrics were coming out, it was that other higher self coming out of her. I told her in amazement: “Olivia, how many songs can you get on one album?” It’s fantastic, it was awe-inspiring to see her blossom.’
While Olivia gained renewed strength and her health improved, Matt, however, was plunged into a totally unexpected crisis. He had resolutely remained strong while helping his wife cope with her illness and with the grief she felt over the death of her father. But now that Olivia was patently so much better, the feelings of stressful anxiety he had suppressed for so long got the better of him.
All the strain of the problems he and Olivia had faced over the past few years, and which they had struggled to overcome, now overwhelmed Olivia’s husband. In essence, he suffered a terrible bout of delayed shock. He said:
 
The 1980s were wonderful. We were in a kind of Shangri-La. Then around 1989 we had to face the music. Chloe’s best friend, Colette Chuda, died of cancer at the age of five. They had grown up together and her death tore us apart.
Then everything crumbled. Everything that I held dear, everything that I considered my reason for being, started falling apart. Financial difficulties arose and there was a need to rearrange and reorganise. There were lawsuits, Koala Blue failing, incredible overheads, this huge machine and no income coming in, Livvy’s father dying, Livvy getting cancer - it was just boom, boom, boom from all directions.
 
The hammer blow was, of course, Olivia’s breast cancer.
 
Can you imagine the feelings Livvy and I went through when she got ill? I said to myself: ‘I must have no feelings. I have to be strong and take care of Olivia while she’s going through her chemotherapy, while she’s going through this illness.’ I was blocking my feelings down throughout her whole therapy.
While Olivia blossomed on the farm, I, on the other hand, had no familiar surroundings, no comfort zone and I started working seven days a week. It was an emotional wilderness for me because I didn’t have my family, my friends, my support group with me or the familiarity of my house or my dogs, I was alone a lot of the time and I was under immense pressure to do well - and I had a breakdown.
 
Not for one moment had Matt seen his emotional collapse coming. ‘I would never wish what we endured on my worst enemy. It’s not even something you step out of the moment your partner starts to get better. My problems didn’t really begin until after Livvy recovered.’
Matt had remained positive and strong during Olivia’s dark days and now she was coming through he had expected he would feel relieved and optimistic. But the feelings he had blocked out now flooded to the surface. ‘It was something I’d never experienced before,’ he said. ‘All that shit that I’d suppressed for so long came up and hit me, and it was like a left hook from Mike Tyson. It knocked me down. I had thought I was indestructible, Mr Strong who could deal with everything.’
Matt believed it was the death of his beloved dog Digger that finally tipped him over the edge. ‘He represented more than just a dog,’ he explained. ‘I’d had him since a puppy, and he represented the beginning of my relationship with Olivia, when she and I had just met. When I heard the news I suppressed my feelings. A few hours after that, I was listening to some music and I broke down in tears for my dog.’
Digger’s death, Matt said, was the end of an era and he couldn’t help but wonder whether symbolically it might mean the end of him and Olivia too. Matt’s downward spiral was now rapid.
 
Then I started wondering what was happening to me. I was getting dizzy, depressed, having anxiety attacks. I would never wish it on anyone as it was so traumatic and Livvy had to watch me go through it helpless, completely helpless.
Olivia understood what I was going through and was in pain for me. But I told her: ‘Don’t take this on yourself.’ I had to believe I was going to get through it even though sometimes I believed I wasn’t going to.
I told Livvy: ‘Don’t worry, you have come through, but I’m going to have to blubber away on the bed and go to work and do my job then come home and fall apart.’
Livvy was fine and I was miserable. It was frightening and I wondered whether I was going to make it out the other side. ‘Is this happening to me?’ I asked myself. Chloe, who’s sharp as a tack, would come up to me and say: ‘Daddy, you just don’t seem to be quite yourself. I hope you make it through this. Don’t worry about it, Dad. We all feel bad sometimes.’
My grovelling, lowest point came at a time when I realised I was on my own. Livvy wasn’t there, she was out of town, and I was at home alone trying to study my lines and I was literally shaking, like I was convulsive, and there were tears, confusion, and I was screaming into a pillow. But I realised I could survive it. I had a couple of those moments, but there was one where I went below sea level. I felt like I was as low as I could get.
If you come up against a traumatic experience, something’s going to happen. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew the meaning of anxiety, depression, uncontrollable crying and wanting to run away but not being able to. But I didn’t understand it.
I thought I was dying. I went to the doctor and had every single test but there was nothing. I asked: ‘How could I be feeling like this?’ The answer is your brain is a very powerful thing. It had been eating away at me for months and there was the fact that I’d been away from my home comforts. If you have a mental problem it affects you physically - you have dizzy spells, you feel weak, fatigued. The mind is so powerful.
It was a big lesson and it lasted for a solid three months. I was working and trying to pull myself together, and I came out the other end of it a more compassionate human being for people who have gone through this type of thing. I’d lived too much of an insulated life, insulated from all these things, and I learned a lot from this. It’s the best thing that could have happened to me.
We are conditioned to ignore feelings or hide from them or preoccupy ourselves with things. But if you’re lucky enough to grasp hold of what feelings are, then let them come up, bad, good or indifferent, and experience them, not shove them away or try to hide it.
BOOK: Olivia
11.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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