OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN Twenty-five years after her first diagnosis, the star faces new cancer with her characteristic courage.
Olivia Newton-john After her initial diagnosis 25 years ago, the beloved singer is facing metastatic breast cancer with courage and determination
As the sun rose over her southern California farm on a recent warm June morning, Olivia Newton-john finished sipping a steaming cup of herbal tea brewed by her husband, John Easterling, and then got on with the first chore of the day: nurturing one of the newborn chicks she is raising. Mixing mush for poultry and tending to her horses brings the 68-year-old Australian icon peace, and country living is exactly what she needs. On May 30, the star told the world that she is facing breast cancer for the second time
after 25 years in remission, and that the disease has metastasised to the sacrum, a bone in the lower back. For many people, the diagnosis would be devastating. But Newton-john is innately optimistic; the same golden girl who went to Hollywood from Melbourne via London and became a 1970s superstar singing feather-light pop and shimmying with John Travolta in Grease. “We both have the same unshakable belief that she’s going to have a wonderful success story,” says Easterling, 65, who plans on celebrating his 9th wedding
anniversary with his wife this month. “We’re not trying to be positive. We have an absolute knowingness that we can turn this around.”
While Newton-john undergoes treatment, she has put her husband in charge of updating loved ones and the media. But in a statement, she
echoes his sunny resolve. “I am feeling good and enjoying total support from my family and friends, along with a team of wellness and medical practitioners. I’m totally confident that my new journey will have a positive success story.”
Eight months ago, Newton-john, nicknamed “Pollyanna” by her sister Rona because of her tendency to “see the good in everything,” told WHO she was feeling happier and healthier than ever. “I’m just grateful for the gift of one more day,” she said last October, reflecting on losing Rona, a fellow actress, to brain cancer at 70 in 2013. “I know that having had cancer, I need to keep myself balanced and healthy, and that’s mental as well as physical.” But as she toured Europe and travelled around America earlier this year promoting her inspirational album Liv On, the singer grappled with severe back pain she initially mistook for sciatica. Last month she was forced to postpone all scheduled shows, and medical tests revealed that her cancer had returned and spread. “We knew something was going on with all the pain she was having,” says Easterling, a natural-health entrepreneur. “As it turns out, you’ve got a tumour growing there pressing on a nerve bundle against the pelvis.” The Grammy winner (who is choosing to keep the specific details of her treatment and prognosis private for now) is undergoing a short course of photon radiation therapy supplemented with other natural wellness therapies. Since beginning cancer treatment a week ago, “the pain has gone from [ level] eight to about a two,” says Easterling. “I’m encouraging her to tune out everything and focus on herself.” Before going public, Newton-john privately shared her diagnosis with those closest to her. “Olivia has always been an incredible human being and an inspiration to millions of people,” says her friend John Travolta, who wooed NewtonJohn’s Sandy as bad boy Danny in 1978’s Grease. “If we all put our intentions for her to get through this—i know her so well, she will feel it and it will support her. We love her and she loves us.”
That kind of outcome would fit an extraordinary life. The youngest of three children born to Brinley Newton-john, an MI5 officer, and Irene Born, the daughter of Nobel prize–winning physicist and Jewish refugee Max Born, she was raised in Cambridge, England, before her family emigrated to Australia. By the late 1960s, Newton-john’s willowy good looks and breathy voice helped her break into showbusiness; she soon found success as a pop-country singer. But it was Grease that turned her into a superstar. A string of pop hits that included “Physical” and “Xanadu” followed in the 1980s. By then, she was a mogul with her own chain of clothing stores, Koala Blue. Newton-john had a daughter, Chloe, now 31, with her first husband, actor Matt Lattanzi, but in 1992 learnt she had breast cancer. “I had all the same fears and traumas that everyone feels,” she said. “But I did massage and meditation and yoga ... all the things that would help heal me and keep me feeling positive.” Instead of falling into despair, “she told me all of a sudden she saw what was important in life, which is the people around her that she loves,” says her Grease castmate Didi Conn. “That’s how she’s lived her life.” Her 1994 album, Gaia, was written about coping with cancer. Positivity also helped her cope with her 1995 divorce from Lattanzi, the mysterious disappearance of her boyfriend Patrick Mcdermott in a 2005 boating trip, and her sister’s death.
In 2013, she lent her name and fundraising power to Australia’s Olivia Newton-john Cancer Wellness & Research Centre. All of it has also helped Newton-john develop a toughness underneath her smile, says her friend, talk-show host Leeza Gibbons. “She’s not naive and doesn’t get immobilised,” says Gibbons. “She finds light in the darkest corners and just always has.”
One of the biggest lights in Newton-john’s life is Easterling, whom she calls “the love of my life.” After Mcdermott vanished and tabloid rumours circulated he had faked his own death, “I dated a little bit, but I wasn’t expecting to fall in love,” she said. Easterling is “incredibly compassionate and smart and says yes to life.” After nearly a decade together, “we share a complete world,” he says. That includes finding laughter in trying times. “What’s really big with us is just laughter,” he says. “We wake up and start each day with gratitude and are able to maintain a sense of humour.” Most of all, Easterling is in awe of his wife’s “capacity to love,” he says. “It’s just something that’s so rare.”
Indeed, friends say Newton-john will focus not just on trying to get well, but on helping others. If all goes well, she plans on returning to the stage this summer. Then, “she will have a real story that will inspire so many people,” says Easterling. Adds friend Beth Nielsen Chapman, who co-wrote Liv On: “If anybody can power through this with amazing determination, it’s Olivia.”
“Olivia has always been an inspiration to millions of people” —John Travolta