Olivia

I always enjoyed Olivia Newton-John's music and I wish I had better stories about her than the measly ones I now offer…

The first occurred on the second day I worked on the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter and my first tape date. I have about eighty stories about things that happened that day including the visit of Groucho Marx to the Kotter set, which I've written about several times. This happened about six hours before that. We taped on a stage over at ABC Studios in a building that housed two studios. The two studios shared make-up and wardrobe rooms and three floors of dressing rooms and a few offices. My partner Dennis and I were housed in an office on the third floor.

So at one point, I get in the elevator (alone) to go downstairs and the car stops at the second floor and two people get on, both of them elegantly dressed sort of like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in one of their movies — but it isn't Fred and Ginger. It's Elliott Gould and Olivia Newton-John. An Olivia Newton-John special is taping in the other studio in the building and Mr. Gould is a guest star on it.

The elevator doors close. The elevator car starts down. The elevator car stops and it takes us a moment to realize we are trapped between the first and second floor. Mr. Gould begins frantically pounding on the doors and pushing buttons. Ms. Newton-John is utterly calm. She just says, "Relax. They'll get us out of here. They can't tape the show without us."

So we all relax and we have a very nice conversation about nothing of consequence that lasts until the elevator starts up again and takes us down to the first floor and lets us out. I think we were in there about eight minutes. Some sort of maintenance man apologizes to us and some stars would have screamed their heads off at the guy and demanded someone's firing but Olivia just says, "It's fine…no big deal" and heads for the stage to tape the dance number. I had a high opinion of her as human being at that moment.

It never went down. Ten or fifteen years later, I briefly worked for an animation company that had an office on Melrose Avenue. The office took up the entire second floor of the building and the first floor was a shop called Koala Blue that sold fashionable clothing, much of it from Australia. Ms. Newton-John owned it or owned part of it…or something. I ran into her a few times when I was coming or going and again, she was gracious and friendly and just very charming.

She was genuinely interested in what we were doing upstairs and at one point when I told her we were producing episodes of the CBS Storybreak series for children, she said, "Well, if you ever need someone to sing a theme song or anything, you know where to find me." I'm not sure why we didn't at least see how serious she was about that — I think maybe our producer figured she'd never do it for the kind of money our budget would have allowed — but I wish we'd at least asked her. She was a wonderful performer.