We were in Xanadu: How a girl named Fleur gave Olivia her look

As Australia pauses to remember the life and career of Olivia Newton-John, Fleur Thiemeyer has more memories to summon than most, more tears to shed and more laughs to remember. Her friendship with the star spanned half a century, and was the spark for a story that has never really been told.

“I think for me, more than anything, I felt like her protector, because I was the tough kid,” Thiemeyer says of the woman she met in Los Angeles in 1973, when these two Melbourne girls were in their mid-20s and on the verge of conquering Hollywood.

“No one could get near her. We gelled so well. I looked at her as being a soulmate, a protector. She was the person who would confide in me if she wasn’t sure about something. The silly stuff. I love the photos where we’re laughing.”

Thiemeyer is sharing her story — and her astonishing photo album — in honour of her friend, and to properly tell the tale of how her own star rose in tandem with Newton-John’s — but behind the scenes.

Newton-John was Thiemeyer’s fashion muse, the superstar who turbocharged her nascent fashion career and helped forge a remarkable rise as designer for an eye-popping Rolodex of music legends.

Even more remarkably, she got there with almost no one knowing who she was, even in her native Australia. “I didn’t really want it,” says Thiemeyer of the fame that might have accompanied her rise. “I never had a manager. I never had an agent.”

What she did have was a reservoir of nerve and determination forged growing up in postwar Melbourne. A tomboy who preferred surfing and athletics, she stumbled into the burgeoning Australian music scene of the late 1960s, moved to London and then Los Angeles with her pop star boyfriend, and fell into the world of Hollywood fashion design.

I felt like her protector, because I was the tough kid ... She was the person who would confide in me if she wasn’t sure about something.

Fleur Thiemeyer on Olivia Newton-John

You could put her name at the centre of a wheel whose spokes reach out to include local pop pioneers such as Zoot and The Easybeats, through her big break dressing ONJ from 1973 onwards, and then Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Ozzy Osbourne, KISS, Motley Crue, Pat Benatar, KC and the Sunshine Band, Dusty Springfield and more.

She put ONJ in that iconic Physical leotard and headband; Rod Stewart in Spandex pants; she made Minnelli dazzle in her legendary Liza with a Z show; and it was Thiemeyer who Midler called on to dress her for a career-flipping Beast Of Burden video with Mick Jagger in 1984.

How did it all happen? It’s tempting to use a word like “fairytale”, but Fleur Thiemeyer is too down-to-earth for that. She recalls her life matter-of-factly and with many a wry laugh.

“I’m growing up in the ’50s. I’m probably the only child whose mother isn’t home at lunchtime, so there’s an independence that you get. Always a rebel. I think if you could be expelled at eight years old, I would have been.”

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She was no shrinking violet, but there were no signs early on that she would one day make her mark as a master of the frills and fads of the fashion world. She was athletic (she remembers racing future Olympian Raelene Boyle’s behind around the track) and took a shine to surfing: “You’re out there with 20 guys and you’re the only girl. I preferred always to be hanging out with guys just for the fun of it. And from there it extended to going out to clubs, and the only people I really related to were the people on stage.”

Thiemeyer was present at the creation of dozens of celebrated music careers. She was going to clubs in her mid-teens, and her first big-name friendship was with The Easybeats, Australia’s answer to The Beatles. Indeed, it is her unusual first name that graces their 1966 song Sorry:

Had a date at seven

With a girl named Fleur

Then I just remembered, had a date with her

At a club she met singer Lynne Randell, resulting in an unlikely shift in focus: Thiemeyer started to dabble in modelling.

Her elder sister was dating Phillip Frazer, founder of the iconic pop magazine Go-Set; her sister was also friends with a young music nut named Ian Meldrum, trying his hand at music writing. Thiemeyer found herself in the pages of Go-Set as a model. She met Zoot, a band that included Darryl Cotton and Rick Springfield. She met a young Bon Scott, then in a band called The Valentines. Roger Davies was around, about to hit the big time managing a band named Sherbet. “It’s all six degrees of separation,” says Thiemeyer.

Fast-forward to 1973. Thiemeyer and her partner Darryl Cotton, who she had dressed along with his Zoot bandmates in all-pink in her first foray into high-impact design, had moved to London for a time. Then they joined the burgeoning Australian presence trying to crack the US market. She enrolled in a fashion course, more as a way of getting a visa than from any larger ambition.

Several of what would later become known as “the Gumleaf Mafia” lived in the same block: “The apartments overlooked the swimming pool and over to Sunset Boulevard and Tower Records.”

Where better to launch a storied Hollywood career?

‘You’re going to need dresses’

One day, a musician from Moonee Ponds — John Farrar, of The Strangers — came over to the apartments to visit Steve Kipner, a young musician from Brisbane who lived upstairs. Farrar brought with him a friend from his Melbourne TV days on programs like Bandstand - Olivia Newton-John, a close friend and singing partner of his wife, Pat.

Farrar and Kipner later wrote some of Newton-John’s biggest hits. But in 1973, she had just cracked the US market with her first country songs and was about to embark on a first Vegas stint. One of the Gumleaf brigade said to her: “You’re going to need dresses. Fleur does dresses. You should meet Fleur.”

The rest is music and fashion history.

Thiemeyer and Newton-John forged an instant bond. They were the same age, from the same town, with the same sense of humour, and — at the same height and with blonde hair — they even looked alike. Vegas shows and foreign tours followed as Newton-John became one of the planet’s biggest stars.

On the road, it could feel like a prison of endless shows and little escape from Newton-John’s celebrity, but they would find ways to break the grind. In Japan, they once slipped out without security but had to flee to the hotel when Newton-John was recognised. In Vegas, they’d make surreptitious late-night visits to a drug store and try on makeup and laugh at the silliness of it all.

“I look at a photo of us now and it’s just two Aussie girls, and that was the great part of always being with her.”

In the second half of the 1970s, Thiemeyer dressed her friend for tours and multiple US TV specials, which Newton-John did yearly with big-name guests such as ABBA, Elton John and Tina Turner. Then in 1978, Newton-John’s star shot into the stratosphere with Grease. And while it wasn’t Thiemeyer who put her in those famous black leather pants, this was a fashion theme she applied more broadly to Newton-John’s videos and performances that drove a pop music trend. Her distinct style, and Newton-John’s effortless natural flair in wearing it, had Hollywood taking notice.

The phone started ringing.

It might be: “Liza Minnelli would like to meet with you, would you be available tomorrow morning? She’s at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

Or: “Can you meet with Dolly Parton?”

Thiemeyer recalls that meeting: “We went to her closet and went through her stuff and Dolly said ‘You can do anything you want with me except for this or this or this’, like her trademarks, the long fingernails and so on.”

She embarked on long working relationships with Rod Stewart and Pat Benatar. Then there was an unlikely detour when she started dressing the big-hair, big-noise, big-everything bands of the 1980s. She is friends to this day with those heavy rockers — Motley Crue in particular — a sharp design departure from her most famous early client.

Now 73, and living in Melbourne where she has raised her son for the last 20 years, those ties are often the cause of sadness. Celebrity deaths these days form a melancholy path through her own life and career. A few days after our interview she gets the news that Raquel Welch, a client for decades, has died. A few weeks earlier, it was Jeff Beck. In November, it was Christine McVie, the Fleetwood Mac singer-songwriter who Thiemeyer dressed for Bill Clinton’s first inauguration concert in 1992.

“I can call up pictures now and I’m the only person still alive.”

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And then there was the early morning barrage of text messages and phone calls that announced the passing of Newton-John on August 9.

Thiemeyer had last seen her in Australia in February 2020, the star’s last visit home for the bushfire relief concert, and the two reunited for a photograph for the National Gallery of Victoria. The NGV was one of the buyers when Newton-John auctioned off many of her career mementos in 2019. The auction raised $US2.4 million, with some of Thiemeyer’s designs and sketches bringing eye-watering sums. “They’re paying $3500 for a sketch.”

One pair of jeans the singer wore on US television in the 1970s fetched $US50,000. Thiemeyer recalls walking into Julien’s Auctions on the day of the big sale and seeing the glory days of her career on display before they went under the hammer: “There were all my clothes and I burst into tears.”

Memories will do that to you, and Thiemeyer has so many of them. She is nothing but thankful for the good fortune her Hollywood adventures brought her. And she reckons her tomboy youth, some of it atop a surfboard off Sandringham, stood her in good stead for all that followed.

“When you get knocked on the head five times in the water, you’ve swallowed enough water, you probably should get out. But you just keep going. You build an internal strength.”

Those words could, of course, equally describe her courageous friend Newton-John. And as she remembers her today, most of her memories will stay just that: her memories, no one else’s.

“They’re the things that are ours,” she says. “They’re nobody else’s and they won’t be. Especially now.”

Fleur’s famous looks

Fleur Thiemeyer laughs at her part in music fashion in the 1980s, the early days of MTV: “Probably 80 per cent of the bad taste is from me!”

Hot Legs: Thiemeyer put Rod Stewart in very tight Spandex pants in his Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? era. She met him through Newton-John. “He said on the phone: ‘This is Rod Stewart’. I said, ‘Sure it is’. And he said: ‘Are you always this rude?’. And that sort of sealed the deal.” They forged a long and lasting friendship.

Let’s get Physical: One of the most iconic fashion moments of the era: ONJ in leotard and headband. The outfit was built in real time, with Thiemeyer dyeing a white leotard pink. “Bad taste is timeless,” she laughs. “We put the white T-shirt on and cut the neck out. The neckband of the shirt became the hairband because her hair wouldn’t stay right. And the turquoise I put on as a wrap-around because I didn’t like the overall shape. And then there were the leggings.”

Beast of Burden: “Bette [Midler] was open to anything. I go to her house and Bette gets up and she’s like ‘I can’t believe it, I’ve looked up everything you’ve done!’ [On set] Mick comes in to say hello, and he’s just chatting and carrying on. I’ve still got the piece of paper they signed.”