We were all on Stockard Channing’s side. I know when someone dies they bring diplomacy with them, but there are things that lie about it that don’t make sense, and one of them is: if you were a kid (even more so: if you were a teenager) in the years that Grease was released did not cheer Olivia Newton-John, rightly convinced that love will come sooner or later.
Sandy, from the opening credits, was what we would call “the big Cinderella” a few years later. She was the good girl. It was the one with the pastel sweaters. And no one who becomes a woman in the Debeauvoir sense wants to be the predictable and sweet good girl, beautiful as she may be. Not even the ones that are; especially the ones that are.
Rizzo on the other hand. Rizzo, who had a bad reputation, who might have accidentally gotten pregnant (what a joke: nobody used that to morally educate us about abortion laws at the time), Rizzo, that the good girl screwed her so effectively: Look at my place I Sandra Dee.
We didn’t know what hegemony was that of the blonde whose antagonist has her moment of glory by making her a parody. And we didn’t know – at least I didn’t know that when it came out I was only six years old and all I noticed were the pastel colors of the cars and the sweaters, which were the same as in Happy Days; and since there was no internet to explain that both Happy Days and Grease were twenty years ago, I was convinced that America was a broken country – that Grease was the story of all flirting in the world.
In which he exaggeratedly tells his friends that he overthrew you because he wants their approval; and at the first kiss she already tries the name with his surname or almost, because that is her part in the comedy (today we would say: patriarchal conditioning; how lucky to grow up in less serious years).
Little did we know that like all Ultra-American heroines from Rossella O’Hara onwards, Sandy wasn’t American. She was an Englishwoman raised in Australia who by this point already had a singing career, she had won three Grammys (fourth came in the 80’s with Physical which, unless you dance it with legwarmers, I don’t know what you do have gone through in this decade).
But it would have been possible without the psychiatric part, like Vivien Leigh: This one role was eaten up by all the others. (Leigh’s biographies state that in a psychiatric hospital, a nurse trying to calm her down told her, “I know her, she’s Rossella O’Hara,” and she yelled, “I’m not Rossella O’Hara, I am Blanche duBois”).
Whatever she did, Olivia Newton-Jonn has been Sandy for forty-four years. She was always the blonde virgin with a sweater slung over her shoulders, no matter how many times she pointed out that none of the virgin divas in American cinema really had a intact hymen, “Doris Day had four husbands.” It was always the one whose turning point with a leather jacket in the final nobody believed.
In those forty-four years, Sandy — unlike Danny Zuko — hasn’t had a Tarantino take advantage of his iconic prominence by turning it against him. The scene from Pulp Fiction where he dances shattered and does the verse himself is by John Travolta because breakup is a male privilege and Cinderella must have the same waist as when she was a girl: we expect it because she is ours mirrors, and we don’t want to see the cobwebs on our training posters.
Thirty of those years, Olivia Newton-John has experienced the recurrence of a breast cancer that first occurred to her in 1992 and which seemed antiquated, cured and avoided. It is heartbreaking to know that Sandy passed away at age 73, an age that is now practically the beginning of adulthood.
As always, we weep for ourselves and therefore for all our friends who, obviously without superstition and without any knowledge of statistics, triumphantly proclaimed “I beat cancer”. We cry for the certainties we can’t have: that the blondes who redeem high school playboys live very long and moderately boring lives, that breast cancer is now stuff that ridicules prevention, that Rizzo can’t go without a blonde to rage against. He needs to be distracted from the fear of having a loaf of bread in the oven.
We mourn the girl in the new school whose old students sweat their integration in years when no one used the word inclusive, we mourn the bygone era that will not return, the pastel age of innocence, whose musicals we memorized all the songs right away because they killed flies, the songs where his friends asked, “Tell us: did you try to resist?” without anyone telling us that we are ugly people when we watch films that extol the culture of rape.
We mourn the loss of entertainment in the form of Big Babol, who looked like Burnt Youth (which is from the years Grease is set) but without the dark side. We mourn the discovery that sooner or later the dark side will make its way outside of the cinema.