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By William Keck, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — She is strong. She is invincible. She is retired. At least from showbiz.
The extent to which 1970s musical icon Helen Reddy, now 66, has turned her back on all things Hollywood is evident immediately. The Grammy-winning Aussie feminist, embarking on a fan-organized speaking tour for her book, The Woman I Am ($20 at helenreddy .com), is dressed in jeans and an old sweater, with no makeup save for a smear of lipstick. "Let me get my hair ready," she jokes, running her hands over her gray, unkempt locks. Her grown son, Jordan Sommers, has been acting as her assistant, but she's by herself today — no publicist or manager. Asked about her appearance, she laughs and explains that makeup always made her feel dirty. "I couldn't wait for the show to end so I could clean it off and feel clean again," she explains. "Being a performer wasn't who I am." It was, of course, her 1972 anthem for the women's movement, IAm Woman, that gave her icon status. Now, she says, her voice has deepened to a lower key, and she's not even sure she could sing hits such as Delta Dawn. Reddy ended her singing career in 2002 with a "lovely" farewell concert in Canada with the Edmonton Symphony, and she says it made her feel "complete." She now insists she will never again perform before an audience. "It's not going to happen. I've moved on." Well, suppose Hillary Clinton were to win the election and ask Reddy to sing at her inauguration? Reddy pauses. She then laughs and tells a story she hadn't planned to tell. Apparently, she sent an e-mail to the Clinton campaign early on offering her involvement. The "enthusiastic" response: "I got a form letter back asking me for a contribution." Reddy acknowledges that Clinton probably never received word of her offer. "Anybody under 40 doesn't know who the (heck) I am," she concedes. Even so, Reddy is hoping to vote for a Clinton/Obama ticket — in that order. Says Reddy, who has had dual citizenship for years: "She has the experience, and I think he'd make a wonderful vice president." Reddy's home, however, is Australia, where she lives simply and frugally off song royalties, pension funds and social security. She rents a 13th-floor apartment with a 180-degree view of the Sydney harbor. When her apartment was recently appraised, she feared she would no longer be able to afford the rent. To her surprise, the New York-based landlord learned he had a celebrity, and wrote to tell her: "I had no idea it was the Helen Reddy who was living in my unit. Because of what you have done for millions of women all over the world, I will not sell or raise your rent. I hope you'll be very happy living there for years to come." Much like Shirley MacLaine, Reddy has become a disciple of past-life regression, helping people, through hypnotherapy, discover who they were before they were born into their current bodies. "We are in tumultuous times," she says. "In the last two months within an eight-day period, Jesus came through twice with my clients." As for her own past lives, Reddy believes she has lived hundreds, including one as an Egyptian foreman who worked on the Great Pyramids and another as a Persian merchant with multiple wives and concubines — a life that led her to have sympathy for women. She also suspects she may have written the French national anthem during the French Revolution: "That would be two times in my life that I'd written an anthem!"
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