By Deborah Cameron

A year after the best Games ever, the Herald tallies the final scorecard for the Olympics and assesses the lasting legacy. Today, Deborah Cameron reports on the big business that is the tiny star who who enchanted the world at the Opening Ceremony.

Ric Birch, the director of Olympic ceremonies, picked her to be the elfin child who would fly over the stadium. He thought she had enough grit to stand alone in the middle of the field at the start of the opening ceremony and enchant the world-wide audience.

That luminous moment nearly 12 months ago transformed the life of Nikki Webster, 14.

It is now a micro-managed timetable with the balance struck by parents who, when need be, quote the Department of Community Services child labour laws.

After almost 10 years as a child star (her first role was in a Twisties commercial when she was five), Nikki Webster has more money in her bank account than her parents. Around her a tight group has assembled to manage her professional schedule, business interests, schooling and book her time, including time off.

“Honestly I have never known anyone, and I mean anyone, who is as busy,” said Judith Johnson, publicist for Webster’s latest vehicle, The Wizard of Oz.

Between a magazine photo shoot in the afternoon and the primping of a make-up artist in the morning, Webster talks to the Herald in her manager’s home.

She’s wearing a pantsuit of lavender vinyl that emphasises small sharp bones, and the loops of her honey coloured hair are pinned with pink crystal-encrusted clips. Ignoring the slice of apple danish in front of her, she instead sips from a glass of water (her favourite drink, as declared on her Web page).

“I don’t think you can call this work. It’s so much fun,”she says.

She talks about the travel schedule and shopping mall appearances being a balancing act but says that she hasn’t missed “that much” school. Study is with a private tutor and her social life has been made easy because her best friends have enlisted as her dance troupe.

On the business side she has signed a contract for the lead role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and joined the stable at record label BMG/Gotham, part-owned by John Farnham.

Her agent, Lisa Hamilton, said that record companies “three of the majors” tabled their offers straight after the Olympics. Her solicitor, says her mother, secured the best deal he’s ever got. The CD, Follow Your Heart, hit the music charts at number six and was HMV’s record of the week. The Australian production of the Wizard of Oz was conceived for her. Her music videos are made with an eye to international markets. She is under contract to Hollywood. And in the meantime she’s singing at shopping centre promotions, is the face of Queensland’s Movieworld, and has endorsed a line of cosmetics. Webster says that she goes to the meetings where her business affairs are discussed and feels involved in the decisions.

“I get told everything, yes. Everything goes past me and I say if I want to do something or not,” she said. And then she admits to sheer amazement at getting her dream so early in life.

“I went to the Olympic auditions for the experience and when they told me I had the part I thought `Did I hear that right?’ I never thought I’d become so big. It’s been amazing. I’ve had the best year ever.”

Hamilton says that as a manager, she is looking at “lifetime potential”.

“Like an Olivia or a Kylie. That is what Nikki wants and it’s what we want for her.”

All things considered, it has turned out as Birch prophesied a year ago: “She’s goin’ in a nobody and comin’ out a star.”

Then, interviewed the day before the opening ceremony as she sat with an ice-cream outside the Olympic stadium, she was more the child and less the star.

Her life today has been altered by having fans and becoming a show business property. Her parents have put effort into not spoiling her and firmly say that money “doesn’t mean anything” and is not their motivation.

“She’s at an age where she doesn’t do anything for money,” her mother, Tina, said.

“She’s never wanted money. Whatever she needs comes out of Mum’s purse … We don’t even take one cent out of her account and never have.”

As a family, the Websters Tina, who administers a child-care centre, Mark, an electrician, and Scott, a schoolboy and actor seem unfazed by the past year.

They still live in the same lemon-painted house with its yard overlooked by brown brick flats, drive a people mover, get up early and go to work and have instant gravy on the shelf for when they eat a roast.

The home is anything but a trophy cabinet. In the open-plan kitchen and dining room the heart of the house there is not a trace, not even a photo in the baltic pine hutch, to prove that the Olympics touched them.

“We still walk up to our club, we still go to the shops, we still eat in the food court,” said Webster.

And yet it is not the same. The food court might seem like a strange place to see an Olympic side-effect, but it is almost the first thing Webster’s mother mentions.

“The hardest things are the simple things,” she says.

She means doing the shopping and eating lunch at the mall which “by the time you’ve got around the autographs” takes twice as long. Her brother will wrap his big coat around Nikki as a loose disguise, just so she can finish her plate.

Food is a concern because Webster is birdlike. Showbusiness famously favours the thin and anorexia stalks many of its young women. Her mother does not think that Nikki is too thin and says that she has been small all of her life and takes after her slightly built father.

“I feel that it is so hard on her,” says Tina. “She’ll sign autographs all the way round but I’d like it if she’s sitting down trying to eat something that she can actually put the food in her mouth.”

They used to go out more, but now they eat at home. “Nikki’s a plain eater. She loves a roast with lots of vegies.” They like to keep away from autograph hunters.

“They will stop her halfway through a mouthful and she never gets angry because they are kids, tiny children. What can you do? They sit on her lap.”

And yet smallness is part of what makes her so successful. One of the things that attracted the producers of the Olympic ceremony was that she had the maturity and experience of a teenager but the stature of a much younger child. In the video clip of her song, Depend on Me, the dancers that surround her are her age but are more robust and so much taller that Webster stood on a box to get up to their height.

Her size also helps to explain the demographic of her fans, some as young as three, who queue for her signature and dance nonstop when she sings. They graft the first and second parts of her name together to form a single word Nikkiwebster. Last month at a shopping mall a little boy chanted `hi Nikkiwebster, hi Nikkiwebster’ all the way through her act.

The charm and menace of having fans is the same for every celebrity. It was for them that the producers of The Wizard of Oz went to DOCS for an exemption from NSW laws that limit child actors to four shows a week.

Webster says that she wanted to play Dorothy in every show eight a week for four months in Sydney followed by seasons in Melbourne and Brisbane. She would have felt responsible for disappointing the fans if they bought tickets and found someone else in lead.

Her manager, her school, her tutor and parents supported the application, though it is understood that what swung DOCS was the reputation of the co-producer, the Gordon Frost Organisation, which has staged other shows involving children. DOCS also noted that the show would be on partly during school holidays and that it was close to Webster’s 15th birthday, which would put her beyond the jurisdiction of the act.

Her parents, virtual shop stewards, wrote their standard “kill” clause into the contract allowing them to withdraw her. “If she’s not coping with her eight shows, that she’s insisted upon, then she doesn’t have to,” Tina said.

“She’ll only do what I feel she’s able to do. She’s still a child and her Dad and I know her better than anyone, and if it’s not helping her or there’s something wrong she knows that we will pull it for her because she is too young to pull it herself.”

As she sees it, the sprite who soared over the stadium, the pop star who sings in the mall, the girl who would be Dorothy, is ethereal. “Everyone believes that was Nikki Webster. It wasn’t. That wasn’t the child.” That is the actor.

But for Webster, who will soon step on to the yellow brick road and sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the dream really did come true.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald