Lunch With John Travolta, 1985
Sex, Scientology, Stallone, and Stardom
John Travolta played a Rolling Stone reporter in the movie “Perfect,” so it made sense for me to invite him to lunch at the UN Plaza Hotel restaurant near the New York Newsday office. It was just the two of us, no publicists or corporate overseers. Not exactly a pair of journos comparing professional notes, but close enough. We were both doing our jobs, and I appreciated Travolta’s candor on sensitive topics. If we were in a hotel suite, I might have asked him to show me some dance moves. We maintained a nice talking groove.
JOHN TRAVOLTA plays a magazine reporter in his latest movie, "Perfect." So it wasn't surprising that during a recent lunch interview at a Manhattan hotel restaurant, he scanned the room with a journalistic eye.
"It's so funny to watch people, how they react over food," Travolta said, gesturing discreetly to a nearby table. "Now here's a table here, of four men, four gentlemen. And one guy's indignant about the food, and wants to make a big deal out of it. I often wonder if how people deal with food is how they deal with sex. Do you know what I mean? For instance, this guy's very picky. I wonder if he's picky about the positions he has his wife get into."
Travolta laughed and put on a stuffy voice. "I can only do it in certain ways," he said, in what he imagined the picky eater to sound like. "I often wonder if it reflects."
Travolta didn't flinch when his metaphor was turned back at him. "I'm a passionate eater, and I tend to eat a lot, and I tend to be aggressive about what I eat unless I'm in company," he said. "And that's sort of a direct reflection of the way I am with sex, too. I like a lot of sex, and I'm very aggressive in my need, in my passion for it."
In the eight years since Travolta was the personification of 1970s disco style in "Saturday Night Fever," he has been one of America's most scrutinized movie stars. His sex-symbol stature makes him natural fodder for gossip columns. His affiliation with Scientology brings controversy. His flops, such as "Moment by Moment" (1978) with Lily Tomlin and ''Two of a Kind" with Olivia Newton-John, receive greater attention than his winning dramatic performances in movies such as "Urban Cowboy" and "Blow-Out."
In "Perfect," Travolta, [then 31] plays Rolling Stone reporter Adam Lawrence. The movie is based on a 1983 Rolling Stone magazine article written by Aaron Latham that portrayed health clubs as the new singles bars. While reporting the article, Lawrence, the Travolta character, falls in love with an aerobics instructor played by Jamie Lee Curtis. The movie isn't as bubble-headed as it sounds, although there is a lengthy scene in which the camera all but fondles Travolta and Curtis as it switches back and forth from torso-to-torso during an aerobics workout. [ed. note: actually it was pretty bubble-headed, and was considered another in a series of JTs lesser cinema works.]
For the most part, or at least to some extent, the emphasis isn't entirely on Travolta's body but his emotions as he confronts his own ethics and how they conflict with those of his boss, Rolling Stone editor Mark Roth (played by real-life Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner).
Travolta does not feel that he's trapped by the youthful, visceral, dance-crazy characters he played in "Saturday Night Fever"and "Grease," the two blockbusters that made him an international star.
"I've gone from street dancer to cowboy to sound technician to ballet dancer to journalist," he said. "That's how I see it. The refreshing thing about this movie is playing an intellectual – not that my other characters weren't intelligent . . . It was refreshing to play someone who had a verbal format rather than some other sort of intentions."
By contrast, Travolta's appeal in "Stayin' Alive," a disappointing attempt to leverage some of that “SNF” magic, was his transformation into what might be called a "mega-hunk" thanks to a weight-lifting routine instigated by Sylvester Stallone, the movie's director.
"Sly is an interesting man, because he has a survival instinct like nobody I've ever seen," Travolta said, after signing an autograph for a man wearing an expensive suit, who said he wanted to shake the actor's hand so he could "take some of him home" for his daughter. Travolta is cordial, and used to such transactions. But it’s back to Stallone.
"All you have to do is hook up with him and it rubs off. In working with him, his energy rubbed off on me. It's exciting to be in his presence, because everything felt important, even if some issues weren't. At that time in my life I was feeling a little drab. Mundane. He was like a nice shot in the arm. He's this Peer Gynt kind of character - he just grabs life."
Travolta spoke in terms of the "affinity flow" between people operating on "another dynamic of life" from material things. Travolta is a believer in and supporter of the Church of Scientology. (Scientology was founded in 1954 by L. RonHubbard and is based on a form of psychotherapy called Dianetics. The core of the religion is an "audit" in which church members confess painful or embarrassing moments.)
Travolta believes that those who perceive Scientology as a cult are doing it "an injustice."
"Nothing I find would constitute that," Travolta said. He has been involved with Scientology for 10 years: "As long as I've been famous," he said. "I found real sanity in it. And the more sane a person feels, the more causative over anything they want to achieve. In my case, I was happier, so I was a better actor. I'm not one of those people from the school that 'darkness is better.' Or, 'the more neurotic I am, the better actor you can be.' I mean, that's gonna be there, whether you like it or not. So if I have to dig deep into one's mind or another's mind, or an environment, to get darkness, that's at hand. What's a more rare thing is sanity or happiness. I'd rather go for that rare thing."
The material thing that gives Travolta the most pleasure is his own airplane. It was in trying to describe the allure of flying that Travolta found himself at a near-loss for words for the only time during the afternoon. "I'm tempted to say I don't know, because when something's such a complete inspiration to you, and such a complete euphoria, you almost don't even want to - if you understood it better, you would spoil the effects or something."
Having pursued a career in show business before he graduated high school, Travolta has a curious, analytical mind that seems free of the self-consciousness that sometimes goes with such a penchant. Toward the end of lunch he decided to crawl on all fours across the restaurant floor and pop up like a puppy to surprise Clay Felker, co-founder of New York magazine, sitting at a table across the room. ("Watch this," he said.) It was Felker's New York that published the Nik Cohn story "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" in 1976, which became the movie "Saturday Night Fever" a year later.
The actor also has a way of looking on the bright side of poorly received films like "Moment by Moment," with Lily Tomlin, a dud which could have had a negative effect on his career. The damage, clearly, was not permanent.
"One could regret 'Moment by Moment,' " Travolta said. "But on the other hand, maybe what one learns from that is invaluable. So is it wise to regret that? I have a tendency to try not to regret, and look at what I've learned from something. Where does it get me, to stew in something? You can't change it. I think half the insanity in this world comes from regret. It comes from people holding onto the past, and onto things that have a negative significance. It's not a practice of mine to do that."
Travolta certainly had the opportunity to be limited by some personal traumas earlier in his career. Within an 18-month period, he lost his mother, who was a major nurtur-ing and motivating force in his life, and Diana Hyland, an actress 18 years older than he with whom Travolta had been in love. Both died of cancer, Hyland in1977. Travolta once described the relationship with Hyland as having "a calming quality" that he hadn't been able to re-create. But that's no longer the case.
"I certainly value that relationship I had with her as one of the high points in my life," Travolta said. "But after successfully dealing with the loss of Diana and my mother (in 1978), it settled down to reality again, where I could then achieve some of the same qualities. I find that every relationship I have is distinctly different. I could achieve that peace as well somewhere else. At the time, I don't think I felt that way. At the time, that felt like Diana was the only one I could achieve that with . . . I don't want people to think that they couldn't achieve something new, because then you'd want to die. At the time, I felt bad enough to want to leave as well. I felt like, gee, the love of my life is gone - I want to go [die] too. Through counseling, I realized, I handled the loss, and it was time to move on. But it took a few years to adjust."
For the last dozen years, the most enduring romance in Travolta's life has been with actress Marilu Henner, who also appears in "Perfect." "The nice thing about our relationship is that we are not each other's minds," Travolta said. "We are individuals, and that's what keeps the sparks up. We have our own distinct viewpoints on things."
When asked what kind of character he'd like to play that he hasn't yet had the opportunity to explore, Travolta said, unhesitatingly, "a dad."
"I have a very parental side to me," Travolta, the youngest of six children in a close-knit family, said. "And it's very clear when I'm with my sisters' and brothers' kids. And it's very full-bodied; I feel it in every cell: this responsibility, this care, this concern for their future. Genuine love, excitement when I see the kids. I haven't been able to show that on-screen yet."
Yet as a real-life role, he believes that parenthood still might be a decade away."It's something I'm actually looking forward to a little later more than now," Travolta said. "Because I'm sort of in a whirlwind in my life, and I figure for the next 10 years it will probably continue to be that way. And I don't know how much time I could give a child. If I had a child, I would like to serve that child well. And I'd like that child to serve me, in exchange of joy, okay? So I want to be able to make it an equal exchange. If the next 10 years don't allow me to do that, I'd rather wait. By that time I can be in the kind of ideal situation I want it to be. And it's not like that's outside the realm of possibilities. A lot of people would argue that it's never ideal. Well, I don't know. I could tend to argue that. There are times when things are more ideal than others."