The Comeback Kid

It is the evening of November 24, 1992, and a drama worthy of a Hollywood development meeting is playing out 41,000 feet over Washington DC. A tiny Gulfstream jet, callsign N728T, is rocketing through the sky. The cabin and cockpit are both in complete darkness. A few hours into the jet’s scheduled flight the tiny aircraft’s primary electrical generator has suddenly failed. The plane automatically switched to its secondary generator, but the resulting power surge has now knocked that system out too.

In the cockpit, the pilot stares in alarm at the plane’s rapidly dimming instruments. Thick cloud cover below obstructs the view of any landmarks, and with no instrumentation, he is essentially flying blind. With only a torch for illumination, a magnetic compass and a battery-powered emergency attitude indicator the pilot begins what anyone familiar with aircraft will tell you is a risky manoeuvre: a blind rapid descent through 12,000 feet of cloud cover. In such situations pilots are told to ‘fly the instruments’, to avoid the spatial disorientation that has resulted in more than one catastrophe. But the pilot of N728T didn’t have [ital] any instrumentation. 

Ten minutes later the Gulfstream punched out of the clouds barely 1000 feet above the ground. With only limited brakes, the landing was fast and hard: all four tyres blew out almost immediately. N728T finally skidded to a halt at the junction between Washington Airport’s two main runways. “That was a squeaker,” a safety official later said. “I thought it could have gone either way.”

But then, maybe things were fated to turn out just fine in the end. If there was anyone who knew about turbulence, about negotiating tricky situations, about, well, staying alive, it was N728T’s pilot: one John Travolta. He has, after all, always been a kind of walking miracle, a born survivor. Even his most ardent fans would admit that the misses outnumber the hits by some margin. After an incendiary early career – stratospheric TV fame with Welcome Back, Kotter, the decade-defining Saturday Night Fever, the evergreen Grease – he plunged into a decade-long career slump. All seemed lost before a single supporting role led to the most spectacular comeback in Hollywood history. A mere bit of unplanned ‘plummeting’ wasn’t the kind of detail that was going to derail that kind of destiny.

Through it all – the career catastrophes, unexpected revivals, personal tragedies, near aeroplane crashes and Battlefield Earth – Travolta endures [ital], his undimmable appeal more in tune with the ancient gods of Hollywood’s previous era than the method actors who are his angsty contemporaries. More than any modern star, audiences are drawn to him more than they are to any character he happens to be playing. There’s something open, generous, irresistibly vulnerable about his screen presence. 

Take the reaction of notoriously waspish critic Pauline Kael, who reacted with protective horror when approached by aspirant Travolta biographer Nigel Andrews. “But you wouldn’t write anything negative about him would you?” Andrews reports the alarmed Kael as saying. The most acute and occasionally brutal critic of her generation had been reduced to a kind of maternal goo by the idea of any Travolta muck being raked.  And the secret to all of this? 

Love, it turns out.

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“He danced in my womb,” Travolta’s mother, Helen, once said of her youngest child. In utero gyrations aside John Joseph Travolta was adored from the moment he arrived. Born in 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey he was the youngest son, the last of a family of two brothers and three sisters. And he was a performer from the start. When he was eight his parents entered him in a twist contest at the local church. Little Johnny Travolta gyrated furiously on the stage, dazzling the crowd (30,000 strong he implausibly later said) with precursors of the moves that would later propel him from the illuminated floors of Saturday Night Fever – via a quick twirl with Princess Di – to Pulp Fiction’s Jack Rabbit Slim’s. Finally, with her youngest unable apparently to stop, mum intervened. “The poor kid looked so trapped and exhausted,” she remembered. “I kept gesturing to him, it’s okay, you can walk off.” There was a sense, already, that he was unstoppable.

And, a little later, there were the looks. In 1977 the then 23-year-old Travolta sat down with Playgirl’s Cameron Crowe. “It’s always the ones who were gawky at school,” he told Crowe of the features that by then were driving the nation’s teenage girls into a kind of collective meltdown. “See now I always had pretty eyes, I was an adorable child from the day I was born until about ten. Then, from ten on I had a big nose and big lips, My eyes were always blue, very pretty, but it didn’t seem to coordinate until I was about twenty years old.”

But when they did – oh boy. He was incandescent. In his first major screen role, guileless guido Vinnie Barbarino in teen sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, the piercingly baby blues, the cupid lips, the jet-black bouffant locks, were enough to ignite a conflagration of teenage lust that seemed all but impossible to douse. The mountain of fan letters to the goofy-stud-with-a-heart-of-gold finally required a separate warehouse at ABC. Fans turned up in Englewood, grabbing bits of the Travolta residence, bricks, slates, bits of the fence, with which to adorn bedroom shrines to the swoonsome hoodlum. With Travolta-mania at a deafening peak, and after sudsy TV movie The Boy In The Bubble (1976), Travolta launched his first serious assault on the big screen. Saturday Night Fever (1977), a ripped-from-the-headlines (even if they turned out to be made-up) tale of blue-collar kids escaping their humdrum lives for the fleeting glamour of the dancefloor, looked superficially unpromising: a repackaged 50s dance-craze movie at best. It would, of course, turn out to be a blazing triumph. And, for John Travolta, a terrible trap.

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“He comes alive as a human being sitting in the room with him,” Saturday Night Fever’s director John Badham told Empire of his star. “But that light really comes out when the camera’s on. You never get a feeling he’s acting. He brings this charm to a character who had so many negative things going for him. Mean to his parents, rebellious, sexist with women, but somehow overlain with this charm that he had. I just knew to get out of his way.”

Saturday Night Fever was perfectly calibrated as a star vehicle for the Travolta. And it’s a movie that just wouldn’t have worked without him. Tony Manero, from when we first glimpse him, strutting the streets of Brooklyn, is a fleshed-out, humanised incarnation of Hollywood’s eternal Rebel: James Dean in a Persil-white suit. But even Dean, who all but invented adolescent anguish for the screen, never quite had Travolta’s aching vulnerability or dared to make his character so superficially unlikable, arrogant, finally bewildered as Travolta did with Manero. 

Grease (1978) was a confection, a precision-tooled Travolta-delivery-system, stripped of all the grittiness of the original stage musical, awarded a PG and spoonfed to a baying crowd of teenyboppers who couldn’t legally join the Fever. But between them, over a period of less than a couple of years, the two films propelled Travolta to four-quadrant global superstardom that spanned TV, movies, stage musicals and with a 1976 album, modestly titled ‘John Travolta’, music. 

Much is often written about the ascent of a star, less about the fall. What does it feel like? To have been universally adored, and then suddenly scorned, or worse, ignored? “How do you go broke?” a character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises asks. “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly,” is the reply. Maybe the decline seemed like that for Travolta: a slight sense of disquiet followed by mounting panic. In 1978 he was the hottest star on the planet. By the early 1990s his films – The Experts (1989), Eyes Of An Angel (1991), Shout (1991) – were playing limited runs or more often going straight to video.  “It got to the point where I thought I’m just going to have to accept anything that comes along,” he later said. “I started to lose confidence. Maybe I have to face the fact that, as far as film is concerned, this doesn't work anymore.” 

What had happened? It didn’t help that around him Hollywood was splitting into two camps, the Oscar-baiting serious thesps such as Pacino and De Niro on the one side, and the Stallones and Schwarzenegger – cartoon action-heroes built of body lotion and zingers – on the other. Travolta fitted comfortably into neither tribe. He was trapped, so soon, in a kind of aspic, unfairly relegated in many minds to the embarrassing excesses of the Disco era.

Staying Alive (1983) was an inevitable, perhaps excusable, Hollywood cash-in, but nevertheless stupendously misjudged in every respect. Director Sylvester Stallone’s transformation of Travolta's body into a doppelganger of his own (one predictably somehow less effortlessly sexy than the one Tony Manero displays dragging himself out of his pit to the mirror in Badham’s film) is a breathtaking display of Hollywood solipsism. And his ruthless purging of the original film’s earthiness in favour of an ever-soaring triumphalist fanfare utterly misses the point. “Travolta still has his star presence,” wrote a disappointed Pauline Kael, “but [Stallone] doesn’t bother much with scenes, characters or dialogue. He just covers Travolta in what looks like an oil slick and goes for the wham-bams.”

The wham-bams were bad enough, but that Travolta’s career was in a tailspin become depressingly evident with Perfect in 1985. The screenplay, the one that was finally shot anyway, seems never to have amounted to much more than a deal-memo stapled to a magazine article about how everybody's wearing lycra and going to the gym these days [11 itals]. Travolta is as likeable and attractive as ever, but there are limits even to his charm. 

As damaging was the fact that the two films that pointed to a different, more critically respected mid-career both unfairly fizzled. Blow Out (1981) saw him return to work with Brian De Palma after his effective turn as the bearer of the pig’s blood, Billy Nolan, in Carrie (1976). The pair had remained friends and when De Palma was looking for a lead for his paranoid thriller about a soundman caught up in a political assassination he sent Travolta the script. “John is a really sweet guy, De Palma later told Noah Baumbach. “He’s really generous to the other actors, he’s incredibly warm and giving. And he wanted to do it.” And it’s that vital warmth, always the pulsing jugular of Travolta’s appeal, that’s at the heart of De Palma’s brilliant, chilly, film. The tight close-ups of Travolta’s stricken face as he listens to his tapes, discovering the magnitude of the conspiracy that surrounds him, provide the humanity that perfectly complements the director’s trademark technical fireworks.

Urban Cowboy (1980) was dismissed by critics at the time as a retread of SNF, with Houston replacing Brooklyn and the Texas Twostep standing in for disco. Travolta plays Bud Davis, a thrillingly dim oil worker who marries Sissy (a stupendously good Debra Winger) on a whim only to find their relationship tested both by scenery-chewing marriage-buster Bob (Scott Glenn) and a competitive passion for mechanical rodeo. An easy film to mock, then, but not a bad one and one, perhaps, with the seeds of greatness somewhere in it. Journeyman director James Bridges struggles to bring things into focus, but the performances are superb. Travolta, in the least promising of the roles, is unafraid to play Bud as, well, a bit of a dick, as usual displaying that ability to register every fleeting emotion with uncanny immediacy.

Then there’s the whole shadow C.V. that lurks in Travolta’s backstory. For other actors, the near misses are mere fodder for pub quiz machines. But in understanding what happened to Travolta they assume a more pressing importance. “There are a couple of roles that I think I could have taken that would have made certain career transitions smoother,” he said, with impressive understatement, in 2018. “Splash was written for me. An Officer and a Gentleman was written for me. I think Days of Heaven and Pretty Woman. There are films that I could have done. But I’m so happy with the films I have chosen. If had done those, I don’t know whether I’d be where I am now.”

Admirable sangfroid [ital] perhaps. But . . . Splash, Pretty Woman, An Officer And A Gentleman. Three of the biggest smashes of the era, and ones in which it isn’t difficult to imagine Travolta knocking it out of the park. Then again, maybe he’s right. With those hits in his back pocket, he wouldn’t have needed re-invention and then a certain video-store jockey from . . .

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. By the late 1980s Travolta was as cold as it is possible to get in Hollywood without turning up on Celebrity Squares. A new agent was acquired. Phone calls were made. A solution was found in the shape of a screenplay about a motormouth baby. Obviously.

 

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It’s received wisdom that Look Who’s Talking (1989) was Travolta’s nadir, the cruel exploitation of a star past his prime. In fact, in box-office terms at least, it laid the groundwork for his resurrection. Travolta, in the role of James Ubriacco, the loveable, ever-so-slightly rumpled dad with an infant Bruce Willis for a son, is affable, charming, and still sexy after all these years. “Twelve years after Saturday Night Fever he is a warm and winning actor when he's not shoe-horned into the wrong roles,” as Roger Ebert put it. The studio didn’t agree, shelving writer/director Amy Heckerling’s picture for months and then panicking and airbrushing Travolta out of its posters and publicity when they did finally release it. “It had tested like E.T.,” Heckerling said. “But their excuse was that John Travolta was box office poison.” 

A lawsuit from Willis and Travolta finally forced the studio’s hand and, once finally set loose, Look Who’s Talking was a box office phenomenon: $297 million worldwide off a $7 million budget, the highest-grossing film then ever directed by a woman. In foreign territories, it was Columbia’s second most successful comedy after Ghostbusters 2. Perhaps what it proved was that Travolta needed a good director. One who could see in him what audiences had once seen, and set it free. 

In 1995 Quentin Tarantino saw perfectly what Travolta was capable of, and told him so. During a day-long meeting in Tarantino’s apartment, the director chastised the star over his recent career choices. “John, what did you do?” Nigel Andrews reports Tarantino saying during what became a long afternoon of the soul. “Don't you remember what Pauline Kael said about you? What Truffaut said about you? Don't you know what you mean to American cinema?” He offered Travolta the choice of roles in two movies he was prepping: From Dusk Till Dawn or Pulp Fiction. “I’m not a vampire kind of guy,” Travolta said. And history was thus made.

Pulp Fiction premiered at the Cannes film festival and in all respects, it was an instant sensation. But the story that dominated all others that Summer of 1995 was ‘did you see John Travolta?’ It’s a jaw-dropping, bravura performance, located in a gloriously weird hinterland between comedy and ultraviolence. Vincent Vega is an utterly unique creation: majestically off-kilter, shambolically cool, unexpectedly sympathetic. It’s a breathtakingly out-there assemblage of loopy moments, memetic gestures and raddled, ragged charm. There have been Hollywood comebacks before; there will be again. But there has never been a moment so unexpected, welcome and so cinematically joyous as Travolta’s re-invention. It was the return of the prodigal star.

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And so, to the third act. It would be nice to report that Pulp Fiction marked a completely clean break, the start of a triumphant upswing. It’s not been so simple. “I think for sure Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction were sort of bookends for my career,” he told Larry King in 2009. But what Pulp Fiction had [ital] achieved was to permanently banish the idea that Travolta was a joke, a has-been: the ghost of Saturday Night Fever had finally been exorcised. His career since has been varied, interesting, and constant. Three films a year, often four (in Hollywood they still call this admirable work-ethic ‘Travolta-ing’). In the mid to late 90s he leveraged his rediscovered popularity, and his new $20 million asking price (a no-doubt pleasant bump from the $145,000 he’d got for Pulp Fiction), conjuring some of the hip magic he had brought to Vincent Vega in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty in 1995. He played whimsical, romantic and inspirational in Michael and Phenomenon (both 1996). And then there was John Travolta: Action Star. He was a perfect fit for John Woo’s slightly dreamy, dove-strewn style as nuclear terrorist Vic Deakins in Broken Arrow (1996) and then puckishly purloined Nicolas Cage’s mannerisms in Face/Off (1997). The aughts and beyond were, perhaps, less consistently successful. But he was thrillingly game in John Waters’ Hairspray, as Edna Turnblad, the role originally played by Divine. (And Tom or Brad dragging up for the King Of Trash? Not likely.) 

It's always been temptingly easy to put the boot into the more dubious of Travolta's films. But so what? Hollywood was built on stars, not actors. And that's the secret elixir of his success: he embodies, resurrects, Hollywood's original, primal, appeal. He had the misfortune to come of age in the midst of an era when the fundamental mystique of the film star was being ripped apart by the anguished neurosis of the New Hollywood: the De Niros, Hoffmans and Pacinos who were staging a temporary coup; actors for who being liked  was almost antithetical to their craft. 

But it's not hyperbolic to say that the closest analogue to Travolta is Marilyn Monroe. Adored. Iconic. In some classics. In some stinkers. Who cares? She’s Monroe. “I can’t help it that the white suit made me iconic, or that leather jacket in Grease,” he mused when the comparison was put to him in 2018. “Marilyn Monroe can’t help it that that white dress made her an icon. It’s just part of the illusion. I’ve felt lucky about what I had achieved. I’ve already gone up and above what I had expected.”

Stardom is not a skill. It's a profoundly human quality, an attraction that reaches out to the audience, that entrances, disarms and that invites us to project onto it whatever we want. It's magical, indefinable, unlearnable. And stars with the wattage of Travolta came around once in a generation, if that. It was Tarantino's genius to know this and to realise that we knew it too, we'd just somehow forgotten. 

Sixty years after Chubby Checker rang out in that church hall in Englewood John Travolta has nothing left to prove, and, if we’re lucky, much still to give. There are movies lined up, there is always the newly respectable avenue of TV. He's still up there, twisting away, effortlessly excelling at that trickiest of things: being loved. Nobody tell him to stop.

Not just yet.