Word: kotter
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There are a lot of false stereotypes about Brooklyn, the result of decades of Brooklyn jokes and Brooklyn put-downs. People think Brooklyn is just like "Welcome Back Kotter" portrays it on television. Others take the title of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn too seriously and believe a single tree grows somewhere among the wall-to-wall tenements. Hordes of Jewish comedians from Brooklyn have helped perpetuate these stereotypes--everyone from Woody Allen to Mel Brooks to Gabe Kaplan to Alan King is guilty. But the myth that Brooklyn is a teeming mass of poverty, illiteracy, downright stupidity and silly...
Someone, in other words, like John Travolta, whose own career is more like a Saturn rocket than anything on his pinball machine. As TV's Vinnie Barbarino, the dedicated underachiever of ABC's Welcome Back, Kotter, he probably draws more soulful sighs from the teenybopper set than any other star in the country. He had an important part in Brian De Palma's Carrie, and he is the star of next spring's movie version of Grease...
Saturday Night Fever is an ideal showcase for Travolta's talents. He swaggers like Mussolini on his platform shoes, struts like Schwarzenegger in his black bikini briefs, and dances like Greco in his white suit. Most of all Travolta shows that he can act. Mr. Kotter's No. 1 sweathog gives a performance of such intensity that he may just grab an Academy Award nomination...
...from being the loudmouth he plays in Kotter, Travolta has plotted his career with the calculating precision of a corporate accountant. He refuses to accept any more Barbarino parts because they would mean a "horizontal" rather than a vertical movement. He has also stopped doing lucrative promotional tours as Vinnie. "It's so easy to keep your integrity if you put your mind to it," he says. "It's as simple as saying no." It is especially simple, he might have added, if your income is, like his, half a million a year...
Success has come easily to Travolta: since he was 16, he has never been turned down for a part. He dropped out of his Englewood high school-a harsher, drug-ridden version of the happy school in Kotter after his second year, and soon landed summer stock roles, a part in an off-Broadway revival of Rain and the first of his 40 TV commercials. The role of Barbarino was a natural for him-"I knew that character from high school," he says-and soon after Roller's Dremiere in 1975 he was receiving 5,000 fan letters...