Word: travolta
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...walls are a nondescript orange and brown, the carpet is forgettable green, and the Spanish style furniture looks as if it had been borrowed from a Holiday Inn. A psychiatrist would have a hard start, in short, if he tried to analyze John Travolta from the way he has decorated his West Hollywood apartment...
Except, of course, for the dozens of model planes piled on top of a pinball machine in an unused bedroom. Built by a friend, the planes are mostly the vintage airliners Travolta saw from his window as a kid, dreaming that they would some day take him away from the humdrum of Englewood, N.J. There are old Lockheed Constellations, with their twin tails, and British Brittanias. But most of all there are sturdy little DC-3s, the workhorse of four decades. "It was the first true airliner," he says. "It depended just on people who wanted to pick...
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...