Word: travoltas
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There's a poignant little scene halfway into Primary Colors. It's primary night in New Hampshire, and candidate Jack Stanton (John Travolta) stands alone on a rainy street, knocking on car windows and importuning drivers for last-minute votes like a squeegee guy cadging a dollar. To hell with the odds; this man won't give up. He will keep asking, charming, wheedling, until people finally collapse under his will to be loved. As a character says in the Joe Klein novel on which the film is based, "The heart is a lonely hustler." But hustling--hey, that...
...Travolta and Bill Clinton both know about perseverance and the uses of charisma. As the actor spreads his seductiveness on a movie screen like jelly on toast, so does Clinton work a room or a country, avidly selling his policies and himself, in love with being loved--and with his need to be loved. No wonder that when Travolta met Klein, he said, "I've been waiting my whole life to play this role...
...million comedy opens next week, almost exactly two months after l'affaire Lewinsky broke. But even without the coincidence of a politician's sex scandals in the film and in surreal real life, the kinship between Clinton and a movie star like Travolta is clear...
...fact Klein was in the thrall of the Clinton charisma; his Jack is a figure that rockets off the page. In the film Stanton is less grand and less sexy, and Travolta plays it subdued, a tad mopish. His smile looks startled, as if he had just sniffed ammonia. He has the hardest job: while everyone else gets to crack wise, he has to make political platitudes sound like poetry and Stanton's skunkish behavior smell almost sweet. His Stanton is a large man unsure whether he's big enough for a job he would kill...
There were whispers that after a White House conversation with Travolta, Clinton put pressure on Germany to soften its stance toward the Church of Scientology, of which the actor is an outspoken adherent, and that in return Travolta portrayed Stanton more sympathetically. That rumor gets a sneer from Klein ("I don't think Clinton would change policy toward Germany to get better treatment from John Travolta"), but the actor has warm memories of the chat, in which he says Clinton spoke of an old roommate who had been a Scientologist. Travolta insists his performance wasn't swayed by the President...