Word: travoltas
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...Travolta clan has not yet become the Barrymores of Bergen County it will not be for want of the firm support and encouragement of Helen ("a very sensitive, giving woman," says Johnny) and Sam ("a very gentle, sensitive man") Travolta. Sam played semipro football and baseball, worked in the tire business to keep the family dreams within reach. Helen, who was one of the Sunshine Sisters on Hackensack radio during the '30s, joined a local stock company after she married Sam. "She was a great, great actress," Sam says. Adds Helen: "They used to compare me with Barbara Stanwyck...
...with conversation, or, as he puts it now, "I tried to communicate with them on a more adult level." This ploy kept him hanging in, but mostly what he learned to do in high school was dance. At Dwight Morrow High, recalls his schoolmate Jerry Wurms, now working for Travolta's production company and still his closest friend, "we were both taught to dance by the blacks. Somebody in the corridors or outside always had a radio, and somebody was always dancing." Says Travolta, "Whatever new dance came to school, I learned it. I think the blacks accepted me because...
Along with his tutorials in ethnic rhythms, Travolta had also enrolled for professional dancing lessons at a local school run by Fred Kelly (brother of Gene). Reinforced by the enthusiasm of Sam and Helen and looming academic catastrophe, Travolta left school and home at 16. "I decided I was good enough to compete with the professionals," he remembers. "So I went into New York City...
...dream," LeMond says. "He got the first part I ever sent him up for, and he's never been turned down since." Young actors currently enduring the rigors of the tough scuffle, or more established ones who still nurse the scars, may be heartened to learn that, in fact, Travolta was rejected in his first movie attempt (for The Panic in Needle Park). He scored on his second, rather more modest call?a commercial for h.i.s slacks...
...London fog and foreign intrigue on the Upper West Side, ate tuna melts and guacamole (never at the same sitting), listened a lot to the sound track from Last Tango in Paris, and even worked together in a show called Over Here! By the last night of the show, Travolta had resolved to try his luck Out There. In Hollywood, his old pal Jerry Wurms drove Johnny to auditions on the back of his motorcycle. Travolta scored his first movie job in a little horror called The Devil's Rain, in which he melts into a puddle of liquid putrescence...