. Truth be told, all this yakety-yak about who's hot and who's cold is like whistling in the wind to John Travolta, who knows stardom so well it haunts him. He doesn't mind being an icon, he says, "because I wouldn't know what it's like at this point not to be one." He dreams about it. There is a scene in Pulp Fiction where Vincent Vega takes Uma Thurman to Jack Rabbit Slim's, a gaudy diner where the waiters look exactly like the famous faces of the '50s: Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, Ed Sullivan. "I had an interesting dream," Travolta says, unspooling his subconscious like a ball of string. "I was shooting the Jack Rabbit Slim's scene with Uma Thurman, and Quentin yelled cut. They left, the crew left, and I was left with Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley-all these icons of the '50s and '60s. And I thought, 'My goodness, this was a setup. Am I dead? Is this where we all go? The icon heaven?' I remember feeling a sense of grief come over me, almost a whimpering kind of feeling. It's like, 'I'm not going to see anyone I know anymore. I mean, this is wonderful to be with all these great folks, but I didn't think the scene was designed to leave me here!'" When Travolta says this, he is sitting at the end of a banquet table as long as an airstrip. It's time for lunch. Once a Jersey boy with the cocky strut of someone who has nothing, Travolta now slouches like a man who has everything. He has grown into a gourmand of the first order. Assistants whisk in and out of the kitchen, bringing him course after course-brimming bowls of broccoli soup, delicate mounds of crabmeat salad, chicken breasts baked in a sesame-seed crust, moist slices of lemon cake, ziggurats of cookies-while the lord of the manor nibbles away and tells you what it was like to be yesterday's news in Hollywood. "Where I felt it most was in the very innards of the movie industry-the agents, producers, studio heads-where a temperature was placed on you, a need was placed on you, a desire was placed on you," he says. "But I never quite felt it from the public. I felt like they were, 'Hey, where ya been?' Or, 'When's the next one?' It was yesterday to them." When Tarantino came through with Pulp Fiction, Travolta knew enough about Hollywood to sense the stakes were high. He knew that his portrayal of Vincent Vega had to be alternately bold, gripping, and weird. "I said to myself, 'I've got to do something in this movie that not only I've never done before, but ^ maybe no one has ever done before, because it's going to be one of the few shots I have to regain a kind of significance in the industry,'" he says. "I knew I was up against the wall on this one." Now he can play it as it lays. "I'm wearing the crown of the Palme d'Or for a year. That's good. Now I get two more jobs out of it." (He'll tackle White Man's Burden, the tale of an oppressed Caucasian in a black man's world, and he'll play heroic hoodlum Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, based on Elmore Leonard's potboiler.) "That's good. Maybe next year at this time it might be better, it might be the same, or it might be worse." But for all his clear-eyed logic about the biz, John Travolta remains "visibly mystified" at folks who describe him as a Hollywood Lazarus risen from the dead. "I have a theory on it," he says. "When people refer to a comeback, it doesn't mean you didn't work. It means that you weren't in a film that registered with them on a certain level. I mean, it's like, 'Oh, you think I haven't been doing anything? Well, does that mean the last 10 years of my life just disappeared?'" Well, in Hollywood terms, yes-but maybe that's because Travolta checked out of Hollywood long ago. He unwinds not in the celebrity playgrounds of Malibu, or Aspen, or the Hamptons, but here on a secluded island in Maine's Penobscot Bay, a silent place where the deer feed on wild blueberries and copper-colored seaweed drapes the rocks. Historically, the island has served as a summer nook for aristocratic families of retail and finance, ancient clans like the Rothschilds, the Tiffanys, and the Marshall Fields. It's not a place where you bump into a lot of wayward deal makers from Lotus Land. Which, as it turns out, is fine with John Travolta. As an actor he cut his swath as the duke of the disco, but the real-life Tony Manero keeps a safe distance from the glittery orbit of nightclubs, premieres, and Planet Hollywood galas. "It makes me nervous," he says. "I'm sure I could get used to it if I tried it, but I've never tried it. I've always been this guy on the outskirts, to some degree." In any case, the outskirts aren't so bad. Built by a Philadelphia tycoon at the turn of the century, and bought by Travolta in 1991, the estate where he spends summers and holidays is an imposing gray manse with 20 bedrooms, a sweeping range of towers and gables, and a 360-degree view of woods and sea-a place that roars with power and plenitude. Travolta often parks his charcoal ! gray Rolls-Royce at the front door. "It's spectacular," he concedes. "I looked for about 15 years, up and down the East Coast, for a home that could house my whole family-and when I say 'whole family,' I mean the tree." At Christmas Travolta opens his doors to up to 50 friends and relatives, their every whim indulged by a staff of housekeepers, waiters, nannies, drivers, and cooks. Today, in fact, Travolta the pilot will board one of his three private jets, a Gulfstream, and fly to Chicago to pick up his sister Margaret. Then he'll turn around and bring her to Maine for the weekend. The Travoltas have another pad in Florida ("the down-to-earth place," he says), and the actor has kept outposts in the California hamlets of Carmel and Santa Barbara, but it's clear that his deepest fantasies rumble to the surface in this Maine chateau. "I have a theory on the homes I live in," Travolta explains, carving himself a morsel of lemon cake. "In Santa Barbara and Carmel, I felt like I was in somebody else's novel. In Maine, I feel like I'm in my novel." Consider that novel The Great Gatsby. Travolta shares so many traits with F. Scott Fitzgerald's hero-manic generosity, an uneasiness in crowds, a sense of mystery that sends ripples of gossip into the outside world, and working- class roots matched with epicurean tastes-that the connection is hard to avoid. "I don't know if the experiences of The Great Gatsby would be in my novel, but the lifestyle, yes," he concurs. "Maybe the way the Kennedys dressed, but how Gatsby lived. The food! The service!" How does he afford it? Even counting his triumphs on celluloid, Travolta's bountiful mode of living is remarkable. He earned $140,000 for Pulp Fiction ("It was an act of love," he says) and the movie ended up costing him cash, since he had to keep his family in a Los Angeles hotel during the shoot. True, he'll make a reported $5 million for Get Shorty, but even A-list salaries don't explain how a millionaire can live like a billionaire. "He's good with money," says friend Marilu Henner, who had a 13-year love affair with Travolta in the '70s and '80s. "He's just smart. A lot of big stars waste their money on stupid things, but he really invests well." When Travolta signed on to Saturday Night Fever and Grease, he also negotiated a chunk of the profits from the soundtracks, which together went on to sell 19 million copies. Says Henner, "I think he's made more money from those than almost anything else." "Actually, I'm very conservative. My goal is the concept of living off the interest. And I actually learned that from an old blue-blood family," Travolta says. "I was your classic nouveau riche at first, and I still am, but with recommendations from the guys that have kept it for several hundred years. I watched people I knew take really big risks, and some lost at it. I'm willing to do that with my career as an actor, but not with money." Travolta's biggest risk might be his luxurious isolation. "John is sort of oblivious to everything," says pal Kirstie Alley, who owns a spread down the road in Maine. "John Travolta lives in a different universe." That universe may keep the actor oblivious to the brutal realities of the industry, but it also protects him from its unreal glamour-and from his own legacy: "I'm afraid if I plug into it too heavily, I won't be able to do it again," he says. "I am proud of my ability to keep my feet on the ground when the balloons are ready to take me up. I'm anchored." Stroll through the salons Chez Travolta and you'll find no trace of Hollywood-no vintage posters, no autographed memorabilia, no white polyester suit preserved in amber above the mantel. (The suit actually belongs to film critic Gene Siskel, who paid $2,000 for it at an auction.) Instead: engraved portraits of fox hunts, mallard ducks, and French dandies perched on stallions. As for Saturday Night Fever, says Henner, "Because Johnny's more interested in flying his planes than disco dancing, I don't think he realizes the impact it had on an entire culture. I think he'd expect to be in a movie book about the '70s, but I don't think he'd realize that he'd be in a pop-culture book about the '70s." Let alone a history book. After lunch, the sated Baron von Barbarino retires to the living room, where a thick volume called Chronicle of the 20th Century lies on a table near the fireplace. Are you in there? you ask. "Let's see," Travolta says. He reluctantly flips toward his birthday, Feb. 18, 1954. No, you protest. You urge him to direct his fingers to 1977. Bingo. There he is-on page 1,133, resplendent in vanilla-hued artificial fibers, his finger pointed prophetically toward the astral plane. Travolta barely looks at the picture. "It feels good," he says softly. "It feels like I made a mark." Travolta may downplay his pivotal role in world events, but he is nonetheless a student of history. He goes to a cabinet and pulls out jaundiced copies of Life and Playboy that he found at an old bookshop. He races through a 1946 Life and finds an ad. "'Who travels by air?'" he bellows theatrically. "'Can you point them out? It's not their look, but their outlook, that characterizes air travelers.'" Indeed, if anyone has the air traveler's outlook, it's Travolta. He loves his son so much that he built him the playroom, but he loves planes so much he named his son after them. In fact, Jett's initials and birthdate are painted on the hull of the family Gulfstream. Asked to name his favorite decade, Travolta says: "Oh, well, strictly because of aviation, I might have to choose the 14-year period between '48 and '62, because that's when the biggest changes were being made in aviation." Heading for his gray Rolls en route to the airfield, Travolta stops in the foyer to chat with Preston and read the mail. There's a letter from a woman in San Francisco. He skims it. The writer has attached a photo of her arm, permanently engraved with a tattoo of Travolta on the dance floor. The white suit, the cocked knee, the finger in the air. "Oh, my God!" gasps Preston. "Is that you?"
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