We had only just met, but John Travolta, big and handsome and hypnotic, was fondling the lapel of my navy blue blazer. "Ooh, what a great idea to match this with a cobalt blue shirt," he cooed. "I wouldn't have thought of that."
Disarming, but doubtful. When it comes to appearances, Travolta seems to think of everything. Chatting on Father's Day in his Spanish-style home here in the Brentwood hills, he was a carefully considered composition in black - blazer, shirt, pants - and crocodile slip-ons. His hair was precisely deployed in a center part flip, which made his bangs look like quotation marks framing his face.
Because we were discussing his role as the obese, fashion-challenged laundress Edna Turnblad in the US$75 million movie version of the musical Hairspray, which opened in the US on Friday, the subject naturally kept returning to clothing, coiffure and body type.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Before filming he had costumers, special makeup-effects people, even prop masters repeatedly revising their work to achieve the look he imagined in housedresses, fat suits and irons. He did not want to resemble a refrigerator or Jabba the Hutt, he said, but Sophia Loren with a couple of hundred extra pounds. And he got his wish: His Edna, unlike the greasy Gorgon created by Divine in the 1988 John Waters original or the Kabuki hausfrau rendered so memorably by Harvey Fierstein in the 2002 Broadway musical adaptation, has cleavage and a waist and a kind of geologic sex appeal.
So you'd think he must have known, and not cared, that complimenting a writer's color coordination might seem not just friendly but also really gay. Which would be nothing but a charming detail were it not for the controversy that had recently arisen about his taking the role of Edna in the first place. In a blog entry posted in May on the Web site of The Washington Blade, a gay newspaper, Kevin Naff, its editor, called for a boycott of Hairspray because of Travolta's membership in the Church of Scientology, which he described as a cult that "rejects gays and lesbians as members and even operates reparative therapy clinics to 'cure' homosexuality."
Seated in a leather club chair in his paneled library, where books on cigars and aviation share space with Scientology treatises and a "photographic tribute" to the church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, Travolta was not at all defensive about any of this. Asked about Naff's comments, he did not protest with allusions to his wife of 15 years, the actress Kelly Preston, or their two children. He merely said he was completely comfortable around gay people, that Edna wasn't gay anyway, and that the claims about Scientology were inaccurate. "Scientology is one of the least homophobic religions," he said. "It's not very interested in the body at all."
Perhaps, but Travolta certainly is. He became a movie star on the basis of a physicality so intense - and so specific to each role - that it almost seemed choreographed. Even beyond the dance moves of Grease and Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy, defining as they were, his ability to create character in the shape of his spine, the tilt of his pelvis, the isolation of various parts of his body was a revelation in films, whether musical or not. The famous slouching Watusi he devised for woozy Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction not only nailed that character but revived a career that by 1994 had fallen into one of its weird, periodic lulls.
Lull is too mild a word, though, for the death-defying plunges in quality, box-office results or both that have usually followed his biggest successes. Whether because of bad hunches, bad advice or a tendency in flush times to grab all the big-ticket jobs he could - owning a fleet of planes doesn't come cheap - Travolta has repeatedly diminished his critical capital and stymied audiences with movies whose redeeming qualities were hard to discern.
Amazingly, he managed to rebound after disasters like Moment by Moment, Staying Alive and Perfect - the list goes on. But rebounding from the bad spell that began with the jaw-dropping 2000 flop Battlefield Earth has proved more difficult. Still, musicals and might-as-well-be musicals like Pulp Fiction have been kind to him ever since the early 1970s, when he made his stage breakthrough as a replacement Doody in the original Broadway Grease. If he has not done more, it's largely because there have not been many to do. He's turned down only three, he said: A Chorus Line ("good move"), The Phantom of the Opera (ditto) and Chicago ("a mistake").
That Hairspray, unlike those others, began life as a movie does not mean it's a likelier prospect for successful remaking, as the recent Producers debacle proves. Still, it is perhaps the most filmworthy stage musical in decades, combining great characters, a strong story and a flawless pop Broadway score. Surprising, then, that Travolta, now 53, took 14 months to agree to make it, stringing along the producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, like lovesick freshmen at Rydell High.
But it was not, after all, self-evident casting. Edna is not the lead in the story; her daughter, Tracy, moves the action. She is also, for all her heft, a dainty creation, not Travolta's usual territory. Executives at New Line Cinema, the studio financing the movie, naturally expected a comic actor in the role: Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks. "Which was valid," Meron said, "but we argued, 'Why not get the musical film star of our generation?'"
Having failed three times to snag him for Billy Flynn in Chicago, Zadan and Meron knew how painfully deliberate he could be in selecting projects. And so, after sending him a DVD of the Waters film and getting him tickets to see a touring production of the stage musical when it played near his home in Florida, they set about to address his concerns. But they were wrong about what those concerns were.
"Playing a woman attracted me," Travolta said. "Playing a drag queen did not. The vaudeville idea of a man in a dress is a joke that works better onstage than it does on film, and I didn't want any winking or camping. I didn't want it to be 'John Travolta plays Edna.' That's not interesting. It had to be something I could go all the way with, disappear in, like I did in the Bill Clinton role in Primary Colors or in Saturday Night Fever." And here he got up and instantly incarnated those characters with a quick redeployment of his weight and posture.
He was not shy about promoting his agenda. He wanted assurances that the Broadway score would not be ruined in translation, as so often happens, and that he would not be the only big star on the bill. (He requested, and got, Christopher Walken as his husband and Michelle Pfeiffer as the villainess.) Adam Shankman, the choreographer-director to whom the producers entrusted the project after talks with many A-list names, had to share his vision of Edna's liberation through costume and dance. She basically becomes Tina Turner in the finale.
Even with all this pinned down, he held out until faced with an absolute deadline. On that day Travolta - a night owl since childhood, when he'd wait for his mother to return from the theater - called his agent with his answer one minute before midnight. If he was ambivalent even after 14 months, it wasn't about money; the salary was nonnegotiable. Nor does his ambivalence seem timid; an afternoon with him, complete with singing, bear hugs and sartorial compliments, quickly dispels the idea that he'd shy away from a role just because it might open him up to questions about sex and religion. However he lives his life, his talent seems to exist in a world beyond such concerns.
After our conversation, as a photographer snapped and a stylist micromanaged his bangs, he moved so easily and without prompting from one pose to another, shifting onto his toes as if to bunny hop or turning up his wrists with timid excitement, it seemed that all the business of the fat suits and the four hours of makeup each day had not been a way of finding Edna so much as a way of delaying and controlling the process by which he became her.
Watching the movie, you understand why, because John Travolta is utterly gone, as if Edna had swallowed him whole. All that's left, peering out from her lunar face, are those famous blue eyes - bluer, even, than a cobalt blue shirt.
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