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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