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"This is Wonderland," proclaims Travolta's wife
of three years, actress Kelly Preston, 32. "John
and I got together and wondered what all of
our fantasies were as kids."
Travolta is still asleep somewhere in this Maine
mansion-he goes to bed in the wee hours of
morning and tends to slumber past noon-but
his son, Jett, is wide awake, darting from one
fantasy to another. Jett winds up at the
theater, a full-scale proscenium stage with a
dressing room, where a waiter delivers the
2-year-old a plate of six tempura shrimp.
"This is Jett's favorite," says Preston. "Mmm,
mmm. These are a good batch."
You are dazzled, but you have not witnessed
the grand finale. Because at this very moment,
John Travolta pops out of the floor. Literally. A
trapdoor opens, and Travolta's head appears.
"How ya doin'?" he says. He wears black jeans
and a black long-sleeved T, which, in tandem,
look like pajamas. The trim, pelvis-pumping
torpedo who glided across the dance floors of
Saturday Night Fever and Grease is 40 now. His
shirt can't hide the slight parabola of a belly
and his sideburns bear more than a tinge of
gray, but his eyes beam with the same cobalt
blue transparency that made America flush
with disco fever in the '70s.
While Jett giggles and shrieks, Travolta grabs
his son adoringly and carries him up and down
the secret ladder.
This, to answer the inevitable question, is
where John Travolta has been all these years.
A star of imperial magnitude in the '70s-a man
who launched crazes, not mere trends-Travolta
watched his status in the late '80s shrivel to
the point where he was stuck in quick-to-video
trifles like The Experts and upstaged by babies
and dogs in the Look Who's Talking series.
Sure, the first of those baby flicks grossed a
plenty-respectable $140 million, but as far as
the cultural cognoscenti were concerned,
Travolta had retired to Wonderland, and his blip
had bounced off the radar long ago.
Then, metaphorically speaking, he popped out
of the floor. Travolta's comeback this year has
been that swift and sudden. The script:
(1) With Miramax skeptical of Travolta's star
voltage, youngblood filmmaker Quentin
Tarantino battles to cast the actor in Pulp
Fiction, a funky, supercharged saga of love,
honor, and sadism among Los Angeles
scumbuckets.
(2) The film, starring Travolta as Vincent
Vega-a hit man with a bad haircut and a taste
for heroin-scores the Palme d'Or at the Cannes
Film Festival in May.
(3) The world realizes what the director knew
all along. "He's one of the best stars Hollywood
has ever produced," Tarantino gushes.
"Reporters ask me, 'So what made you choose
him? He's not really that hot anymore!' Look,
I've walked down the street with some big
stars, okay? I cannot walk two feet down the
street with John Travolta. People stop their
cars. People are clawing all over him and stuff.
It's like, he's a movie star!"
. 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
