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No doubt young Johnny was spoiled in a manner befitting his position as the youngest in a large family. "None of my friends were allowed to eat as much candy as me," he remembers with glee. This indulgence has left him with a marked weakness for such caloric luxuries as tuna-melt sandwiches and hot-fudge sundaes. Maybe part of the extra attention was also due to some special parental intuition that their youngest was the most gifted of the brood. At six, Johnny was off visiting Sister Ellen in a road company of Gypsy. "He'd mouth all Merman's songs from the records," she remembers, "and he could dance every part." When he was nine, he got his first part in a local workshop production of Who'll Save the Plowboy? A retrospective appreciation from Mom: "He had only two or three lines, but he said them so meaningfully."
His talent, indeed, was tripping him up in school, distracting him and keeping his grades marginal. He tried to charm and con his teachers 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 I cared about them accepting me. They seemed to have a better sense of humor, a looser style. I wanted to be like that." One day, coming back on the school bus from a football game, some of the team started singing a James Brown song with the chorus, "Say it loud/ I'm black and I'm proud!" Travolta waited for his moment, then retaliated with "Say it light/ I'm white and outasight!" One early indication of the Travolta charm is that he not only survived the bus ride but also got a few laughs into the bargain.
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."
He lived with Sister Anne and during his first year in the Big Apple landed two parts (in revivals of Gypsy and Bye Bye Birdie) and an agent-manager named Bob LeMond, who has been with Johnny ever since. "He was a 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.