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By the time he turned 18, he was on the road with Grease and keeping an eye on the lively, lush-figured Marilu, who was bouncing around beside him onstage. "Johnny's spontaneous, but he's not impulsive," Marilu maintains, a fact well borne out by their romantic scenario. Johnny made it through most of the tour before he and Marilu became, as she says, "involved."
Marilu maintains that Johnny is "definitely a one-woman man, very selective. He's not the kind of person you worry about at a party." Marilu and Johnny moved in together back in Manhattan, played out their fantasies of London fog and foreign intrigue on the Upper West Side, ate tuna melts and guacamole (never at the same sitting), listened a lot to the sound track from Last Tango in Paris, and even worked together in a show called Over Here! By the last night of the show, Travolta had resolved to try his luck Out There. In Hollywood, his old pal Jerry Wurms drove Johnny to auditions on the back of his motorcycle. Travolta scored his first movie job in a little horror called The Devil's Rain, in which he melts into a puddle of liquid putrescence while shouting, "Blasphemer! Blasphemer!"
Things looked up after that; how could they not? Johnny landed the Barbarino role in Kotter and started his steep, fast climb. He was passed over for a role he badly wanted in The Last Detail but won a prime supporting part in Director Brian DePalma's nightmare fairy tale, Carrie. He had already broken up with Marilu, but while working on Carrie he had become the hottest hood on TV since The Fonz. Four-color posters were being printed, and record contracts were in negotiation.
The summer after Carrie was completed, Travolta found himself one of the tube's major attractions, a status that snagged him his own made-for-TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. The part was the first serious test of his dramatic talent. The experience, and its aftermath, turned out to be the most serious trial of his young life.
His costar, who played his mother, was an exquisitely naturalistic actress named Diana Hyland. She was 18 years older than Travolta, had a young son and an uncertain medical history. They spent a lot of time together, talking quietly on the set. At the cast party, Travolta remembers, "we admitted not only a friendly attraction but a sexual one. The intensity of it was new to both of us." They "well, sort of kissed." Then Travolta left on an extended holiday, did some long thinking.
When he returned, he says, "we started getting involved. There was something about her—a quality I can't define even now—that I found so appealing. It exceeded anything physical. She had every color I ever imagined in a person." She told him that their six months together were the happiest time of her life. While he was making Saturday Night Fever, Diana Hyland died of cancer.