(3 of 4)
"I was probably less preoccupied with my career than others were," he now says. "I always had some job offers," even if they "weren't particularly great ones." He cheerfully admits he was no one's first choice for Get Shorty and that when the script was submitted to him, "it didn't push me over the edge." He changed his mind after talking with Pulp Fiction's writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, who has become his unofficial adviser. "He said, 'Look man, what's going on here? This is the one you say yes to.'" This he finally did after insisting that much of Leonard's dialogue from the novel be restored. "In the original script it said something like, 'Where's my coat? You better find it. It cost $400.' But in the book it was, 'You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suitcoat? You don't, you owe me three seventy-nine ... You get the coat back or you give me the three seventy-nine my wife paid for it at Alexander's.' It was the detail. I said I'd do the movie, but they had to put back everything they paraphrased." This took three weeks, but "they put every goodie back."
His next career choice was more dubious. White Man's Burden, due out later this year, is a flat fantasy about a future in which American blacks and whites exchange social status--the former becoming the ruling class, the latter doing the menial work. But Travolta delivers a heartbreaking portrayal of a desperate working stiff, unfairly fired from his job and turning to crime in order to support his family. Next will come Broken Arrow, a John Woo action film, and a mess of high-concept, high-profile pictures that signify his return to Hollywood's A list.
Yet Travolta is unimpressed by his "comeback." "It was last year's story, and prior to that it was a story in '89, and prior to that it was a story in '83, and prior to that it was a story in '80," he says, no trace of bitterness in his tone. "I've never quite figured out why I'm the comeback kid when another actor might just have a normal career of movies that work and don't work."
Acknowledging this mystery, he refuses to plumb it. As he correctly observes, he always has had enough work to keep him busy and support his habit of "doing what I want in life." This includes a sort of guilt-free materialism--"a millionaire who lives like a billionaire," someone once called him--as he takes a casual, almost childlike, pleasure in his Rolls Royces, the Gulfstream II jet he pilots himself, his mansion in Maine. It also includes marriage to actress Kelly Preston (they have a three-year-old son, Jett) and his embrace of Scientology, which he credits for much of his equanimity. "A belief system, if it works like Scientology does, is just a way of helping you," he says simply. "You grow from it."
It may be Travolta's apparent indifference to the upward and downward lurches of his career that draws him the nervous attention he has trouble comprehending. People in the movie business like to pretend they inhabit a rational universe, one where you can determine a star's course through a series of well-plotted career moves. Strolling equably through a universe he implicitly defines as chaotic, playing what amounts to a real-life Chili Palmer--mannerly, sweet-spirited, yet utterly confident of his own strength--Travolta calls all their operating assumptions into question. And deepens his own mystery.