Travolta: The Life

Few Hollywood careers in recent years have had so flamboyant a reversal of fortune as John Travolta's, from his early superstardom in Welcome Back Kotter and Grease, to the obscurity of straight-to-video flicks and the critically unacclaimed Look Who's Talking films, and his stunning redemption at the hands of Quentin Tarantino, who cast him as a drug-addled hitman in Pulp Fiction. In this lively, playfully written biography, Andrews, a Financial Times film critic, dutifully runs through the details of the erstwhile Barbarino's life--his youthful love for cancer-stricken Diana Hyland, his lifelong passion for aviation, his devotion to his son, Jett, his long-term loyalty to Scientology--and convincingly connects Travolta's universally acknowledged nice-guy status and empathetic openness with his mimetic talents and physical adaptiveness. But ultimately Andrews seems less interested in the man than in the phenomenon of American celebrity. Hence, the account is at its most engaging when the biographer turns cultural critic, trying to make sense of the superstar's career trajectory. The author's intelligence and lucid analysis do much to compensate for a self-conscious tendency to overread portents in Travolta's life, but his comments on Richard Gere as Travolta's doppelganger or on the echo of Diana Hyland's name in Travolta's preoccupation with Dianetics can begin to seem downright mystical. That the Travolta mystique exceeds the bare facts of biography is hardly surprising, but despite occasional rhetorical excesses, Andrews's Travolta does much to illuminate both, for disciple and cynic alike. 16 pages of photos in color and b&w. (Sept.)