The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  What happened? The answer, of course, is Pulp Fiction. Another, more general answer is Quentin Tarantino. Smoothly Travolta guided me to a living room (this was a rented property in Beverly Hills, north of Sunset) and, his voice dropping to a whisper of gratitude, told me how it had gone—how “it was all Quentin.” Or so it would now seem. Actually, even Quentin needed outside help. The latest phase in this inimitably American story also owes something to postmodernism—and to Scientology. How drunk was Scott Fitzgerald when he said there were no second acts in American lives?

  Two years ago almost to the day, John Travolta, apparently, had only one movie prospect. “It was Look Who’s Talking Three,” he said, with some resignation (but with insufficient embarrassment and scorn). That would be the one with the talking dogs. We can picture Travolta back then, in his twenty-room château in Penobscot Bay, Maine, or in his second home, in the Spruce Creek Fly-In development in Daytona Beach, Florida, or, indeed, en route between them, at the controls of one of his three airplanes, in actorly preparation for the dogs movie: thinking dogs.

  As it happens, he was unprecedentedly rich and fat and happy in his private life, with his wife, the actress Kelly Preston, and his newborn son, little Jett. But he was preparing to make a film about talking dogs. “I try to be realistic,” he said, in his measured way. “You know: you can’t dance without legs. I would continue to work with the best that was offered. But I did think, Well, it’s all over.” Then there came a succession of rumors that Quentin Tarantino, “the hottest guy in town,” wanted a meeting with John Travolta, the frigid relic with the vanished career. The meeting happened, and it lasted twelve hours.

  “It didn’t look as though he had a project in mind. He had started writing Pulp Fiction, but he kept talking about some horror movie. And I am not a horror kind of guy. His interest in me seemed to be…generic.” The meeting began in Quentin’s apartment—“which turned out to be my apartment,” he went on. “The one I rented when I first came to L.A., in 1974.” (Resolutely unflaky, Travolta didn’t make much of the coincidence.) They talked, they had a glass of wine, they went out to dinner, they came back and played Tarantino’s movie-buff board games, they went out to a coffee shop, they came back again. “And then Quentin let me have it.

  “He said, ‘What did you do? Don’t you remember what Pauline Kael said about you? What Truffaut said about you? Don’t you know what you mean to the American cinema? John, what did you do?’ I was hurt—but moved. He was telling me I’d had a promise like no one else’s. I went out of there with my tail between my legs. I was devastated. But I also thought, Jesus Christ, I must have been a fucking good actor.”

  By now we were seated at his circular dining table, drinking wine. The house was comfortable and anonymous, but there was still the sense of the movie star’s in-depth backup: helpers, minders. It has been said that Travolta is a millionaire who lives like a billionaire. Still, here in L.A. everything is scaled down and streamlined for work—for Get Shorty—including the star himself. Although the energies of the house center on Travolta, there is now another power source, who is fitfully sleeping. Kelly Preston—tousled, pretty, petite—appeared. Next came an earnest discussion about the imminence of Jett’s return to full consciousness. Soon afterward, Jett duly presented himself, in his mother’s arms, looking crumpled and drunkenly applying himself to a bottle of juice. Many hugs and kisses and avowals. Jett’s eyelashes are an inch long.

  It occurred to me that Jett must be one of the most cosseted creatures on the entire planet. In Maine, evidently, he has his own Wonderland wing, where servants approach him bearing plates of tempura shrimp. Children, when they come, knock everybody sideways, but movie stars (with their expanded selves) have further to shift. So they tend to whale: movie stars’ children really live like movie stars. Can you imagine how nice the help are to Jett Travolta? Wouldn’t you be nice to someone called Jett Travolta?

  We talked about parenthood. Travolta was eager to speak, eager to listen. The grotesque vicissitudes of his career must seem more distant now; but it’s always possible that his objectivity is long established and secure. Something he once said struck me, and I quoted it to him over the cheesecake: “You’re assuming that a person is introverted and self-obsessed all the time….He feels bad. He feels a loss. But give the guy the benefit of not being insane.”

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  Tarantino’s question remains, and remains unanswered. What did Travolta do? To curl up with a VCR and the Collected Movies, 1976–1993, is to witness a trajectory of dizzy decline. In the firmament, as elsewhere, the brightest stars have the shortest lives: blue giant to black hole. But the universe isn’t old enough to encompass the degeneration that Travolta managed. It will take ten billennia for our sun to reach its ultimate state, frozen in crystalline undetectability. He did it in ten years.

  By 1980, John Travolta had made three movies that passed him straight into pop-culture immortality. You can summon them in stills. First, in Saturday Night Fever, the polystyrene erection under the disco strobes, in the kind of shirt that reduces your nipples to blobs of plasma, on brick-like high heels, pointing skyward. Next, in Grease, the rocker with the cigarette in the corner of his knockout smile, the eyes mere slits of clichéd cool. And then, in Urban Cowboy, the proud, puzzled, romantically sculpted profile beneath the stiff rim of the cowpuncher hat. It is not just good looks and good lighting that give these images their durability. What we are seeing here is what the camera sees when it confronts a palpable charge of life. And in these films Travolta gives complete performances; they form a trilogy whose subject is masculine youth. In his thwarted frowns and glares, his tonguey cadences, his strutting uncertainty, in the italicizations of his forehead, Travolta contrives a mature commentary on what it is to be immature.

  Now comes the transitional Blow Out (1981), overdirected and miserably underwritten by Brian De Palma, who launched Travolta in Carrie in 1976 (and whose career curve would take the same kind of turn). A scarecrow of ragged illogicalities, spruced up by Hitchcock via Antonioni, Blow Out was nonetheless a logical choice for Travolta, now twenty-seven and ready, it seemed, to receive his Italian-American inheritance. Pauline Kael, writing in these pages, compared him to Brando in On the Waterfront (“It’s the willingness to go emotionally naked and the control to do it in character”); and there was a more general expectation that he would soon fall under the sway of directors such as Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Instead, he fell under the sway of Sylvester Stallone. What this entrained, in any event, was catastrophic collapse.

  Travolta, loyally, has never seen it this way. In his view, he was more or less naturally displaced by a new generation of stars: Hanks, Cruise, Costner. One wonders about the nature of the initial attraction: Stallone is an icon, too, of course. Rambo, that lethal trapezium of organ meat; Rocky, out jogging with his dog. Maybe even the dog thing goes all the way back to Sly. Dogs, at any rate, were what Travolta started starring in, exclusively, after 1982.

  In the space of one year, he made the Stallone-directed Fever follow-up, Staying Alive—a charmlessly muscular salaam to bodybuilding and the Big Time—plus Two of a Kind, with Olivia Newton-John, a sort of wishful lube job on Grease. Two, one of the worst films ever made, opens in a celestial setting (clouds, white-smocked angels, a deep-voiced God off camera), and features Oliver Reed as the Devil. Can we fully imagine what kind of trouble a movie is in when it features Oliver Reed as the Devil? Oliver Reed in a ringmaster suit?

  Next came the thoroughly average Perfect, which can be considered a local high point. Thereafter, Travolta was finding himself in the kinds of films that get exclamation marks added to their titles when they expeditiously appear in the rental stores. I refer to what Columbia Tristar Home Video calls Look Who’s Talking Now! (A TOM ROPELEWSKI Film).” Look Who’s Talking (1989) showcased a garrulous baby; Look Who’s Talking Too (1990) showcased a garrulous toddler plus a garrulous newborn. Look Who’s Talking Now was the tal
kie with the dogs: simply an ad for the silent screen. And that was Travolta in 1993.

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  “The day Quentin finished writing Pulp Fiction, he sent it to me,” Travolta resumed. “He said, ‘Look at Vincent.’ ” Tarantino had adapted the part for Travolta; he believed in Travolta—“but he was the only guy who was thinking that way. Which kind of shows you how my light had died. The studio wanted an actor with…a higher temperature. Quentin had much more to lose than I did. Finally, he told them, ‘You either do it with John Travolta or you don’t do it.’ ”

  Simultaneously—and ridiculously, it might seem—Tarantino was having to win over Travolta. “My doubts were not artistic doubts. They were moral doubts.” We live in an age of mass suggestibility, the argument went. And in his earlier days, in the days of Tony and Danny and Bud, Travolta’s performances had an uncontrollable effect: they caused crazes. What kind of role model was Vincent, with his hypodermic and his handgun? The reservation seems responsible, but it hardly seems appropriate, given Vincent’s fate (studded with bullets, on a toilet seat). Given, too, the quality of Tarantino’s writing. As with David Mamet—as with Elmore Leonard—the burnished heartlessness of the dialogue is always pointing beyond itself, to the moral world it carefully excludes. In one scene, Vincent goes to score a few grams of “madman” heroin from his dealer, Lance (the droll and Jesusy Eric Stoltz):

  LANCE: Still got your Malibu?

  VINCENT: Oh, man. You know what some fucker did the other day?

  LANCE: What?

  VINCENT: Fuckin’ keyed it?

  LANCE: Oh, man. That’s fucked up.

  VINCENT: Tell me about it. I had it in storage for three years. It was out five days and some dickless piece of shit fucked with it.

  LANCE: (weighing out the powder): They should be fuckin’ killed, man. No trial, no jury. Straight to execution…What a fucker.

  VINCENT: What’s more chickenshit than fucking with a man’s automobile? I mean, don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle.

  LANCE: You don’t do it.

  VINCENT: It’s against the rules.

  (Drugs and cash exchange hands.)

  LANCE: Thank you.

  VINCENT: Thank you. Mind if I shoot up here?

  It seems that by this stage in his career Travolta was almost incapable of accepting a good script—or of rejecting a bad one. He saw the irony of it even then. “I was saying to Quentin, ‘No. I’ll do Look Who’s Talking Four instead. In which the chairs talk.’ ” But when I asked him, the next day, about the long list of parts he had mistakenly turned down, Travolta mentioned Arthur and Splash before throwing in Prince of the City and Midnight Express—and he blandly dismissed An Officer and a Gentleman and American Gigolo. Travolta is thoughtful and articulate, but he is also obtuse and something of a point-misser.

  The talk turned to Get Shorty. (Travolta had just finished an interim project, White Man’s Burden, a drama about the racial divide, produced by Tarantino’s stablemate Lawrence Bender.) I said what I believed to be true: that Elmore Leonard was one of the greatest popular writers of all time; that Get Shorty was a masterpiece; and that Travolta’s mother (working closely with his agent) couldn’t have come up with a better Travolta role than the one he was playing—that of Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark with big ideas about making movies.

  “I turned it down at first.”

  “You what?”

  “I turned it down. Then Quentin called and said”—Travolta’s voice became a wheedling whisper—“ ‘This is not the one you say no to. This is the one you say yes to. I’m not going to let you make this mistake.’ ”

  “You’ve lost weight for Chili, I see.”

  “That was Quentin, too. He said lose about fifteen pounds. I lost exactly fifteen pounds.”

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  While writing Pulp Fiction, Tarantino must have instinctively grasped that Travolta could never “come back” in any conventional sense. The rebirth had to be a revamp, and a kind of travesty. Accordingly, the physically graceful but emotionally gawky American calf—Tony-Danny-Bud—was obliged to reappear as a corrupt and jowly journeyman. This is why the dance scene with Uma Thurman is central: it is a postmodern coup de théâtre, in which the audience archly colludes. Every moviegoer knows what Travolta can do on a dance floor. Watching his drugged gyrations is like watching the aged Picasso drawing a stick man. “Stephanie, I want to ask you something, all right?” pleads Tony Manero, in Saturday Night Fever. “Do you think that I am either interesting or intelligent?” Tarantino provides the heartless—and contemporary—destination for that old American quest. All that Vincent knows, after three years in Europe, is how to order a Big Mac in French.

  Yet Tarantino’s simpler aim was just to get Travolta in front of the camera with some lines worth saying. And we find that the talent was always there, unimpaired and entire: concentration, timing, fluidity, and wit. In his preparations for the part, Travolta mingled not with Mob executioners but with heroin addicts. There he found a fear of full consciousness—a fear of the intelligence that Tony-Danny-Bud liked to hope would be waiting for them. From then on, with Vincent, it is all in a twitch, a roll of the dead eyes.

  “Pauline Kael said you had the ‘gift of transparency.’ What do you think she meant by that?”

  “It doesn’t take much for a thought to be seen. I keep having to talk directors out of talking me into overacting. I say, ‘You won’t see it on the set. You’ll see it in the editing room.’ ” And he adds, with an emphasis quieter than the italics I give it, “I have an ability to be it, and it will read.”

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  Get Shorty has a beautiful premise. If Hollywood is full of cheats, liars, hustlers, and double-crossers—if movies are made by crooks—then why can’t a crook make a movie? Chili Palmer, ex–wise guy and general Mob hard-on, a shylock who gives loans at 150 percent, chases a debt to Hollywood, and sticks around. The business practices look pretty familiar, though even Chili can sense subtleties he has yet to master:

  Other things to remember: you don’t “take a meeting” anymore, you say you have “a two-thirty at Tower.” If a studio passes on a script, you don’t say “they took a Pasadena.” That was out before it was in. Like “so-and-so gives good phone.”…There were a lot of terms you had to learn, as opposed to the shylock business where all you had to know how to say was “Give me the fuckin’ money.”

  On most movie sets, the visiting journalist hangs around for thirteen hours and then, when the cameras are finally rolling, watches an extra tying up his shoelace. But Travolta was as obliging as ever. I arrived at the multistory parking lot at LAX in time to watch several takes of a funny, dramatic, and salient action sequence during which Chili Palmer taunts, works over, and finally befriends a menacing lunk (an ex-stuntman) called the Bear. Travolta was wearing silks and loafers (what he calls “a street guy’s idea of GQ”) and a pitying sneer, recalling Jack Nicholson in Chinatown—the sneer that says, “You’re even dumber than you think I think you are.” The two actors rehearse. A kick, a punch, a knee in the face, and the Bear goes down. Chili crouches over him and says,

  “How many movies have you been in?”

  “About sixty.”

  “No shit. What’re some of them?”

  “Saturday Night Fever,” ad-libs the Bear.

  On the set Travolta is candidly regal. He is a prince mingling with his subjects. Wearing the high finish (and light makeup) of intransigent stardom, he triggers hysteria wherever he goes. (“I’ve walked down the street with some big stars, okay?” Tarantino has said. “I cannot walk two feet down the street with John Travolta. People stop their cars. People are clawing all over him.”) The day before, a production assistant warned the extras that they would be fired if they asked for more autographs. “No, no. You will not be fired,” Travolta said and continued signing. Today, on my arrival, Travolta veers off to secure me a cappuccino, confronting a fl
ock of paparazzi; and then I sit beside him (while the makeup woman copes with some subatomic blemish) in a director’s chair. Wait: not a director’s chair. The director’s chair—Barry Sonnenfeld’s chair.

  “Why is it that you seem to be the people’s star?” I asked. “It certainly isn’t your lifestyle. They love you as if you still lived with your brothers and sisters in Englewood, New Jersey.”

  “It works the other way. You know: quintessentially American, living out your dreams. They don’t want you to be humble.”

  Twenty minutes later, I learn something—something entirely ludicrous—about not being humble. In his public dealings, Travolta is polite, considerate, even courtly. But he doesn’t make the mistake of the movie star in Get Shorty, who, in Chili’s view, “wanted people to think he was a regular guy, but was too used to being who he was to pull it off.” You cannot combine being a movie star with being a regular guy. You cannot combine being a movie star with not being a movie star.

  A chauffeur-driven car appears. I assume that we are going to be chauffeured to the Travolta trailer (saving ourselves a three-minute stroll). It turns out that we are going to be chauffeured to the elevator, which is a hundred and fifty yards away. En route, we pass the Bear. Travolta asks the driver to stop and lowers his electric window. Gently and, I think, unironically, he asks this powerhouse if he “wants a ride.” The Bear says it’s okay: he’s good. We reach the end of the journey and climb out. As the elevator doors open, we are joined by a couple of members of the crew. And by the Bear.

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