"I NEED something to eat," John Travolta is saying. An aide rushes over quickly to click shut the door of his suite on this small display of star displeasure. But not before he can be heard adding, in a measured and eminently reasonable tone of voice, "Everything I've had here since yesterday morning has been unacceptable..."
His cuttings convey the strong impression that Travolta prefers to meet the press in restaurants over a damn fine lunch. A colleague who interviewed him a couple of years ago for the Independent on Sunday .boggled while he ordered a chocolate ice-cream, chocolate truffle cake in raspberry sauce and a chocolate mousse with whipped cream, and proceeded to devour the lot.
When he is holed up in a hotel doing conveyor-belt publicity, there are always the consolations of room service. Usually. But now the door reopens to eject a trolley laden with plates whose gleaming silver cloches conceal doubtless inedible substances. It's 11 a.m. and he's starved.
Not that Travolta is probably being picky: we are in Germany, land of unacceptable nosh. And not that he's being the teeniest bit unpleasant. At this year's Berlin Film Festival he might be at the centre of a media maelstrom, but he is conducting himself with unflagging courtesy and composure. At the next day's press conference, someone takes the floor with a carefully prepared bon mot: "You once made Saturday Night Fever, Herr Travolta. Are you in a FEVER of excitement now that your new film is being shown here this SATURDAY?"
There is a chorus of catcalls and groans at the asinine question, but Herr Travolta drowns them out, magically transforms them into warm applause, as he replies with his dazzling smile: "Ich bin ein Berliner," and says with apparent sincerity that he is honoured and delighted to be present.
Two or three things without which no Travolta piece is quite complete. Humble origins: father a former semi-pro football player, later the proprietor of the Travolta Tire Shop in suburban New Jersey. Mother in show business - an acting coach. John the youngest of six children, with two brothers and three sisters who nicknamed him "Bone" because he was so long and lean. That was before he could walk. Aged six, he informed his mom that if she didn't make him a chocolate pudding, he would cut off his weenie (she made the pudding) and has never looked back since.
Plane-crazy since a tender age and now the owner of three jets, a Vampire, a Lear and a Gulfstream II. A committed disciple of Scientology for nearly 20 years, and for which (alarmingly) he today seems a brilliant advertisement. First love Diana Hyland, an actress 18 years his senior, who played his mother in a 1976 television film; a year later, she died in his arms (of cancer), leaving him devastated. "Outed" as gay, along with a number of other luminaries, four or five years ago, though since his marriage to the actress Kelly Preston, with whom he has a small son, those rumours have fizzled away.
Classic helter-skelter Hollywood career, from overnight phenomenon (Saturday Night Fever, Grease) to has been in a matter of movies. Conventional wisdom has it that he chose badly and certainly, in the mid 1980s, there were some frightful duds. Still, these things seem more obvious with hindsight: Arthur, Splash! and An Officer and a Gentleman might have kept Travolta bankable, but forgive me if I fail to see that he missed out on a string of masterpieces when he passed on them in favour of films like Brian De Palma's Blow Out. Travolta's Arthur is a lost opportunity I can comfortably live without. Then Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, Oscar nomination: he instantly acquired the affectionate nickname "The Comeback Kid". And it seemed everyone was pleased to see him in town again.
In Berlin he is accompanying Get Shorty, based on Elmore Leonard's satirical novel about Chili Palmer, a small-time loan shark (Travolta) who comes to Hollywood and launches himself successfully on a second career in the movie business. Asked earlier whether he had had any brushes with the Mob in Hollywood, Danny De Vito, the film's producer/co-star, had flannelled that he'd never experienced or even heard of "this kind of money-laundering thing".
To the same question, Travolta promptly replies (even though, as a non-producer, he is far less likely to have come across dodgy dealings): "My brother [Joey] had done some independent films financed by... who knows? That's the only close-to-reality I know of that whole world. I'd say, `How much is it being done for?' `Oh, we're gonna do the whole movie for $200,000.' `And where are you getting the money?' `Someone in Las Vegas.' `Oh' - he mimes slowly dawning awareness - `I see. I get it...'"
There does not seem to be much place for guile in the broad and open steppes of the Travolta mindscape. One remembers a diary he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine while playing a (Rolling Stone) reporter in one of his I980s flops, Perfect. "I'm not sure if Jamie Lee Curtis, his co-star wants to make love to me or not," he confided to millions of readers. "It would be nice, but I'm getting cross-signals at this point... I get the feeling she would want it to be genuine, but that she gets confused when the time is right. I'm more comfortable being seduced by a woman the first time, and she doesn't know that." That degree of candour is, to say the least, rare in a Hollywood megastar, and rather disarming.
He's often cast as a bad boy and has just played two gangsters on the trot (Why? "Offers I couldn't refuse," he shoots back instantly), although, he also points out, the two characters are very different beasts; they just have "a similar profession", as he quaintly puts it.
"I don't think the man in Get Shorty would tolerate the man in Pulp Fiction for more than five minutes. Because he's a drug addict, he's unprofessional. Unpredictable. He might be appealing but he's a loose cannon. Chili could smell that, just like he could smell everybody in Hollywood." But these two hard nuts share a sweetness - an innocence, almost - and a vulnerability, qualities at the very core of the Travolta appeal: even when playing a bad guy, you have to warm to him.
CHILI'S Achilles' heel is that he's a helpless movie buff - one scene finds him in a half-empty cinema entranced by a revival of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, mouthing the lines along with the characters. "He's tough, he's real, he's smart, but his love for the movies is like a 12-year-old's. That's what makes him interesting. I fought for the childlike quality in him; it wasn't originally in there. I said, `Please: if you don't see why he loves the movies so much, you're going to miss a potential for this character that's enormous. All I need is three or four moments.' So they wrote the cinema scene and a couple of others. Like I beat a guy up and then I find out he's a stunt man and ask him what movies he's been in. You just need a few things like that to colour a character and give him an are.
Travolta talked to the real Chili Palmer, on whom Leonard based his character, but says he did not attempt to imitate the man. "He was quite different than I anticipated. I met him during the movie and I was glad I didn't before because I may have picked up some choices that wouldn't have been right for how I interpreted it. He's very straightforward."
And now Travolta springs to his feet. His body goes ramrod stiff, his large, slightly greying head is tilted straight and slightly upward, his voice rises a half-octave into a high, nasal, monotone whine." `Down in Miami, yeah, we were down there and this guy come up and I punched him...' Chili had an unusual personality, nothing that would have been transferable to the screen." The sudden transformation is funny, impressive and a little uncanny, but Travolta makes acting sound like pure simplicity.
"I study the character in as many details as I can get. I physicalise him until the thinkingness [sic] comes together. There's a moment when everything you say comes out exactly like he would say it. The way. you dress, the way you smoke, the way you speak, the way you walk. When it's all automatic, at that moment you know it's happened. Then, once you've got one character down and you're certain what he's about, it's very easy to start working on another. Characters have their own lives, you know. I could bring you three or four characters this minute.
Travolta will be needing that ability, for his dance-card is full for quite a while to come. Next month we will see him in John Woo's Broken Arrow, a piece of enjoyable pyrotechnical bunkum that allows him to indulge his passion for flying as a maverick air force major who steals an 800mph plane with two nuclear warheads on board. It's scarcely an acting stretch, but he obviously has a ball playing a double-dyed (but still, inevitably, somehow likeable) villain. "John Wool wanted him very stylish, he wanted him to smoke, then I had to mix that in with psycho... psycho... psychoses? if you will." He stumbles over the word, ending on a rising, questioning inflection.
"I remembered some military types I had met when I was younger, who were warmongers, articulate calm but scary, and I incorporated a lot of that. I went to some bases and watched how they moved. It wasn't hard. I got to pontificate and order people around and smoke cigarettes a lot. My big fight stuff was at the beginning and end. Most of it was being nuts, know what I mean? I had the fun part." There is more over the next year or so we should see him in White Man's Burden, a satire based on the premise that blacks are the privileged class in society and whites the underdogs; Phenomenon, a fantasy in which he plays a small-town guy who becomes a genius after being struck by lightning; Michael, a comedy directed by Nora Ephron; and a film with Roman Polanski, The Double.
Plus, further down the line, there is a project with Sharon Stone and a political thriller called Dark Horse. His combined salaries for this little lot are said to exceed $40 million.
As I leave, a trolley arrives groaning with fresh rations: time for a quick pit-stop before the next session. He has his own Travolta Tire right now - a small one, and all but camouflaged by the expensive tailoring - but who's worried? He's professional enough to shed pounds when required, and bon vivant enough not to care about piling them on again in the down-time between pictures (though even in the Saturday Night Fever days, he never ballooned to Brandoesque proportions).
He does not drink and, though a furious smoker on screen - one of the few actors, in fact, to practise this near-obsolete art with real panache - did not light up once on the several occasions I saw him (he sometimes permits himself a cigar, which, he says, reminds him of his father). These minor weaknesses put us in mind of an adored little brother with a passion for chocolate pudding. They're permissible - more than that, endearing. In a word, acceptable.
Get Shorty is showing at cinemas around the country