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JOHN TRAVOLTA by Wensley Clarkson

JOHN TRAVOLTA

King of Cool

by Wensley Clarkson

Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-125-8
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar

Incoherent mash note to the man in the white suit.

Celebrity biographer Clarkson (Cruise Control, 2003) here dutifully enumerates John Travolta's film roles, gourmet meals, real-estate purchases and assorted aircraft in a headlong gush of infotainment clichés and tortured syntax. Travolta's story—adored, spoiled scion of a close-knit, showbiz-mad family experiences early success, a string of failures and a series of comebacks—lacks dramatic punch: Even at his lowest points, Travolta remained financially solvent and avoided drugs and alcohol. Mostly, he sulked and over-ate. While Travolta has worked with Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma and Mike Nichols, Clarkson has not included a single interesting fact regarding any of these collaborations. We do hear from Danny Terrio. Sorry, film fans. As for analysis of Travolta's craft, Clarkson gamely offers, “all the characters he’d played had become a part of John’s psyche—he was the ultimate chameleon.” Despite Clarkson's puzzling insistence on Travolta's supreme “coolness,” the actor comes off as a dimwitted manchild, gluttonous for sweets and credulous to the point of grotesquerie; Clarkson gingerly handles the controversial subject of Travolta's zealous devotion to Scientology with the dispassion of a man renting a pornographic movie. Clarkson does provide some incidental amusement with the narrative's very ineptness, admiringly comparing Travolta to Mussolini and describing the actor as “a great deliverer of lines” and, two pages later, as having `never been great with lines.` He locates Travolta's hometown of Englewood, N.J., in “Middle America,” and helpfully identifies superstar George Clooney as “now the star of TV’s E.R. and Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster From Dusk Till Dawn.” Facts recur pointlessly throughout the book, as if the author had forgotten he mentioned them earlier. Best of all, Clarkson repeatedly refers to Travolta's villainous character Terl from the catastrophic science fiction stinker Battlefield Earth as “Teri.”

Travolta deserves a serious book. This is not it.