From: Gooch McCracken
Category: Amis
Date: 7/19/99
Time: 10:26:55 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
FROM *TRAVOLTA'S SECOND ACT* BY MARTIN AMIS:
"Two years ago almost to the day, John Travolta, apparently, had only one movie in prospect. 'It was *Look Who's Talking 3*', he said, with some resignation (but with insufficient incredulity). 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 about to make a film about talking dogs."
"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, know everybody sidewise, 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?"