Sweathog Heartthrob

The matinee audience for Bus Stop at the Lakewood, Me., summer theater consisted mostly of thick-thighed teenagers with braces on their teeth. For the first 20 minutes of the play they sat clutching each other, ecstatic with anticipation. Then the star of the show loped onstage, wearing skintight jeans and a white sombrero. "My name is Bo Decker and I'm 21 years old," he cried. "Everywhere I go I got all the women." The audience squealed.

The actor's name is John Travolta. He is 22, and seems to be the successor to David Cassidy and Donnie and Marie Osmond in the hearts of the eleven-to 15-year-old crowd. Taking Don Murray's old role in Bus Stop is just a passing thing for him. Travolta is best known as Vinnie Barbarino, the tough, macho "Sweathog" in ABC's hit series Welcome Back, Kotter. The show is an updated version of Happy Days, a genial exercise in instant nostalgia, and Vinnie Barbarino is barely distinguishable from Arthur Fonzarelli, a.k.a. the Fonz, who made Henry Winkler famous. As it happens, Travolta even resembles Winkler.

Travolta's approach to his career, however, is very much his own. Despite his youth, he has been acting for ten years. Unlike Winkler, he does not spend his energies talking about the Yale Drama School or other heavy topics. Instead, he has shrewdly consolidated his reputation by recording a bland rock album tailored to subteens. Let Her In, Travolta's biggest hit on the album, is now No. 5 on the Cashbox charts.

The urge to perform runs in the Travolta family. John's mother, Helen Burke, an actress in Englewood, N.J., urged all her six children to take part in local theater. As the baby of the family, John had many acts to follow. At age seven, he flew around the country with his sister Ellen in a road show of Gypsy and at twelve acted in his first amateur production. Recalls Travolta: "That world of airplanes and theaters seemed my only route to freedom." At 16, he quit school and began working in dinner theaters and summer stock. Looking back now he muses; "How do you go back to school and make anybody understand how it was to be with those theater people watching the sun come up over cigarettes and glasses of wine?"

Public Maulings. The days of free-and-easy anonymity are over for Travolta. On his Bus Stop tour he lives like a recluse in his dressing room. The last time he tried to take a date to a disco, the place was overrun. "I don't think any girl could take my schedule now," he says, quite accurately, and claims to have no steady girl friend. He was mobbed by 5,000 fans at a Cleveland record store recently. At the world's largest indoor shopping mall at Schaumburg, Ill., outside Chicago, an estimated 30,000 engulfed him.

Along with public maulings, the role of Vinnie Barbarino has brought Travolta some half-million dollars this year. He is also acquiring such star trappings as a 1955 Thunderbird--a collector's item--and his own single-engine Aircoupe. He has moved out of the family house in Englewood to a high-rise in West Hollywood. He likes slipping into his wise cracking, tough-tender role. The macho act comes easier to Vinnie than it did to John in his high school days. But now he poses for beefcake shots in the teen mags and answers the fans' letters (Q: What kind of girl does Johnny like? A: The enthusiastic type). He is shrewd enough to know how fickle his fans can be. The time will come to move on or join the Partridge Family in oblivion. He has finished shooting a film called Carrie, about a high school girl with psychic powers. His problem at the moment is a scheduling conflict that could keep him from making a Paramount movie called Days of Heaven with hot, young Director Terrence Malik (Badlands). "It's a mess," says John, who is supposed to shoot a Sweathog Christmas special at the same time. "That part is James Dean's East of Eden and Warren Beatty's Splendor in the Grass." He would be very sorry to lose it, but it wouldn't be the end of his young world. As he says with his Vinnie Barbarino swagger: "When your batting average is as good as mine, there's nothing to be really nervous about."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.