A flier not content to just glide

If you fly to Orlando watching “Primary Colors” and “Face/Off” on your laptop, drive an hour and a half north to Ocala, then eat turnip greens and fried apples at the Cracker Barrel and fall asleep watching “Pulp Fiction,” you are guaranteed to have some pretty strange dreams about John Travolta. But none of them will prepare you for the 10-mile rural route drive to his house.

Not for the Florida sky bluer than any movie star’s eyes or the clouds so perfect they look painted on. Not for the Cash and Carry, or the Journey’s End motel, eerily frozen in the 1950s, or the Bread of Life Ministry across the street. Not for the Happy Hill Pet Cemetery with its hand-painted sign and smattering of tiny crosses.

None of this would be at all out of place in Travolta’s new film, “A Love Song for Bobby Long,” a Southern Gothic tale about loss and love and family set in New Orleans. Until the entrance to Jumbolair Aviation Estates rises out of the verge. A brand-new security kiosk and electronic gate guard the flying community where Travolta; his wife, actress Kelly Preston; and their two children live six months out of the year. And if this is unexpected, just wait till you see the house.

Marion County is horse country, the finest in the nation according to the locals, which explains the equine nature of every single piece of public art in Ocala. Horses need land, but private jets need more, and Travolta didn’t come to Ocala for the horses. A licensed jet pilot and longtime aviation devotee, Travolta designed the house himself. From the front, it is Frank Lloyd Wright via the Fontainebleau; from the back, Dulles airport in the 1960s (if Dulles had a really nice swimming pool). Complete with a 707 parked at one end and room for a Gulfstream at the other.

It is odd to walk into such a house and meet a man whose face is as familiar as a friend’s, a face that has appeared on magazine covers, billboards, movie screens and T-shirts for 30 years now. Travolta appears in the living room and immediately begins to offer things -- Coffee? Sandwich? Water? Cookies? -- just as if this were a normal house, one that didn’t look just like a very cool airport lounge, complete with a faux radio tower on top and a very big jet in the backyard.

But then the family has been here two years, and perhaps the newness has worn off -- Travolta seems surprised that a person would want a tour. He himself is more interested in the house that is going up on the lot next door.

“Our house in Maine is isolated because it’s on an island, and our house in Brentwood is isolated because ... well, because it’s L.A,” he says, squinting with satisfaction at the early stages of construction half a mile from his house. “So we wanted a community here. Because otherwise,” Travolta says, flashing one of those smiles that takes a handsome man and turns him into a superstar, “it’s the Cracker Barrel for us too.”

The view from 50

He is surprisingly soft-spoken with a long-held reputation for being genuinely nice. Here at home, he is not wearing a supercool hit man suit or Hollywood gangster hair and his face is calm and still. Those blue eyes beam from the covers of old issues of Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest on the coffee table, but in person it’s as if he’s John Travolta on a dimmer switch; only the occasional smile gives him away.

Still, it’s pretty hard to picture him at the Cracker Barrel.

Travolta is officially 50 now, which means it can happen to anyone. Age is the enemy of every actor, and for Travolta, who has long traded on his boyish charm and perpetually youthful virility, 50, as a concept anyway, is a pretty big deal.

“At first I was just taken aback,” he says. “I hit a plateau of complete denial. I could not believe it was going to happen, was happening. Seriously Could Not Believe It.”

The expression on his face beneath a black baseball cap is indeed almost alarmingly serious as he gazes into the middle distance.

Well, not precisely the middle distance; he is actually looking past one of the 10-foot white acrylic Christmas trees through huge blue tinted windows across the swimming pool to the 707. And in as many beats as it takes to list these things, the memory of his concern over middle age turns to sly mirth. “Eventually,” he says with a sideways look, “I got over it.”

“Got over it” enough to make a movie in which he looks every single one of those 50 years. And then some.

As the title character in “A Love Song for Bobby Long,” Travolta plays an occasionally charming, hard-drinking, despair-coddling scholar who has seemingly surrendered to the idea that the only graceful way for a Southern writer to die is of cirrhosis. He lives in colorful squalor with a former student who is ostensibly writing Long’s memoir. When the owner of the house dies, her young daughter shows up and an anti-family is born, with Long as its reluctant patriarch. The film opens as Long lights a cigarette with drink-palsied hands and then walks a long, circuitous route from a bar in New Orleans to a cemetery in New Orleans. Within two minutes, Bobby Long’s character and intentions are revealed. But more surprisingly, so are Travolta’s.

There is no way moviegoers will not compare the stagger-stuttered shuffle of this gentlemanly drunk with the iconic, soundtrack-propelled strut of Tony Manero, the character from “Saturday Night Fever” that branded Travolta into the international consciousness.

“Bobby Long” has awards aspiration written all over it, but successful in this quest or not, it marks a shift for Travolta. Tony is where he has been, the genesis of almost every role that has brought him success, from Danny Zuko in “Grease” to Vincent in “Pulp Fiction” -- all versions of the streetwise, sexy dude who has the looks and the moves if not the brains. Bobby Long, a man straight out of Tennessee Williams, is where Travolta says he hopes to go -- characters played from the inside out, characters with more substance than attitude.

“I was worried that I’d look better than I should,” he says. “I told the director [Shainee Gabel]: ‘Let the hair go white, let the bald spot show,’ because I wanted him to be real. She was very brave,” he adds, laughing. “Some people would have gotten scared because people expect a certain thing after all this time.”

“Some people” includes the actor himself, who was taken aback by his own physical decrepitude while watching the dailies. “It was hard to see how bad I could look,” he says. “Because of course I realized I could be that, I could have gone that way. It was frightening at times; I’d think, ‘Is this the same man I’ve been watching for 30 years?’ ”

John talks about Travolta

To live with long-term celebrity, at some point a person must compartmentalize his life into the reality versus the image. This may help a star stay sane, but it leads to some odd conversational tics -- Travolta doesn’t refer to himself in the third person exactly, but when talking about his career, he uses terms more distant than the first.

“I was just thinking of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and how young they were when they died,” Travolta says, continuing a rumination on age. “I would like to be a pop icon who survives. I would like to be a living icon.”

It is a strange thing to hear a person calmly, without a hint of braggadocio, refer to himself as a pop icon. But then, it is an accurate enough job description. Travolta has spent more than half his life being very, very famous. Of course, some of those years included that queasy “whatever happened to” fame. If you color-coded it, Travolta’s career would read a bit like a partial timeline of European history -- the glory of Rome (“Saturday Night Fever,” “Grease,” “Urban Cowboy”), the Dark Ages (“Perfect,” all the “Look Who’s Talking” films) and the Renaissance (“Pulp Fiction” and “Get Shorty”).

This year, big paychecks for “The Punisher” and “Be Cool,” the upcoming sequel to “Get Shorty,” put him at 54th on Forbes’ Top 100 Celebrity List, just behind Jay Leno and Bill Clinton. His street-recognition level is about as high as it gets, even in seen-everyone L.A. and certainly in Ocala, where he and his family have occasionally required police escorts to escape mobs at local events.

But Travolta has always wanted to be an actor, always, and he is not the sort to snipe about the downsides. His wife, a former model, has her own acting career (“The Cat in the Hat,” “What a Girl Wants”), which helps them stay on the same wavelength if not on the same schedule. The two keep their children out of the limelight, but Travolta knows that his image is his livelihood and so he protects it -- from double-checking the lighting on a certain photograph to monitoring the tone his PR people take with the press.

“There is never any reason to be impolite,” he says. “People stop liking me and I’m out of a job.”

“He took the car down to the gas station the other day,” says Ron Zupancic, who has worked for Travolta for 19 years, first as his driver, now as his assistant. “I told him I’d do it myself but he wanted to go, and we were there for like an hour signing autographs.” He sighs. “Wherever we go, we’re there for an hour signing autographs.”

At Jumbolair, time itself has been bent to accommodate this. Travolta is a nocturnal creature -- he flies in the middle of the night, takes his kids for breakfast at Denny’s in the middle of the night, even schedules interviews and photo shoots at night, partly so he can get things done without being mobbed.

The unusual hours may explain the startling fairness of his skin and why, at 2 on a weekday afternoon, his 12-year-old son Jett is asleep and his 4 1/2 -year-old daughter Ella is sitting with a friend on her parents’ unmade bed watching cartoons, her long pretty hair still mussed.

As Travolta talks in the living room, staff members polish and sweep and produce trays of cookies and crustless sandwiches, glasses of water and iced tea. The house is very, very quiet.

“Egg salad is an East Coast thing,” says Travolta, helping himself. “You have to explain it everywhere else.”

Travolta was born and raised in New Jersey and he mentions his family often -- his mother, his sisters, the creative atmosphere of the house where being an actor was considered a much loftier goal than being, say, a doctor. Nostalgia is evident in the decor, all of which is very much airport but of a specific time. The walls of the round dining room are ablaze with a mural depicting a glamorous cocktail lounge from the ‘50s overlooking a twinkling airfield; the living room is done in the cool turquoise and chartreuse of the early ‘60s.

Nostalgia was also one of the forces behind Travolta’s decision to take on “Bobby Long.” From the moment Scarlett Johansson and her mother, Melanie Sloan, approached him with the project, he felt he knew, and loved, the ruined scholar.

“He felt so real to me,” he says. “He was almost too smart; it made him dangerous even to himself. I’ve known so many wonderful drinkers who are gone now and he reminded me of them.”

His Southern exposure

The downscale local color and poetry-quoting characters of Ronald Everett Capps’ book, on which the film is based, reminded him of movies he had watched when he was young, of writers he read when he was young.

“When I was growing up,” he says, “the voice of America was the Southern writer, and I think we’ve forgotten that.”

Back then, stories took their time to unfold rather than “popped” and had messages that were quiet and heartfelt rather than cool or hip. “I thought, ‘No one has made this movie in 40 years,’ ” he says.

He also felt he really understood Bobby. “I’ve spent half my life with heavy drinkers, listening to them talk and spin and explain why it was ‘so important to the creative process.’ ”

When you’re an actor, he adds, “you’re used to endless nights with very bright people lecturing and quoting things at you.”

Travolta has heard the old saws about the pain of the creative process and the importance of the “altered state” often enough to realize that some people believe them -- “that is what Bobby thought was true, so I kept that in mind when I was Bobby.” But his own attitude toward the work is rooted much more in pleasure than anguish. And it shows. The films from Travolta’s Dark Ages may not be very good, but in every one there he is, acting his heart out.

“I can count on one hand the number of films that I didn’t enjoy doing,” he says. “No matter how they turned out.

“I was good friends with Brando. And he always experienced the moment. And that is why he was great. He was the spirit of play, and that validated me. Because I am the spirit of play too.”

Travolta settles back and tells a Brando story: The two were discussing a famous football player. Brando said he had heard he was a friend of Travolta’s; Travolta said, well, sort of, “but I told him it wasn’t like when I first met him [Brando], when he picked me up off my feet and kissed me on the lips.”

Brando looked at Travolta and shook his head. “He said” -- and here Travolta does a very impressive Marlon Brando -- “ ‘John, he doesn’t have the emotional elasticity that you and I have, so you can’t expect that of him.’

“I couldn’t believe it,” Travolta says. “ ‘Emotional elasticity.’ Years of insecurity and worry about how other people acted and what it meant just rolled away. It was as if God had spoken.”

Brando, he says, remained ageless in the public imagination, and that is a pretty good goal for an actor. “I would like to grow old with my art,” Travolta says. “If I can stay healthy enough and productive. Like Cary Grant or Warren Beatty. If I lose a set of physical characteristics, that shouldn’t matter. I’m an actor first.”

Well, maybe. For almost three hours, Ella Travolta has played quietly in another room, but enough is enough. The universal cry of the 4 1/2 -year old -- “Daaa---aaadeee, Daaaaa---aaadeeee” -- precedes her by a few seconds into the room. The nanny and the teacher hang back waiting to see if this is OK. Travolta smiles at his daughter and they vanish.

Ella sits on the coffee table, eats a cookie, sits on the sofa, eats another cookie. She is very pretty, like her mother, and she circles her father, watching him as he watches her.

“What do you want, Ella?” her father asks.

“Your hat,” she says. And in an instant she has scrambled up her father’s arm and onto his shoulders, grabbed the hat and sat on his head. His hair is no longer white but quite short and spare and smashed flat.

“Your hair looks funny without the hat,” she tells him.

“I know, honey,” Travolta says. “That’s why I wear the hat.”

The Scientology influence

For the three months or so they live in Los Angeles, Ella and Jett attend a Scientology-based school their parents helped found. In Ocala, where they spend half the year, they are home-schooled, in part because their father’s schedule is erratic and in part to keep their education in line with the tenets of Scientology.

“LRH loved to fly too,” Travolta says, referring to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. “He wrote a lot of interesting articles about flying.” One of them is framed and on the wall in the hallway, beneath several shots of Hubbard in aviator gear. Travolta’s devotion to Hubbard’s writing is well known -- three years ago, he made “Battlefield Earth,” a film based on one of Hubbard’s science fiction novels that is universally considered to be the worst movie Travolta has been in.

One reason the family lives in Ocala is to be close to the Flag Service Organization in Clearwater, the spiritual headquarters of Scientology. By plane, it is less than half an hour away. This week, however, both planes are having maintenance work done, so Travolta has driven the almost five-hour round trip every day to attend classes and processing sessions.

“You work with a trained professional on various ways to approach your life,” Travolta explains. “You get insight and stress relief.”

He describes Scientology as a spirituality based on being clear, understanding what is actually happening. The God part is optional. “You can believe in God if you want,” he says. “Scientology allows freedom of thinking. It’s based on freedom of thinking.

“It’s a very practical way to live. It’s not something you believe in. It’s something that works. It has certainly worked for me.”

It is late afternoon of the next day and he is driving to Clearwater, his white Jaguar XJ8L pointed toward the magenta tatters of the sunset. As darkness crowds the car, he talks about the past, about a time when he was “technically the biggest star in the world.”

Twenty years later, he is in a position to decide what he wants next, and, in a way, need and desire have dovetailed; he is choosing characters rather than “projects.” He just finished “Be Cool” and is working on “Lonely Hearts,” a film in which he plays a detective alongside James Gandolfini. He says he recently turned down three big pictures in search of something more resonant, something more like “Bobby Long.”

“Sometimes,” he says, “I really wish I was a writer, you know? So I could just immerse myself in story. But,” he shrugs, “I’m too hungry for people. I want to be in with the people. That’s what makes me feel alive.”

Still, he has to accommodate change -- his and the industry’s. Television is so spread out now he doesn’t even recognize it. “For ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ to be No. 1, we had to have 40 percent of the audience. Forty percent! Now you’re a No. 1 show if you’ve got, like, 10. So no matter how good your work is, hardly anyone is watching.”

When he was young, the movie industry was smaller, more personal. “There were, like, five of us,” he says. “If I didn’t do it, Richard Gere would, or Treat Williams. Now,” he shakes his head, “Everyone’s a celebrity, everyone’s a star, and there are 100 actors for every role.”

The media have fueled it, the Internet, reality programming. It isn’t like it used to be, not even for young actors.

“Tom Cruise was probably the last big star,” he says. “Maybe Brad Pitt. But no one is as famous as they used to be, as famous as I was.” He looks out at the road where the future is measured by the distance of his headlights. “Not even me.”

Mary McNamara can be e-mailed at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.