Fame and fortune may shield you from some of life’s sharper edges, but they provide little shelter from loss and suffering. John Travolta has had more than his fair share of both despite having a successful career that includes a Golden Globe Award, two Oscar nominations, and a fortune estimated at £150 million last year.
Of course, there is no such thing as fair when it comes to losing loved ones, so it is important to remember that.
The Pulp Fiction actor said on Monday that Kelly Preston, his wife of nearly 29 years, had passed away after a two-year battle with breast cancer.
Since the couple co-starred in the mafia movie Gotti in 2018, the 57-year-old actress has avoided the spotlight while keeping her illness a closely-guarded secret. Preston’s most recent Instagram post, which was all smiles and uploaded on Father’s Day, gave off the appearance that all was OK in their Hollywood world.
However, less than a month later, Travolta lost his longtime partner of three decades. Even before her passing, he had previously referred to his life as “a life filled with variations of loss” because “marriage doesn’t just happen on its own,” Preston said while promoting Gotti at the Cannes Film Festival.
He and Preston went through the nightmare of every parent in 2009 when their 16-year-old son, Jett, passed away suddenly after having a seizure and striking his skull on a bathtub while on a family vacation to the Bahamas for Christmas. Long-running intrusive rumors about Travolta’s sexuality and health have also surrounded Jett Travolta for years, but it wasn’t until after his passing that his parents announced that their son, who had suffered from seizures his whole infancy, had also been diagnosed with autism.
Fewer people are aware that Travolta, then 23 years old, lost his first love to the same illness that would ultimately kill his wife in 1976, at the beginning of his career. He had fallen in love with his on-screen mother, the Emmy-winning actress Diana Hyland, who was 18 years his senior, while they were filming the television movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. He subsequently recalled, “I have never been more in love with someone in my life. “On the Bubble set, my coworker and I were talking nonstop like two maniacs. It turned romantic after a month.”
Tragic events, however, happened soon after. Travolta sat by Hyland’s bedside as she died her own struggle with breast cancer in the same year that Saturday Night Fever made him a global star and sex icon as the cleft-chinned, white-suited disco king, Tony Manero. This earned him the first of those Oscar nods. Later, her son Zachary disclosed that his mother passed away in Travolta’s arms.
In a 2014 interview with this paper, Travolta said that such experience so early in his adult life had “removed the edge of death” and left him with a certain strength. “Because so many people close to me have passed away before their time, and because I believe that if they can do it, then I can do it too, I’m probably less afraid of death than the typical person these days, he admitted. When others have been able to overcome their fears, I almost feel disrespected to do the same.”
On that occasion, he was discussing how he handled Jett’s passing. In the immediate aftermath, a local ambulance driver and his lawyer allegedly tried to extort $25 million from the couple by threatening to reveal private information about Jett’s death. At the time, they had a younger daughter, Ella Bleu, and the following year, when Preston was 47, she gave birth to a son, Benjamin. Travolta testified in a well-known criminal trial but later chose to drop the case due to the enormous strain it was putting on his family.
Travolta admitted to the Telegraph’s Celia Walden that he had been so completely overcome by grief at the time that he had contemplated quitting performing. Instead, he moved on to take on the challenge of The Forger in 2014, a thriller that was a reflection of his recent experiences: he played a convicted felon who was granted an early release from jail in order to care for his little son, who had an incurable brain tumor and was in danger of dying.
He also gave gratitude to his fellow Church of Scientology members for helping him recover what he refers to be his natural state as “a glass half full man” and “an optimist by nature.”
However, when it comes to experiencing grief and loss, faith in a greater force or higher purpose still holds a powerful resonance in our secular, skeptic western society. Some people find solace in the reincarnation theories of Buddhism or the promise of a heavenly afterlife in Christianity.
The actor John Travolta has previously discussed how he still holds onto some of the values he learned as a young child growing up in a New York suburb with his Italian American father and Irish mother as the youngest of six. He stated in the 2014 interview that he still adheres to the traditional Catholic doctrine that “a person’s soul lives on forever.”
But by then, he had also spent over four decades as a member of the contentious Church of Scientology. After the passing of Jett, it proved to be Travolta’s salvation. Preston was also a member, and the two starred in the widely panned 2000 film adaptation of Battlefield Earth by founding member L.Ron Hubbard.
He said, “I don’t know what I would have done if Scientology hadn’t supported me. “I don’t believe I could have survived. After Jett died, they were there for me every day. When I needed to go, they even went with me. And that’s how it went for a solid two years: they were present every day.”
He asserted that “truly does provide a mechanism that helps you face tremendous disasters” in Scientology. One of Hubbard’s teachings is the notion that those who pass away are reborn in a new body; in contrast to reincarnation, which entails some aspect of judgment for previous lives, Hubbard once stated that his vision involved “simply living time after time, getting a new body, eventually losing it and getting a new one.”
On the set of The Devil’s Rain in Mexico, Travolta first accepted Scientology in 1975 after being exposed to it by Joan Prather. He subsequently said, “I wasn’t well and she gave me what’s termed an assist.” After that, I recovered extremely quickly, although by quickly I mean 30 minutes later.
He has stated countless times that Scientology provides not only ideas but also useful instruments – “workable technology” is how he refers to them – to eliminate pain. In 2013, he stated, “I believe L Ron Hubbard resolved the human mind, and in resolving it he has also resolved human pain—really that’s what I think has happened here.”
No matter how good or bad his religion is, Travolta will need every resource at his disposal to deal with this terrible tragedy. He added these words to the Instagram post announcing the passing of his wife:
“Please excuse me in advance if we are silent for a bit. I will be taking some time to support my children who have lost their mother. However, please be aware that I will feel your love in the next weeks and months as we heal.”
Just as Travolta is all too well, illness is not always something that can be fought and won, grief is not something that can be overcome by sheer willpower. But perhaps he is also more aware than most of the fact that time can be somewhat curative.
