John Travolta: True-Grit Tenderfoot

The silence of a falling star
Lights up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome I could cry* 
—Hank Williams

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE FROM THE STAR — or face being fired immediately. This is the stern ruling that has come down to the rank-and-file extras. Not surprisingly, there is something sinister and smoldering in the manner of many of the local, on-set “expendables,” all of them dressed in tight, dirty jeans — the pale young women, slump-shouldered and sullen in frayed halter tops, their sour-faced men stalking back and forth in washed-out Western shirts. Standing stiffly in their midst is John Travolta, his one-way eyes as piercing as a raven’s, wearing a sleek, black cowpoke get-up accented by the splash of scarlet in his two-tone satin shirt.

There’s a movie being made here called Urban Cowboy, based on a 1978 Esquire article by Texas-born writer Aaron Latham. It’s a contemporary, boomtown Western, a farmboy-meets-girl romantic fracas that ultimately figures around the mechanical bull sitting defiantly in one corner of Gilley’s, the world’s largest honky-tonk, a three-and-a-half-acre, prime-for-brawling saloon nestled in the dingy heart of Pasadena, Texas. The bull, a rock-hard hunk of bucking and swiveling hydraulic might, was devised to toughen the timing of rodeo bull riders, but country singer Mickey Gilley and partner Sherwood Cryer installed this one to cool off the club’s shit-kicking clientele — mostly drugstore cowboys who labor by day at nearby petrochemical plants.

This afternoon’s shooting schedule concerns the film’s climactic bull-riding contest, wherein Bud Davis (Travolta) challenges archrival Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn), a sinewy ex-con with “real cowboy” rodeo credentials who has diverted the attentions of Bud’s rambunctious bride, Sissy (Debra Winger).

The club’s noisy air-conditioning system has been shut off to avoid interfering with the sound technicians, and the sweltering environs have been suffused with musty artificial smoke. To make matters worse, today’s ration of beer is Gilley’s own, not the far superior, long-necked Lone Star the extras had previously been served — an indiscretion greeted with grunts of “What’s this, cow piss?” It is all the camera crew can do to hold back the Gilley’s regulars until the day’s shooting is in the can. Paramount is struggling to place a frame around a frame, so to speak, and the filmmakers can’t help editing these people’s lives in the process; and they, in turn, can’t help openly resenting it. (In order to keep the club open during Paramount’s four-month-long cinematic bender, the management of Gilley’s has insisted the movie folk clear out every night no later than seven.)

There’s an undeniably spooky aura about the way Travolta looms on the sidelines of the “bull ring,” somehow shutting out the envious, even angry glares surging down from the bleachers erected around this strange arena. Nevertheless, there is an informal posse among the Pasadena-area talent, who occasionally crack clumsy jokes about the “Texas ways” Travolta has yet to assimilate. When one cocky local fella summons up the courage, he blurts out that he’s heard Travolta, who is reported to be hog-wild about aviation, is actually scared shitless of flyin’! No one offers Travolta a hearty Texas backslap to diffuse the gag. He smiles and gamely murmurs, “Lies, lies.” But his timing is off, and the uneasy instant is swallowed up in the silence.

“The first night I went down to Gilley’s with Travolta, we slipped in a side door to show John exactly what it looked like,” director James Bridges later tells me. “Before we could stop him, he was on the dance floor. He had a beard then, and nobody noticed him. But the minute we were in the ‘hot’ area around the bull, people began to recognize him. There were catcalls, the redneck honky-tonkers baiting him while their girls screamed with excitement. A little too much macho tension there.

“I was in there one night when there were fifteen fights,” Bridges continues. “I was there one night when somebody’s eye was gouged out. And I was there when Steve Strange [who runs the bull machine] threw a guy on the bull. He said to me, ‘Watch.’ And he took the controls and threw him up in the air. The guy’s back fell against the plastic base of the bull and he split his head open. There was blood everywhere; everybody thought he was dead. They got him up after about fifteen minutes. Steve walked over, laughing, poured beer on the base to wash off the blood, then looked around and said, ‘Next.'”

When I mention all of this to Travolta afterward, he falls silent for a moment, stares off into space, then looks me squarely in the eyes.

“The people who hung out there were ready for a fight, definitely.” Travolta agrees. “But I liked it, ’cause I got a real charge out of that danger.”