John Travolta has had his unfair share of loss
Fame and wealth may insulate you against many of life’s rougher edges, but they offer little protection when it comes to grief and loss. And, despite a glittering career that includes two Golden Globe Awards and two Oscar nominations, not to mention a fortune estimated last year at US$200 million, John Travolta has had more than his fair share of both — though, of course, when it comes to losing loved ones, there is no such thing as fair.
Earlier this week, the Pulp Fiction star announced the death of his wife of almost 29 years, Kelly Preston, following a two-year battle with breast cancer. The 57-year-old actress had shunned the spotlight since 2018, when the couple co-starred in the gangster film, Gotti, her diagnosis a closely kept secret. As recently as Father’s Day, Preston made an all-smiles post on Instagram, giving every impression that all was well in their Hollywood world.
Less than a month later, however, Travolta has lost his companion of three decades — “marriage doesn’t just happen on its own,” Preston said when promoting Gotti at the Cannes Film Festival, “you have to keep creating love” — the latest blow in what, even before her death, he had described as “a life filled with variations of loss.”
In 2009, he and Preston experienced every parent’s worst nightmare when their 16-year-old son, Jett, died suddenly after having a seizure and hitting his head on a bathtub during a family Christmas holiday in the Bahamas. There had been speculation about Jett’s health for many years — intrusive speculation is another recurring feature of Travolta’s life, including his sexuality — but it was only after his death that the couple revealed their son, who had suffered seizures throughout his childhood, had also been diagnosed with autism.
What fewer people realize is that in 1977, 23-year-old Travolta lost his first love to the same disease that would later claim his wife. In 1976, on the set of the TV movie, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, he had fallen for his onscreen mother, the Emmy-winning actress Diana Hyland, who was 18 years his senior. “I have never been more in love with anyone in my life,” he later said. “We were like two maniacs talking all the time on the set of Bubble. After a month it became romantic.”
Tragedy followed shortly afterwards. In the same year that Saturday Night Fever made him an international star and sex symbol as the white-suited disco king, Tony Manero — winning him his first Oscar nomination — Travolta was at Hyland’s bedside as she lost her own battle with breast cancer. Her son Zachary subsequently revealed his mother died in Travolta’s arms.
Such trauma so early in his adult life, Travolta reflected in an interview in 2014, had bequeathed him a certain strength. “I’m probably less terrified of death than your average fellow now,” he said, “because people so near to me have suffered before their time, and I just feel that if they can do it, so can I. I almost feel like it’s disrespectful to fear it when others have been able to do it.”
He was talking on that occasion about how he coped with the death of Jett. His family’s distress — at the time they had a younger daughter, Ella, and the following year, when Preston was 47, she gave birth to a son, Benjamin.