During the last few years of the 1970s, John Travolta reigned as one of the most towering stars in Hollywood, second, perhaps, only to Burt Reynolds and Robert Redford as a top male box office draw. After a string of hits in films, on television, and on the radio, Travolta emerged as a seemingly unstoppable cultural phenomenon, defining tastes in music and fashion while dominating innumerable columns of newspapers and tabloids. Like so many other celebrities, Travolta's initial fame proved short-lived, however, and by the mid-1980s the media and the public alike began to regard him as an outmoded relic of his era...