These are some photos of John Travolta and Kelly Preston in late January at the Living Legends of Aviation awards. John hosted the event as the official ambassador of aviation, which I don’t understand. He’s a celebrity and a flight enthusiast. He owns several of his own planes. I guess that’s good enough to be a host and ambassador? So be it.

John is currently promoting an onstage special (in London) called “A Conversation with John Travolta.” He’ll discuss his career hits and misses as well as other aspects of his life thus far. Can you believe John is about to turn 60 years old in a month? He sat down with the Telegraph to reveal a few tidbits in advance. Of particular interest is John’s admission that his Scientology minders didn’t leave his side for two years after the death of his eldest son, Jett, at age 16. Poor John is completely brainwashed, or he’s a better actor than I’ve ever given him credit for being. He communicates gratitude for the CO$’s support, but most of us find the idea of Scientology minders very scary in general. Let’s do some excerpts:

On his Oscar nomination for Saturday Night Fever at age 24: “I always knew how lucky I was. So actually I was quite humbled by success when it came. I felt like the decade between 25 and 35 was my most difficult. Then, once Pulp Fiction came into play, I was being offered the most wonderful roles again.”

His feelings on death: “I’m probably less terrified of death than your average fellow now, because people so near to me have suffered before their time and I just feel that if they can do it, so can I. The edge — the panic that most people feel — has been taken off death for me. I almost feel like it’s disrespectful to fear it when others have been able to do it.”

Scientologist handlers followed him for years: “Oh my God. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had the support of Scientology. I don’t think I could have got through it. They were with me every day after Jett died. They even travelled with me when I needed to get away. And for a solid two years it was like that. It was only in the second year that I started to take a break of a day or two just to see how I was doing on my own.”

His 1985 dance with Princess Diana: Travolta felt that it was “two victims of [fame] dancing together.” “There really was something lovely and girlish about her, and I felt that I had taken her back to her childhood, when she had probably watched Grease — and for that moment I was her Prince Charming.” He wasn’t nervous, he says, “because I’d seen her dance with Charles beforehand so I knew that she was strong. But she looked like she was leading [him] and because I knew that the world was watching I thought that I really needed to give her certainty that I knew what to do. I put my hand in the middle of her back, brought her hand down so that it wouldn’t be so high and gave her the confidence that we would do just fine. She was the real deal. And I think that was partly because she followed the rule that ‘it’s OK to be important as long as everyone else is equally important.'”

On getting older: “I don’t love the idea of turning 60,” he admits of his birthday later this month, “so I had hoped to keep it under the radar.” He won’t really “close the chapter on playing villains,” he says, until he gets cast as a baddy in a James Bond film. “I would love that. They’re going a different way with their villain in this next film but I’ve spoken to Barbara Broccoli about it and she loves the idea, so that would be great.”

[From The Telegraph]

Of course Scientologists monitored John (and Kelly) for years after Jett’s death. They didn’t want either parent to go “off message” about autism, which Scientology doesn’t believe even exists. Jett died in January 2009, and then John admitted in April during a sketchy extortion trial that Jett was autistic. Presumably, that’s when the CO$ stepped in to prevent John from publicly talking about it again.

Then in 2012, Kelly blamed chemicals for Jett’s autism. That was a really sad interview where she sounded like she was blaming herself. I even remember watching a late 1990s episode of Regis and Kathie Lee where Kelly was discussing how she believed carpet cleaning fluid had caused Jett to develop Kawasaki syndrome. I guess she eventually accepted that Jett did have autism, and it’s all very sad. Especially since the CO$ doesn’t give a flip about how Kelly or John feels. They just want to control the publicity aspect.

Photos courtesy of WENN