Revealed: John Travoltas Secret Love Life!

After a passionate, steamy kiss between Grease co-stars  and  at the film premiere's Paramount Studios after-party in 1978 made the rounds in fan magazines, it was the question on everyone's lips. Were these hot superstars hopelessly devoted in real life, too?

Bouncing hand-in-hand onto the stage, with smiles as big as their bouffant 1980s hair, Newton-John and Travoltawere greeted by Joan Rivers's audience with thunderous applause a few short years later.

'You look great together,' the host told the couple as they snuggled up side-by-side, still holding hands. 'Are you an item?'

'Yes,' said Travolta, causing Newton-John to giggle. He continued, attempting to be serious: 'The truth is, we were both involved with other people. So it never happened.'

But that 1983 interview, it now emerges, may not have been the full picture.

A new biography of the British-born Australian-American actress claims that Newton-John and Travolta were, indeed, romantically involved while filming the 1978 classic Grease. 

So enamored were they that she contemplated marrying him.

But, according to Matthew Hild, author of A Little More Love: The Life and Legacy of Olivia Newton-John, Travolta's beliefs were an insurmountable obstacle. Raised a Catholic, he converted in 1975, age 21, and remains to this day one of the faith's most high-profile figures.

Newton-John gave little sign of the seriousness of her feelings until, more than 20 years after the film was made, she asked a musician in her band, who had been married to a Scientologist, what it meant for marriage.

Hild writes: '"I know the Church of Scientology really reveres him as a very valuable follower," Olivia said. "If I had married John, would he have expected me to become a Scientologist?"'

The musician replied, according to Hild: 'It would not have been mandatory, but it would have been encouraged, put it that way.'

Newton-John reportedly responded: 'Thank you. That's all I want to know.'

Scientology does not ban non-believers from marrying a member of the church, as long as they are not deemed to be in opposition to it - an individual termed a 'Suppressive Person.'

But if Travolta's faith was indeed an obstacle to Newton-John, it would not be the first time that Scientology has reportedly come between high-profile couples.

Tom Cruise, perhaps even more famous as a Scientologist than Travolta, divorced Nicole Kidman in 2001, shortly after their tenth wedding anniversary, with his faith reported to be a factor. She never embraced the religion, and neither did Cruise's second wife, Katie Holmes, who divorced in June 2012 after six years.

Marriage concerns aside, the chemistry between the pair on set was undeniable - and from the start. In her 2019 memoir Don’t Stop Believin, Newton-John reflected about the moment she met Travolta on set of the movie.

'When we walked inside the room together, it was magic, and everyone saw it,' she wrote. 'Yes, we really liked each other and there was an attraction, but we would never date because we were both involved with other people at the time and both of us have a loyalty streak that runs deep.'

Still, that attraction was so evident, according to Didi Conn, their Grease co-star who played Frenchy, that Travolta had the hots for Newton-John.

'Oh yeah [he did fancy her],' Conn said.

'So the beginning of the movie Sandy and Danny are kissing and then she pulls away dramatically and sad and wondering if they'll ever see each other again. Well, do they ever kiss in the movie again? They never.'

'Randal Kleiser, the director, thought: "Maybe I should make an alternative ending," and they fly up into the sky and instead of looking back, Danny looks at Sandy and pulls her closer to him and gives her the juiciest kiss and Olivia. 

'You see for a moment she's surprised and then she responds. It's juicy and it's great.

'They weren't acting in that moment, it was like he had his chance and he was going to take it. It was real, it really was.'

It clearly stuck with Newton-John, who admitted years later: 'There's a safety I feel when I'm with him. He's always been my protector.'

However, Newton-John and Travolta both always denied anything beyond friendship.

'It almost happened between us a few times, but it didn't,' Travolta wrote in a passage for Newton-John's memoir. 'Sometimes life just offers you the wrong timing. We had to leave it as dear friends.'

In 1980, on arrival at London's Heathrow airport, Newton-John was asked about Travolta boasting that he always ended up in a relationship with his leading ladies.

She replied: 'He is always being misquoted. We are good friends, and I know he would never say anything like that.'

By that point, of course, Travolta was well known as a ladies' man.

At the age of 23, he began dating his on-screen mother in the TV film The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, 41-year-old Diana Hyland. She died a year later, in 1977, from breast cancer.

Several months later he would move on with Marilu Henner, who he would see on-and-off for the next 13 years – including while filming Grease.

In 1980 he sparked dating rumors with Catherine Deneuve, and the following year was seen around town with Brooke Shields – at the time he was 27, and she was 16. In her memoir, she wrote years later that it was a platonic relationship.

That doesn't mean that Travolta ever gave up hope of winning over Newton-John.

'If you were a young man in the 70s, and I'm sure many of you were, out there, if you remember that album cover of Olivia with that blue shirt on, with those big blue eyes staring right at you, every boy's, every man's dream was, "Oh, I'd love for that girl to be my girlfriend,"' he said in 2018.

Newton-John, who died in August 2022 at the age of 73, went on to marry twice.

She was married to actor Matt Lattanzi from 1984 to 1995, with whom she had her only child, daughter Chloe, now 40.

And from 2008 until her death, she was married to businessman John Easterling, who specialized in Amazonian herbal medicine.

Travolta, meanwhile, was married to actress Kelly Preston from 1991 until her death in 2020.

In 2016, the New Jersey-born Travolta said that he was adamant that Newton-John - at the time, a musical superstar but film novice - be cast opposite him.

'She had a brilliant voice, and I didn't think there could be any more correct person for Sandy in the universe,' he told Vanity Fair, adding that casting Newton-John in the 70s was like 'putting Taylor Swift in that role today.'

He added: 'I never let up on it. I insisted that she be met, and that we cast her.'

Hild, in the first new biography of Newton-John since her death, details a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

In 1982, Newton-John and her future husband, Lattanzi, spent the July 4 holiday with Travolta and his then-girlfriend Marilu Henner, who met Travolta when they both starred in the original Broadway musical of Grease.

In 1983, Newton-John and Travolta reunited on screen for Two of a Kind, which sadly was a flop. It was ruinous for her acting career, and saw Travolta sidelined for several years, until his return with Look Who's Talking and then Pulp Fiction.

Almost 20 years later, they were back together again to record the single This Christmas.

Forty years after Grease was released, Newton-John said: 'We did something life-changing, making that film. [At the premiere] you got the feeling from the energy that something was happening. It was a huge response. I feel grateful to be a part of that and to have worked with him. We've stayed friends ever since.'

Travolta added: 'When you share that kind of meteoric success - and nothing has been able to exceed it - you share a bond. 

'I've been through her having a child, getting divorced, losing her sister. She's been through my getting married, having children. It's wonderful and full of shared memories.'