What's Driving Miss Jodie?

by Michael Segell
Redbook (November 1991)

Jodie Foster has an instinct for telling the truth. Sort of. She's just called from her car phone to apologize for being late. She's been stuck in traffic, she says, and will be along in no more than ten minutes. Sure enough, she soon bounds into the Hollywood office where we've agreed to meet, all buoyant charm and energy.

"Hi, I'm Jodie Foster," she says unpretentiously, extending a small hand with a powerful grip. She's dressed in what she calls her "schlumpfy" mode: brown denim skirt, a man's white T-shirt and tan sandals, her face free of makeup and her tousled dirty-blond hair begging for a comb. She places a drawstring shopping bag on the floor. The name of the boutique is printed on its side: Traffic.

So. Was she stuck in traffic, or stuck in Traffic?

She blushes a little and then smiles, apparently delighted that her wordplay had not gone unappreciated. "I had to pick up a belt," she says, settling onto a couch.Those famous limpid blue eyes sharpen their focus: I wasn't lying, they say. "I got stuck in Traffic."

To anyone who has seen her movies, it should come as no surprise that Foster would resort to verbal gymnastics to avoid telling a white lie. On screen, she has always leaned toward illuminating subjects that everyone else prefers to cover up. In her personal life, honesty is a high prioritty — almost to a fault, says her mother, Evelyn "Brandy" Foster. "I go for complexity," Jodie maintains, "and usually the truth is complex."

Fortunately, there's nothing complex about her down-to-earth friendliness. Twiddling a strand of hair between her fingers, she sits cross-legged on the edge of the couch, seemingly as delighted and eager as a quiz show contestant to show off her brains. A Yale graduate with honors (Class of '85), she's a verbal type who tends to think out loud. Because she thinks so fast, there seems almost no time for deception.

Foster is at one of those enviable crossroads in a young actress' career. In quick succession, she has won an Oscar (for her performance as the gang-rape victim in the 1988 movie, The Accused, hoisted the year's most talked-about film, The Silence of the Lambs, with a riveting performance, and directed her first feature film, Little Man Tate. The former child actress, now 28, can pretty much do what she wants in the adult film world. So what might that be?

She wants to make a sexual scorcher.

Out of nowhere she's leaped onto the subject of how absurd — and false — Hollywood's renderings of women's sexuality are on screen. She finds it "laughable" that women in movies can manage a shattering orgasm after about 20 seconds of sex.

"Most movies use sexuality as a symbol," she says with the seriousness of an art-film student. "It's all about poses and postures, and that's not what my generation is about. I'm waiting to see a movie about the women I know — a movie that explores the dynamics of why that other person completes you, why you're together. I'd like to explore female sexuality in a way that people don't get to see on screen."

And how would she do that?

She leans forward, cradling a cup of coffee in both hands.

"I'm fascinated by the idea of putting two people in a room for twenty hours, finding out what they do when no one else is around — and filming it." Those blue eyes narrow their focus again. Are you getting this? they want to know. "I mean, people do the weirdest things when they're alone."

What things? What people? The temperature in the room seems to have risen a few degrees.

She crosses her legs, combs her fingers through her hair and sinks back into the couch. Those famous baby blues twinkle yet again.

Jodie Foster is skilled at avoiding questions and dodging comments on forbidden territory — specifically the realm of two prohibited topics. Prohibited Topic Number One involves everything about her romantic life and inclinations, which is where conversations about female sexuality naturally lead.

Prohibited Topic Number Two is John W. Hinckley, Jr., the deranged drifter who, at age 26, shot President Reagan (and three of his escorts, including then-White House Press Secretary James Brady) in 1981. The attempted assassination, as Hinckley later told authorities, was meant to impress Foster "in my own unique way." For months before the incident, Hinckley had pestered Foster by phone and sent her, by his count, about 100 poems and love letters — twice visiting Yale and hand-delivering his disturbing missives to her dorm. Hinckley professed to have been in love with the actress ever since seeing her portray a 12-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver five years before.

Foster's freshman year, which she had looked forward to, was shattered by the crush of media attention that followed the shooting, and by the latter discovery that a copycat madman had been dogging her on campus — even attending a play she was appearing in with a loaded gun in his pocket. Yale officials moved Foster to an emergency security apartment and threw a blanket of protection around her.

Jodie was disappointed. "She had tried so hard to be anonymous there," says Brandy. A year later, the actress wrote about the terror she experienced in an article for Esquire: "In a time of crisis, you resort to strength you'd never dreamed you owned, like frantic mothers lifting their children from under two-ton trucks. The will to survive is stronger than any emotion."

Lee Eisenberg, who was editor-in-chief of Esquire then, offered Foster a summer internship at the magazine, which led to a close friendship between the two. "She was a bright, talented young woman who had written a piece about the Hinckley affair that I thought was good," he says. "We went on to become friends."

Today, though she's understandably reluctant to discuss the Hinckley incident, Foster admits that her movie choices have been influenced — at least unconsciously — by traumatic events. "The characters I've chosen and the issues I've been moved by are all about things I need to understand about myself and about things I need other people to understand about me," she says.

Not surprisingly, personal strength is a trait by many of her big-screen characters, starting with the girls she played in The Hotel New Hampshire and Five Corners. Some characters, like Sarah Tobias, the waitress in The Accused who is gang-raped in a bar while on a drinking binge, have not been readily sympathetic.

"Jodie has always looked at the political subtext of her movies," says Foster's mother, who is also her daughter's manager. "Fortunately, when she was at Yale and the [Hinckley] crime happened, the women's movement was at its prime. Since then, I don't think she's done anything that, in her own conscience, went against her values or was not politically correct for her."

Silence director Jonathan Demme, too, says that what Foster has been through emotionally helped pilot her riveting performance in the film. "I liked what she felt was important about Silence," he says. "Her identification was with a character who felt deeply for victims."

For her part, Foster denies using her film roles as therapy. "You can paint autobiography on anything," she says. "But most of these movies are about the making of heroines.

"Many people have the idea that my movies are fueled by an avid feminism," Foster explains. "I am a feminist — I don't think it's a dirty word — but that's not what the movies are about. I'm interested in complexity. I'm tired of seeing women on the screen who are cheerleaders or victims with a capital V, incapable of being anything in between. That's oppressive to me."

"Somebody like Sarah Tobias is not exactly a mature, intelligent, sophisticated female role model," Foster adds. "But she's human, and is entitled to dignity and respect. It's very important for everybody to recognize that negative stereotypes and negative history have a place in movies. Not every woman in a film should be a lawyer or a president of some company. That's only a part of female experience."

Recently, Foster entered another realm of female experience in movies: motherhood. In Little Man Tate, which also marks her debut as a director, Foster plays Dede Tate, a waitress of limited means and talents and the affectionate mother of a gifted little boy.

"This role is more of a step than anything I've done in a long time," Foster says, "because I show something I've never before chosen to show on screen. And that is: totally warm, totally loving. I feel like I've built my characters on this strength stuff, and now I want to explore a part of me that's a little bit lighter, but not necessarily comic."

Is the next stage in her wonderful career all about nurturing?

"Well, I do want to have kids," she says with an air of mystery. "But I won't feel unfulfilled if I don't. Maybe I will — and maybe I won't."

Tate contains obvious parallels to Foster's own life. She was also the whiz kid to a single mother — she learned to read before she was three and was accepted in a program for gifted children when she was in second grade.

"Single parenting is something I know a lot about," says Foster. "It's a very strange, very intense, very intimate relationship. A single parent has to be everything to a child. And the needs the parent has, which might have been fulfilled by a partner, are fulfilled by you or your siblings."

Foster describes her family history as unconventional, filled with a great deal of love and harmony, but also marked by "certain types of tragedies." She has always been extremely close to her mother, who was left with the daunting task of raising Foster and her three siblings alone after she and their father, Lucius, divorced. Brandy was four months pregnant with Foster when the marriage dissolved.

"When I say tragedies, I don't mean like Oedipus and Electra," explains Foster, who says she has seen her father only four times. "I mean the subtle events and influences that make you who you are. You're just given whatever you're given; not everything has to be suburban and perfect. Sure, not having a station wagon and two parents pushed me to be certain things and kept me from being others. But I'm not going to say, 'Gee, I wish I had had that,' because I wouldn't be who I am. I'd be someone else, which is okay, but not who I am. And I like who I am."

When Brandy Foster hears her daughter talk about the "tragedies" in her life, she professes not to know what she means. "I think she can be a little dramatic," says Brandy, her voice crackling with laughter. "We didn't have the easiest time, because I had to raise four children alone. But tragedies? No, she didn't have that. What she might be talking about is her having to push herself to get what she wanted for herself. She always did that."

By the time Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster was born, Brandy was renting a Spanish-style stucco house in a seedy section of Hollywood, where she did public relations work for a movie producer. Within a few months of her divorce, the child-support payments had dried up — this was the second flock of kids Lucius had left. A one-for-all attitude prevailed in the house, with first-born Lucinda taking care of the cleaning, and second-oldest, Constance, babysitting Jodie and her older brother, Buddy. "We didn't have much, but what we had was exquisite," recalls Foster. "Like, we always had good Tuscan bread around, and my mother drove a Peugeot and she took us to arty movies. We were a cool, cultured family."

Brandy had used her show biz connections to find Buddy work in commercials. One day, the then-three-year-old Jodie tagged along with her brother and mother to an interview for a Coppertone commercial — and came away with the job herself. Four years later, Jodie followed Buddy's footsteps again when she appeared on Mayberry, R.F.D., the TV series in which he costarred. That show led to a slew of other small-screen roles, before she got a foothold in films. When she was 11, she played a wine-chugging ragamuffin in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Director Martin Scorsese was so impressed by her performance that he also recruited her to play the child hooker in his film Taxi Driver, for which she received her first Oscar nomination.

"Jodie loved working," says her mother. "She enjoyed seeing herself on television and in movies. I never thought it would last — I thought it was a joke that she was able to act. Then one day it dawned on me that I'd better accept it. It wasn't going to stop."

Foster attended Le Lycee Francais in Los Angeles, a strict private school where she was valedictorian of her class. Her mother recalls finding her up at two o'clock one morning writing essays for her applications to Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford. "She got into all of them," says Brandy proudly, "and she used her legal name so they didn't know who she was until she showed up. She was very proud of what she had accomplished."

Despite her fancy education, Foster is decidedly unpreppy and she keeps her nose to the grindstone. At Yale, where she graduated cum laude with a degree in American literature, she usually turned in term papers early — often so that she could get to work on a movie.

Lee Eisenberg recalls that Foster's lack of pretense was widely appreciated. "It wasn't an act," he recalls. "Some people who meet her think she's too good to be true in the sense that she's literate and modest — which is not to say she's without ambition. She's intensely curious and she's genuine. Jodie is all those things."

She credits her discipline — and good genes — with preventing her from experiencing a typical child performer meltdown. "There are a lot of former child actors who are on drugs or just weren't able to cope or adjust," she says. "Why is it that I coped, growing up in a town filled with deceptive people who were trying to screw you all the time? Why didn't I turn into one of them? I think I just inherited strength of character, an ability to take things that could have been disappoinments or hurtful, and use them constructively."

She also credits discipline with getting her over some rough patches, like the postgraduate doldrums. For six months after graduating from Yale, she did little but sleep, read magazines and put on weight. How much weight? She's not saying, but it's difficult to imagine that her small frame — she's 5'4" — would be able to hide more than a few extra pounds.

"Those were dark days," she recalls. "One day, I finally said, 'This is dumb. Since I don't have a job, I'll treat my body like it's a job.' So I spent all day in the gym doing karate, aerobics, yoga, weight lifting — everything. I got into cooking organic food. I'd eat lunch in the same place at the same time every day and at three o'clock, make phone calls. I was really organizing myself from not slipping into the abyss. It was my way of coping."

Her discipline paid off. She desperately wanted to work on The Accused, but knew there had been some concern about her "conditioning." After meeting with the film's producer and casting agent, she told director Jonathan Kaplan, "Well, they saw I'm no longer fat." Her disciplined work ethic also impressed Jonathan Demme when they worked together on The Silence of the Lambs. "Jodie was as no-nonsense and unneurotically focused on the work at hand as can be imagined," he says.

Her degree of exercise compulsion is now the litmus test she uses to decide when she's ready to work.

"After I finish a film, I go away and don't do anything for a while. I know I'm ready to start working again when I start working out like crazy. It's not about exercise; it's about discipline. It's about regenerating a sense of self."

Such regeneration wouldn't be necessary, she says, if acting weren't so debilitating. "To act is to experience powerlessness," she says. "It really kills my confidence. I get torn down, and I need to build up again."

Foster's lifestyle is not inconsistent with her all-American work ethic. She lives in a small, unglamorous house in the Valley, that unsightly suburban sprawl on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. Her mother calls her a nester because she enjoys being home, cooking and gardening. Though money will never again be a concern in her life, Foster claims not to know how to spend it — except on fancy kitchenware. "I love pots and pans," she says. One day, she figures, she'll get around to buying some furniture.

"I like beautiful objects, but I don't like the worry and responsibility that comes along with owning them," she explains. "I'd rather die than have 30 paintings in my house that are all worth seven million dollars. So what I have are some cheap but beautiful photographs."

"Like, my car [a Saab Turbo convertible] drives me crazy. It's a nice car, not fancy or anything, but when I first got it, I was so upset all the time worrying about it. If I went to a show or something, I'd sit there and worry that it was being broken into. Once I got a few dings in it, I was okay. But every once in a while, I drive my old Volkswagen. It makes me feel secure."

She may not have much use for $7 million paintings or the fancy car (her Volkswagen is, in fact, a black-on-black classic convertible in mint condition), but Foster takes nicely to an expensive dress. She can move easily between a skimpy Armani suit (which she wore to great personal advantage at this year's Oscars) and the sweatshirt-and-cutoff mode. "I have two types of clothing," she says. "'Schlumpfy' and exquisite. Both are comfortable to me, but there's not much in between the two."

Sensible, pragmatic and hardworking, Foster is not without her spiritual side. Though raised without a formal religion — "the Golden Rule was the religion of the house," says her mother — she's always had a sense of her own destiny. "I do feel like I've been on a path that's been laid down for me," she says, fingering a pendant around her neck. "And I've always been absolutely willing to follow it."

She's also not without her superstitions. Between jobs (though she has a cameo in Woody Allen's upcoming film Shadows and Fog) she wears, as a talisman, a piece of jewelry purchased by the costume designer of her previous movie. Today, as she has every day since finishing Little Man Tate, she's wearing a reversible pendant with portraits of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Between Silence and Tate, it was Mardi Gras beads. When she travels, she brings along a special little pillow. "It's not like I think it brings me luck,' she says. "I just like it. I could sleep without it." She squirms a bit uncomfortably at the thought. "But I always have it with me."

Brandy Foster sees a lot of herself in her daughter. "Like me, Jodie's bossy, stubborn, inquisitive, resilient and adaptable," she says. What did she inherit from her father Lucius? "Nothing," Brandy says quickly. "Well...maybe his charm." Now both mother and daughter are attempting to parlay that charm into a career change. They're on the lookout for a film that Foster figures will complete the transition from strong, determined victim to totally loving, totally warm. And, of course, scorchingly sexual.

Meanwhile, she dreams of writing a book about filmmaking or, when the dreams get really surreal, becoming a talk show host.

"When I was a kid, it was inferred to me that acting is not something you do when you grow up," she says. "It wasn't a profession for anyone who's intelligent. I think when I was fifteen to twenty, my acting was all about playing safe and looking down my nose at everything I saw. The truth is thatt I didn't give it enough credit, because when I work hard enough, acting is the most stimulating thing I've ever done. Performing is not something you can explain to someone. If you're a performer, you can't stop performing."