It is November, 1976. The final Sunday of the month. Carter has just beaten Ford, the Founding Fathers have just turned 200, and Jodie Foster, who is nine days past her 14th birthday, walks into Hotel Pierre on New York’s Upper East Side. It is cloudy and mild, but dry; Jodie is wearing blue jeans, black boots, a tweed blazer and a newsboy cap. She is there to have lunch with Andy Warhol, though not just to have lunch: Warhol wants to feature her on the cover of his magazine, Interview. The resulting story — presented in Interview’s signature style, a near-verbatim transcript of their conversation — is, like all great magazine moments, an antique. Warhol plays Warhol: affected but intimate. He invites Jodie, who is 14, to order a Bloody Mary. He asks her when she’s going to marry. And he’s bowled over when Jodie, who is 14, speaks fluently in French to a passing acquaintance of his. (“I think you’re really something,” he tells her.) Foster is the ingénue, though she is not naive or unsophisticated. Far from it: she displays a fierce mixture of intelligence, self-possession and finely honed teenaged haughtiness. When her mother, Brandy, who is her chaperone, leaves the restaurant and asks her daughter whether she should return, Jodie’s response is withering: “I don’t care.”
In November ’76, Jodie’s life is changing almost as quickly as she talks. Hours earlier, she’d hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time (becoming the youngest person to have done so), and that year she has five feature films in theatres — five! She is an ingénue and a grafter. One of the five is Taxi Driver, in which she plays the child prostitute Iris Steensma. In a few weeks’ time she’ll receive her first Oscar nomination, for her performance opposite De Niro. She is the child star hoping for acceptance as an actor, and she has it all in front of her. But she doesn’t know what on earth that will constitute, and she is anxious and insecure and already under pressure to conform — to Warhol, the culture, her mother’s expectations. Five decades later, when she reflects on what has transpired — the long reel of movie legend she’s created, the awards, the exposure, the prurience, the fear, the loneliness, and beyond, to an almost mystical ‘other side’ she didn’t even know existed — she will come to regard those teenage years as the most difficult of her life. But at lunch in New York that Sunday, she cares about ‘it’ more than anything, and so she leans in as best she can.
Never, she tells Warhol. She hopes never to marry. “It’s got to be boring — having to share a bathroom with someone.”
When Foster appears on ’s Zoom screen from her home in Los Angeles, the picture could not be more ordinary. Her office walls are cream, bare and a little drab (“I’m going to open up the light,” she says, pulling back some curtains), and Foster is dressed in a loose, striped T-shirt and metal-rimmed glasses. She wears no make-up and has wet, unstyled,” she explains, holding out her hands like a robot receiving an imaginary box. “I just need, like, three feet by 10 feet. And I need a good light. I’m super-easygoing. I mean, I’m crazy, of course. Who wouldn’t be? But yeah, I don’t need a lot from people. I’m super-easygoing.” She considers this anew and adds: “To a fault, actually. I’ve had to work on that.”
