Hooker Hooked

When she was "just a child" of eleven, her ambition was to be a lawyer and, perhaps, President of the U.S. Now a self-assured 13, Jodie Foster wants instead to be "a very good actress," a goal for which she is almost frighteningly well endowed. What hooked her on acting as a career was the movie Taxi Driver (TIME, Feb. 16), a florid melodrama of Manhattan's streets that is mostly memorable for Jodie's portrayal, as to the bordello born, of the trick-wise twelve-year-old whore.

A sheltered, studious Los Angeles tomboy, diminutive (5 ft.) Jodie had little empathy for the role. Her previous parts in movies and TV, notably Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, had been more conventional. "For me it was just a part," says Jodie. "I never feel like the people I'm playing." That may help to explain why her performance escapes the usual prostitute stereotypes. Jodie, however, gives credit to Director Martin Scorsese. Says she: "Before, I would never listen to the directors--they always wanted you to act the same way. But with Marty I saw acting as something creative."

Scorsese first met Jodie at a 1974 audition. "In came this little girl with a Lauren Bacall voice," he recalls. "She cracked us up." When he sent her the script, says Jodie, "I thought this was a great part for a 21-year-old. I couldn't believe they were offering it to me."

Nor could the Los Angeles welfare board, which is charged with the moral chaperonage of young performers. After a long legal hassle, it was agreed that Jodie would be replaced in the more sexually explicit scenes by a double--actually her own 20-year-old sister, Connie. Then Jodie underwent a four-hour session with a U.C.L.A. psychiatrist who had to rule on her mental stability. Says she: "I suppose they figured that if I was willing to play a part like that, I had to be insane." To prepare for the role, she got into "Iris' " satin hot pants and six-inch platforms and spent a month of her summer vacation walking a beat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She was not picked up. "I couldn't believe how she looked in her wardrobe," says her mother, Brandy Foster, a former Hollywood pressagent. "Suddenly she had legs. I don't think I'd ever seen her with her hair curled. I was very happy when she returned to her grubby little self."

For Jodie, returning to herself meant to the gray-skirted school uniform of the rigorous Lycee Franc,ais, where she gets straight A's. She and her mother, who divorced Jodie's father when Jodie was nine months old, share a modest house overlooking the Hollywood Bowl. Since her debut on the television series Mayberry R.F.D., Jodie brightened the short-lived Paper Moon on TV and has made a total of ten movies, including the yet to be released Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, portraying a teeny-bopper killer; Bugsey Malone, an all-child musical; and Echoes of a Summer, with Richard Harris.

Has she missed having a conventional childhood? No, says Jodie. "I've got something extra. I know how to talk to adults and make a decision. Acting has spared me from being a regular everyday kid slob." Or even from being a regular everyday kid-slob actress.

Jodie is neither a button-nosed naif like the young Hayley Mills, nor hard-edged precocious, like Tatum O'Neal ("I think she is very good, but we are different characters"). She does not date, or attend Hollywood functions. She is disarmingly unconcerned about money. Aside from the $1,600 in a savings account from her dollar-a-week allowance, "a few bets" and "liars' poker with the movie crews," she has no idea how much her manager-mother has stashed away. "After all," says Jodie, "I'm just a kid."

She is hoping, however, that Taxi Driver will bring her more adult parts. Says she: "The only place I draw the line is nudity." Then, forgetting what the role of Iris was all about, she adds: "Anyway, no one would want to see a 13-year-old take off her clothes." Some day, she says, she intends to play Othello, no less. Coming from Jodie Foster, that is no teeny-bopper fantasy.

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