I have a longing to connect

‘Being a child prodigy is inherently lonely,” Jodie Foster says. “I was one of them. You’re different from other kids. No one else can understand. There’s a longing to connect, a craving to say, ‘Here is the deepest part of me, the part that people don’t see.’”
Sitting in an elegant suite in a Beverly Hills hotel a short drive from her home, Jodie leans forward, her elbows on her knees, and speaks softly in her deep, boyish voice.
“When I look back at my life,” she tells me, “I think it has been about the search for meaning and connection.”

Jodie seems weary. Her lovely face is drawn, her blue eyes tired behind her glasses. Small (5 feet 3), thin and with very little makeup, she has none of the glamour expected of an A-list movie star. She’s dressed simply in tight jeans, ankle boots and a blue cardigan sweater pulled over a white blouse.

“I’ve been working for 42 years,” says Jodie, who’s now 45. “Sometimes I think, ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s the value of all this?’I have fantasies about the things I might have done. I wish I’d been a ski bum or maybe had a job at a Starbucks in a ski place.” She chuckles to herself. “Now I’ve got responsibilities, cars, kids…”

Jodie, who never married, has two sons: Charles Bernard Foster, 9, and Kit Bernard Foster, 6. She worries about them and the effect her life will have on them.

“I do what I can,” she says. “We try not to go out at night or go places where there’ll be 20 photographers. I try to minimize their exposure to assaults.”

The same goes for herself. She will not address long-standing rumors about her sexual orientation or name her sons’ father. When asked about her personal life, she fidgets and turns wary.

“I don’t think there is any good thing about fame,” she asserts. “In this business, in order to care for yourself and the people you love, you have to separate your professional life from your personal life. I have a work life that is at times fulfilling, at times mind-numbingly boring and totally trivial, with the hair, makeup, red carpet—but when it is 7 o’clock and I come home, that’s my life.”

Jodie first tasted celebrity as a kid in commercials, TV shows and Disney teen pictures. World stardom followed when director Martin Scorsese cast her as a teen prostitute opposite Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. She was 13 and earned an Oscar nomination. In the following decades, she won Academy Awards as Best Actress for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs. Her new movie, Nim’s Island, a delightful family comedy-adventure, opens on April 4. It is Jodie’s 43rd film and her first adult role in a picture made for children.

“Today I see kids at 10 who have this kind of internal light in them about acting,” she observes. “They want to put a lampshade on their heads. I was never like that. I grew up here in L.A. I sort of fell into acting.”

The dominant influence on Jodie was her mother, Evelyn “Brandy” Foster, now 79. “My parents divorced before I was born,” she says. “I’ve never really known my father. He lives somewhere in L.A. I’ve only met him a couple of times.”

When Jodie was 3, she landed her first job—a Coppertone commercial. From that point on, her mom became her manager.

“A parent’s love for her children is unconditional,” she says. “I don’t think the reverse is true. In some ways, my mother’s life was given meaning through me. She didn’t have my opportunities. I had to take care of her, and that pretty much meant I had to wake up and go to work.

“People ask me if I missed anything by not having a normal childhood.” She shrugs. “The truth is, if I’d been an ambassador’s daughter or grown up on a farm in Missouri, I wouldn’t have had a normal childhood either. I had the only childhood I knew.”

Jodie attended Yale. While she was there, John Hinckley Jr., an obsessed fan, shot President Reagan in a bid to impress her. Despite the resulting media frenzy, she graduated magna cum laude, with a B.A. in literature, in 1985. She was 23.

Following graduation, Jodie returned to California. “I got really depressed. I’d watch old movies until 2 a.m., wake up at noon. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I couldn’t decide if I’d be OK being an actor anymore.”

Jodie considered changing occupations, but first she decided she would go after the leading role in The Accused—a gang-rape victim who seeks justice. “I thought the movie was a chance for me to figure out what I should do with my life. I’m drawn to films about people who live these lonely, heroic journeys. When I saw the first cut of the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, my God! I am so bad!’” she says. “I went straight out and took my GREs [graduate school entrance exams]. I was definitely going to grad school.”

Winning the Oscar as Best Actress for The Accused changed her mind.

Jodie has never admitted to any romantic involvements. When I ask why she has not yet fallen in love, she gets irritated and explains, perhaps disingenuously, “Oh, my life is basically from the head up. I’m definitely not proud of that. I’m very analytical.”

This past December, she opened the window slightly on her emotional commitments by publicly acknowledging her longtime friend, Cydney Bernard, at a Women in Entertainment breakfast in Los Angeles. Speaking about her, Jodie said: “My beautiful Cydney sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss.” The middle name of both of Jodie’s sons is Bernard.

“I’m still not sure where I’m going in my life,” Jodie tells me. “There are times when I don’t really know what I am here for. When I had my kids, I was burnt out on the film business again and wondering if this new identity as a parent was going to be fulfilling enough. I was forced to ask these really hard questions about myself: Is being a mother everything? Are you supposed to lose yourself in the process of being a mother?

“I wanted to have children,” she continues, speaking intently. “I’ve always had a special connection with my boys. They are the center of my world. I wanted to love someone more than myself. What I realize now is the joy I feel in watching my boys become somebody—and also knowing that in time they will walk away. They will leave you, and when they do, you will tell yourself you’ve succeeded because they can fly away. They don’t need you anymore.”

She pauses, glancing out the hotel window as if looking for her sons.

“Now, of course, I am starting to see and understand how valuable it is for me to have an adult life apart from them,” she says quietly, as if to herself. “That’s important for kids to know. Otherwise you’re a burden.

“Most of all,” she adds, “I want my children to find connection and meaning, like I’ve found connection through them. I’ve found my own nuggets of meaning too. That’s what I am most proud of—that I’ve known those transcendent moments. I’ve had those quick realizations of connection that are impossible to explain. They fly away so fast! But isn’t it the hope of finding them again that keeps us moving?”

Updated:
via The celebrity facts
Her mother Evelyn Ella “Brandy” Almond and her father Lucius Fisher Foster III divorced three years before Jodie’s birth. Foster was a real estate broker and came from a wealthy background. He left his wife with three children – Cindy, Connie and Buddy. Jodie’s mother worked as a film producer in order to support her family. In 1962 Evelyn visited Lucius in order to ask him for child support and they ended up conceiving Jodie. The baby was born under the name Alicia Christian Foster but her siblings nicknamed her Jodie and later she started using the nickname officially.

Sources:

JODIE FOSTER

Jodie Foster

Ants at war

In the American desert, where resources are scarce, honeypot ants wage war without end. Rob Dunn asks if we can draw parallels between ant and human conflict.

He was seven. His dad had just come back from the frontline in World War II, where he worked as a medic. The bombs had not yet fallen on Germany. But father and son did not discuss the war; instead, they talked about insects.

In the American desert, where resources are scarce, honeypot ants wage war without end. Rob Dunn asks if we can draw parallels between ant and human conflict.

The pair went on long country walks to look for beetles, butterflies and, more than anything, ants. The father, Karl Hölldobler, loved ants. But he was also fascinated by the wasps and other animals that lived in their nests with them, “behind enemy lines” as he put it.

In the years that followed, the world changed. The Allies arrived in Germany. East and West were divided and set upon their separate paths. Meanwhile, the boy, Bert Hölldobler, remained devoted to ants.

He began by studying species like those his father had collected during the war. Next, he resolved how the beetles that inhabit some ant nests find their hosts. Eventually, he came to study conflict.

All's fair... in war

Warfare in ants can be ferocious. Ants pull at legs. They bite at antennae and heads. They spray formic acid and stab with their needle-like stings. It was not so much that Hölldobler sought out the wars of ants: his approach was simply to study any ant that he happened upon, in the hope of making new observations. But it was hard to ignore the fighting.

Some clashes, like those of the pavement ant Tetramorium caespitum, seemed to drag on, viciously, without end. Others were harder to relate to his experience of human warfare – or even to explain at all. Such was the case one day in Arizona when he found himself out in the desert on his belly, staring, rapt, at the ground.

Honey monsters

Hölldobler checked for snakes, cleared a spot and made himself as comfortable as one can be out in the desert sun. Then he proceeded to watch. His subjects were female workers of the species Myrmecocystus mimicus, an American honeypot ant.

Honeypot ants, as their name suggests, can store honey. The specialised workers that perform this function, called repletes, hang from the ceiling of the nest. This is their only job.

When conditions are good, they are fed by other workers, mouth to mouth, until their abdomens swell with sugary honeydew and nectar. Their heads, legs and antennae are tiny, but their golden bellies bloat to the size of marbles. During lean times, they share their stored goodness with those in need. Their wax and wane mark the seasons.

The honeypots of Myrmecocystus have been eaten by desert-dwelling people for generations. But this is not what Hölldobler noticed that day in the desert. The scene looked more like a ritual than a biological phenomenon. It defied belief.

Ritual sparring

The ants ran towards each other, reared up as high as they could, then looked at one another, heads cocked. It was almost as if they were sizing up their opponents in a diminutive version of West Side Story, staged on a set of prickly pear and sand.

Hölldobler noticed certain patterns in the ants’ behaviour. Again and again, they faced off. Most of the time, these ‘contests’, for want of a better word, resulted in a kind of uneasy peace. But, every so often, full-scale wars broke out.

When hostilities erupted, the resolution was swift and dramatic. The winning army would kill the workers of the rival colony, dispatch the queen, then carry home the honeypots.

Back in the nest, these abductees would be tended to as a living larder, in much the same way that sailors once kept live tortoises aboard ships, to be eaten when needed.

A limited resource

Hölldobler discovered that Myrmecocystus ants in general, and those of the species M. mimicus in particular, feed on termites. Termites are a food worth fighting for. Like cows, they are fat and unprotected. But – unlike cows – they are hard to predict.

Termites emerge in one place one day, only to appear in another the next. It is difficult for ants to defend such an ephemeral food source by establishing territories in the traditional manner.

And so Hölldobler began to wonder if perhaps it might not pay for M. mimicus colonies to defend a single patch of ground for long. Maybe they defend more momentary territories – a piece of space and time. The question was how.

To understand what was going on, the scientist recorded thousands of hours of video of the ants and their contests. He filmed for two years, letting the tape roll as the drama unfolded.

What emerged from these observations, and later modelling efforts, was that the ants he had seen, acting out their strange rituals, were, indeed, assessing each other.

Know your enemy

The contests were bloodless, with warring ants standing tall and even climbing on pebbles in order to assess their adversaries based on some mix of individual size, the numbers involved and other difficult to discern calculations.

Most days, that is the end of it: two colonies, having asserted their respective size and status, manage to keep the peace. However, if one colony judges the other to be small (that is, roughly a 10th of its own size), it attacks.

The desert floor is a hard place to be an up-and-comer. It is a geopolitical realm where only the old powers can share a truce.

This is not the full extent of the complex world of ant politics, but a measure of it anyway, and these complex manoeuvres are going on right now, out in the desert, as you read this article, as they no doubt have done for millions of years.

Of ants and men

Hölldobler went on to study many other kinds of ant, and in 1990 published the book on the subject (called simply The Ants). In doing so, he and co-author EO Wilson won a Pulitzer prize for their writing, which included, dare I say it, his wartime journalism among the ants.

By the time of Hölldobler’s work on M. mimicus, there was already a long history of studying ant wars in order to better understand the travails of man. It was even felt that generals could learn from their battles (he received two reprint requests for his first Myrmecocystus paper from the KGB and CIA). But, for him, they remained just ants: lovely and complex, yet uncomplicated.

Though Hölldobler himself can ignore the parallels between ant and human conflict, as a reader it is more difficult. One cannot help noticing, for example, that his studies of honeypot ants coincided with the Cold War, a quarrel in which two powers rattled sabres at each other while consuming the world’s resources – not termites and nectar, yet the narrative was similar.

We stand like the ants on our biggest pebbles and try, again and again, to look tall. This is not to say the ants are a model for what we should do.

Hölldobler recently confided this to me: “Wherever you find highly co-operative societies, whether slime moulds, insects or primates (including humans), you will invariably encounter discrimination and aggression against members of neighbouring societies.”

 Resources and reason

In the end, there is no pithy lesson to be learned from the ants, other than that there is a tendency towards competition and wars, which is exacerbated when resources are scarce. In ants, this may be balanced on some occasions by rituals – a dance here and there of figures struggling to look tall.

In women and men, this must be balanced by reason, that most tenuous of creatures, rather than rituals. Reason holds back the demons. It is also what continues to send Hölldobler, now almost 80 years old, out into the desert.

DID YOU KNOW?

Myrmecocystus mimicus colonies may have several queens – up to six is not unheard of. Each may live for 20 years or more, nearly all of which is spent in total darkness.

ANTS ON THE MENU

Sweet-toothed humans have snacked on honeypot ants since prehistoric times.

• Ants have independently evolved honey storage in deserts around the world: Myrmecocystus in North America,Camponotus and Melophorus in Australia, other kinds in other places. Repletes hang. Honey is stored. Tough times are overcome through pluck and reserve.

• But ant societies are not the only ones for which history repeats itself. In what is now the south-west USA, Native Americans have long plundered the repletes of honeypot ants, lying prone on the hot earth to dig them out with sticks. Amazingly, the same also happens in Australia, where a totally unrelated honeypot ant is harvested by a culturally unrelated race of people.

• If there is a lesson here, it is this: in a desert, ants will work out how to store sugar, and, if they store sugar, desert people will work out how to find it.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FOOD STORAGE

From ants to wasps, many creatures have evolved the ability to store food.

• Grasshoppers store food by getting fat. That is enough for them and so they have diversified and persisted. It’s the same for bears and crickets. They have no other way, no place to put anything else they might gather, nor any way to keep it from rotting. In this they are like our ancestors or, for that matter, the ancestors of ants.

• But then the ability to store food evolved, many times. Moles store half-eaten (but still living) earthworms. Squirrels store fungi. Carnivores store meat, bowerbirds fruit. Shrews store snails. Wasps store paralysed spiders and nearly everything stores seeds.

• And then there are the ants, some of which cache seeds, while others hang up honey. Ants are the only group in which a special caste of individuals has evolved to store food. We can be thankful for that. I have plenty of relatives, but there are none from whom, even in times of great need, I’d be pleased to receive a dose of regurgitated honey.

 Sources:

Looting, Cannibalism and Death Blows: The ‘Shock and Awe’ of Ant Warfare