Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [27]
“I got to go out to dinner,” she said. “Look, it’s nice meeting you but I, I’m not supposed to talk to people I don’t know, okay?”
During their next and longest phone conversation, Foster couldn’t even get Hinckley’s name right. “Is this John Hendrix?” she asked.
He corrected her and then said, “Jodie?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you.”
She soon tried to bring the awkward call to an end. “Look, I can’t really be bothered with this, and I don’t want, I don’t want to be mean, and do you know, it just, it upsets my roommates and it upsets me.… You understand why I can’t, you know, carry on these conversations with people I don’t know. You understand that it is dangerous, and it’s just not done, and it’s not fair, and it’s rude.”
“Oh.”
“All right.”
“Well, I’m not dangerous. I promise you that.”
A bit later, Hinckley heard snickering in the background. “What are they laughing at?” he asked.
“They’re laughing at you.”
“Jodie.”
“Seriously, this isn’t fair. Do me a favor and don’t call back. All right?”
Hinckley was devastated by his inability to develop a relationship with Foster. By late October, he had returned home. He had long complained about a variety of maladies, including dizziness, headaches, pain in his arms, weakness in his legs, and heart palpitations. A few months earlier, a doctor had diagnosed him with “depressive reaction” and prescribed an antidepressant and Valium. In August, he had seen a psychologist who worked for his father’s firm. After two sessions, the psychologist concluded that Hinckley was someone “who needed to get his shit together,” not a deeply troubled man.
Writing was one of Hinckley’s passions, and if he had allowed anyone to read his poems and short stories he would have provided clues to his distress. In recent years, his writing had grown increasingly dark, exploring such themes as suicide and patricide. In one story, a chess player kills himself; in another, a man rejects God on his deathbed, an act Hinckley portrayed as an act of courage. His most vivid descriptions were of pain: of a mind being destroyed by “dozens of ravenous lice,” of “a hypodermic penis caught inside a working meat grinder,” of a “few more hungry animals” chewing on a man’s bones.
After he had returned home, Hinckley made a halfhearted attempt to kill himself by overdosing on the antidepressants. Within days, feeling himself near a breaking point, he had his first appointment with a psychiatrist. “A relationship I had dreamed about went absolutely nowhere,” he wrote in a short autobiographical essay for the psychiatrist. “My disillusionment with EVERYTHING was complete. I gave up on myself and came back to Colorado.” In the essay, he said that he cared about only two things: writing and Jodie Foster. Despite the warning signs, the psychiatrist probed no further. During their next ten sessions, which ended in February, the subject of Foster was never discussed again.
In late November, Hinckley struck back at the actress, hoping to complicate her life, or at least shake it up a bit. He sent an anonymous and threatening letter to FBI headquarters in Washington. In block letters, he wrote: “THERE IS A PLOT UNDERWAY TO ABDUCT ACTRESS JODIE FOSTER FROM YALE UNIVERSITY DORM IN DECEMBER OR JANUARY. NO RANSOM. SHE’S BEING TAKEN FOR ROMANTIC REASONS. THIS IS NO JOKE! I DON’T WISH TO GET FURTHER INVOLVED. ACT AS YOU WISH.”
Over the next three months, he returned to New Haven several times and left Foster more messages and letters. In early March, before yet another trip east, he left his parents a note. “Your prodigal son has taken off again to exorcise some demons. I’ll let you know where I am in a few days. This is something I have to do even though I know you don’t understand.”
His approaches to Foster grew more and more brazen, especially during his final trip to New Haven. “Just wait,” he wrote in one letter he left at her door, “I’ll rescue you very soon. J.W.H.” In another, he scribbled: “Jodie, Goodbye! I love you six trillion times. Don’t you maybe like me just a little bit? (You must admit I am different.) It would