Managers in the West

Back in 1977, a media triumvirate of three young girls reigned in the West. Jodie Foster plays a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, roaming the sidewalks of New York in high heels and mini-shorts. ‘Are you really twelve and a half?’ worries the character played by Robert de Niro. ‘Hey, Jodie, have you got a boyfriend, when are you going to get married?’ asks the journalist interviewing the actress on his programme.

Brooke Shields, too, plays a prostituted child in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, a virgin in a cream guipure dress, sold at auction in a turn-of-the-century brothel.

‘I want you to be my lover,’ she whispers to Keith Carradine while the soundtrack plays a nostalgic Scot Joplin tune. ‘Mmmm, you have quite a come-on look… Do you know what that expression means?’ a mocking talk-show host asks Brooke Shields. Embarrassed, the little girl murmurs, ‘Not really, no.’ Then the presenter flicks through a magazine and holds it up to the camera, ‘Mmm, so much the better. Tell me, do you think you’re sexy in this photo?’

Aged ten, she posed naked in a bath, her smooth, slender body covered in oil, her face thick with make-up. Silent, Brooke rubs her nose and turns to the photographer sitting on the set beside her. He says enthusiastically, ‘What a vamp! That photo is of a naked young girl who looks like a little boy who wants to look like a woman.’ He’s in the pay of Playboy Press, contributing the photograph to a publication devoted to very young girls: Sugar and Spice.

Nadia C. is the third young girl. For the girls in the West, the communist child with her make-up-free face gives them a taste of what war is all about. The best line of attack is to launch their straining bodies as hard as they can.

‘I went to New York in 1977 for a competition. On Broadway there were these huge billboards showing a young girl the same age as me, advertising a perfume, I think. I was fascinated. I wasn’t that kind of… I wasn’t a girl who dreamed of becoming a woman. I wasn’t a boy either. I kept myself… somewhere else. Outside all that.’

Lacquered chestnut brown bunches frame her blue gaze and long mascaraed eyelashes, her glossy lips half open as she clutches a beige teddy bear to her; the little girl in a white dress Nadia remembers so well is eight years old when she becomes the face of Love’s Baby Soft perfumes. At the bottom of the poster, the slogan ‘Because innocence is sexier than you imagine…’