EGYPTIAN THEATRE
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
SUMMER 1976
AFTERNOON
Just fifteen miles from the home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, John Hinckley Jr. sits alone in this aging movie palace watching a new film called Taxi Driver. It’s a motion picture Hinckley will eventually see more than fifteen times. The twenty-one-year-old drifter, who continues to put on weight, wears an army surplus jacket and combat boots, just like the film’s main character, Travis Bickle. Hinckley’s hair is now down to his shoulders, and his breath smells of peach brandy, another affectation he has picked up from Bickle, who is played with frightening intensity by actor Robert De Niro.
Screenwriter Paul Schrader based the character of Bickle on Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Bremer shot Wallace to become famous and impress a girlfriend who had just broken up with him. He had originally intended to kill President Richard Nixon but botched several attempts.1
But it is not De Niro who stirs the most emotion in John Hinckley. Instead, it is the child prostitute Iris who brings him back to the Egyptian Theatre time after time. Portrayed by twelve-year-old Jodie Foster, Iris behaves like an innocent child by day while turning tricks with grown men at night. During the filming of Taxi Driver, Foster was so young that she had to undergo a psychological evaluation to make sure she could cope with the troubling subject matter. Her nineteen-year-old sister, Connie, was brought in to be a body double for her in explicit scenes.2
Hinckley does not know these things. Nor does he care. He is falling in love with Jodie Foster, no matter what her age.
Outside the Egyptian, the once-glamorous streets of Hollywood that Ronald Reagan knew when he was a movie star thirty years ago are no more. Hustlers, con artists, pimps, and drug addicts troll the sidewalks. There is an air of menace as solitary men enter cheap X-rated theaters. Street thugs and drug addicts mingle with tourists who buy tacky souvenirs and study the cement sidewalk handprints of the stars at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
John Hinckley has come to Hollywood to be a star in his own right. He hopes to use his guitar skills to make his fortune, but that has not happened. His squalid accommodation at Howard’s Weekly Apartments just off Sunset Boulevard has become a prison. “I stayed by myself in my apartment,” he would later write of his months in Southern California, “and dreamed of future glory in some undefined field, perhaps music or politics.”
The lonely Hinckley keeps to himself, living on fast food and slowly becoming convinced that Jews and blacks are the enemies of white men like him. The more time he spends in Hollywood, the more Hinckley expands his circle of loathing. He now views the city of Los Angeles as “phony” and “impersonal.”
Isolated, Hinckley does not even keep in contact with his parents unless he needs money. He has become a drifter, unwilling to finish his studies at Texas Tech or get a job, and would be homeless without their support. John and Jo Ann Hinckley are growing increasingly concerned about their son’s behavior, but they support him financially, hoping that one day he will turn his life around and come back to Colorado. Hinckley gives them hope by writing that he is in a relationship with a woman named Lynn. But “Lynn Collins” is not real. She is a myth based on Betsy, Cybill Shepherd’s character in Taxi Driver—a fact the Hinckleys will not learn for five more years.
Jodie Foster as Iris in Taxi Driver
There are more lies, such as the one about the rock music demo he fictitiously records. In reality, the only good thing in John Hinckley Jr.’s life right now is up there on the screen at the Egyptian. Taxi Driver gives him hope and a sense of purpose. The fog of depression hanging over him lifts. Adopting the same manner of dress and behavior as Robert De Niro’s character is empowering for him. In Taxi Driver, Hinckley sees a series of clues that will lead him to a better life.
“You talking to me?” Travis Bickle says, alone in a ratty apartment not much different from Hinckley’s. Bickle stares at his reflection in the mirror, taunting an imaginary antagonist. “You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”3
Hinckley is enthralled as the on-screen action shifts to an attempted political assassination. The scene shows Bickle intending to kill a presidential candidate in order to win the love of a woman. But the Secret Service foil Bickle’s effort, and he slips away without firing a shot.
John Hinckley knows the next scene well. It is the final gun battle. Travis Bickle goes to rescue Jodie Foster’s character from her pimp, who has sold her to an aging mobster. Jodie is beautiful up there on the screen, her blond hair rolled into tight curls, lips painted a vivid red. A one-man vigilante, Bickle blasts his way down the dingy hallway to where Iris’s liaison is being consummated. Blood spatters the walls as the body count rises. The camera pulls in tight to the surprised look on Iris’s face as she hears the approaching gunshots. It is her friend, Travis Bickle, who has come to save her. She is not afraid. Quite the opposite. She cries when it appears that Travis might die.
As the movie ends and the credits role, Travis Bickle is a hero in the eyes of Jodie Foster’s character—and in the eyes of John Hinckley Jr.
And if Bickle can be a hero, then Hinckley can be a hero, too.
There are any number of reasons John Hinckley has fallen in love with that beautiful young girl up there on the screen. She is the one person the solitary Travis Bickle cares enough about to put his own life on the line for—and in real life, her name is Jodie, which is the nickname Hinckley’s mother goes by. A delusion is beginning to take shape in Hinckley’s disturbed brain: that Jodie Foster might just be capable of falling in love with him.4
The screen grows dark. John Hinckley steps out into the hot California sunlight. He walks the streets, just as Ronald Reagan once did. It was here on Hollywood Boulevard, near the corner of Cahuenga, that Reagan received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. Hinckley strides over it without even noticing.
In addition to acquiring boots, a jacket, and a newfound thirst for peach brandy, John Hinckley now also keeps a journal, just like Travis Bickle. The only trait he has not borrowed from the taxi driver is a passion for owning guns.
That will soon change.