BUDDY Foster is feeling hurt and confused. His younger sister Jodie has just issued a stinging rebuke to his "labour of love." denouncing him as a violent, money-grabbing drug-user, whose decision to "out" her as a bi-sexual in his no-holds barred unauthorised biography was motivated solely by greed and sour grapes".
Clearly still reeling from the Oscar-winning actor's decision to break her usual silence, Buddy repeatedly says he has no regrets and claims his only crime was to be honest. "Nothing in this book should make Jodie ashamed, if there is then she should deal with it. It is a loving tribute to her and it doesn't injure anyone. She may say that I should have waited until my mother was dead, and she could be right, but it doesn't hurt her," he insists.
Unfortunately for Buddy, this is hard to accept. If there is one thing the world knows about Jodie Foster, it is that she values her privacy - and her only brother has now taken that away from her. A target of stalkers, his sister has been receiving death threats regularly since she was a teenager, culminating in John Hinckley shooting the then President Ronald Reagan, to capture her attention.
Surely Buddy's book will fulfil their fantasies, finally providing the titillation about her that they so desperately crave? "No, I think they have more fantasies because they don't know her. This is a woman who looks perfect and she never says anything about her sexuality. All the men say "I've got to know." If she said something people wouldn't care," he insists.
In fact, although Foster Child is being plugged as the intimate biography that "outs" Jodie Foster, there is very little detail about her sexuality. Buddy mentions three men he believes may have been boyfriends and then nearly three-quarters of the way through the book, reveals that she once shared a flat with a "lesbian-looking" woman in France.
"It was just an assumption, a feeling as a sibling. Sometimes you get a feeling of which direction you think one is. It is more towards the hi, rather than gay. It is an assumption, but if I had caught my sister in bed with a woman I wouldn't say. I pray to God that she rings me up one day and says she is in a happy relationship. I don't care who it is with, a man, a woman, or a eunuch," he says.
Nevertheless this "assumption" is the rather weak fuel that has prompted worldwide "Jodie Foster in gay shock" headlines, a second print-run of the book in the US, a European promotion tour and the Foster family's continuing feud now being fought out in the full glare of the world's media.
Denouncing her brother's book as "a cheap cry for attention and money", Jodie Foster derides its contents as being "hazy recollections, fantasies and borrowed press excerpts" and insists she has only seen Buddy 20 times in the last 25 years.
"I have never spoken to him about my private life, as I and my family consider him a distant acquaintance motivated solely by greed and sour grapes ... I feel sad for him. Mostly I feel sad for my 69-year-old mother, who has spent her life struggling to raise four children on her own with dignity and strength of character," she stated.
BUDDY admits he hasn't spoken to Jodie for nearly three years. He sent a copy of the manuscript to her lawyers for approval and agreed to 90 per cent of the changes she wanted. His other two sisters won't return his calls and his mother never rings him. It appears only his father is still speaking to him.
Sitting in the bar of his London hotel, Buddy's pained expression suggests that perhaps the hook is a cry for attention. A small, slight man, who looks strikingly like Jodie, he admits that at the age of 40 all he really wants is to be loved by his mother, Brandy.
It is easy to question Buddy's motives for writing this book, the years of therapy and drug dependence have certainly taken their toll. Yet his self-deprecating tone and desperation to please, makes one uncomfortable and you cannot help but feel sorry for him.
It is all too painfully clear Buddy would much rather be sharing dinner with his family, hugging his mother and celebrating his sister's career, than airing their "dirty laundry" over a glass of lemonade and some crisps.
To say Buddy grew up in a dysfunctional family is perhaps an understatement. As the only boy, he lived with his three sisters, their mother and her lesbian lover, "Aunt" Jo, whom Jodie was named after. His father, an airforce pilot, was a violent womaniser who finally left the home when Aunt Jo pulled a gun on him.
Although his parents had separated before Jodie, the youngest was born, her conception reveals the brutality of their lives. According to Buddy, his mother was so desperate for child support, that one day when she eventually tracked down her ex-husband she agreed to sleep with him for money. Jodie was the result.
However the violence continued despite his father's absence, with Brandy ruling the household with an "iron-fist". He portrays his mother as a control freak, manipulating her children, determined to rule their lives and says she has "moulded Jodie into a work robot". To celebrate her daughter's achievements she has created a "Jodie Shrine".
Every wound, insult and beating is etched on Buddy's memory, and it is hard to listen as he quietly recounts all the bitter details. Even his older sisters apparently enjoyed belittling him.
"To be a male in the household was very difficult. I felt emotionally castrated. I was picked on a lot, the constant theme being that men cannot be trusted, men are philanderers, who don't give child support and pretend they are dead so they don't see their kids this reflected on my sisters, they used to call me a faggot and beat me up," he recalls.
Jodie was different though she was his shadow and desperate to emulate her older brother. She would wear his clothes including his underwear and follow him everywhere. Conscious of the family's financial plight, Buddy became a minor child star in his teens, acting in commercials and television series, always giving his pay-cheque to his mother.
But at the tender of age of four, Jodie effectively ended her brother's career when she accompanied him to an audition for a Coppertone sun-tan lotion advertisement. As he strutted his stuff she mimicked him and so impressed the casting directors that she was hired on the spot.
From then on the story was the same. Whenever the brother and sister attended the same audition she won. During one film, Foxes, Buddy had already been offered the lead role, but then Jodie was interviewed to play his love-interest. She was immediately hired and he was demoted to a minor part.
It was to be his last film. Buddy then left home and dropped out, turning to drugs to hide his pain. First it was marijuana then after a motorbike accident he became addicted to morphine.
"I felt like a baby inside my mother's womb. Warm, cosy, no emotional pain. I felt like all of a sudden I was going through the white tunnel to heaven. It felt so good, it was as good as an orgasm, or more. So obviously it was very addictive," he recalls, as he inhales hard on his cigarette.
Insisting that he was never jealous of his sister's success, merely envious, Buddy nods with agreement when I wonder whether his life would have been better if he had been born a girl. "It would have been so much easier," he says softly.