Brooke Shields became an early star, was raped, was married to Andre Agassi, and was best friends with Michael Jackson. Now 57, the actress tells how she escaped her alcoholic mother and a tragic fate.
At one point in 'Brooke Shields, the most beautiful woman', the Disney + documentary in which the actress (New York, 1965) reviews her extraordinary life, she collapses. It's not the scene where she talks about when her mother, Teri, made her pose completely N- at just 10 for a Playboy publication; nor that other one in which she remembers her work in the little one (1978), the Louis Malle film, where she played a prost--ute girl; Nor is it the sequence in which she speaks publicly, for the first time, about the rape that she was the victim of when she was in her early 20s.
No, the situation occurs at the end, when the actress appears sitting with her two daughters, Rowan (19) and Grier (16), and they explain why they will never see Malle's film. Would you have let us do that at 11 years old? No, she replies, and her shoulders slump, unable to contain herself.
"It was hard for me not to justify my mother in front of the girls, but when they asked me I knew she had to be honest," Shields says hesitantly over a sandwich in a New York photographer's studio. «I could have tried to explain to them that these were other times or that, after all, we were making art. But the truth is that I don't know why Mom thought all of that was okay. Don't know".
The most reprehensible acts of Brooke Shields' alcoholic mother
The actress has defended and justified her parent practically since she learned to speak. Teri, a working single mother from New Jersey, landed her first job modeling for her daughter in a soap ad when she was 11 months old. The girl immediately became her family's breadwinner, thanks to publicity and photographs.
Her notoriety skyrocketed when Malle cast her in The Little One. This caused, on the one hand, journalists and public opinion to criticize her mother for allowing her to play a prost--ute and, on the other, many of these people salivated for a brat of only 11 years.
Teri was portrayed as something of a pimp by the media, who accused her of monetizing her daughter's beauty by pushing her to appear in a series of morbidly S- films. After La pequeña, came El lago azul (1980) and Amor sin Fin (1981), by Franco Zeffirelli, which fetishized adolescent S- and which, as a friend of the actress assures in the documentary, no one would think of producing today.
But Brooke always defended her mother, insisting that she never forced her to work and that she enjoyed making those movies. And that Teri, far from exploiting her daughter, always protected her from her, accompanying her to every interview and every party.
At another point in the documentary, a journalist questions the pre-teen actress about her mother's alleged drinking problem; Specifically, he does think Teri has the rough skin and puffy eyes of an alcoholic. She settles the issue by insisting, wrongly, that her mother simply had "allergies." "She's my mom!" she concludes protectively.
"When you're the only child of a single mother, it's second nature," the actress says now. All you want is to love your parents and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her no matter what. And in doing so she also justified everything. That solidified the bond that united us."
After her mother died in 2012, Brooke Shields wrote a book about her relationship with her, because she was horrified by the criticism she read in her obituaries. In There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, published in 2014, she admitted that Teri was an alcoholic who refused to give up drinking despite her daughter's pleas. "Mommy, please don't drink," the girl wrote in a letter when she was about 10 years old.
In any case, and as she now admits, she did not tell everything in the book. She omitted some of her mother's most reprehensible acts, such as her authorization for her at the age of 10 to star in a frontal N- for a photo shoot for Playboy magazine, made up and smeared with oil. Six years later, the actress unsuccessfully tried to prevent the photographer, Garry Gross, from publishing those images. And, later, the American artist Richard Prince used one of them in one of his works, which was briefly exhibited at the Tate Modern in London in 2009 until, due to protests, it was withdrawn.
"Facing all that was too much for me," confesses the actress -. Writing about it broke me. It was my mother who she was protecting ». But not anymore. After reading the two memoirs Shields has written—Down Came the Rain (2005), in which she discussed her postpartum depression, and subsequently, There Was a Little Girl—I figured I knew all about her. She was wrong. The new documentary casts a moving and, in many ways, hurtful look at the exploitation she suffered during her childhood. In it, she still doesn't condemn her mother as much as might be expected, but she does come across as brutally honest.
Did the #MeToo movement encourage you to look at her past with less leniency than she had previously shown? "What provoked it was the documentary," he admits. She allowed me to see what kind of person I am and to claim myself. I had to put up with too much too soon, and while I was resilient, I also put on a blindfold as a coping mechanism. But now I can look at the girl I was and think: "She did it, she got through it."
A while ago, the possibility of Brooke Shields getting ahead seemed as remote as time travel. During her teenage years in the 1980s, she became one of the most famous people in the world. She frequented the Studio 54 nightclub, she was close friends with Michael Jackson, and seemed to have the gift of ubiquity. Her face appeared on hundreds of magazine covers and she served as a model for doll makers.
She could have ended up hooked on drugs and forgotten, like so many other child stars. Instead, she studied at Princeton University and is now happily married to Chris Henchy, a renowned television writer, director, and producer. She has two teenage daughters and continues to work as an actress. In other words, she's a rarity: a former child star turned adult who is now living a healthy and successful life.
She is also a lovely company. In her, there is not a trace of the vanity that one would expect from someone who, before reaching puberty, was already an icon. At the beginning of our conversation, she sheds a few tears, and for good reason (the family dog is going to have to be euthanized very soon), but instead of canceling the interview or interrupting it to fix her makeup, she wipes her nose on her sleeve. his jersey and recovers.
The saving role of Frank, the Father of Brooke Shields
The secret to his survival has never been a mystery, she explains. Yes, her mother was an alcoholic, but that forced her to play the role of a sober adult. In addition, she had two avenues to escape her mother's increasingly erratic and emotionally abusive behavior: the first was work. "Making movies was always my safety net," she admits. The other was her father, Frank.
Shields's parents divorced when she was only a few months old, but Frank, an executive at the Revlon cosmetics firm, was very much a part of her life. Her mother was always her main support, but the actress regularly visited her father and her stepmother, and she maintains a close relationship with the three daughters and two sons the latter had from her previous marriage.
Her life with Teri was fun but chaotic, while her time at her father's house, a conservative, upper-class household, was calm and structured, with regular meal times and rigid rules. Another girl might have been confused by the contrast, but it provided balance for her. While Teri worked as her manager, Frank never alluded to her fame, and if he ever objected to his ex-wife's career choices—which he surely did—he never mentioned it.
"Dad refused to acknowledge reality," says the actress. She was a shrewd enough girl to realize that her father didn't like her fame. "And that fueled my strong resolve to be a decent person because he wanted me to be proud of me," she says.
Despite her career, she was a good student, and she remembers with delight how, when she turned 18, shortly after being accepted to Princeton, her father told her, "I can't believe you've come this far." away from her." And Teri, you have to give her credit, helped too. "Even when I was filming, she protected me like she was Rapunzel in a tower. That preserved my naivety. It was a constant contradiction », she admits.
Today, there is still something innocent and youthful about her. For many years, she confesses, she was emotionally immature and dependent on her mother. Even after leaving for the university to study French literature, she continued to call her constantly. “I think I finally got it down to five calls a day,” she says with a laugh.
