She was married to Andre Agassi and best friends with Michael Jackson. Now 57, the actress tells Hadley Freeman how she escaped the alcoholic mother who turned her into a child star.
There is a moment towards the end of Brooke Shields’ new documentary about her extraordinary life, titled Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, where you can see her defences come crashing down. It doesn’t happen when she’s talking about the time her mother, Teri, agreed for her to pose fully nude at the age of 10 for a Playboy publication; nor when recalling her role as a child prostitute a year later in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, also called Pretty Baby. And it’s not when she talks publicly for the first time about being raped in her early 20s by a man she thought wanted to hire her for a film. Instead, it comes when she’s sitting at her dining table and her two daughters, Rowan, now 19, and Grier, 16, are explaining why they will never see Malle’s movie. “It’s child pornography!” Rowan says. “Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?”
“No,” Shields replies instinctively, before she can stop herself, and her shoulders collapse.
“That was … that was hard for me, to not justify my mom to them, but when they asked me, I thought, ‘Oh God, I have to admit this,’ " Shields, 57, tells me haltingly over sandwiches at a photographer’s studio in New York City. “I mean, I could say, ‘Oh, it was the time back then,’ or ‘Oh, it was art.’ But I don’t know why she thought it was all right. I don’t know.”
Shields has been defending and justifying her mother pretty much since she learnt to talk. Teri, a working-class single mum from New Jersey, booked her daughter’s first modelling job, for a soap advert, when she was just 11 months old. From then on Shields was the family breadwinner, doing TV adverts and magazine shoots throughout her childhood. When Malle cast her in Pretty Baby, her notoriety exploded, with, on the one hand, journalists and members of the public excoriating Teri for allowing her child to play a prostitute in a film and, on the other, many of those same people openly salivating over the 11-year-old girl. Among many astonishing moments in the documentary, some of the most nauseating are clips from 1970s TV interviews in which male journalists gush over Shields while her mother sits beaming beside her. “You really are an exquisite young lady,” one heavy-breathes at her. “Isn’t she a pretty little girl?” Shields, her feet barely reaching the floor, responds with a tight smile.
Teri was portrayed in the media as little better than a pimp, monetising her daughter’s beauty while allowing her to appear in a series of queasily sexual films. After Pretty Baby Shields starred in The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love (1981). With their soft-focus fetishisation of teen sex. None of these films would be made today, one of her friends rightly says in the documentary. But Shields was always her mother’s defender, insisting that she never made her work — she enjoyed doing it. And far from exploiting her daughter, Teri protected her, accompanying her to every interview and party, to the point that Shields was a virgin until, at the age of 22, she slept with her adored college boyfriend Dean Cain, aka future Superman [in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman].
In one clip we see a TV interviewer asking a prepubescent Shields about her mother’s alleged drinking problem and asking if she thinks Teri has the alcoholic’s telltale bad skin and puffy eyes. Shields shuts him down, insisting, erroneously, that her mother merely has “allergies”. “She’s my mama,” she concludes protectively.
“It’s so innate when you’re an only child of a single mother,” Shields says today. “All you want to do is love your parent and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her. And by virtue of protecting her, I was justifying everything, and that solidified that bond between us.”
After Teri died in 2012, Shields wrote a book about their relationship because she was so horrified by the critical obituaries. In There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me, published in 2014, she admitted that Teri was a lifelong alcoholic who refused to quit no matter how much her daughter pleaded with her. (“Mommy, I beg of you please stay without drinking,” she wrote in a letter when she was about 10.)
Even in this book, Shields admits today, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. She breezes past some of her mother’s most indefensible actions, such as the time she consented for her 10-year-old daughter to do a full-frontal nude photoshoot, made up and oiled down, for the Playboy publication Sugar and Spice. Six years later Shields tried and failed to prevent the photographer, Garry Gross, from releasing the images. The American artist Richard Prince later used one of them in one of his works. Tate Modern removed it in 2009 after protests.
“It was too much for me to cop to that, really,” Shields says. “Writing about it just broke me. It was her that I was protecting.”
No more. Having read both of Shields’ memoirs — 2005′s Down Came the Rain, about her postnatal depression, and then There Was a Little Girl, both of which are excellent — I assumed I knew all there was to know about her. I was wrong. The new documentary is a gripping and, in many ways, excoriating look at how Shields’ image was exploited from her earliest age. She is still not as condemnatory of her mother as many might expect, but she is brutally honest.
One of the commentators in Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields argues that it’s sexist to blame Teri for her daughter being in provocative movies and shoots, but then to applaud the male film-makers and photographers for the artistic merit of their works. Once Shields would have wholeheartedly backed that sentiment. Yet when I say I can’t fully agree with it, given that it was, say, Malle’s job to make a movie but Teri’s job to protect her daughter, she gives a firm nod: “Right, absolutely.” And yet she doesn’t feel anger towards her mother. “Everyone always wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was,” she says.
And yet it was hard for me not to feel anger while watching the documentary and hearing Shields as an adult recall how difficult it was, aged 11, to give the 27-year-old actor Keith Carradine a seductive kiss on the lips for a scene in Pretty Baby. Her mother offered no help; Malle grouched at her for making a repulsed face. It was left to Carradine to reassure her that this “doesn’t count. It’s pretend. It’s all make-believe.”
Did the #MeToo movement encourage her to cast a perhaps less forgiving eye on her past than she’d done before?
“It was making the documentary that encouraged it,” she says. “That made me look at what kind of person I am and to give myself a little credit. I had to contend with so much at such an early age, and there was resilience, but also I put on blinders as a defence mechanism. But now I can look at that little girl and think, ‘She did it, she pulled through.’ "
The prospect of Shields pulling through once seemed as improbable as time travel. During her teen years in the 1980s she was one of the most famous people in the world. She hung out at Studio 54, was close friends with Michael Jackson and seemed ubiquitous, her face on hundreds of magazine covers, her image licensed to doll manufacturers. She could have easily ended up strung out and forgotten, like so many other child stars. Instead, Shields went to Princeton University and is in a happy marriage with Chris Henchy, a successful TV writer, director and producer. She is a mother to their two teenage daughters and she still works as an actress. Shields is that rarest of beasts: a former child star who grew up to be a healthy and successful adult.
She is also delightful company. There is none of the starriness you might expect from someone who has been described as an icon since before puberty. She is a little weepy when we start talking, for the deeply relatable reason that she has to put down the beloved family dog later that day, but instead of cancelling the interview or even just fixing her makeup, she wipes her nose on the sleeve of her jumper and soldiers on.
The secret to Shields’ survival has never been a mystery to her, she says. Yes, her mother was an alcoholic, but that meant she had to be the sober grown-up. She also had two essential escapes from her mother’s increasingly erratic and emotionally abusive behaviour: the first was work. “Making movies was always my safety net,” she says. The other was her father, Frank.
Shields’ parents divorced when she was only a few months old, but Frank, an executive for Revlon cosmetics with the handsome looks of a silent movie star, stayed very much in her life. Her mother was always her primary parent but Shields regularly visited her father and stepmother, and she remains close to her three half-sisters and the two step-siblings from her stepmother’s previous marriage. Life at her mother’s apartment was fun but chaotic, while time spent at the family home of her upper-class and conservative father was calm and structured, with regular mealtimes and rigid rules. Another child might have found this contrast confusing but for Shields it provided balance. While Teri worked as her manager, Frank never mentioned Shields’ celebrity and, if he objected to his ex-wife’s career choices for their daughter, which he surely did, he never brought it up.
“My dad was just in absolute denial about it,” Shields says. As a perceptive child, she knew her father didn’t like her celebrity. “And that made me adamant about turning out okay, so that he would be proud of me.” Despite her career she was a good student, going to school in New York and then high school in New Jersey. She recalls with delight how Frank said to her on her 18th birthday, shortly after she was accepted to Princeton, “I can’t believe you turned out so well.”
And Teri, to give her credit, helped too. “Even while I was [making the films] she did this high-wire act of protecting me, like Rapunzel in a tower,” Shields says. “So I was able to stay naive. It was a constant contradiction.”
There is still something guileless and girlish about Shields. She was, she says, emotionally immature for a long time and utterly enmeshed with her mother. When she made an ostensible bid for freedom and went to Princeton to study French literature, she still phoned her constantly. “I think I finally got it down to five calls a day,” she says with a self-mocking laugh.
She struggled to get back into acting after university. I ask her why she bothered — surely this was the moment to choose her own career? “But I loved what I did!” she says, surprised by the question. “Also, you know, it has always been my identity.” And yet, probably thanks to her father, she also knew she wanted normality, unlike so many of her young celebrity contemporaries. She became friends with Michael Jackson when she was 13, largely because they understood each other, and could be one another’s dates to big awards shows. “He was so famous and I was so famous, and we could laugh at everybody, like little kids,” she says.
In 1993, when Shields was 28, Jackson claimed in a live TV special with Oprah Winfrey that she was his girlfriend, when she was in fact in a relationship with someone else. “I called him up and I think I said, ‘This is kind of pathetic that you need to do this. I am having a shot at normal life — you cannot drag me into crazy town.’ " Jackson just laughed it off. He used to say that he wanted to adopt a child with her — so did they ever date? Or even kiss?
“No! There was one moment when we were in the car and the cameras were there and he grabbed me to kiss me and I said, ‘No! Stop! We are just friends and you need me as a friend.’ I remember the early days when other actresses were after him and he was kind of cute, before the shift. But it never even crossed my mind.”
Given their early friendship, what does she make of the posthumous allegations that he repeatedly molested young boys?
“I … I don’t know how to think about it. Because it’s so hard to believe. I wish I knew the truth. Then I could figure out how to structure the narrative in my head. But I’m as shocked as I think the world is,” she says.
Teri encouraged Shields and Jackson’s “relationship”. Shields writes in There Was a Little Girl, “Mom encouraged friendships with people like George Michael, Michael Jackson and John Travolta, because she was impressed by their genuinely sweet natures as well as their level of fame … They did not pose a threat to her.”
“That was the trifecta!” Shields laughs when I quote this to her. “It was lost on me at the time, but they all seemed to respect my virginity.” Actual boyfriends got short shrift from Teri. She disliked Cain, and was even more wary of tennis star Andre Agassi, who Shields started dating in 1993. They married in 1997, when she was 31.
Marrying Agassi was Shields’ belated teenage rebellion, the moment she finally broke from her mother. He encouraged her theatre-acting ambitions and ultimately seized control of her career, to the point that his managers went into her mother’s office one weekend, cleaned it out and shipped it to Las Vegas, where Agassi was based.
“I really regret the pain that caused,” Shields says. There’s no nice way to break up with someone, I say, and she looks at me as if I’ve absolved her. “There was no other way,” she says. “But it was a huge moment.”
Her relationship with her mother never fully recovered, and Teri told people her daughter had “divorced” her. She died in 2012 at the age of 79, suffering from dementia. Shields was by her side.
Shields eagerly subsumed herself into Agassi’s world, following his advice about her acting career and tiptoeing around his extreme mood swings, which she assumed were about his tennis career.
“I’d only heard the saying that you marry your father, but I kind of married my mom and swapped one form of control for another,” she says. There was another connection between them: while Teri was addicted to alcohol, Agassi eventually admitted that he’d used crystal meth, which also explained the moods. “He said he hadn’t wanted to tell me because of my mom, but I said, ‘You dope. I would have been your best co-dependent, I know how to do that.’ "
Shields’s career was soaring again — in 1997 and 1998 she picked up Golden Globe nominations for her hit sitcom Suddenly Susan. But she says that Agassi, despite his encouragement, didn’t really like her to act. For a guest spot on Friends she played a stalker who is obsessed with Joey (Matt LeBlanc), but when she licked his hand in one scene, Agassi stormed off the set. When he got home he smashed all of his tennis trophies. Agassi writes about the incident in self-flagellating detail in his 2009 memoir, Open, whereas Shields largely glosses over it in There Was a Little Girl. I tell her that she comes across like a saint and Agassi sounds like a nightmare in his book.
“Which he did not write,” she adds pointedly. (J.R. Moehringer — who also wrote Prince Harry’s memoir — wrote it. Shields does not use a ghost writer.) Still, Agassi is pretty candid about his mistakes with you, I say. “Mmm — ish,” she says, even more pointedly. “The book’s called Open, but well …” Agassi, she says, asked her to look through the pages that mentioned her to make sure everything was correct. “I was pleased because I thought, ‘Oh, he is a good guy.’ I had to read the pages in a publicist’s office, and I wasn’t allowed to take the papers with me. I was, like, it’s not Watergate, it’s a f***ing book about a tennis player. But then I got a letter saying, ‘Thank you so much for spending time with my writer. Unfortunately I can’t make any of the changes you suggested because it’s my memoir, and that’s not how I remember it.’ To the press he could say, ‘I gave it to Brooke to read,’ which indicates that I said, ‘This is the truth.’ My editor said, ‘It’s the oldest trick in the book.’ "
They divorced in 1999 and Shields finally controlled her own life. For a long time she protected Agassi, just like she protected her mother. But increasingly she realises that talking helps to take away the shame. This is why she decided to talk in the documentary about being raped.
It happened right after she graduated. She was struggling to get work, so she was pleased when someone said they wanted to meet to discuss her career. After dinner he suggested she come to his hotel room so he could call her a taxi. Suddenly he was “right on me”, she recalls in the documentary. “I just froze. I thought one ‘no’ should’ve been enough, and I just thought, ‘Stay alive and get out,’ and I shut it out. God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practised that.”
I ask if she ever saw her attacker again. “A couple of times. Yeah. I just ignored him because I had written him a long letter afterwards and he never responded. So I thought, ‘Okay, that’s psychosis, and I don’t want anything to do with that in my life. You don’t get to have that.’”
In 2001 Shields married Chris Henchy, whom she describes as “an Irish guy from the Bronx, just unbelievably stable and normal”. She had found the normality she craved. They struggled to conceive and after their much-longed-for first baby, Rowan, was born, Shields fell into a deep postpartum depression and used antidepressants.
Tom Cruise — whom Shields had known since she was 15, from his first film role in Endless Love — decided it was incumbent upon him, as a Scientologist who rejects psychiatry, to criticise her in an interview on the Today show for using medication. Shields at this point was in Chicago in the West End and Henchy called to tell her what had happened. “You need to respond to him,” he said. She said that Cruise should “stick to fighting aliens” and wrote a piece for The New York Times defending medication. Cruise apologised.
“He said, ‘I don’t know why I did it. You’ve always been nice to me. I felt cornered.’ By — what? His beliefs? " Shields says. “I said, ‘I don’t really want to get into a discussion about it. You did it — and it did not go well for you.’ "
Their lives became unexpectedly intertwined again in April 2006. When Shields went into hospital in Los Angeles to give birth to her youngest daughter, Grier, she noticed a lot of helicopters and news trucks outside. “I was, like, ‘Oh God, can’t they ever leave me alone?’ And the nurse said, ‘Umm, they’re not for you,’ " They were there for Katie Holmes, who had given birth to her and Cruise’s daughter, Suri, a few hours earlier. Months later Shields attended their wedding as a gesture that she and Cruise had reconciled. Suri and Grier celebrated their first birthdays together — “Chris and I were, like, ‘Okay, I guess we’re all gonna be friends now?’ " — but that ended in 2012 when Cruise and Holmes got divorced, “which changed everything”, she says.
When Grier announced she wanted to be a model, Shields “fought it for so long”; “But then I thought, ‘She’s going to do it whether I sanction her or not.’ And the agency won’t let her work until she’s 18, which is already so much older than when I started.”
Seventeen years and one month older, I say. “Yeah,” says Shields with a laugh and a roll of her eyes. Once this would have made her wince a little at the implied criticism of her mother. But these days, Shields says, she is making a point of seeing her life as a whole rather than compartmentalising sections and feeling bad about them: “You can own your past and be proud of it, instead of ashamed or sad. And you can be excited, because there is more to come.”
The documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is available to watch on Disney+
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London