The model and actress has three new titles: Netflix rom-com star, union boss and CEO of a beauty brand aimed at women over 40.
Some stories are so perfect and poignant that even if we suspect they are not true, we simply do not want to know.
There is a white peacock perched inside Brooke Shields’ home in New York City. She named it Steve. He sits frozen on an acrylic pedestal, feathers draped to the floor. Shields was told he was rescued from other peafowl, who can turn aggressive toward their old, pecking them to death.
“I’m probably being lied to through the beak,” said Shields, whose pun usage can be contagious. But the story made sense to her. She sighed at the taxidermy. “The really beautiful ones are all male. Doesn’t it figure?”
There is no universal experience of ageing. But surely some American women can relate to feeling pecked or prodded, and pushed aside when they reach middle age.
At least that was a sentiment shared with Shields in 2021, when she founded an online community called Beginning Is Now. More than 100,000 people followed the group’s Instagram account, which posted inspirational content for women over 40.
It felt very much like a women’s magazine — with interviews, listicles, giveaways and recurring columns (Dear Brooke and Brooke Don’t Cook) — though without all of the advertising. Beginning Is Now mostly sold merch: workout sets and bright yellow hoodies.
Occasionally Shields would host group Zoom calls with her followers. They would ask questions like, “Do you feel like you’re being overlooked?” Shields would answer: “As a woman, yes, I feel that somehow, once we hit a certain age, it’s assumed that we’re no longer sexy.” Another woman would chime in: “‘It’s as if the light switches have been turned off,’” Shields said.
“It wasn’t angry,” she said of the tenor of the conversations. “I was worried that there would be this undercurrent of anger. There was more of an undercurrent of bewilderment.”
It was during these Zoom calls that Beginning Is Now began to morph. Certain “fraught” age-related issues kept coming up, Shields said. Like hair — thinning, coarsening, greying hair.
“Very soon people said, ‘Well, what can we buy?’” she said.
The skin of her nascent media brand began shedding. Infographics and merch were no longer enough for Shields, who had put a small team of executives together and mined the community for ideas. In June, a new company will emerge, called Commence. It will sell three hair-care products on its website.
In the modern beauty industry, there is precedent for pivoting from content to commerce: Glossier, valued at US$1.8 billion ($2.9 billion) in 2021, was born from the blog Into the Gloss. Its first skin-care products were developed using feedback from the website’s commenters.
But for anyone familiar with Shields’ career, Commence also makes one of those perfect and poignant stories.
Ever since she could crawl, Shields has been the face of household products: a model for Ivory soap at 11 months, Band-Aids at 5, Colgate toothpaste at 10, Calvin Klein jeans at 15, Coppertone sunscreen at 43, La-Z-Boy furniture at 45, and that is just a highlight reel. In the 1980s, her name was put on blow dryers and curling irons and hair crimpers. “By the way, I loathe the colour purple, and all of the products were purple,” she said. “I didn’t know I had anything to say about it.”
Now, at 59, Shields is a chief executive overseeing how her products are made and how her name is used to sell them. It is capitalist empowerment.
“I’ve sold for other people my whole life,” Shields said.
‘An accessibility’
I did not expect to find Teri Shields, famed stage mother, at her daughter’s house in the West Village of Manhattan. But there she was, blending into a marble-topped bar in the living room. Among liquor bottles and barware sat Teri’s urn. Shields lifted the lid to show me.
“Closest to the things that she liked the most,” said Shields, whose mother died in 2012 at age 79. “Booze and me.”
Their relationship formed the emotional spine of Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a documentary released last year that reexamined her early life.
The title mirrored that of a 1978 film in which Shields played a 12-year-old prostitute in early 20th-century New Orleans — the first time she, and her mother’s parenting choices, made international headlines. She became a sex symbol before she became a teenager.
Shields also discloses in the documentary that in her 20s, after graduating from Princeton University, she was raped by a Hollywood executive. She did not say his name, and to her relief and surprise, viewers moved past the revelation fairly quickly.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is a first — so that’s not all I am,’” Shields said. “Whereas when I was younger, my sexuality was all I was — that and beauty.”
Shields did not produce the film or control the final edit, which set it apart from many other celebrity documentaries. It was produced by people she trusted, however, including her friends Ali Wentworth and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“I used to always say to her, ‘You should either be in rehab or dead based on your childhood,’” Wentworth said. “She can be at a dinner party and tell a story, and you’re laughing — it’s really entertaining — but then you go, ‘Oh, this is actually a very tragic story.’ She can disassociate in a way that has protected her for her whole life.”
Shields is funny and candid. But her singular gift is her ability to relate to people, even if they’ll never be able to relate to her. Even among her famous friends — like her neighbour Bradley Cooper, who might be casually taking a call in Shields’ garden on a Tuesday afternoon, unbeknown to the New York Times reporter sitting on her couch inside — Shields’ very unusual girlhood sets her apart. It isolates her. No one else on this planet was christened by Time magazine as the “look” of the 1980s.
And yet there is still “an accessibility with Brooke that people love,” Wentworth said. “People feel like they know her, and that somehow, whatever she tells you to use or drink or wear, is real. A friend is telling you to do that.”
Shields is well aware of her public perception, with all of its benefits (instant press when she starts a beauty brand) and drawbacks (the need to convince investors and consumers that this is not just another celebrity beauty brand in a market saturated with celebrity beauty brands).
There is always a moment — and Shields always notices it — when people settle into her company for the first time. They relax their grip on the idea of Brooke Shields and begin to adjust to the reality of her.
“Sometimes it’s a flicker in the eye, sometimes it’s an exhale,” she said. Sometimes it’s the moment your eyes stop flicking between Steve the peacock and Shields’ rhinestone Prada loafers and the Keith Haring and Will Cotton artworks on her walls. “And then we can just do our jobs.”
Privately, that was one of her motivations for pursuing the presidency of the Actors’ Equity Association, a labour union representing stage performers and managers. (Shields’ Broadway credits include Rizzo in Grease, Roxie in Chicago and Morticia in The Addams Family.) She saw an opportunity to champion the people who make theatre possible and to use her name to bring attention to union issues. But she also liked that this job would not be explicitly about her.
“That appeals to me,” said Shields, who won the election on May 24. “It’s a lot of me all the time. And it has been that way since I was an infant.”
‘A woman of substance’
The US summer box office may be off to a disastrous start, but as of May 23, the most-watched original film on any streaming platform was a romantic comedy starring Brooke Shields.
Mother of the Bride has remained in Netflix’s top 10 movies, peaking at No. 1, since its release on May 9.
Of all the moving pieces of Shields’ life, acting is still the thing that makes her feel like a “complete person,” she said. “I go to sleep thinking about it and wake up thinking about it.”
Until that moment, Shields had generally been composed and analytical in conversation — she once stopped midsentence to deconstruct the definition of “catharsis.” But when discussing her acting career, there was a new urgency in her voice: “I must continue to pursue it tirelessly,” she said, sitting up in a makeup chair in a hotel bathroom, preparing for a photo shoot. There was so much pent-up desire that she seemed to struggle to express the size of it.
“If I could be in Hacks,” she said, almost bursting, “that is what I want for my life. That level of humour.” She recalled watching a scene from that Max series in which an iPhone is unlocked not by Face ID — the owner’s face is recovering from an eye lift — but by the face of her wax museum figure. “I now know there is actually a God.”
It is not that Shields doesn’t speak about Commence with the same enthusiasm. It is just a different flavour of enthusiasm. She has raised about US$3.5 million ($5.7 million) from investors. She can cite relevant statistics (by 2025 there will be 80 million women over 40 in the United States) and has learned the unlyrical language of the business: capitalisation tables, convertible notes, price equity round, total addressable market.
But she doesn’t see herself in this position forever. “I’ll always be the founder,” she said. “But at a certain point, we are going to grow so exponentially that it’s going to take a kick-ass CEO to bring us to that next level.”
Last year, Shields appointed a company president, Denise Landman, who was the founder and former chief executive of Victoria’s Secret Pink. That brand was tailored to young women, 18 or 19, who were “half woman, half child,” Landman said. “You really haven’t been humbled around too much by the world writ large.”
By contrast, Landman identifies the Commence customer as “a woman of substance,” someone who has accumulated knowledge and experience and pride over her decades, “much as soil layers up and becomes more nurturing over time,” she said. “That substance is earned.”
To Landman, who said she is in her late 60s, it is not a worthwhile exercise to dwell on problems like itchy scalps or brittle hair. “The place to dwell is, God gave me a head of hair,” she said. “Let me make the most beautiful head of hair it can be.”
As for Shields, she can relate to more middle-aged anxieties than one might think, she said.
Yes, she somehow survived the ‘80s and ‘90s without internalising toxic beauty standards — spared, she explained, by her mother’s mindset that her beauty was their path toward financial security. (Modelling was just a job with no relation to her self-worth.) And yes, she doesn’t entirely mind the experience of gaining a but of weight. (“I immediately look younger,” she said. “It’s like natural filler.”) And yes, those eyebrows are natural and majestic.
But Shields still knows what it is like to pee a little bit when she sneezes. She still injects the crevice between her eyebrows to make it disappear before doing a movie. And she still has a minor crisis of identity over her daughters, now 18 and 21, leaving home. “If I’m not Mum 24/7, who am I?” she said.
“I really identify with so much more than people have given me credit for,” Shields said. “Might I remind you, I’m still a female and still human.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jessica Testa
Photographs by: OK McCausland
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
