‘I had to contend with so much:’ Brooke Shields reveals how she dealt with posing nude for Playboy publication aged 10 and kissing grown men as a pre-teen – admitting she doesn’t know why her mom ‘thought it was all right’
- Brooke Shields, 57, confronts her own childhood exploitation
- Her mother reportedly stood by and watched it happened, while her co-star Carradine reassured her that it was all ‘make-believe’
- The documentary ‘Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby’ premieres on April 3 on Disney+
Brooke Shields has revealed shocking details about how she dealt with kissing grown men as a pre-teen on a movie sets – and how she defended her mother who stood by and watched it happen.
The actress, 57, has long deflected the blame faced by her mother – who allowed Shields to pose nude for a Playboy publication at the age of 10 and star as a sex worker in the 1978 film Pretty Baby at just 11 years old.
But now, Shields admitted to the Sunday Times: ‘I don’t know why she thought it was all right. I don’t know.’
In her new documentary, the actress is seen breaking down as she reflects on her childhood in the starlight – dealing with issues from being sexualized as a pre-pubescent girl, to the public shame she felt over losing her virginity as a young adult.
The admission comes as Shields explained to her two daughters, Rowan, 19, and Grier, 16, that she would never let them watch the film in which she kissed a 27-year-old Keith Carradine and also appears nude.
Shields’ mother, Teri, reportedly stood by and watched it happened, while her co-star Carradine reassured her that it was all ‘make-believe.’
Brooke Shields, 57, reveals shocking details in her new documentary how she dealt with kissing men as a pre-teen on a movie set in 1978, repeatedly defending her mother who stood by and let it happen. Pictured: Shields and her mother, Teri, in 1978
Emotional: Brooke Shields got emotional while confronting her own childhood exploitation in the first official trailer for her two-part documentary, Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson
An appalled Rowen questions her mother on the documentary: ‘It’s child pornography! Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?’
Shields begins her defense once again before stopping, realizing she could not longer justify her mother’s actions.
The two-part documentary, also titled ‘Pretty Baby’ premieres on April 3 on Disney+.
Directed by Lana Wilson, the documentary takes its name from Louis Malle’s 1978 film ‘Pretty Baby,’ a drama about a young sex worker, played by an 11-year-old Shields, in New Orleans in 1917.
In the film, written by Polly Platt, she kisses a 27-year-old Keith Carradine and also appears nude. At one point, Shields reportedly gave a repulsed face and was yelled at by the director. Yet, her mother never stepped in.
‘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 told The Sunday Times when speaking about the documentary.
‘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.’
It wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last time she was sexualized by the media. At 15 she shot ‘Blue Lagoon,’ then came ‘Endless Love.’ Both featured sex and nudity. And then there were those Calvin Klein denim ads.
When she was 16 and a global star, a family friend and photographer tried to sell nude photos he took of her when she was only 10. Her mother sued. They went to court. The photographer won.
Shields, who has written two memoirs, has been approached about documentaries before and always said no. But now 57, with a kid going off to college, the encouragement of her friend Ali Wentworth and a generally good feeling about where she is in life after years of therapy, Shields felt the time was right.
She has recently admitted that even in her books, she wasn’t telling the whole truth – like the time her mother consented for her, at age 10, to do a full-frontal nude photo shoot for the Playboy publication Sugar and Spice.
Or when, six years later, she tried to prevent the photographer, Garry Gross, from releasing the images, in order to protect her mother.
‘It was too much for me to cop to that, really,’ Shields said. ‘Writing about it just broke me. It was her that I was protecting.’
Shields, who was just 11 when she portrayed a child prostitute in the controversial film Pretty Baby, admitted she is ‘amazed that’ she ‘survived any of it’
Brooke Shields’ character seduces Keith Carradine in a scene from the film ‘Pretty Baby’, 1978
Actress Brooke Shields and mother Teri Shields attend Michaele Vollbracht’s Debut Fashion Show to Benefit the American Cancer Society on May 4, 1978
In the documentary, Shields gets emotional while confronting her own childhood.
The trailer released earlier this year began with Shields being asked as a teenager what she made of all the ‘fuss being made over’ her as she sat next to her mom Teri.
In the footage from an old interview, she smiles and answers: ‘I think it’s kind of fun.’
The older male journalist then tells her that she really is an ‘exquisite-looking young lady’ and a ‘pretty girl.’
Now looking back, Shields narrates that the ‘entirety’ of her life she was bombarded by people calling her a ‘pretty’ face ‘over and over again.’
‘And, that always, seared me,’ she confessed.
The mother-of-two went on to reflect on being being selected for the cover of Time Magazine in 1981, at just 16, to represent the ’80s look.’
‘I was on the cover of Time magazine as the face of that whole era. Who decides that?’ she asked.
Shields, who was just 11 when she portrayed a child prostitute in the controversial film Pretty Baby, admitted she is ‘amazed that’ she ‘survived any of it.’
‘I found my confidence and thought, ‘I can have my own opinion,’ she reflected after years of struggling to ‘find’ her ‘own voice’ through her adolescence and early life.
Emotional: Brooke Shields got emotional while confronting her own childhood exploitation in the first official trailer for her two-part documentary, Pretty Baby, directed by Lana Wilson
At 14, when other girls were still decorating their pencil cases, she had become the youngest model ever to make the cover of Vogue
At 14, when other girls were still decorating their pencil cases, Shields had become the youngest model ever to make the cover of Vogue.
That same year, she began filming the leering teen romance Blue Lagoon — in which her character frequently stripped off and had sex with her fellow shipwrecked sweetheart (played by Christopher Atkins, then 18).
A body-double stood in for her sex scenes but, Shields says, the film-makers encouraged her to pursue a real romance with Atkins off-screen.
There was more sex and nudity for her the following year in Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic drama Endless Love, about two high-school sweethearts who are forbidden to see each other.
And at 15, she appeared — writhing around in figure-hugging denim — in the provocative adverts for Calvin Klein Jeans, which featured the suggestive tagline: ‘You want to know what comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.’
The films and that ad campaign helped propel her to international stardom.
Shields appeared — writhing around in figure-hugging denim — in the provocative adverts for American Apparel and Calvin Klein Jeans, which featured the suggestive tagline: ‘You want to know what comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing’
Despite her vampish image, Shields would later admit she didn’t have sex until she was 22 — and would have preferred to have waited even longer
Known around the world simply as ‘Brooke’, she became the party-girl mascot of New York’s debauched nightclub Studio 54. With those iconic thick eyebrows and long lustrous hair that made her look older than her years, she was the teenager a top agent once described as ‘so beautiful that strong men forget to flick their cigar ash’.
Despite her vampish image, Shields would later admit she didn’t have sex until she was 22 — and would have preferred to have waited even longer.
It was a revelation that saw her cruelly dubbed ‘America’s most famous virgin’. Yet her abstinence had undoubtedly helped her escape the worst excesses of Hollywood’s sexual predators.
For years she credited her fiercely defensive mother Teri, who was also her manager. ‘If anybody looked at me sideways, she was like: ‘I will cut off your b***s and make you eat them,’ ‘ Shields said in 2019.
But now, little more than a year since giving an interview in which she claimed she’d been ‘kind of untouchable… I was not easy prey’ — and had never had a ‘#MeToo moment’ of her own — she is singing a very different tune.
In the documentary, the actress reveals she was raped in her early 20s in a hotel room by an unnamed man in the film industry.
In 2000, she gave an interview to the gay magazine The Advocate in which she said: ‘There are many women I find very attractive. But that’s not acceptable in this world’
She had met him to discuss possible film projects following her graduation from the prestigious Princeton University in 1987.
After dinner, the man — whom she says was a friend — invited her to call a taxi from his hotel room, which he then left. Shields says her ‘friend’ later returned naked and suddenly attacked her.
‘He was right on me. It was just like wrestling,’ she adds.
Shields says she ‘froze’ and didn’t fight back for fear of being killed: ‘God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practiced that.’
She claims she left the hotel after the attack, got in a taxi and ‘cried all the way’ to the apartment of another friend.
For years, Shields says she refused to accept what had happened to her: ‘I drank wine at dinner. I went up to the room. I just was so trusting…’ Of her meteoric rise to fame at such a young age.
Shields also revealed in the documentary that when she had to kiss actor Keith Carradine in Pretty Baby she’d never kissed anyone before.
‘This doesn’t count. It’s pretend. It’s all make-believe,’ Carradine reassured her. Shields says she responded by trying to separate the sleazy on-screen version of herself from the real her. ‘I learned to compartmentalize at an early age. It was a survival technique.’
But this was, some say, the start of a deep identity crisis for the actress — including over her sexuality.
After all, the depravity of Pretty Baby and the soft porn of Blue Lagoon were a world away from her home life.
Perhaps, it’s no surprise then that when she subsequently lost her virginity, aged 22, to fellow Princeton student Dean Cain (who went on to play Superman in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman), she said the moment left her racked with guilt and shame.
Then in 1994, aged almost 30 and with a middling film career prompting a move to Broadway, she announced she had fallen in love with Andre Agassi, the rather more charming successor to John McEnroe as tennis’s bad boy.
Romance reportedly blossomed when, a few months after their meeting, he broke off from touring and flew to New York on his private jet to comfort her while she was in hospital being treated for painful bunions.
Her mother — by then sober — thought the notorious tennis ‘punk’ too wild and immature, prompting a set-to with Shields in a restaurant in which the actress was heard shouting: ‘Dump him? I’m going to marry him!’
And she did, in 1997. Yet the marriage lasted just two years. Long periods of time spent apart — while he played in tournaments and she followed her own career — were cited as the likely cause for the breakdown of their marriage.
Agassi was also deeply possessive, once getting so furious at her flirtatious cameo in a 1995 episode of Friends — in which she licked Matt LeBlanc’s fingers — that he stormed off set, drove home and smashed his Wimbledon trophy.
However, there were also whispers that the pair were simply sexually incompatible and that Shields didn’t actually like men.
In 2000, she gave an interview to the gay magazine The Advocate in which she said: ‘There are many women I find very attractive. But that’s not acceptable in this world.’
The following year, though, she wed television writer Chris Henchy, after meeting through a mutual friend. They had two daughters together — Rowan and Grier — following several rounds of IVF.
And in 2005, Shields disclosed she’d suffered from postnatal depression and had even considered suicide. ‘I finally had a healthy beautiful baby girl and I couldn’t look at her,’ she revealed.
Some weeks later, her Endless Love co-star Tom Cruise — who, as a Scientologist, opposes psychiatry on the grounds it is abusive — attacked Shields for using an antidepressant drug, Paxil, cattily asking: ‘Where has her career gone?’
Shields claimed Michael Jackson repeatedly asked to marry her and adopt a child together but, she insisted, they were never more than friends
She shot back, saying he should ‘stick to fighting aliens’ — a reference to the belief among Scientologists that space alien parasites live inside all of us and must be destroyed.
In contrast, the beauty had a good friendship with late superstar Michael Jackson and was even his ‘date’ for one of Elizabeth Taylor’s weddings.
Jackson told Oprah Winfrey in 1993 that Shields was his girlfriend, repeating that claim in 2001 and telling another interviewer: ‘We dated a lot. Her pictures were all over my wall, my mirror, everything.’
Shields, in turn, claimed he’d repeatedly asked to marry her and adopt a child together but, she insisted, they were never more than friends.
In this new documentary, she describes her relationship with Jackson as ‘childlike’. And certainly, that may have suited a star who recently admitted she didn’t start thinking of sex as ‘my experience’ until she was in her 40s.
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