Brooke Shields Versus the World of Adults
Was any child star more creepily gawked over than Brooke Shields?
Content warning: This issue contains discussions of CSA and predatory behaviour. Please approach with caution.
It’s a miracle that Brooke Shields is okay. Society is not especially kind to former child stars, viewing them as disposable novelties to be derided when they age out of their cute years. Hollywood history is littered with too many examples to count of child performers who were exploited by the industry and left to rot when they could be replaced with someone younger and more pliable. But even within that messed-up system, Brooke Shields was treated monstrously. It could easily be argued that she was the most sexualized child in the history of the American entertainment industry. For the entirety of her adolescence, and a couple of years before it, Shields was a “sex object”, the face of a rotten world’s fetish for children who was openly leered at by the press, the business, and the world. If she’d chosen to hide in a cave from the age of 18 onward, or sue the entire effing planet, nobody would have blamed her.
So, I wanted to find one of the many oft-referenced profiles of Shields that were written in the ‘70s, when she was introduced to the world as a “model” and image of child desire. Often, stuff like this is hard to find and not digitized by their publications, but I was still surprised by how tough it was to locate stuff like the New York Magazine cover story featuring Shields and her mother. That mag has a really detailed archive, and a lot of issues are available to read in their entirety on Google Books. This one? Not so much. I could only find a couple of pages of it on Instagram, which are hard to read. Other profiles, like one from the marijuana-focused magazine High Times, were a little easier. Still, I got the sense that a lot of places were playing a game of hindsight, trying to cover their tracks. I don’t blame them, but the internet is forever. So, I’ll be looking into the bits of the two aforementioned profiles as well as a few other things I found scattered across the web. Warning: They’re all horrifying.
Brooke Christa Shields was born in 1965 to Teri Shields, an actress and model, and Francis Alexander Shields, a Revlon executive whose mother was an Italian princess. Francis's family had not approved of Teri. When Teri announced her pregnancy, Francis's family gave her money to get an abortion. She took the money and kept the baby. Eventually, Francis and Teri wed, but it was a short-lived union. From the moment Brooke was born, Teri decreed that she was destined for greater things. "She's the most beautiful child and I'm going to help her with her career," Teri reportedly said when Brooke was barely five days old.
Brooke's first modelling gig came when she was 11 months old. She built up a career in front of the camera from that point on, doing movies, TV work, and advertising. Legendary modelling agent Eileen Ford said of Brooke, "She is a professional child and unique. She looks like an adult and thinks like one." It's still pretty common to hear people talk about child stars as being mini adults or so mature for their age. It's an industry that forces kids to grow up before their time, to becoming workers and take on all the weight of that. Still, the way people talked about Brooke was different. They weren't just heralding her mentality: they were celebrating that she was a child with a supposedly more adult look, and that was a profitable thing to be in the '70s.
Looking at pictures of Brooke when she is 10 and 11 years old, I don't exactly see this supposedly adult-looking kid. She has very soulful eyes and gorgeous thick brows, but she still looks undoubtedly like a pre-teen girl. It’s not that anyone really believed she could pass for 18 or whatever, but the way her “maturity” was held up as evidence that she could and should be positioned as “sultry” or “adult” was heavily reliant on the notion that Brooke was more than just a kid.
In 1977, Brooke was cast in the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby. The movie was written by the legendary production designer Polly Platt, who was inspired by a story she'd read about a girl who was forced into prostitution by her mother. The studio wanted Jodie Foster for the lead role, following her Oscar-nominated performance as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver. Malle, however, wanted a younger actress, one who could fully convey the horror of a little girl being forced into sex work before she really knew what sex was. Malle and Platt met with Brooke and her mother. To ensure that Shields was intellectually able to navigate the material, they asked her if she knew what prostitution was. She said yes, her mother had informed her.
