Playing a child prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978), aged 12The Times Magazine 45Schmon refused to take alimony, but her
father paid for Shields’s private education at
well-heeled Manhattan schools. “And then you
had my mum, who was bohemian, and we
worked all the time, in weird locations, until
ten at night.” Shields took part in her first
shoot, for Ivory Soap, at 11 months old, and
was a veteran by the time she became the
youngest model to appear on the cover of
Vogue, at 14. “It was a privileged life on the
one hand, but I also worked my ass off.”
While Teri has been compared to more
contemporary showbiz “momagers”, her
daughter insists that her career was far less
designed than that. “My mother never had a
plan. It was: you did this, you got a house; you
did that, you got a car. It was hand to mouth.”
Her mother was, she says, obsessed by
buying property, much of which they would
rarely spend a night in and on which they
struggled to keep up the payments. “We’d fall
in love with a place and want to live that life,
but then we never went back there. We only
went to Montana twice, but we had a ranch
there. We were capital-poor, house-rich. We
just had too many houses.” (Today she has just
two: a West Village townhouse, featured
regularly in Architectural Digest, and a beach
house in the Hamptons.)
If the burden of supporting them both
financially weighed on Shields, her mother’s
alcoholism was equally crushing. Shields
would lead Teri home from restaurants when
she was too drunk to walk straight, cover her
with a blanket when she passed out on the
sofa and once, when Teri (who Shields reports
would swear “like a construction worker”)
embarked on a profane tirade on the set of a
film, placed a length of masking tape gently
over her mother’s mouth. Yet when Shields
talks of her, it is with compassion, a benefit,
no doubt, of “35 years of therapy”.
“I always had an eye out for her safety,” she
says. “I just needed to keep her alive. She was
a single mum and she was fierce, but she was
also extremely scarred and insecure. To be
that much of an alcoholic, you really have to
be pushing a lot of stuff down.” Shields can
even find the positives in how it shaped her
own character. “I think that kind of vigilance
was valuable. There’s something to be said for
having good manners and behaving, because
you clear a space for yourself to learn and
watch. But it also made me hypersensitive,
which can be exhausting.”
And hyper well-behaved too. “I always
wanted to be liked, so I behaved and I was
rewarded for it,” she says. When she hung out
at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol, aged 16, it was
without drugs or debauchery. “I danced and
got sweaty. I hung out with all the cool people,
but I was always home by 10pm.”
This compassion for her mother has long
been at odds with the received publicnarrative: that Teri was a controlling narcissist,
cruelly forcing her cash-cow daughter onto
the stage, set and billboards. Shields insists
this was never the case. “They [by which she
means both the press and the public] couldn’t
grasp that I did not feel pressed on and lorded
over by my mum,” she says. “They wanted
me to feel claustrophobic and imprisoned,
but I had no reason to. I was having so much
fun. I loved being on movie sets. Listen, she
was hated for sure. But not by me.
“Of course, I was so enmeshed with her,
but no one was interested in the psychology
of that. They wanted me to feel exploited.
They wanted me to feel powerless and it just
wasn’t the truth.”
With the recent revisionism of the media
and public treatment of other young female
stars – most notably following the
documentary released earlier this year,
Framing Britney Spears – all this has, says
Shields, come into sharper relief for her.
“When you watch them ask Britney about
her virginity and, in old interviews, you watch
them ask me about my virginity... I was just
like, ‘Oh my God.’ ” Shields clutches her face
in her hands.
“There is a level of disrespect that you see
towards Britney, towards me, towards Taylor
Swift. ‘You’re not only female, but you’re
young and you can’t possibly have an opinion.
And you can’t be happy. You must not be
happy.’ And you’re like, ‘Do you not want me
to be happy? Is that too much for you? For
me to do all this and then also be happy?’ ”
The misogynistic treatment of more
recent American sweethearts, Swift and Spears- regarding their youth and innocence, but
also their sexuality as public property – is also
not far from the sinister public obsession with
Shields’s virginity, while simultaneously
objectifying and exploiting her youthful
sexuality. Yet, again, Shields is at pains to
insist she was never the victim of exploitation - not directly at least – and never experienced
a #MeToo moment.
“I was kind of untouchable,” she says. “I
was really famous and I was working, and so
there was no desperation in me as an actress.
It shocks people, but I was not easy prey.”
Shields believes aspects of the cautious,
post-#MeToo protectiveness have gone too
far, creating taboos around anything that
connects sexuality and youth.
“I think it’s too much. You look at movies
‘I danced and got sweaty.
I hung out with all the
cool people, but I was
always home by 10 pm’
With Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon (1980), aged 15With Andy Warhol at Studio 54 in 1981, aged 16With her mother, Teri Schmon, 1981Brooke Shields Continued from page 33GETTY IMAGES