46 The Times Magazinesuch as Pretty Baby, you look at Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet or you look at any coming of
age movie that Louis Malle did, like Au Revoir
les Enfants or Lacombe, Lucien or whatever.
There was always a sexual element to them.
Maybe the movies I did wouldn’t be made
now because of such censorship, and that’s
a tremendous loss. Pretty Baby is one of the
most beautiful movies I’ve ever been in and
I will defend it for ever. I wrote my thesis on
it and I’m proud of it.”
She has personal experience of this new
puritanism too. In 2009, the Tate Modern
in London removed a naked picture of her- taken when she was ten years old, with her
mother’s consent, by the photographer Gary
Gross and repurposed by the artist Richard
Prince – for fears it might break obscenity
laws. “I was removed from the Tate,” she
beams. “How many people can say that?
But it makes you lack confidence in that
institution, because the very purpose of that
picture was to make a comment on [the idea
of the child star] and on reappropriation.
It made them look weak.”
Nevertheless, separating her own sexuality
from that of her public persona was not a
simple or swift process. “I think the liberation
for me took longer than most. Being so shut
off from my sexuality for so long, and the flip
side, smouldering on magazine covers, it
confuses the hell out of you.” Plus, she’d been
raised a strict Catholic. Plus, “Men, for the
most part, would be threatened by my mum,
which is understandable, or threatened by my
fame, which is also understandable.”
Hardly surprising, then, that a list of her
former boyfriends is a roll call of equally
famous men: John Travolta, who, ten years her
senior, used to pick her up from high school in
his car when she was 17; George Michael, who,
long before coming out, moved so slowly she
“thought it must be love” (“I just thought he
was being extraordinarily respectful of my
virginity”); John F Kennedy Jr; Liam Neeson...
“You know, I dated a lot of non-famous guys,
but nobody wanted to know about them,”
she says. “And 99 per cent of them I didn’t
really date. It wasn’t until I went to college
that I actually fell in love.”
At Princeton, where she was studying
French literature and enjoying relative
anonymity for the first time, she lost her
virginity, at the age of 22, to future Superman
Dean Cain. “I wish I had celebrated us more,
but I was just so laden with fear and guilt that
I didn’t have a wild time,” she says. “I want my
girls to explore and experience and not feel
guilt and not feel shame. My daughter talks
to me about everything and I’m kind of like,
‘I didn’t bargain for this much information, but
I’m going to listen.’ I look at her as an 18-year-
old and just think, ‘Wow, she is so much more
in her body and she owns her sexuality.’ ”
Even Shields’s two-year marriage to Andre
Agassi, while crucial in helping her finally
separate from her mother, was not, it seems,
any sort of sexual awakening. “That was not
a part of my first marriage,” she says. But then,
aged 35, she met Henchy, “this man who
celebrates my body”.
“I would always walk backwards out of
rooms and he’s like, ‘No, I want to grab onto
you.’ I’d always felt like I could arm-wrestle
every guy I’d ever dated – and win – but thenthis big hunky guy was like, ‘Come here,
woman,’ and it felt really good. It’s not like,
oh, I needed a man. But in a way, I did need
a man. I needed a man to celebrate me, so
that I could see that I was a woman.”
She admits, laughing, that she gave their
marriage two years. “I was like, ‘Don’t count
your chickens.’ I would always want a foot
out of the door.” They celebrated their
20th anniversary in May.
Their two daughters were hard won. “It
was two years and seven rounds of IVF just to
get Rowan. She was from the first batch. She
was frozen for two years. I was like, ‘You’re
stubborn.’ But it feels like the biggest failure.
Women are getting pregnant all around you
and you want this and it’s all you’ve wanted in
your life. And then you think, ‘I don’t deserve
it. I’ve had too much in my life.’
“Thank God I had a great doctor. And that
she spoke to me in a way that took away the
guilt. And the perseverance. She was not going
not to get me pregnant.”
A couple of years ago, Shields began to feel
that her demographic was not represented and
she wanted to do something about it. “I am in
a prime now, a different type of prime, and
they’re not marketing to me. We [post-
menopausal women] control 80 per cent of
the purse strings, most of us are independently
supporting ourselves and we’ve come into our
own, but the message out there is, ‘You’re
done.’ And I really feel like I’m just beginning.”
Her new company, Beginning Is Now, will,
she hopes, begin to redress this. She describes
it as “a 360-degree wellbeing brand”. She’s
begun by building an online community and
will soon start selling beauty products,
“because that’s what everyone wanted”. She
may yet become the face of another decade.
Yet she is surprised to find herself, at 56,
“becoming an entrepreneur or a CEO”. But
as a close friend commented to her recently,
“You’ve been a businesswoman since you
were born.” And, she says, “I feel like it’s a new
beginning, that there’s a resurgence in me.
“I’m less insecure. I don’t mind failing, but
I don’t like losing because I didn’t try. So I’m
always going to throw myself in and at least
say, ‘Oh, well, that’s not my forte, but I’ll have
a go at it.’ I don’t want to be on the bench.”
She’s a grafter. “I’ve not known anything
else, so panic does set in if I don’t have a job
lined up.” The notion of retirement brings her
out in hives. “They’re going to have to give
me the hook.” She laughs, motioning being
yanked around the throat. “They’re going to
have to rip me off the stage or the set. People
are like, ‘Don’t you want to relax and sit
back?’ ” She looks horrified. “No. That’s when
you just die.” nA Castle for Christmas is streaming on
Netflix now; beginningisnow.com‘Being shut off from my
sexuality and also posing
for magazines confused
the hell out of me’
With Cary Elwes in A Castle for ChristmasWith her husband, Chris Henchy, and daughters Grier,
15 (left), and Rowan, 18NETFLIX, GETTY IMAGES. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: ASHLY TSAO. MAKE-UP: MEREDITH BARAF USING TOM FORD FOR BA-REPS. HAIR: TIM NOLAN USING COLOR WOW/TRACEYMATTINGLY.COM. BROOKE SHIELDS WEARS SEQUINED DRESS AND SHOES, BURBERRY.COM; BODYSUIT, BRANDON MAXWELL (BERGDORF GOODMAN); BOOTS, GIANVITO ROSSI