The “face of a decade” is sitting opposite me with two large, black, comma-like stickers planted beneath her eyes. It is testament both to the professionalism of the owner of said face and the depth to which we are engaged in our conversation that neither of us has mentioned it as, casually and wordlessly, she has removed her spectacles, torn open a sachet, teased out the sticky commas – cosmetic miracles that magically de-puff the under-eye area – and attached them firmly to her face. There they will remain, taking up prime Hollywood real estate, for the next hour or so.
Following her controversial rise to fame at 12 years old, when she played a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields and her face defined the Eighties and became a byword for its provocative popular culture. She starred in two notorious coming of age/end of innocence films, The Blue Lagoon and Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love, at the age of 15 and 16 respectively, and shocked middle America and its denim-buying masses with her 1980 Calvin Klein advert in which she proclaimed, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (Simpler times.) It’s difficult to overstate just how ridiculously, globally famous the teenage Brooke Shields was.
And now, aged 56 and in the sixth decade of a career that has waxed and waned – in the early Nineties she was reduced to endorsing cauliflower for the Foxy vegetable company – she’s still very much here, all cheekbones and eyebrows. “I just keep moving” she says with a shrug. “Reinvention has always been my path to longevity. I didn’t want to go away. I’m a Gemini. I’m stubborn and I don’t like losing. I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t do things, and I was told no all the time.
“I’m ambitious. Even more so now. And I want more now. There’s more value in me and it hasn’t been cultivated yet.”
There is, she says, “this perception that if you’re famous or recognisable, that you’re ‘box office’, then that’s enough. But it’s not.” When she appeared on Broadway in 1994, playing Rizzo in Grease, it was, she says, “stunt casting”. “I was a novelty on Broadway, but I studied every day and I was good. Then it was, ‘Oh, there’s this television show [she played the lead in the sitcom Suddenly Susan in the late Nineties, which led to more comedic roles] – who knew she could be funny?’ ”
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Similarly, you might well land upon her latest film, the Netflix festive offering A Castle for Christmas, drawn to its cosily nostalgic leads – Shields opposite The Princess Bride actor Cary Elwes as a grumpy aristo in overalls – but then find it perfect post-roast/holiday hangover viewing.
Shields’s character, Sophie Brown, is a prolific chick-lit author, recently divorced, with a college-age daughter. “She’s an empty-nester with a successful career,” says Shields. “And she’s my age.” It’s new, she thinks, to find a rom-com focused on a middle-aged couple and to see a female character in her mid-fifties being celebrated for being sexy. “I think it’s a different type of prime.” And Shields relates to it closely. “Some parts of my body I wish were as high as they were in my twenties,” she quips. “But I don’t covet being that age again.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) modelling swimwear from the age of 15, Shields has spent a lifetime battling with her body image. “I was always called the ‘athletic’ one, which is a euphemism for ‘not skinny’. ‘She’s the athletic type. She’s a handsome woman. She’s a workhorse, a mule,’ ” she says, rolling her eyes at the list of backhanded descriptors. “My mum wasn’t skinny. My dad was 6ft 7in and a big guy. We’re a big family. But I never fit into any catwalk clothes and then you are just the Vogue model from the neck up, comparing yourself with every skinny actress and model.”
Such critical messaging was compounded at home. “My mother [a highly volatile alcoholic to whom Shields was devoted until her death in 2012] would get drunk and say, ‘Why don’t you move your fat ass?’ So I’ve always believed I had a fat ass.”
Until a few years ago she wouldn’t wear a bikini. “My kids [her daughters with husband, Chris Henchy, a comedy writer, are 18 and 15] were the ones who said, ‘Mum, you can’t wear that muumuu. You have to show your body.’ Body image has changed. These kids celebrate their shape.”
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One daughter, she says, is curvy. “She got that from me and I don’t want her to hate it – or hate me. So I can’t denigrate my own body and cover it up, because what message am I then giving her?” Last year, aged 55, she posted bikini shots of herself. “Elasticity is a problem,” she laughs. “I think I should have walked around on my hands for a decade.”
A couple of hours later, however, as she cavorts around our suite in the Four Seasons Downtown in New York wearing, variously, a red bra top and leggings, a sheer lace dress and a leopard-print body and fishnets, all taut, toned flesh and not a muumuu in sight, I am most definitely with her daughters on this one.
Although Shields insists that she herself did “have a childhood”, it was not one that many would recognise as such. Her father, Frank Shields, was the preppy, privileged businessman son of Italian aristocrats on his mother’s side and tennis players, actors and bankers on his father’s. Her mother, Teri Schmon, was pure blue-collar New Jersey and worked in a brewery and at a garment factory. When Teri announced she was pregnant after a brief fling, Frank’s family paid her to have an abortion. She took the money and spent it on a coffee table. They married but divorced when Shields was five months old and while Teri never remarried, her ex-husband went on to wed a socialite and have three more daughters, with whom Shields grew up, shuttling between two worlds: her father’s Long Island luxury and the Upper East Side apartment where she lived with her mother.
Schmon 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.”
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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 public narrative: 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.
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“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.”
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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 such 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 then this 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.”
A Castle for Christmas is streaming on Netflix now; beginningisnow.com
Shoot credits
Styling Deborah Watson Stylist’s assistant Ashly Tsao Make-up Meredith Baraf for BA-Rep using Tom Ford Hair Tim Nolan using Color Wow/TraceyMattingly.com. Brooke Shields wears sequined dress and shoes, burberry.com. Coat, top, trousers and shoes, Burberry. Bodysuit, Brandon Maxwell (Bergdorf Goodman); boots, Gianvito Rossi