"Pretty Baby" Brooke Shields looks back on her life in new documentary

April 7, 2023 5:18 PM

Brooke Shields' first modeling job was an Ivory Soap ad, shot by Francesco Scavullo, when she was eleven months old. She's spent most of her life in the public eye, including many years under intense (and, in hindsight, icky and misogynistic) media scrutiny. A new documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields (streaming on Hulu), provides an opportunity for Shields and others to look back on her life and career, and for the viewer to consider just how gross it was that a child was both sexualized by and pilloried for decisions made by the adults in her life.

Other topics: Brooke's alcoholic momager Teri, college life at Princeton, her first marriage to Andre Agassi, a sexual assault by an unnamed director, and Tom Cruise's outsized criticism of her decision to publicly discuss her postpartum depression. The doc ends with a scene of Shields (now 57), her husband and two daughters sitting at their dinner table, discussing her early movie career. An interesting look at a survivor.

NYT review (gift link)
AV Club review
Brooke Shields' Complicated Feelings About Being TIME's Face of the 1980s
Twitter thread revisits a (c) 1978 High Times article about 12-year-old Brooke, "million dollar jailbait"

posted by Sweetie Darling (33 comments total)

(I put this in the blue rather than Fan Fare because I thought there was a wider discussion possible here, beyond the film itself)
posted by Sweetie Darling at 5:23 PM on April 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

When I was a kid/adolescent, my looks would occasionally be compared to Brooke's.

I'm seven years younger than she. I'm looking back at those comparisons with a retroactive frisson of horror.
posted by humbug at 6:07 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm the same age as Shields. I had a friend, a year younger than me, that bore an astonishing resemblance to Shields and grown men were so gross about it. The sheriff SAed her and bragged about it. The late 70s sexualized tween and teen girls so much. It was just accepted that men would try to have sex with us as soon as we had boobs and it seems like no one was there to protect us.
posted by LindsayIrene at 6:17 PM on April 7, 2023 [24 favorites]

When I was young, it was accepted that a) Brooke Shields was the most beautiful girl alive and b) there was something extremely naughty about the way she wore jeans that were "painted on." I was extremely confused about this. How could you wear jeans in a wrong way when they cover you up? And how are jeans "painted on"? Wouldn't that smear?

A bad time to learn things from media. Now is not a great time, either, but I venture that it sucks less. I'm glad to see Shields gaining her voice.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:21 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

The 1970s was peak Creeping On Young Girls Season. Teri Shields has a lot to answer for.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:24 PM on April 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

Only a couple years older than Shields, and was a cute child myself, with the usual unwanted kind of attention that attracts.

Many years ago I started watching Pretty Baby without knowing anything about it other than it was a Louis Malle film with Brooke Shields in it.

When it got to *that scene* (the first of 2-3, as I understand it), I noped the fuck out of there.

Well over the line, IMHO. Straight child sexual exploitation. No artistic licence extends to that.

>The 1970s was peak Creeping On Young Girls Season.

Not just girls.
posted by Pouteria at 6:28 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just young enough to have been aware of Brooke Shields as famously pretty but not to have heard of Pretty Baby. I hesitate to condemn it outright without seeing it, but it's probably for the best that it's faded into obscurity.
posted by praemunire at 6:34 PM on April 7, 2023

So - you know those kids' books by the photographer Jill Krementz, which were profiles of kids doing some kind of avocation? Usually titled "A Very Young [blank]"?

Everyone's heard of her "Very Young Dancer", and you can also find books about very young horseriders, actresses, gymnasts and skaters. But I swear to you all that she also had a book called "A Very Young Model", which followed the same pattern as the others - lots of pictures of the kinds of things the young model in question did on the job and also at home, lots of as-told-to verbiage in between, early photos showing her very earliest efforts, etc.

I don't remember the name of the child model in question, and I cannot find the book mentioned anywhere. But I distinctly remember it - because the girl in question mentioned her friend Brooke who was also a model several times, and there were a handful of photos of this girl with - a young Brooke Shields, either joking around or posing for a shot together.

I think I stumbled upon this book when I was eleven or twelve, and kind of got my mind blown by the end - where the young model was talking about how a Hollywood movie guy had reached out to her and her mother, and also to Brooke and Brooke's mother, about this movie he was making, about a young boy and girl who got shipwrecked on an island and grew up together and then fell in love. The girl ended by saying it sounded like a beautiful story but her mother was still thinking about it because there was nudity, so we'll see...

At the time I read it I thought it was a fascinating peek into what an alternate universe may have looked like, but now I think back on it and think "oh, girl, you have no idea how lucky you were that your mother clearly turned that down."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:35 PM on April 7, 2023

Marc Maron has a great interview with Shields - she comes across as having an incredibly insightful understanding of what she went through and a perspective that seems very healthy.
posted by bluesky43 at 6:38 PM on April 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I’m a year or two older than Shields, and I remember feeling uncomfortable and anxious about her when I was growing up, like someone should have been looking out for her, but it was very clear that no one was.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:43 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

From Wikipedia:

From 1981 to 1983, Shields, her mother, photographer Garry Gross, and Playboy Press were involved in litigation in the New York City Courts over the rights to photographs her mother had signed away to Gross (when dealing with models who are minors, a parent or legal guardian must sign such a release form while other agreements are subject to negotiation). Gross was the photographer of a controversial set of nude images taken in 1975 of a then ten-year-old Brooke Shields with the consent of her mother, Teri Shields, for the Playboy Press publication Sugar 'n' Spice. The images portray Shields nude, standing and sitting in a bathtub, wearing makeup and covered in oil.

Truly mind-boggling shit.
posted by cubeb at 6:43 PM on April 7, 2023 [16 favorites]

cubeb, she talks about that lawsuit in the documentary. She was on the stand for two days, forced to answer question after question about to what extent she enjoyed the photo shoot. I wanted to throw up.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 6:47 PM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

(to not abuse edit window) They lost the lawsuit and the pictures were published by a subsidiary of Playboy (that should not have existed) called Sugar and Spice.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 6:51 PM on April 7, 2023

Oops, which cubeb noted. It's been a long day, sorry.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 6:53 PM on April 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is one of those things that makes you realize holy shit the recent past was seriously fucked up in a bad way, and everyone is just pretending like it made sense at the time as though that’s even an excuse.
posted by aramaic at 7:00 PM on April 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

the Playboy Press publication Sugar 'n' Spice. The images portray Shields nude, standing and sitting in a bathtub, wearing makeup and covered in oil.

This, however, I feel perfectly happy condemning unseen!!!
posted by praemunire at 7:21 PM on April 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

This, however, I feel perfectly happy condemning unseen!!!

I'd really like to think that this wouldn't fly anymore, but I'm not confident in that.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:28 PM on April 7, 2023

I thought Shields was a fine actor in "Suddenly Susan", her show from the late 1990s.
posted by maxwelton at 7:42 PM on April 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm two years younger than Shields and also got some notes on the resemblance as a tween/young teen (it was the eyebrows). I'm torn between wanting to watch this series and being afraid I'm going to have to nope out.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:11 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

>The 1970s was peak Creeping On Young Girls Season.

Not just girls.

I was referring to the glorification of creeping in the media - movies, books, TV, and advertising were bursting at the seams with it, and men who ogled little girls were seen by mainstream society as sophisticates rather than degenerates.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:54 PM on April 7, 2023 [14 favorites]

Richard Prince did a series of works where he rephotographed famous photos. One photo, titled "Spritual America", was an image of Brooke Shields from the Sugar and Spice magazine. This apparently made it "art" with exhibits at the Guggenheim in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It was still on display at SFMOMA as of three years ago.
posted by blob at 10:04 PM on April 7, 2023

Jesus Christ that article in the Twitter thread, what the actual fuck
posted by creatrixtiara at 11:16 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Marc Maron has a great interview with Shields - she comes across as having an incredibly insightful understanding of what she went through and a perspective that seems very healthy.

I haven't seen the documentary, but I did listen to this interview. I don't know if I've ever heard Shields in an interview and honestly haven't seen much of her work, but she is a very smart person who seems to have a strong grasp of how modeling and Hollywood worked/works. She's very witty, too.
posted by zardoz at 1:45 AM on April 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I remember the 80s were very full of very gross comments about famous girls, made by chronological adults.

Whenever the adults around us started drooling about Brooke Shields, my mom would interrupt, look pointedly at her daughters, and say something like, "I've heard Brooke Shields is very smart. Isn't she going to go to Princeton?"

Generally adults took the hint and changed the subject to school.

My mother has her flaws, but I'm grateful she had the grace to do that. I model the same behavior for my daughter.
posted by champers at 2:49 AM on April 8, 2023 [40 favorites]

I feel like one could very easily trace a thread from this kind of sexualization of kids in the 70s to it becoming unacceptable to the people with outsized political power who are now very interested in kids genitalia.
posted by Zargon X at 7:32 AM on April 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

EmpressCallipygos -- I remember that book too, and I found it! It wasn't a Krementz book, but it was of the same ilk (I was a children's library assistant in the early 80s so I read a lot of them).
posted by JanetLand at 11:37 AM on April 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I often buy vintage sewing patterns. Sometimes I will see her as the model on the package for children’s clothes. Very weird.
posted by Melismata at 12:17 PM on April 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

This kind of nudges me to reflect on someone like Millie Bobby Brown, who rose to fame as a child, and in a role that was overtly androgenous and child-like and non-sexualised... and yet you could still practically hear the press panting and waiting for her to "come of age" so that they could say what they really wanted to about her on the red carpet.

It felt like the the entertainment industry had realised they looked bad for putting kids into sexualised fictional roles at a young age, but in real life, the eagerness to see them sexaully was still barely hidden.
posted by penguin pie at 4:37 PM on April 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I know a few people in passing who were at Princeton with her—one of them was working at the Princeton library, last I heard. She was apparently (and understandably!) a bit skittish, and her friends were very protective of her. I’m glad she had peers who had her best interests at heart—I just wish it hadn’t taken her until college to find them.
posted by pxe2000 at 4:59 AM on April 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The 1970s was peak Creeping On Young Girls Season. Teri Shields has a lot to answer for.

The men who made these movies and ads, and asked the creepy questions when they interviewed her, and filmed her and photographed her, have a helluva lot more to answer for, though. Her mother is definitely not without blame, but her mother was also a victim of generations of misogynistic brainwashing. I’m five years older than Brooke, and at the time, I thought the movies and ads were disgusting, but the only adults anywhere whom I remember saying that it was wrong were a handful of people who were portrayed as being excessively uptight “church lady” conservatives.
posted by MexicanYenta at 3:42 AM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

You're not wrong, MexicanYenta, but I personally think that the greater responsibility to look out for a child rests more with their parents than with a bunch of strangers whose only relationship with the child is explicitly about making money.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:50 AM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

tl;dr the only thing I know about Brooke Shields is that she blowed up real good.
posted by neuron at 2:49 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember that book too, and I found it!

Oh good lord. I recognized that name immediately--Lisanne Falk is probably best known as Heather MacNamara. Interesting choice!
posted by dlugoczaj at 10:02 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]