[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
If you haven’t yet seen the Brooke Shields documentary, you probably have NO IDEA what she went through as a child!
We knew the movie star began life as a child model in the ’70s, but we had no idea just how sketchy that work was in those days. For those who haven’t yet seen Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the child star’s mother, model Teri Shields, was also her manager early on. She got her started posing as a baby for Ivory Soap at just 11 months old. By 12 she had her first starring role in a movie, playing a child prostitute in a film called Pretty Baby — the doc’s namesake, and at 14 she was starring in The Blue Lagoon and posing in sexualized Calvin Klein ads.
Related: About That Time Brooke Was Called ‘Million-Dollar Jailbait’…
All of that is boundary-pushing enough. But somewhere in there, around 1975, Brooke’s mother gave her consent for her daughter to be photographed nude for a Playboy Press magazine called Sugar ‘n’ Spice. She was 9 years old at the time. We’re going to be straight with you — we are unwilling to even look to see if this is as sick as it sounds. We don’t want something like that in our brains OR on our computer’s history! What we can say is that according to Wikipedia:
“The images portray Shields nude, standing and sitting in a bathtub, wearing makeup and covered in oil.”
As she grew in fame, she and her mother must have regretted the icky pics — they sued Playboy and photographer Garry Gross to try to keep them from seeing the light of day. Disturbingly the NYC court found in favor of the photographer! Something about Brooke’s job as a “model” protected him?
We’ll say it again, SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE AND ARREST ALL OF THE 1970s! Yeesh.
The now 57-year-old was promoting the Hulu documentary on SiriusXM‘s The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday and opened up about the unbelievable incident. She complained about Gross being allowed to release the photos:
“He waited till I was famous to do it, too, which was just gross.”
Howard balked at the ridiculous court system back then, saying:
“You know nowadays, the norm is different. If you went to court now, they would say, ‘This is kiddie porn, there’s no way this guy’s allowed to release it.’ But back then, they were like, ‘F**k you, Brooke Shields.'”
He ain’t wrong! It’s certainly what we’d expect! But Brooke says the whole process was pretty disgusting:
“Yeah, I lost, and the prosecuting attorney was just such a prick. He was making lewd gestures to me, and nobody was seeing it. It was so surreal… He would lick his lips and look at me and say things like, ‘You were thinking of fornification, weren’t you?'”
Ew ew ew ew! That’s it, call the police on the ’80s, too!
As for the photos themselves, Brooke explained she didn’t know any better, calling it “dress-up” with makeup:
“We were a little kid in one picture, then we were an adult in the other.”
Howard was still in disbelief that she did this naked, to which she responded that she didn’t see the issue until she was a bit older:
“I walked around nude as a 9-year-old, I didn’t have budding sexuality. But when you’re 15, and you’re in high school, and to bring those out… it was embarrassing.”
When Howard asked about her mother, who should have known all along the photos were problematic, Brooke explained:
“She had this like crazy justification for things. She believed that as long as she was in my personal life, keeping me safe and virginal and pure and all that, that she was sparing me.”
While putting her on display?! Yeesh!
Brooke knew later on she “was never protected by the people that you think would look after somebody.” But separating from her mom as an agent did make her feel guilty despite it all.
See the full clip from Stern (below):
Brooke also brought some adult anecdotes — ones that don’t makes us feel the need for a shower. Well, maybe a cold one?
The Suddenly Susan star actually got to go on a date with her lifelong crush, John F Kennedy Jr. And folks, they say never meet your heroes — but definitely don’t date them! Brooke was obsessed with John John since she was a child, recalling:
“I was so madly in love with him since the time I was like three. My mom would say, ‘That’s the boy you’re going to marry.'”
And because she’s Brooke Shields, she actually did get to meet him! It was while they were in Aspen, Colorado, though she didn’t specify when — just that she was an adult at the time and in town for a wedding. In an effort to impress him, she pretended she knew how to ski and went along with him to the expert slopes. It… didn’t work out!
“I had to get ski lifted out because I went into the trees. And he didn’t help me, but I was like, ‘It’s okay. He can’t help me. He’s John John.’”
This is so oddly relatable. This sounds like a Sandra Bullock movie. Unfortunately it might have been in the All About Steve ouvre because it got super weird from jump street:
“We went out. I was invited with the family. He kept saying I look like his mother, which is really interesting, and a compliment that was also like, ‘I don’t know how to feel about this.'”
Yeah, that’s a red flag. Even for a guy whose mom was Jackie O, it’s weird, right? She continued:
“And then we did have a real date and I wouldn’t sleep with him because I kind of loved him too much.”
Yeah, no way Howard was going to let it go with that! He wanted deets! (Thank you, Howard! LOLz!) Brooke explained:
“First we go out to this bar, pub with the rest of his family. Everybody’s just drinking at the bar, and there’s bar fights. He said, ‘Do you want to get out of here?’ And I was like, ‘Uh, yeah, I do want to get out of here, John Kennedy!'”
LOLz! He took her back to his “chalet hotel” and kissed her! She reminisced:
“It was like the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life… beyond not disappointing… The lips are beautiful, and the face is amazing and the body and the person, he’s down to earth and funny and irreverent.”
BUT… she wasn’t willing to sleep with him. She “froze” because the love she had for him, the crush “was so precious” to her. She knew she just couldn’t deal with it:
“I was like, ‘You’re falling in love and if you sleep with him, he may not talk to you again and you can’t handle that.'”
Brooke insists she wasn’t trying a hard-to-get strategy, she “wasn’t playing a game” with him by not giving it up. She knew he wanted to sleep with her, she just wasn’t ready for the commitment that it would have meant for her heart:
“I was so afraid of being really hurt because if I slept with him I would’ve given him my entire universe, my heart, my everything.”
Wow. Brooke tried to remain diplomatic in her depiction of the late Kennedy heir, who died in a place crash in 1999. But she did say things got somewhat icy after she turned him down for sex — a dangerous thing when skiing is involved! She remembers she “had to get a cab home” — and the fact he didn’t offer to drive her after their makeout sesh “was a little less than chivalrous in my opinion.”
But she understood how he ended up not being the kind of guy to make an extra effort:
“He didn’t have to though. He had women falling at his feet and he didn’t have to do anything for it.”
Yeah, that’s a recipe for a jerk if ever we heard one. Speaking of which, when they saw one another on the slopes the next day “he didn’t look at me and he didn’t talk to me.” WHA?? Brooke mused:
“On the one hand, I was like ‘S**t.’ On the other hand, I was like, ‘Thank God, because he still might not have talked to you even if you had and you would have given something he wouldn’t have cared about.’ He showed his true colors in that.”
But then, in total Sandy B fashion, she got snowed in with JFK Jr — AND her mother — during that trip! And he still wouldn’t talk to her!
“So then it was my mom, John John and me in this chalet and it was like, this is surreal. I think I knew enough about myself by then to say, ‘You won’t be able to handle this, Brooke.'”
Well, thankfully she didn’t have to. She had plenty of romances with guys who were willing to make the effort and respect her boundaries and all of it.
See Brooke talk about her disastrous rom com of a date with American royalty (below)!
Oh, and Brooke’s doc, Pretty Baby, is streaming now on Hulu for even more wild stories from the star!
[Image via Paramount/Howard Stern/Calvin Klein/YouTube/WENN.]
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