“I don’t think you can say fuck in Town & Country,” Brooke Shields tells me, but who am I to stop her? The 57-year-old model, actress, author, and entrepreneur has earned the right, and in an interview about her new documentary she speaks her mind freely about a wide variety of subjects.
Shields has been in the public eye since 1966 when she was cast at 11-months old as the Ivory Snow baby. Since then there have been countless articles written about her as well as many books (including some authored by her), and hundreds of TV news and talk-show segments. She’s made movies like Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, starred in campaigns for, among others, Calvin Klein, Revlon, and Versace. She continues to act and will appear in the forthcoming HBO Max film Holiday Harmony. And recently she launched a successful podcast called Now What?
But she’s never been as open as she is in Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a two-part documentary that debuts this week on Hulu. It is a comprehensive portrait of one of America’s most recognizable celebrities that somehow delivers scores of revelations about a person whose every action has been scrutinized.
Earlier this year, news sites were quick to report that Shields reveals in the documentary that she was sexually assaulted by a professional acquaintance when she was in her twenties. And last week, tabloids reported that Shields describes how her ex-husband Andre Agassi stormed off a TV set and went home and broke his tennis trophies after Shields licked Matt LeBlanc’s hands while filming a scene for Friends.
Pretty Baby, which was directed by Lana Wilson, handles its headline making moments in a nuanced and illuminating way, but there is so much more to this 136-minute production than tabloid fodder. In recent conversations, Wilson and Shields described four parts of the documentary they thought were the most challenging and rewarding to make.
“You can’t say fuck in Town & Country.”
There are many unsettling moments in the documentary. At one point Shields describes how Franco Zeffirelli, the director of 1981’s Endless Love, sat off camera at her feet during lovemaking scenes and twisted her toes to get the exact expression of “ecstasy” he wanted to capture on her face.
But some of the most upsetting parts are clips of Shields being interviewed on news and talk shows when she’s a child and young teen. Interviewers, some of them much older men, leer and insinuate as they grill her about her sex life, her mother’s alcoholism, and more.
Shields says she has a hard time watching old clips. “There's one interview where the woman asked me the same freaking question four times, and as a 12 year old, I sat there with my hands in my lap and said, ‘Excuse me, ma'am, I don't think you want my answer. Because I keep answering the same question and I think you want a different answer.’”
“I look at that little girl now and my heart really does go out to her,” Shields says. “But I'm also like, ‘Yeah, you fucking show them that you're not gonna be intimidated. You are innocent and you're scared, and excuse me, fuck them. I don’t think you can say fuck in Town & Country.”
Even at a young age, Brooke understood what kind of scoops her interviewers wanted, but she was determined not to give in. “I look back and have anger for the ignorance of these grown adults who prided themselves on being journalists and educators….I mean [in one interview] Barbara Walters turns around and asks me for my measurements. It was absurd.”
“Brooke with an e”
One of Wilson’s favorite parts of the project was delving into Shields’s time at college. “Brooke's decision to attend Princeton—in the context of what actresses did at that time—was a big deal. It was seen as a huge risk and a rebellion for her. It was just not what sex symbols did.”
Wilson says Pretty Baby’s producers had originally envisioned the documentary as a single feature but she convinced them it should be divided into two parts with Princeton as the transition point. “I remember watching Brooke in interviews after she graduated and noticing she was always so self-possessed. It really moved me and I wanted to highlight that change.”
Shields thought that when she finished college she would go right back to acting in features, but she quickly discovered that interest had dried up. She describes calling producers and having their assistants not recognize her name. “I’d be like, ‘Yes, it’s Brooke with an e.’” The young star who’d been mobbed at premieres had to take bit parts and do advertising work in Japan to make a living for herself and for her mother. “Nobody understands how much work it is to stay in the limelight,” Shields says. “The media likes to call people overnight successes. Yeah right.”
In part two of Pretty Baby, Wilson focuses on how Shields hustles to find projects that she likes. Her perseverance lands her the role of Rizzo in a well-received Broadway production of Grease, a hilarious guest spot on Friends, her own TV series Suddenly Susan. “It’s my passion to perform so I was always going to put the work in,” Shields says, but then quickly points out that hard work doesn’t guarantee anything, “Just listen to all the award show speeches from people who kept at it for decades before they got their break. And then think of all the equally talented people who never get one.”
To promote this documentary, Shields has sat for dozens of print, TV, and radio interviews. On the day we spoke, she says, “I woke up at four in the morning because I realized that I wanted to make sure that the list for the Pretty Baby premier party included people in the industry. My inclination is just to invite my friends but you need these opportunities to convert into more opportunities.”
“They want you to have rage and anger.”
Shields’s parents divorced a few months after she was born and she was raised primarily by her mother, Teri Shields. Throughout her childhood and early twenties, Teri was Brooke’s omnipresent manager and companion, accompanying her on photo and film shoots as well as on talk show interviews. Teri’s decisions—allowing Brooke to be photographed nude when she was 10, to play a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, the 1978 Louis Malle–directed film that gives this documentary its title, and to star in the Calvin Klein jeans ads, were questioned by the media from the start—first respectfully and then increasingly less so.
Shields has written and spoken about her mother’s alcoholism many times, and she doesn’t attempt to tidy up her relationship with Teri, who died in 2012, in Pretty Baby. Instead she describes how being a daughter of an alcoholic affected her own behavior. “I chose to be a type A person because I had to keep everything else in order to feel like I had control. You never know what’s going to happen with an alcoholic parent. The primary thing is they go away. The person you know leaves. And you are left alone.”
Although Shields is matter-of-fact about her mother’s faults, she also talks about how much she loved her. “That’s something a lot of people have a hard time understanding. They want you to have only rage and anger. But it’s really hard to feel relentless rage when you care about someone. But that’s also why you can be angry at them. If you didn't care, you wouldn't give a shit.”
“I would never watch your early movies.”
Another of Wilson’s and Shields’ favorite sections of the documentary comes at the end when the cameras go inside Shields’ home and record her, her husband Chris Henchy, and their two daughters, Rowan, 19, and Grier, 16, making and eating dinner together. “It was Lana’s idea and I told her she had to ask their permission.” Shields says.
There’s nothing remarkable about the setup other than the fact that Shields and Henchy rarely include their kids in media appearances. Rowan and Grier are outspoken in a familiar teenage way but also thoughtful and challenging. They discuss Shields’s career, how conventions have changed, and their own experiences with social media. Shields’s eyes widen in surprise occasionally during the conversation, especially when Grier says she’ll never watch one of her early movies. “They don't mince words or skirt around with their opinions,” Shields tells me.
“Brooke had such a complicated relationship with her mother,” says Wilson, “I had a sense from the beginning of this project that getting to see that she has these two daughters at the end of the film would be really powerful.” But Wilson had no idea how illuminating the conversation would be. She says she asked the girls a couple of questions about their mother’s career and then “sat back and was blown away by both of them.”
“We know Brooke would never have spoken so freely to her mom. I was moved by how comfortable her daughters are being themselves, saying what they think, how they can say something and really challenge their mom. And Brooke is strong enough that she can say, ‘Okay, I see what you’re saying.’ And then you actually have her thinking change in front of your eyes.”
Shields says she was apprehensive when filming this part of Pretty Baby. “But I felt it was really important to see how full circle my life has come. It was a positive view of how, if you work at it enough—even if you’ve had a wildly different, unconventional life—you can make your home a solid and safe and a happy place.”
Stream Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields now on HULU
