Brooke Shields: Why Now?

“Choosing a career is a decision you don’t want to rush.” –
From the “Career and Success” chapter of “On Your Own,” by Brooke Shields

Lost somewhere in the Brooke Shields cinematic oeuvre –– an easy place to go missing –– you’ll find Speed Zone!, a justifiably forgotten 1989 Cannonball Run retread with an all-star cast that also includes Donna Dixon, Shari Belafonte, Jamie Farr, Eugene Levy, boxer Michael Spinks and the late John Candy. In this mirthless romp –– which should have been titled It’s a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World! –– there’s a moment that resonates for the Brooke Shields scholar. Seemingly hours into the forced high jinks, Shields pops up as a flight attendant on a Vegas-to-L.A. shuttle. She’s uniformed and permed but still recognizably, beautifully Brooke. After giving a comically brusque safety spiel, Shields gets called over by two passengers played by –– who else? – the Smothers brothers.

The following exchange takes place.

Shields: Was there something I can do for you gentlemen?
Tom Smothers: Excuse me, I’ve seen you before. Aren’t you … um … ?
Shields: Still am.
Another passenger: Oh, Brookes!
Shields: It’s Brooke, lady, not Brookes. Brooke! There is only one of me!
Dick Smothers: Brooke Shields. That’s Brooke Shields!
Tom Smothers [amazed by her presence]: Wow! If you don’t mind my asking… but… why… but you work… I mean… what are you… ?
Shields: After four years of Princeton, my professors suggested I seek higher goals. So I figured what better place, you know, to keep my face in the public? Besides, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing bit parts in movies.

Once upon a time when she was but a Lolita-ish lass, Brooke Shields appeared on the cover of Time billed as the face of the ’80s. There is, of course, one problem with being the face of the ’80s –– it’s called the ’90s.

As much as anyone, Brooke Shields has grown up in public. She has reaped the benefits of premature attention and paid its price. “Fame probably inhibited my growth,” Shields, now 31, tells me in one of our many soul-baring conversations. “It definitely slowed things down.” Being the hardest-working kid in show business, Shields got rich and spent her school vacations traipsing around islands making movies like Endless Love. But, and this is a big but, the pop-culture fishbowl is an unnatural place to live, much less grow up. Even Chelsea Clinton has more breathing room than Shields ever did.

If Plato –– a guy she probably met at Princeton –– is correct and the unexamined life is not worth living, then Brooke Shields has lead an overwhelmingly worthwhile life. Over the course of two decades, she’s acted in more than 20 movies, starred in a groundbreaking Calvin Klein jeans campaign (“What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”) and even shared some of her life experiences in 1985’s woefully out-of-print On Your Own. When she took a sabbatical from showbiz to attend Princeton, People magazine went, too.

In recent years our viewing has largely been restricted to paparazzi photos, Bob Hope specials and family-members-box shots during the tennis matches of her fiance, Andre Agassi. We’ve all watched so much of her life, but the million-dollar question remains: Just what the hell were we seeing?

Indeed, as Shields says in Speed Zone!, there is only one of her. She’s a sexy enigma inside a pure paradox. She spent her wonder years being professionally provocative but remained an impenetrable-fortress celebrity. Decades before Alanis Morissette declared herself so, Brooke Shields was Miss Thing: a distant object of desire, a hot puritan in tight jeans. She was the first beautiful nymphet to give us a collective forbidden hard-on –– assuming Shirley Temple didn’t do it for you. Nothing came between Shields and her jeans except our prurient obsession with America’s best-loved jailbait.

We can measure our own lives by hers and discover she got a hell of a head start by going to work right out of the womb. Or at least I can. Shields and I grew up living just an exit apart in New Jersey. Before she turned one, Shields started modeling. I’m 34 and have yet to book my first shoot. At 11 she gave a remarkable performance in the late Louis Malle’s artful Pretty Baby, in which she’s initiated into the world of New Orleans prostitution. I was preparing for my bar mitzvah. That same year, she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Now I work there. Weird.

She’s been an adolescent sex symbol and a spokeswoman for virginity despite being linked in the press with everyone from John F. Kennedy Jr. to Michael Jackson. She grew up with, perhaps, the mother of all stage mothers. Yet there Shields stands tall before us, a bright, sweet, seemingly well-adjusted model citizen and proud survivor of the shit storm of modern celebrity, a condition fatal to many adults.

“I’m not sure healthy is a word I would use to describe my childhood,” she says. “It was what it was.” What it was –– enough worldwide attention to stunt anyone’s growth and land her on some Danny Bonaduce talk-show panel discussion –– could have made Shields a full-on psycho. (“She’s been around enough of them,” says Agassi.) Yet, remarkably, the closest she got was playing one on Friends. When Shields guest-spotted earlier this year on the show’s post-Super Bowl episode as a crazed soap-opera fan of Joey Tribbiani, she churned up a tidal wave of buzz. That buzz, which came on the heels of a successful Broadway run as bad girl Rizzo in Grease!, helped persuade Warner Bros. and NBC to build a sitcom around her, the much-promoed Suddenly Susan, and to schedule it between Seinfeld and ER in the network’s powerhouse Thursday-night lineup. “This is the way NBC tells you they love you,” says Warren Littlefield, NBC’s entertainment president. “We could have just sent flowers, but somehow it didn’t seem enough.”