A cinematic sequence depicts the moral bankruptcy of 1970s Hollywood at its peak. A severely dolled-up 12-year-old girl is carried through a high-class brothel while drooling clients compete for her virginity.
Brooke Shields played the child prostitute in Beautiful Baby when she was only 11 years old and had to appear naked on TV and kiss 29-year-old Keith Carradine.
The film’s production company selected Jodie Foster, 14, for the role, but French director Louis Malle insisted on Shields.
Shields subsequently defended the 1978 picture about New Orleans’ red-light district, but it sparked outrage and was regarded as little more than child pornography.
It received an X-rating in the United Kingdom, and its distribution was postponed until cuts were made. It was only in 1995 that it was made available for viewing in Canada.
Yet for young Brooke, this was the beginning of a cycle of exploitation that culminated in her being raped in her early twenties at the hands of an industry insider, as she now claims in an explosive new documentary.
She had become the youngest model ever to grace the cover of Vogue at the age of 14 when other girls were still decorating their pencil bags.
The same year, she began filming Blue Lagoon, a leering teen romance in which her character repeatedly stripped naked and had sex with her fellow shipwrecked sweetheart (played by Christopher Atkins, then 18).
A body double was used for her sex scenes, but Shields claims the filmmakers encouraged her to continue an off-screen liaison with Atkins.
The following year, she had more sex and nudity in Franco Zeffirelli’s love drama Endless Love, about two high-school sweethearts barred from seeing each other.
And, at the age of 15, she starred in racy Calvin Klein Jeans advertisements, writhing around in figure-hugging denim, with the enticing tagline: ‘You want to know what comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.’
The movie and marketing campaign propelled her to become an international celebrity.
She became the party-girl mascot of New York’s debauched nightclub Studio 54 and was known as ‘Brooke’ worldwide. She was the adolescent a top agency once characterized as “so gorgeous that strong men forgot to flick their cigar ash,” with those distinctive thick brows and long shiny hair that made her look older than her years.
Despite her vampish appearance, Shields subsequently admitted that she didn’t have sex until she was 22 – and would have loved to have waited even longer.
She was unjustly labeled “America’s most famous virgin” due to this discovery. Yet, her abstinence had indeed assisted her in avoiding the worst excesses of Hollywood’s sexual predators.
For years, she blamed her fiercely defensive mother, Teri, who also served as her manager. ‘If somebody looked at me funny, she’d say, ‘I’ll cut off your b***s and make you eat them.’ Shields stated this in 2019.
But now, less than a year after claiming in an interview that she was “sort of untouchable… I was not easy prey” and had never had a “#MeToo moment,” she is singing a completely different tune.
The actress, 57, says in the documentary Beautiful Baby, which premiered last month in the United States, that she was raped in her early twenties in a hotel room by an anonymous male in the film industry.
She had met him after graduating from Princeton University in 1987 to discuss potential film ideas.
Following dinner, the man, whom she claims was a friend, offered her to call a taxi from his hotel room, which he then departed. Shields claims her ‘friend’ returned naked and attacked her, echoing the convicted rapist producer Harvey Weinstein.
‘He was right on top of me. ‘It felt exactly like wrestling,’ she adds.
Shields claims she ‘froze’ and did not fight back because she feared being killed: ‘God knows I knew how to be disassociated from my body. That was something I’d practiced.’
She alleges she left the hotel after the incident, got in a cab, and cried “all the way” to another friend’s place.
Shields claims she refused to accept what had happened to her for years, drinking wine at dinner. I entered the room. I was just so trusting…’ ‘Sometimes, I’m astonished I survived any of it,’ she says of her spectacular climb to prominence at such a young age.
In the documentary, a childhood friend, Laura Linney recalls, “I remember thinking: “I hope she’s Fine.” She was a young girl in an adult-dominated environment.’
And how Hollywood used that youth. Shields admits that she had never kissed someone before when she had to kiss actor Keith Carradine in Beautiful Baby.
‘This isn’t going to count. It’s all a ruse. ‘It’s all made up,’ Carradine informed her. Shields claims she reacted by attempting to distinguish the sleazy on-screen version of herself from the real her. ‘From a young age, I learned to compartmentalize. It was a means of survival.’
Nonetheless, some believe this was the beginning of the actress’s severe identity issue, including her sexuality.
After all, Beautiful Baby’s depravity and Blue Lagoon’s gentle porn were worlds apart from her home life.
Her father, Frank, was a businessman with wealthy roots, and her mother, Teri Schmon, was an ambitious actress from working-class New Jersey. She was raised in a strict Catholic environment.
Teri’s family handed her money for an abortion after she declared she was pregnant at 31 following a brief romance with Frank, but she spent it on a coffee table.
Shields’ parents married but divorced when he was only five months old.
Teri never remarried, but Frank married a socialite and had three more daughters. Brooke, therefore, straddled two worlds, seeing her wealthy father and step-sisters on Long Island on occasion (he paid for her to attend several New York private schools) but primarily spent her time in a modest Manhattan apartment with her mother.
Teri, a bitter alcoholic, was determined to live vicariously via her beautiful daughter, driving her to celebrity from a young age.
Shields was 11 months old when she had her first photo shoot for an Ivory soap commercial. Teri heaped her wealth into endless property investments as her daughter’s prodigious aptitude paid benefits.
She was a huge presence in her daughter’s life, scrutinizing and intimidating potential suitors and even accompanying Brooke on film shoots, where her habit of swearing like a construction worker’ once caused Brooke to cover her mouth with masking tape.
Shields has recently attempted to dispel the myth that Teri was the “stage mother from hell,” allowing her ten-year-old child to pose naked in a bath for promotional images. Shields revealed that she and her mother, who died in 2021, were close.
Perhaps Shields’s mother’s bad behavior explains why she always made sure her behavior was impeccable despite tales of various pranks with Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and the Rolling Stones in Studio 54.
She adds that Debauchery and narcotics were forbidden, and she was always home by 10 p.m. However, the young Brooke was not without male companionship. When she was 17, John Travolta, ten years her senior, would bring her up from high school.
And, before he came out, pop sensation George Michael was a friend and, she assumed, an admirer. ‘I just felt he was being exceptionally respectful of my virginity,’ she said years afterward.
She claims she first fell in love really when she started university.
She produced a book espousing the advantages of chastity in her first year at Princeton, where she studied French literature, resolving to remain ‘pure’ until her wedding night and urging other young Americans to do the same.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that when she later lost her virginity at 22 to fellow Princeton student Dean Cain (who went on to play Superman in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman), she was overcome with regret and humiliation.
Later, over 30 years later, with a mediocre film career driving a shift to Broadway, she revealed her love for Andre Agassi, the somewhat more appealing successor to John McEnroe as tennis’ bad boy.
A few months after they met, he paused his tour and traveled to New York on his jet to console her when she was treated for severe bunions in the hospital.
Her sober mother thought the infamous tennis ‘punk’ was too reckless and immature, triggering a spat with Shields in a restaurant, during which the actress was heard shouting: ‘Drop him? ‘I’m getting married to him!’
In 1997, she did. Despite this, the marriage lasted only two years. Extended periods of separation — as he competed in tournaments and she pursued her profession — were recognized as the most likely cause of their marriage’s demise.
Agassi was also quite protective, storming off set, driving home, and smashing his Wimbledon trophy after a flirty cameo in a 1995 episode of Friends in which she licked Matt LeBlanc’s fingers.
Nonetheless, there were rumors that the couple was sexually mismatched and that Shields didn’t like men.
In an interview with the homosexual magazine The Advocate in 2000, she stated, ‘There are many women I find quite attractive. But in this world, that is not acceptable.’
But, the next year, she married television writer Chris Henchy, whom she met through a mutual friend. Following multiple rounds of IVF, they had two daughters, Rowan and Grier.
Shields also said in 2005 that she had suffered from postpartum depression and had considered suicide. ‘I finally had a healthy, lovely baby girl, and I couldn’t look at her,’ she said.
Several weeks later, her Endless Love co-star Tom Cruise — who, as a Scientologist, views psychiatry as cruel — criticized Shields for using an antidepressant medicine, Paxil, and cattily asked, ‘Where has her career gone?’
She fired back, telling him to “stick to battling aliens” — a reference to Scientologists’ belief that space alien parasites exist inside all of us and must be killed.
Many readers will recall her strange association with another eccentric superstar.
Shields met Michael Jackson when she was 13, according to her eulogy at his 2009 funeral service. She also stated in the same speech that she had been his ‘date’ for one of Elizabeth Taylor’s weddings.
Jackson told Oprah Winfrey in 1993 that Shields was his girlfriend, and he repeated that allegation in 2001, telling another interviewer, ‘We dated a lot. Her photos were all over my wall, mirror, and everything.’
Shields, for his part, claimed he’d repeatedly requested to marry her and adopt a kid with her, but she insisted they were only friends.
She characterizes her bond with Jackson as “childlike” in this new documentary. That would suit a star who recently claimed that she didn’t think of sex as “my experience” until she was in her 40s.
She’d been ‘terrified’ of it before then, she said. Who could blame her, given what she has recently revealed about her past?
