Brooke Shields And Her Sexually Exploitative Stage Mother
Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesBrooke Shields and her stage mother Teri Shields in 1981.
With her father a Revlon executive and her mother a Manhattan socialite-turned-actress, Brooke Shields was destined to make a splash. Yet her stage mother Teri Shields had troubling notions of what that meant.
Teri Shields began managing her daughter when she was just 11 months old. Her first gig was as a model for Ivory Soap, but the real trouble started with a $450 Playboy shoot that a featured 10-year-old Shields naked. The shoot notes described her as: “A young vamp and a harlot, a seasoned sexual veteran, a provocative child-woman, an erotic and sensual sex symbol, the Lolita of her generation.”
Then came 1978’s Pretty Baby, in which the now 12-year-old was filmed nude and forced to kiss her adult co-star Keith Carradine. As People reported at the time: “Brooke Shields, 12, stirs furor of child porn in films.”
That trend only worsened. Teri Shields then booked her 14-year-old on The Blue Lagoon, a 1980 film that featured nude sex scenes between Shields and an adult male actor who played her brother. The movie garnered the attention of the government which dropped her as a non-smoking advocate and then held a Congressional inquiry in to the film.
Paramount/Getty ImagesA 12-year-old Brooke Shields seducing Keith Carradine in 1978’s Pretty Baby.
Shields testified that her Blue Lagoon sex scenes were filmed with a body double, and that her image as a child sex symbol was a bad reason to drop her from anti-smoking campaign. Then the oversight committee asked Shields about her Playboy spread.
“She [Teri Shields] thought it was alright if I did it,” said Shields replied. Her mother became visibly upset when handed a copy of the porn magazine which featured her 10-year-old daughter, but admitted that at the time she found the photos to be “beautiful.”
Shields later tried to prevent the full-frontal shots from being republished but lost the case when Justice Edward Greenfield ruled that a child was bound by the consent of their guardian. While he shamed Brooke’s mother, he also deemed the images to be “not erotic” — except to “perverse minds.”
“I was such a naive, innocent child,” Shields later said. “I wasn’t Lolita. I didn’t have that precocious understanding of my sexuality.”
