LIZZIE

Dear Brooke,

I first “met” you when we were both 12 years old. I was sitting in my orthodontist’s office, getting ready for the next wire-tightening that would rein in the ambitious, odd-angled teeth that were hopelessly crowded into my pre-adolescent mouth.  I was flat-chested, skinny, and gangly (with a Dorothy Hamill haircut that never quite managed to look Dorothy-perky.  More like Mark Hamill, come to think of it).  And I had developed a hunch-shouldered posture ever since being nicknamed “Concave” by my streetwise, 5-foot-tall, blow-dried lab partner Mario Signorelli. (I seem to remember that there was some sort of science activity involving convex and concave watchglasses. Trust a seventh-grade boy to make the leap from watchglass curvature to female classmates.)

So how did a late-blooming,headgear-sporting peer in Dr. Friedman’s waiting room meet the controversial child star Brooke Shields? Well, okay… I didn’t exactly meet you. I just read about you in the People Magazine on the waiting room coffee table. As I flipped through the magazines on the table, my eyes fixed on a cover picture of a beautiful pouty-mouthed, sultry…12-year-old.   Could we possibly be the same age? No slick little guy in science class would have made fun of you. He would have been speechless and worshipping in your lovely child-star presence.  It was a promo piece for your movie Pretty Baby, which had just recently come out (and was causing quite a stir) in theaters.

The article title read, "Pretty Brooke:  Her Nude Scene in the Film Pretty Baby is a Shocker, but Brooke Shields Remains a Very Normal Little Girl."

I knew I wanted to read all about you, and I hoped that Dr. Friedman (whose own teeth were unprepossessingly yellow and snaggly) would take his time with the retainer fitting ahead of me.  I read all about you, Brooke.  Your terrifying, hungry-looking, aquanet-hardened mother Terri, your rich dad who left you and your mom to sink or swim in Newark, (a Jersey slum only 30 minutes away on the train line).  Terri insisted there was nothing a bit wrong with having you play a child prostitute. It was such an artistic film, after all. And just one more rung on your ladder to super-stardom. The two of you would show that deadbeat dad that his wallet full of cash was irrelevant.   Terri gushed to the People reporter:  ’People like to hear that Brooke’s childhood is taken away from her. It isn’t' 

Oh, gee.  Okaaaaaay, Mrs. Shields.  If you say so I guess it’s all really just fine.  Why would posing nude at 12 in a movie do anything to hurt your little girl?  What’s wrong with people anyway?  Girl’s gotta have cash!

Brooke, you were your crazy, desperate Mom’s ticket out of Newark.  That much was clear to me, even as a slouchy, naïve seventh-grader.  And as I sat there wishing I could have even an ounce of your impossible beauty, I knew I would never want to BE you..I’d rather have Dr. Friedman give me a 20-gauge wire-tightening the day before the class pizza-sub party.

I wondered what your life as a model and actress would be like. I wondered how you felt about posing nude in a movie and everybody going on and on about how beautiful you were.  Was it worth it to be so beautiful if it meant THAT?  How could your mother let them do that to you?    Did you have a tantrum or make a fuss when they told you to take your clothes off?  Did you even know when you did it that millions and millions of people would see your body?

JANE

Is there a woman our age (we are the same age!) who hasn’t felt some sort of kinship with you?  At the time, you really sparked so many emotional reactions for me. 

Awe: "she’s a 12 year old, beautiful movie star and model!" 

Envy: "she’s a 12 year old, beautiful movie star and model!" 

Empathy mixed with disbelief: "oh my God, she has to be naked in a film?!?  How can she do that?" followed by…

Relief: that I’d never have to figure that one out…  Being so publicly nude was not something most little girls my (our!) age had to grapple with. (It was not 2009 for sure, and people were very judgmental about this.  Pre-Britney, pre-Miley – Pretty Baby, whether it was "art" or "entertainment", was a whole new ball game).  At 12, my breasts were already a lot larger than most of my classmates, larger than yours, Brooke.  The idea of anyone actually seeing mine was unthinkable.

Hmmm… My first memory of you finds me sitting on my parent’s bed, reading an article that had much more to do with that horror-show stage mother of yours.  "She and I are the same age… we both have crazy mothers…"  I immediately recognized the look in Terri’s eyes – that wheels spinning too fast look.  I didn’t want to examine that one so much, it was just another reassuring realization that I was not the only one.  

As for you?  I pored over your pictures, from the Ivory Snow baby pictures, and the Pretty Baby pictures, anything that popped up inPeople magazine.  And I searched for differences between us.  We were both from NJ.  Both the same age.  Both pretty.  Why you and not me?  What did you have besides a pushy mom and luck? Sadly, the realization that I was most definitely not beautiful the way you seemed to be sunk in.  I was way "too curvy".  You were so thin.  So grown up looking, but still so not grown up looking. (how confusing was that??)  That gorgeous long, thick hair.  Only later would I become aware of makeup artists and lighting and media manipulation causing little girls’ untold damaged self-esteem.  

You were unlike any other celebrity icon I’d seen.  Other teen actresses looked like kids.  Other teen models looked like, and were in, Seventeen magazine (the 1970’s edition). You looked like an adult, and appeared in Vogue.   Models and actresses who looked like you did were adults.  It was very confusing.  

Only later, perhaps as you eventually did as an adult, did I think of the hard work you endured; the weird grown-up world in which you were immersed; the childhood you did not have; the conflict and toll of being such an obedient child, who’s obedience was the bread and butter for so many people – including yourself.  

LIZZIE

There is no creature more self-conscious than a 12-year-old girl.  It all seemed so clear that what was happening to you was as wrong as wrong could be.  I’m happy to see that you have a few things to say about it all now.   Now that you’re a mom of little girls yourself.  The next time I met you, I guess we were both about 15….  

I was babysitting for a family in town.  The dad of the family was sort of a wolfish person–perhaps 35, handsome until he showed his teeth, which looked just a little predatory.  This man who had on several occasions found a way to brush his hand against my knee on the short drive home.  I was in the kitchen getting instructions from his wife for the evening, and he walked in with an armful of mail.  A glossy magazine with your face and thin-but-perfectly-curvy body on the cover slipped off the top of the pile.  The husband leered.  "Pretty Baby’s growing up to be pretty foxy," he remarked to no one in particular.  When I looked at his wife, her face registered nothing.  But she was looking intently at your picture.

When the kids were in bed later, I picked up the magazine and studied you.  I walked to the bathroom and examined my own face critically in the mirror.  Just average.  I fluffed my shoulder-length hair, mussed my eyebrow hairs, and pouted my lips.  No good.  You were exquisite, and I was, hmmmm….just slightly unkempt and puckery.  With a body still just beginning to develop.

I tossed the magazine cover side down on the kitchen counter, flipped on Love Boat, and settled into the sofa cushions.  I no longer felt a trace of sympathy for you, Brooke.  Just pure, bright-green envy.

JANE

You were just always there.  In those notorious Calvin Klein ads, breathily (and notoriously) proclaiming how "nothing comes between me and my Calvins", The Blue Lagoon, Endless Love… And in magazines. And then you went to college.  It was a big deal, putting your career on hold, like Jody Foster before you.  And of course, I wondered if you were really smart enough to go to Princeton, or if your celebrity and future alum donations had gotten you in.  But I had friends (or friends of friends – everyone knew someone who was in school with you) at Princeton, who announced that yes, you were  more than smart enough.  (you have to admit, the whole Michael Jackson thing would cause a girl to wonder… )  I wonder how many women born in 1965 held you up for comparison?  Turns out that you were grappling with so much of the same stuff we all do, just in a very public, very different way.  In a recent More magazine article, you spoke about being in a dance class, tripping up because you wouldn’t look in a mirror.  You were afraid to look in that mirror and see that you didn’t look like the girl in the ads.  Me, too.  

LIZZIE

 Next, we went to college together, Brooke–sort of.  I was not quite 18.  I didn’t go to Princeton like you–but my roommate’s best guy friend did–and he lived on the floor above you.  I therefore got regular reports (full of drooling admiration, of course) about what it was like to "sleep on top of Brooke every night."

And once again, envy became empathy.  Not that anyone was bragging to a wide network of friends up and down the East Coast about sleeping on top of me.  (I lived on the top floor of the dorm anyway.)  But I had entered into a stormy relationship with a guy who by turns worshiped and despised me.  And even when he was busy worshiping my physical attractiveness and showing me off to his rich Manhattanite friends, he was critical.  I should have my teeth bleached.  I should lose an inch off the thighs.  I should grow my hair out.  I should put blonde streaks in my hair.  I should wear sexier clothes.

I had arrived at college with a mild eating disorder.  As my body had filled out in the final two years of high school, I had panicked, thinking I was getting fat.  And so I would starve myself, purge myself, go for midnight runs.  (In the back of my mind, I always thought of you looking so amazing in those Calvin Klein jeans ads.  Not quite girl, not quite woman–but thoroughly lean and radiant)  

And when I found myself in this drama-filled relationship in which my physical self was so front-and-center, I dieted and purged myself down to a scary-thin weight.  I felt weak and foggy all the time, but I thought that if that was what it took to be beautiful, I would just choose to live with that.

But, after an intervention by RA and roommates, I gave myself a good hard shake.  Broke up with the misogynist (for that, I realized was what he was), tried to learn to enjoy food again, and threw myself into the intellectual ferment of college life.  I remember having more and more moments of being struck by how little I knew and how brilliant my teachers were.  There was no time to waste on endless self-scrutiny in the mirror.  And why in the world would I want to walk around in a mental fog?  I needed my brain to work hard for me!

As the year wore on, I remember the "sleeping on top of Brooke" comments turning into little snippets like "Dave from Princeton says Brooke is actually REALLY smart."  I felt happy for you.  You probably hadn’t let some rich-guy yutz crush your self-esteem and distract you from your studies–it sounded like you were showing them all right out of the gate that you had a formidable mind to match the beautiful exterior.  

JANE

Skip forward a decade after college.  You married and divorced Andre Agassi, I was a serial dater.  And then we met our husbands around the same time.  And sure enough, just as I was going through all sorts of baby-making problems, there you were too – in the same predicament.  My son is one year older than your first daughter, our second children are almost the same age.  Listening to Tom Cruise blast you for publicly addressing the fact that you treated your post-partum issues with medication, was excruciating and infuriating.  (What a freak!)  It was yet another thing we had in common, at the same time.  I read Down Comes the Rain, right around the time I started to admit to myself what was going on in my own life, in the time after my daughter was born.  Your descriptions of that experience rang so true, in the purest sense.  Forget my silly adolescent envy, this was one thing I wished we didn’t have in common.  

LIZZIE

While Jane was serial-dating, I was busy procreating.  Each of my four babies, born over the span of a decade, was (and is!) loved. Each one is miraculous and beautiful–and three of the four were conceived despite my very determined use of some form of birth control.  Whom did this body belong to, anyway?  Certainly not to me. It seemed that half the time I was pregnant or nursing, and the other half the time I was trying to recognize my postpartum body again.  And, Brooke, when I read about your postpartum depression and recognized my own dark shadows in your story, I marveled at your maturity and courage.  You had defied all the odds and become a woman of character and emotional honesty.

JANE

Again in the May More article, here we are once more, Brooke.  Pregnancy and motherhood make a woman realize that her body is not the enemy, it is not this unattached thing to be resented/feared/despised.  Our bodies serve us well, and then – for some – they create (sometimes with a little – or a lot – of help) and nurture that which is most precious to us, our children. Discovering the mind/body connection during the childbearing/parenting season of our lives is familiar to so many women our age.  Especially in our late thirties, into our forties… this is the time when our bodies are our own, disliked less and accepted more. But frankly, I’m with you – I don’t "love" my wrinkles either…  

It’s a funny thing, to connect with so public a figure in so many personal ways.  Many women grew up with you, Brooke.  We are your fans (or not) who are the very same age as you.  We’ve followed you from afar, not in a creepy, stalker kind of way; but in a mixed up, distant but somehow connected, sort of way.  It’s not like you are a constant or actual "presence" in our lives; but every time you land a new movie or TV series, or appear in the tabloid news, I think there is a certain group of women who are cheering you on – or at least taking note – happy for you when things go well.  For myself, to read about you finally having those babies, freeing yourself of depression, and continuing a successful career; it’s nice to see.  You never became that train wreck celebrity.  You are still an icon, but perhaps a more personal one.  Your public ups and downs are a touchstone for the lives of those of us who "grew up with you".  Vastly different experiences that in some ways were not so dissimilar.  

Note from Jane: The interview with Brooke Shields, in the May issue of More magazine can be found online here.