Brooke Shields says that a revelation in her 50s made her reflect on her career — and consider what it could have been like if her mother hadn’t been her manager.
In Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, the 59-year-old actress writes that she was told in her early 50s that Hollywood agent Sam Cohn, who represented the likes of Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Cher and Sigourney Weaver, had wanted to take her on as a client when she was young.
“This was the first time I had heard anything about it!” Shields writes. “My God, I agonized, if I’d signed with him back then, it would have fundamentally changed the trajectory of my acting career.”
Teri Shields and Brooke Shields in 1981.
Roxanne Lowit/WWD/Penske Media via Getty
As it was, Shields’ mother, Teri, who died in 2012, managed her daughter’s career until she reached her 20s. Shields rose to fame in the late ’70s, starring in provocative films like 1978’s Pretty Baby when she was just 12 years old and 1980’s The Blue Lagoon when she was 15.
“Hearing all those years later that I’d lost that opportunity made me think, What the f— good does that do me now?’ ” Shields writes. “I think about what my career would have looked like had I known, or if I’d had the guts to demand, a professional agent. Maybe I wouldn’t have become someone they made a doll of or who had branded hair dryers (hundreds of which still sit in my garage). Perhaps I wouldn’t have had to go to Japan to do a Nescafé commercial in the mid-1990s to keep our brownstone.”
During a 2023 appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, Shields discussed her complicated relationship with her momager.
“It was all I knew, you know what I mean?” Shields told Barrymore. “But we got stuff. It’s like, I did a movie and we got a car. All I knew was, keep my mother alive, keep dancing and get stuff.”
The cover of ‘Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old’.
Flatiron Books/Amazon
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Elsewhere in her new memoir, Shields reflects on seeing footage in her 2023 documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields of her mother teaching her how to swim as a child.
“My mom is sitting poolside, giving me feedback,” she writes of the clip. “You see me pop out of the water and swim over to her and the first words out of my mouth are ‘What am I doing wrong?’ She’s directing me to ‘think out, not down, and think all the way across to the other end of the pool,’ and showing me with her hands from the comfort of her lounge chair.”
Shields writes that it was only in rewatching the documentary that she realized her mother didn’t actually know how to swim. “She was never taught, but I followed her coaching as if she were Katie Ledecky,” she writes. “That was our relationship in a nutshell. To me, she was the arbiter of all things Brookie.”
Shields admits that she wishes she had “more of a past. More rebellion” in her younger years. But she also empathizes with stars who’ve walked a similar path as her.
“The truth is, I absolutely understand the urge to shave your head, smash a car window with an umbrella, and say f— you to all the craziness,” she writes. “To punch a paparazzi. The hounding is constant from the moment you leave your house, and that can really mess with a person … I had to fight for normalcy … My attitude has always been, I will not let them win.”
Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old is available for purchase now.
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