The story of Brooke Shields is often told in terms of her age. She was 11 months old when she shot her first ad campaign for Ivory soap. She was 11 years old when she played a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film Pretty Baby and 14 years old when she starred with an 18-year-old Christopher Atkins as shipwrecked cousins discovering their sexuality in The Blue Lagoon. She was 15 years old when she appeared as a teen in lust in the Franco Zeffirelli film Endless Love. She was also 15 when she appeared in her first Calvin Klein ad, uttering these words to camera: “You want to know what comes in between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
To present her story this way is to highlight just how young Shields was when all these milestones were happening, how young she was when she became a paragon of all American beauty. For many, Shields, now 59, will be indelibly associated with her teenage dimpled, bushy-browed ingenue self, frozen in time like a butterfly in epoxy. Her new book, then, is aptly titled: Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Ageing as a Woman.
