Brooke Shields has explained why she was initially against her teenage daughter Grier Hammond Henchy joining the “brutal” modelling industry.
The 58-year-old, arguably one of the most famous child models-turned-actors of her time, said she “fought it for so long” but has since realised the “rules have changed” since her own experiences.
Shields was recently the focus of a two-part Hulu documentary Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby, in which she described being sexualised at a very young age. At the age of 10, her mother Teri Shields consented to her daughter being photographed nude for Playboy,and at 12, Sheilds appeared in the 1978 film Pretty Baby as a child sex worker.
After eventually giving her daughter the green light to begin her own modelling career, Shields said she has laid down some ground rules.
In an interview on US chat show Live with Kelly and Mark on Thursday (1 May), she said: “It’s such a different industry now than it was… I finally had to give in and say, ‘If you’re going to do this, I’m not going to be your manager. You’re going to be with an agency. You’re going to have a great work ethic. It’s not going to be comfortable and you’re going to listen to me’.”
Grier is keen to begin modelling on the runway, a category that Shields never broke into but which she understood to be “brutal”.
“That’s brutal and backstage is just brutal,” she told hosts Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, adding she did not think she could have “handled it”.
When Shields began working, her mother Teri was her manager and they were “glued at the hip”, she said. “[It was] probably how I could survive because you couldn’t get to me. She was such a mama bear and so protective. On the one hand I was very naïve and on the other, I was just thrown into this crazy world.”
In an interview with The Times published earlier this year ahead of her documentary, Shields reflected on her mother’s choices for her.
She said it was difficult to have a conversation with her daughters, Rowan, 19, and Grier, about why their grandmother allowed her to do projects that left her vulnerable to sexualisation.
“I mean, I could say: ‘Oh, it was the time back then’ or ‘Oh, it was art’. But I don’t know why she thought it was alright. I don’t know,” she admitted.
However, Shelds said she wasn’t angry with her mother, who died on 31 October 2012 at 72. “Everyone wanted me to be angry with her, but anger was just too sad for me to take when I looked at how insecure she was,” she told the publication.
“It’s so innate when you’re an only child of a single mother. All you want to do is love your parent and keep them alive forever, and so I wanted to protect her. And by virtue of protecting her, I was justifying everything and that solidified that bond between us.”
Shields shares her daughters with husband and film director Chris Henchy, whom she married in 2001.
