40 Years Later, Brooke Shields Has No Regrets About Her Scandalous Star-Making Role

There was no hiding Brooke Shields from the frenzy surrounding the 1978 film Pretty Baby, in which she starred as 12-year-old Violet, who lived with her prostitute mother in a Storyville brothel in 1917 New Orleans. But she was insulated from the controversy ignited by her nude scenes in the film. Teri Shields, her mother and manager, saved every article and review written about her daughter, like the People magazine cover that proclaimed, “Brooke Shields, 12, stirs furor over child porn in films”—but protectively never shared them with her daughter.

If Shields hinted that she had heard negative comments about herself or the film, her mother responded, “Are you proud of what you did? Well, then fuck ‘em.” Today, she remains resolutely proud of the movie.

Louis Malle’s film, released 40 years ago this week, made an indelible impression on its pre-teen star, just as she made an indelible impression on the world in her first starring role. “It was the best creative project I’ve ever been associated with, the best group of people I’ve ever been blessed enough to work with,” she tells Vanity Fair. Still, the intense experience of making and promoting the film, and the childhood trauma of forging an on-set “family” only to see it break apart when the film wrapped, nearly prompted her to quit making movies.

At the time, the precociously striking Shields had done modeling, commercials, and a couple of made-for-TV movies. She was promptly killed off in her feature-film debut, Alice, Sweet Alice, and also got edited out of Annie Hall: ”I was seated in the classroom next to the girl who was ‘into leather.’”

Malle was the award-winning director of acclaimed and controversial films including Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers, which became the object of the obscenity lawsuit that prompted Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Pretty Baby was his first American film.

The movie’s R-rated content was not an issue with Teri, who had taught her daughter to appreciate foreign films. Living in New York in the 70s also meant that the Shieldses knew sordid when they saw it—and Pretty Baby wasn’t. Creative license aside, the film was based on a real place and inspired by the life and times of E. J. Bellocq, who photographed Storyville prostitutes; in the film, his character falls in love with Violet and sets up house with her.

From the cast (Susan Sarandon as her mother, Keith Carradine as Bellocq, Antonio Fargas as the brothel piano player) to the crew (the legendary Sven Nykvist was the cinematographer), “we knew this was a labor of love,” Shields says. “More than anything, we felt we were part of something special.”

Shields previously recalled the making of Pretty Baby in her memoir, There Was a Little Girl, which chronicles her loving but fraught relationship with Teri. There was plenty of drama on the set: at one point, an attempt, she wrote, was allegedly made on her mother’s life after Teri reported to the labor board that Brooke was being overworked.

Despite period costumes that amplified the New Orleans heat and sometimes 14-hour days, Shields cherished the experience—though her relationship with Sarandon wavered from frosty to supportive, according to her memoir. (It much improved, she says, when the two co-starred again as mother and daughter in King of the Gypsies.) Carradine “was so kind and respectful,” even when Bellocq and Violet kissed—Shields’s first. Carradine “so sweetly” reassured her that a movie kiss was make-believe and would not count. “I was really well taken care of emotionally,” she says.

Even so, two traumatic experiences soured her on the prospect of making any more movies. “It was an altered universe we were all in, and coming out of filming was a real shock to my system,” she says. “I remember being on the plane just sobbing. . . . That kind of heartbreak can only happen to an 11-year-old.” The set felt like “a family. . . . And then to feel like you have to possibly get that close to people again, and then one day it’s over? I didn’t want to feel that again.”

Shields also had to endure the Cannes Film Festival, where the film caused a furor and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. At one point, someone emerged from the crowd with scissors and was restrained when he tried to cut her hair. “I hated everything about Cannes,” she says. “I had never seen frenzy like that. It was so obscene but absurd. I couldn’t identify with it. . . . The magnitude of the attention was really scary.”

Controversial scenes such as one in which brothel customers bid on Violet led to charges that the film amounted to pornography—and they only escalated when the film was released in North America. (It was banned in Ontario.) Teri was attacked in some quarters for allowing her daughter to star in the film. On Phil Donahue’s daytime talk show, Shields recalls, audience members yelled, ‘This is terrible you let your daughter do this.’ And my mom says, ‘Have you seen the film?’ And they would say, ‘No, I would never go see a movie like that.’”

Film critics, however, gave both it and and Shields good notices. “It turns out to be a good-hearted, good-looking, quietly elegiac movie,” praised Roger Ebert. “Shields really creates a character here; her subtlety and depth are astonishing.” And just as Julia Roberts did in Pretty Woman, Shields became America’s sweetheart by playing a prostitute.

The film also inspired a song, Blondie’s “Pretty Baby”—a fact Shields did not learn until she met Debbie Harry on a magazine shoot in 1981. “I don’t think I had that high opinion of myself,” she says with a laugh. “I’d heard the song, but I didn’t dream it was talking about me. . . . All babies are pretty babies to me. My mom used to say, ‘You’re my pretty baby.’ I say it to my kids. I didn’t make the correlation.”

Shields would go on to make more movies, but Pretty Baby set a high bar. Her next film was Tilt, in which she portrayed a teenage pinball wizard runaway. “It was so disappointing to me,” she says. “It was so thin, is the best way I can articulate it.”

Now, it’s been many years since Shields has watched her breakout film. “I don’t know how good I was,” she says. “I was virtually untrained and just was in the moment. Louis had always said he didn’t want a Lolita who was cognizant of her sexuality. He didn’t want me to be slick or coy.”

Does she think Pretty Baby could be remade today? Would she let her own daughter star in it? “In this environment and with social media and with the dangers on that level and just being a mom now, looking at my 11-year-old, I would not facilitate it,” she says.

But she does share her mother’s “fuck ‘em” advice. “I tell my daughters that they are going to experience meanness, but they just have to stay strong,” she says. “You have to believe in yourself. That is a daily thing . . . with children, in particular.”

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