Brooke Shields Recalls Controversial 1981 Interview ‘Fiasco’ With Barbara Walters
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Brooke Shields opened up about feeling “taken advantage of” in a 1981 interview with Barbara Walters.
Shields was 16 at the time, and was riding the publicity craze of her viral 1980 Calvin Klein ad.
Walters asked her intimate questions about her body. The experience taught Shields how to set boundaries as a young professional.
Brooke Shields has been in the spotlight for decades. Beginning with that world-shaking Calvin Klein ad in 1980, she kicked down the proverbial Hollywood door at age 15, which left the actress in a powerful, yet vulnerable position—one that she felt was taken advantage of often, especially during press interviews. Now, when Shields looks back, an interview with Barbara Walters stands out as particularly problematic.
Shields revisited the moment on The Drew Barrymore Show with Barrymore and her co-host, Ross Matthews. They discussed how Shields learned to set boundaries as a young professional.
“I had to watch an interview of when I was ten or something like that, and this woman asked the same question repeatedly,” Shields, 57, recalled. Barrymore then asked if Shields was referring to her controversial 1981 interview with Walters, and Shields said she wasn’t, but Barrymore’s mention of it led her to talk about the “fiasco” anyway.
In the interview, the ABC news anchor asked Shields a series of invasive, intimate questions regarding her Calvin Klein ad, including those about her body measurements. “I stand up and she’s comparing herself to this little girl and I thought, ‘This isn’t right. I don’t understand what this is,’” Shields recalled. “But I behaved and smiled and felt like so taken advantage of in so many ways.”
Barrymore, who was also a child star, shared her own pressing interview experience with Walters, but first prefaced the story by saying she “loves” Walters, “really looks up to her,” and has never seen her in “a negative light.”
“She was like, ‘Talk to me about the drugs and alcohol, talk to me about your mother, talk to me about bisexuality, talk to me about everything,’” Barrymore recalled. “And I kept saying, ‘You know Barbara I’m really doing well,’ and it was five, six, seven times over.”
The conversation had a full-circle moment when Shields went on to discuss her latest SKIMS bra campaign, which she shot 40-plus years after her viral Calvin Klein ad. She told Barrymore that modeling underwear at 57 was “empowering.”
“I had to fake it until I made it,” she said, which you would never be able to tell by looking at the incredible shots. “I felt like I was in a train wreck by the end of it, but it was an honor,” she added. “There was a human piece to it, that probably shocked me more than the fact that I had the guts at all to get in underwear after these few years.”
At 15 or 57, Shields is an icon. There’s no way of asking around that.
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