You see? Just like Milton Berle and Bob Hope, Brooke Shields (b. 1965) started out as a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. In this photo she's about five, but then she went and dressed like The Little Tramp again about a decade later at a Halloween costume party, that time on roller skates. (That's a CORBIS photo, I don't have the budget to share that one here). Anyway, Shields is almost exactly my age (she was born four months earlier) -- it's an example of how stars from the vaudeville era were still exerting cultural influence in the late 20th century. For that matter, when still a child star, Shields was in many of Bob Hope's TV variety specials, and in the buddy picture Just You and Me, Kid (1979) with George Burns. She was also on Doug Hennings World of Magic, The Muppet Show, and Circus with the Stars.
This is actually my second Brooke Shields post. The previous one, on the weird Peter Fonda movie Wanda Nevada, is descriptive of the more common Brooke Shields vehicle of the '70s and early '80s, which involved the inappropriate sexualization of children. The peak of her reputation along those lines were those two Romeo and Juliet style teenage sex films The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981). My younger sister was way into those movies at the time; I was more inclined to snicker about them. It's unfortunate, but she was widely regarded as a figure of fun at her peak. "Panty Shields" would be a representative quip from a not-very-funny friend of mine at the time. Shields' first movie had been the horror picture Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), which I wrote about here. But her legend sort of begins with the Polly Platt and Louis Malle team up Pretty Baby (1978), a period piece about a New Orleans whorehouse with Susan Sarandon and Keith Carradine. This was followed by King of the Gypsies (1978), Tilt (1979, a pinball story), Sahara (1983), and the other films we've named.
In Pretty Baby (1978) Shields plays a teenaged prostitute, setting the tone for the rest of her early career. What's weird to me is that people talk about it like it was some sort of new precedent. What about Jodie Foster, who had done Bugsy Malone (1976), Taxi Driver (1976), Foxes (1980) and Carny (1980)? Or Melanie Griffith in Night Moves (1975)? The ill-fated Dorothy Stratton (speaking of Platt/ Bogdanovich)? And the 13 year old girl whom Roman Polanski molested? The deflowering of children seems to have been the decade's sick frontier. The attitude seemed to be that it was an inevitable outcome of the sexual revolution. It wasn't happening in a bubble, and it seems to me the whole culture was pretty complicit in it. What's weird to me is that, if you watch any of Shields' performances of that time, she is behaving pretty much like a normal kid, she just happens to be beautiful, just tarted up by directors, make-up people and costumers. She isn't behaving in a sexual way per se, it's entirely projected onto her by others. Having that happen on a sort of global scale is an unsettling phenomenon to say the least, watching an entire culture participate in some wrong shit. It's not unlike (or unrelated) to America's political predicament of the past several years. What is the meaning of "wrong" when an entire culture is wrong?
We just watched a very good documentary about Shields on Hulu called Pretty Baby (2023) which tells about what the experience was like from the inside (including incidents of sexual assault and rape). It should be no surprise to most who've paid attention to Shields' career over the past four decades that as a person, she is as unlike what Hollywood tried to make her as she could possibly be. Well do I remember an SCTV sketch of the early '80s where Catherine O'Hara played her as a kind of dumb bunny. But Shields went on to major in French literature at Princeton, and then resumed her acting career, amassing scores of new credits in films and on tv series, and establishing quite a different persona from the one she grew up coping with. Having the latter one talk about the former one is a compelling exercise, given the distance there is between them. It's pretty miraculous how wise and well-balanced she turned out. In that she seems just as blessed with the inner self she was born with, as she was with the outer one.
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