There Was a Little Girl

October 13, 2014
Shields was prompted by the death of her mother, Teri, in 2012, at age 79, to do some defensive soul-searching about their complicated, interdependent relationship. In this conversational, limpid effort, the actress and former model traces her mother’s life—starting with Teri’s working-class Newark, N.J., upbringing and distant parents—as well as her own. As a beautiful, lively young woman working at odd jobs in New York City, Teri met and briefly married a well-connected scion of Italian aristocrats who was eight years her junior; their only child, Brooke, was born in 1965. From her first modeling job for Ivory soap as a toddler to her heyday as the poster girl for Calvin Klein, Shields, with her distinctive “European look,” let her mother make decisions for her, without much thought to a “career” but with an eye to money and trips they took together. Some of those decisions were highly criticized, such as her starring at age 11 as a prostitute in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Shields admits to feeling “abandoned” when her mother drank, and eventually the actress found some independence by attending Princeton. Some degree of self-awareness emerges, though Shields’s prose is lackluster.

October 15, 2014
Shields reflects on the protective-and stifling-relationship between her and her mother. Different generations of people know the actress from different phases of her lengthy TV and film career. She began as a model at 11 months old and would go on to star in popular movies such as Endless Love and The Blue Lagoon. She continued in TV with Suddenly Susan and has spent years as a strong advocate for treatment of postpartum depression. In some ways, she is an aberration: Many child stars shine brightly for a short time and then either retreat to a private adulthood or end up in some poorly considered variation of a Miley Cyrus-type lifestyle. Shields' more dignified path through life is in no small part thanks to her mother, Teri, and following her death in 2012, Shields was horrified to find the obituary rife with misrepresentations. This book is her effort to set the story straight. As Shields notes in the introduction, it's not an effort "to idealize her or condemn her," and the narrative walks a line between the two, detailing the efforts her mother made-mostly successful-to walk her own fine line between being her daughter's promoter and being her mother. As the author's social sphere expanded, she and her mother were like two different planets, pulling in other actors and actresses, high-society couples and directors. At times, their intense gravity worked against each other, but Shields continued her ascent. Teri found herself in the grip of a battle with alcohol, and as the book shows, her addiction became a powerful, destructive third force. Shields writes with considerable reflection; she's done the hard work of making sense of the contradictions in her mother, and now we get the benefit of her sharing what she's learned.

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November 15, 2014

Shields, who documented her postpartum depression in 2006's Down Came the Rain, turns her attention to her mother, Terri. Tough and gregarious, Terri divorced Brooke's father when Brooke was just a baby. The actress grew up feeling inextricably entwined with and responsible for her mother. Terri was offered a baby modeling opportunity for Brooke, and the girl's career subsequently took off, eventually leading to acting roles. It was Brooke's role as a child prostitute in the 1978 Louis Malle film Pretty Baby that garnered Terri a reputation as a single mother who sold her daughter for her own ambition. Brooke wants to set the record straight about that but pulls no punches about her mother's full-blown alcoholism. Terri died young of dementia and this book is in part her daughter's response to her guilt that she never told her mother what she meant to her. Although Terri's alcoholism was an embarrassment and a worry, says Shields, she was her mother and she loved her very much. VERDICT A raw, honest tale of a mother and daughter that will appeal not only to celebrity watchers but mothers and daughters.--Rosellen Brewer, Sno-Isle Libs., Marysville, WA

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