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.