I stumbled across the ABC special “Pretty Baby” the other night and came away with a profound respect for the actress Brooke Shields and an unexpected reinforcing of a lesson it can take a long time to learn: the past doesn’t have to be prologue — the most important factors in determining your future are ultimately your own choices. (If you missed it, the special has been streaming on Hulu since April.)
It’s probably more fair to say I have a renewed respect for Shields. I’ve been a fan since she admitted struggling with postpartum depression two decades ago. Infamously, she got publicly berated then by that numbskull Tom Cruise for taking antidepressants. Her epic slapback in an op-ed published in the New York Times is seared in my memory.
The “Pretty Baby” documentary finds Shields at 58, the mother of two teenage daughters, long and happily married and surrounded by loyal women friends. She’s still beautiful, but more accessibly so — I’m a sucker for wrinkles around the eyes that are as much a window on our life’s journey as that famed saying about eyes and souls.
Well-gone is the sing-songy child’s voice on talk shows that repeated lines fed to her by adults, some well-meaning, some cruel. The movie “Pretty Baby” in which she at 11 was auctioned for sex in a brothel, and kissed a 29-year old man on camera was “done in good taste” and the visible effect of her mother’s alcoholism was “allergies,” she said almost robotically then.
Her voice now and her unflinching self-reflection are strong and clear, and completely without bitterness.
Shields describes what can only be defined as a post-traumatic-stress response as she recounts numerous instances of dissociating while filming sex scenes. She recalls “zooming out, seeing a situation but you are not connected to it. You instantly become a vapor of yourself.”
Referring to the entertainment industry, she said, “The system had never once come to help me, so I just had to get stronger on my own.”
How did she reclaim herself from the grips of a narrative completely not of her own making? First, she broke the mold of child actress and model by going to and excelling at college. There she learned that she could think and speak for herself.
A first marriage to someone as controlling as her mother-manager ended when she realized what she had reconstructed.
She found the courage to take risks and face rejection by trying on other entertainment hats in comedy and theater.
Of the hypersexualized persona that was forced upon her, a past sexual assault and the harrowing nature of being raised by her loving but erratic mother, she says, “Sometimes I’m amazed I survived any of it.”
How many times have you thought that about your own stories? We don’t have to have the same past as Shields to have employed the same tools to make a different future:
— Forge your own path.
— Unflinchingly acknowledge the past.
— Start over again if you repeat mistakes.
— Take risks.
— Be vulnerable.
— Keep faith.
Remarkably, and perhaps most importantly if one is to build a new better life, as Shields has, is her determination not to wallow in bitterness. “There’s no judgment. I’m not interested in that concept.”
Her attitude resonated with me, recalling a conversation I once had with an older gentleman wise in the ways of Washington and the world. Upon hearing my 9/11 story, he asked me, “You know what the most important thing to do now is, right?”
I did, after a long journey. I promptly answered, “Have a happy life.” And I know that to be the right answer, if only because of how hard it is to achieve day to day.
What a wonderful model Shields is for helping me and others to keep trying and to embrace what follows Shakespeare’s “past is prologue” line — “what to come, In yours and my discharge.”
Your choices, your life.
Thanks for the reminder, Brooke. Please, readers, remind me again tomorrow!
