The setup is: You’re at lunch with Brooke Shields. It’s fall in New York and you know you shouldn’t, but Shields gives you that smile. You know the one. The one that launched a thousand billboards. Okay, you decide. Let’s be bad. You look at the menu. You order Champagne.
Brooke Shields—supermodel, actor, author, mother, Princeton graduate, thank you very much—has spent most of her life feeling a watchful gaze land on her. Camera lenses and directors, photographers, paparazzi, pedestrians who yank their heads around when she walks past them. This year Shields, 58, decided to focus those eyes on what she wanted them to see. In January the acclaimed documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields illuminated the triumphs and consequences of her child stardom. In September, she opened a solo show at Café Carlyle in Manhattan. She’s also hosting a podcast called Now What? With Brooke Shields. And much to the delight of her legion of fans, entertaining what it might look like to reboot some of her most iconic roles. But more on that in a minute.
Shields and Glamour editor in chief Samantha Barry have been friends since 2015. To celebrate her being a Glamour Woman of the Year, the two had lunch at The Mark Hotel the week after Shields made her Café Carlyle debut. What follows is their conversation, complete with reflections on power, sex, aging, and learning to give zero fucks.
Brooke Shields: At this point I literally have such a fucking attitude.
Samantha Barry: Yeah?
Brooke: That I’ve never had in my life. And it’s sort of very liberating. I had a full-blown grand mal seizure on Thursday before the show. Nobody knows about it.
Samantha: What happened?
Brooke: I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium. I was waiting for an Uber. I get down to the bottom of the steps, and I start evidently looking weird, and [the people I was with] were like, “Are you okay?”
You know what? Let’s take our first sip.
Samantha: Cheers. Oh my God, that’s gorgeous.
Brooke: It’s just mother’s milk.
Samantha: Wait, go back to tell me what happened last Thursday. So you drank some water.
Brooke: I drank all this water. I leave my house. And they kept asking me, “Do you want coffee?” And I was like, “No.” “Are you all right?” I go, “Yeah, great.” Then I walked to the corner—no reason at all. I’m like, “Why am I out here?” Then I walk into the restaurant L’Artusi, and I go to the sommelier who had just taken an hour to watch my run-through.
I go in, two women come up to me; I don’t know them. Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall.
Samantha: Shut the fuck up.
Brooke: I start having a grand mal seizure.
Samantha: What does that mean?
Brooke: It means frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue. The next thing I remember, Ivm being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on.
Samantha: Oh my God, Brooke.
Brooke: And Bradley fucking Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.
Samantha: Shut up.
Brooke: I didn’t have a sense of humor. I couldn’t really get any words out. But I thought to myself, This is what death must be like. You wake up and Bradley Cooper’s going, “I’m going to go to the hospital with you, Brooke,” and he’s holding my hand. And I’m looking at my hand, I’m looking at Bradley Cooper’s hand in my hand, and I’m like, “This is odd and surreal.”
Samantha: What happened? Bradley Cooper, riding in the ambulance in the West Village to Mount Sinai?
A you-couldn’t-make-this-up game of phone tag had ensued, as the sommelier at L’Artusi first tried to reach Chris Henchy, Shields’s husband, which ended up with an assistant reaching an assistant, who eventually called Bradley Cooper, who was nearby.
Brooke: His assistant called Bradley and said, “Brooke’s on the ground. Chris isn’t around. Go get her.” And he came, and somebody called the ambulance. And then it was like, I walked in with Jesus.
Samantha: Oh my God, stop.
Samantha: This is just before the Carlyle?
Brooke: Thursday before the Carlyle. And I kept saying to the doctor, “You’ve got to get me better.” And they had the EEGs and things; they thought my brain was seizing. They had catheters; they had IVs. I was stuck. And then they put me into ICU and that’s where I got bronchitis.
Samantha: Wait, what did the doctor say though?
Brooke: Low sodium. I had had too much water. I flooded my system, and I drowned myself. And if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure. And then male doctors kept asking me if I was limiting my salt. And I said, “You know what? I’ve had it with male doctors. I know you’re all smart—smarter than I am in what you do. But let me just tell you something: I look younger when I’m bloated. If I’m bloated, people think I’ve had Botox.” So as a 58-year-old woman, I’m not limiting my salt, okay? Stop trying to make me a crazy actress or a female that doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing. I was drinking too much water because I felt dehydrated because I was singing more than I’ve ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast. So they were just like, “Eat potato chips every day.”
Samantha: You talk a lot to women about health in your endeavors, and you’ve obviously gone through a lot recently with injuries and stuff. Where are you in your athleticism?
Brooke: I love food and I love alcohol and I love life and I want to be healthy for my heart. I don’t like going to the gym. I like Pilates. That’s where I am. And I am tired of not feeling skinny enough. It’s boring and it’s a waste of my time.
Samantha: Life’s meant to be enjoyed.
Brooke: I wish stuff was a little higher, and I have a bit of a belly that I never had, and I could lose it if I really, really wanted to try, but I would rather spend that time having lunch, reading a book, walking, buying a piece of jewelry, going to my daughter’s games.
Samantha: I like that. And when we sat down, we ordered some Champagne, you were like, “This is the era of ‘fuck it.’”
Brooke: I don’t think I could have gotten here earlier. It’s a process. You really have to tread through it. I wish I could say it was a lot earlier than recently. The first time I did it was when I had children because my body had a purpose that nobody [could take away]. But I had it in college too. I graduated with honors, and journalists hated it. They were so threatened.
Shields was in the class of 1987 at Princeton, bucking commentators’ expectations about where a child star might go to college.
Samantha: I read this piece from your graduation. Some outlets went to campus asking the students, “Do you know Brooke Shields?” They were like, “We didn’t expect her to be so…”
Brooke: Normal. Everybody says “normal.”
Samantha: Yes, normal, or just diligent.
Brooke: My brilliant therapist of 35 years would say to me, “When are you going to allow yourself to believe that there’s something in your character that will not be beaten?” And I said, “Well, I’m not a victim. I will never be.”
The first semester at Princeton was miserable because [the kids] want to give me all my space. And I’m like, “Oh my God. I don’t want space. I need friends. I want friends.” So I decided, “You know what? I’m going to win them over.”
One of my best friends from college, she has two daughters with her wife. Our kids are the same age. One of the little girls asked her mom, she was like, “Mom, why are you friends with Brooke?” This friend has a very different life. She is so brilliant. She speaks Japanese. She’s a brilliant mathematician and political scientist, and she’s like what you would think would be the antithesis [of me], and she’s one of my closest friends. Before she could answer, I said to her daughter, “I forced her.”
Samantha: “You’re going to be my friend now.”
Brooke: I go, “I beat her down.” I said, “She didn’t want to like me. I represented everything she didn’t want, but I was going to get to her because she was going to be my friend because I loved her.”
Samantha: I know female friendship is super important to you.
Brooke: It’s everything, and it’s upholding, and it’s necessary, and it fills in the gaps where your gay husband can’t and your real husband would never even begin to try or even know what language you’re speaking. We are a village. You need a village. You need to ferret out the people who are going to be there when shit goes down.
And you have to fight for it. You have to fight. I went to college and I was so miserable. I was so scared. I was so lonely. I so wanted to go home. I thought I made a huge mistake. I was like, “There’s no reason why you should be normal. You’ve never been normal. Why are you pretending to be normal? Just take care of your mom, keep paying for the houses, keep making money, try to be taken seriously,” which is such a cliché. But I knew that if I got an education, it would be the one thing that couldn’t be taken from me.
Samantha: That was the first time you stopped being all consumed by other people’s opinion. You started making your own path.
Brooke: I stopped reacting and changing my behavior, and I started just trying to be in the moment. I knew the one thing that I could do was focus on my studies, and I picked interesting, difficult topics. I didn’t try to prove myself. I just tried to study my hardest. I was a nerd, and I was made fun of for how much I studied and didn’t party, and they wanted me to be a party or trainwreck, and I was like, “It’s not my DNA. I don’t have that.”
Samantha: But you wanted to go home.
Brooke: I wanted to go home. I missed my mom. I’ve never lived without my mother. I had never not had a call sheet. All you have to do is show up, and be nice and a good girl, and be accountable, and then they will reward you for it. It works. You don’t have to grow, right? In college, I realized, “Oh, I have opinions.”
After college Shields decided to continue to pursue acting, but she struggled to be taken seriously. She had product deals and endorsements—moves that are now practically expected for starlets on the rise but were then seen as at odds with a rigorous acting career.
Brooke: So, intellectually, college was my first freedom moment. Then I went kind of dark. I was like, “I’m clearly not good enough. I clearly have never had talent. I don’t know why I thought I did. What am I going to do about it?” So I was like, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to study.” I studied, I studied, I studied; I took acting classes with Sandra Seacat. I did these things, and I was miserable.
I was sitting on a mat looking at a fucking green light finding my shadow side. Everybody wants to find Brooke Shields’s shadow side. They wanted to unleash this. I’m like, “You guys, you’re not going about this the right way,” but they were the institution and that was what I was going to be validated by.
And it was dangerous. You can’t do that to people who are impressionable 20-year-olds. My mother drove from New Jersey and said, “You’re stopping this acting class, you’re eating a full meal, you are losing your mind, and we’re worried about you, and you’re coming back and you’re spending the weekend in New Jersey, and we’re going to watch movies and eat Chinese food.”
Samantha: What age were you then?
Brooke: I was 22. And I had to make money. So then I’m having to fly to Japan to do an Italian Nescafé commercial, and there was nothing that was right, and my mother never stopped drinking, so it felt like a free fall, but I knew I was like, “You better pull that cord, man, because you’re going to go down with this whole program.”
Samantha: You were the breadwinner for everybody.
Brooke: I had four women working in an office and they would give me stacks of autographs to sign every day, and my mom was like, “These are your fans. You need to be good to your fans. You need to give it all away. Give it all away. They’re one person. They love you. You’re theirs. You symbolize that. You talk about virginity. They’re scared little girls. They look up to you. You’re blah, blah, blah,” and you’re holding this burden. You’re like, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.” All the while, you have no fucking idea who you are. I hadn’t even lost my virginity because I never let myself go in any way.
In 1985, Shields published On Your Own, a self-help book geared toward young women. She revealed in it that she was still a virgin. In the Pretty Baby documentary, she would reveal that she had sex for the first time at age 22. In 1994, Shields was cast in the Broadway revival of Grease, a pivotal role for her. In 1996 the sitcom Suddenly Susan premiered, starring Shields. A year later she married the tennis player Andre Agassi, whom she’d met in 1993. Shields loved the show, but in 1999, her costar and close friend David Strickland died by apparent suicide. It was the beginning of a dark period. She and Agassi divorced in 1999.
Samantha: You’ve had jobs since you were a baby. Did you ever doubt you’d have more work?
Brooke: All I knew was hard work, right? So to me, hard work is associated with success.
But Broadway was the first place that welcomed me and challenged me, and asked more of me, and yes, they were using the hell out of me to sell tickets. I get it. I have no problem with that. But I was going to use them too, and I was going to grow and I was going to learn, and I watched the best dancers and I listened to the best singers, and I started to get to know my comedy. My instincts were trusted for the first time by people I respected.
[With Suddenly Susan] I looked forward to going to work every single day. Then my best friend who was on the show killed himself, and my whole world unraveled, and the show got canceled, my dad got diagnosed with cancer, and I got divorced. It started in 1998, and it was like two years total. I was like, “Wow, okay.” My mom was in a very, very big downward spiral, and I couldn’t keep saving her, and I clearly couldn’t save my best friend. I couldn’t do one more night of getting police cars and going through LA looking for him and finding him in places, and enabling and doing all this stuff that I did all the time so naturally. It’s interesting. My mother was an addict. My best friend was an addict. It was like, “Okay, Brooke, you might have to pay attention to this.” A little bit of a pattern here.
Samantha: Do you think it’s that you’re a fixer? I mean, you staged an intervention for your mom when you were 13.
Brooke: I think [addicts] are kind of brilliant people. They’re sadly fabulous. They’re just broken and they have so many layers, and they’re so smart, but they’re not strong enough. In fact, Andre was strong enough because he went cold turkey, but it was a familiar position for me to be in. I’m a really good codependent.
Samantha: Can you spot an addict now?
Brooke: Oh God. I can spot a sober addict.
Samantha: Okay, so you have had this hard year, and then along the way, you reclaimed yourself intellectually at Princeton; you reclaimed what work and pleasure and acting looks like for you on Broadway; you reclaimed your life from your mom through the vehicle of Andre, right? Then you meet Chris.
Brooke: Then I meet Chris. He met me getting a divorce. I had been diagnosed with CIN 3, cervical dysplasia, which is precancerous. Next step is cancer. I have to have this massive surgery. My dad gets sick. My best friend dies. I was at this level, and he was unfazed. He was so funny and so smart, and I just fell into him but never turned into anybody for him.
When I was with Andre, I wanted to morph into his world. It was freedom to me. Chris saw me for who I was, loved who I was with all of my dorky things, and just was unfazed. His jokes were funnier than the ones I was being written [on Suddenly Susan], and so he was giving me alts and I was claiming them as my own. They got Brooke Shields. It didn’t matter.
Samantha: Do people rewatch it now? There’s a nostalgia going on at the moment, right? You’ve got The Super Models out on Apple TV.
Brooke: Honestly, if I could, I’d have it on a loop in my house all day long. I love that show.
Samantha: Do your girls watch it?
Brooke: I made them watch it, but it didn’t feel cool for them to watch it.
Samantha: There’s a nostalgia, retro vibe, though. People are discovering things!
Brooke: But our show is never a hit enough to do a reboot. Who wants a reboot, really?
Samantha: I don’t know. I don’t know if I agree with that. I love a reboot.
Brooke: I would do it tomorrow. It is dated, though. If I could play a version of Susan older maybe, but it’s a little reductive.
It’s a little bit trying to make a party happen again when you’ve had a really good party on Friday night and you want to try to repeat it, and it just doesn’t work.
Suddenly Susan aired its final season in 2000. Then, as Shields puts it, life “became all about babies.” She was open about struggling with her fertility and spent years in IVF treatments. Her older daughter, Rowan Francis Henchy, was born in 2003, and her younger daughter, Grier Hammond Henchy, was born in 2006. After Rowan’s birth Shields battled vicious postpartum depression, a process she wrote about in her 2005 memoir, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression.
Samantha: Do women still talk to you about postpartum [depression]? What are the things that people come up to you on the street to talk about?
Brooke: It’s a lot of “I spent all my babysitting money on getting Calvin Klein jeans” and “I went to college because you went to college.” And then there are the women that just cry and thank me. They go, “I had it so bad and I didn’t know. And I felt like I was so wrong and my husband didn’t understand and I felt so guilty.” And the tears, and it’s like, God, I feel for you. Because they carry it with them, and you carry a lot of guilt about it.
Samantha: Have you and Rowan talked about it?
Brooke: I’ve talked to her about it. And after the documentary, Chris was really worried, and he was upset with me because he thought I didn’t warn the kids enough.
I said, “Rowan, I need to tell you, I never didn’t love you. I was very sick.” And she goes, “Mom…” I said, “And I never wanted to hurt you.” She goes, “Well, I made it this far.” She said, “And Mom, I get it.” But women need to hear this. They need to know, because it’s scary.
Samantha: People didn’t talk about it back then.
Brooke: No!
Samantha: In my research I also found out something I didn’t know about you—that you did this Nora and Delia Ephron play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.
Brooke: Yes.
Samantha: In recent years your girls have gone out into the world wearing your clothes. Talk to me about that. You have Rowan wearing something very special from you at her senior prom, and then Grier on opening night at the Carlyle wearing something. How does that feel?
Brooke: Well, now it makes me feel great because it wasn’t my idea. If I had tried to tell them what to wear, they would’ve gotten so mad at me and been like, “Mom, that’s weird.” But they both went down unbeknownst to me, to the cedar closet where all the archive stuff is, and their bodies now were what my body used to be, and they fit them like a glove. I never dreamt they would want to wear my clothes. I just thought they would think I’m old-fashioned and I’m not cool.
Rowan actually wore my Golden Globe nomination dress—from when I got nominated for a Golden Globe for Suddenly Susan. It was a custom-made dress for me. It was red, and I did Lana Turner hair and red lips. I felt so pretty. I got brought in to William Morris the next day and was lambasted by my agent, “You are never going to be taken seriously if you wear red! You looked like an old-time movie star and that’s not serious, and you’re never going to get acting jobs,” and I was like, “Congratulations, you got nominated.”
The next year everybody wore red and I tore all the photos out, and I sent it to the agents, and I was like, “I’m ahead of my time, fuckers.”
Samantha: Well, you never get fazed by it. You were like, “Fuck you.”
Brooke: It’s not like you’re not fazed. It hurts, you cry, and then you get over it, and you go, “Okay, you’re not going to let them win twice.” I got it.
Samantha: What matters to you now?
Brooke: Now I’m at this place which I don’t think I dreamt I’d ever get to. I’m changing the narrative that I’ve been playing over in my head: not good enough, too famous, not this, not this, not this. I am so proud. I’m proud of my girls: two vibrant women who are going to be fine, who are unique and smart and funny and different. I feel lucky, and I do feel proud, because I know I had something to do with it.
Samantha: You’re the mom!
Brooke: This is the first time I’ve really sort of given myself credit for how much I have done, and I want to do more. I want to be a comedian. I want to be a comedic act. I am a comedic actress. It is where I’m happy.
I want to do another television show, and an ensemble, or I’m the lead, or dramedy, comedy mostly. I like being up there as a character. I enjoy it and I trust my instincts.
Samantha: You and I have talked about this many times: The older you get, the more confident you are in who you are, what matters to you, how sexy you are, your value to the world. But there’s the dichotomy in that in all the other metrics, you’re being discounted.
Brooke: People can’t handle it. You’re being put out to pasture, and it’s ironic, and it’s wrong and not fair. You look at the women who are over 40—their history, their vibrance, their intelligence, their responsibility, their adaptability. They’ve raised families; they’ve run companies; they’ve been in multiple different types of relationships; they kept moving forward. We were the Amazons!
Samantha: What’s beauty to you? What’s your take on surgery?
Brooke: I am all for any of it if it truly is done for yourself, for the right reasons, and gives you a level of some kind of confidence that you need. Listen, I’ve seen it give women such confidence. But I think it’s easy to go down the slope of overdoing it. I’m scared of not looking like myself; the times that I’ve had Botox, I end up with this Spock eye and I’m like, “I don’t look like myself.” But I’ll get Fraxels, and peels, and whatever the newest thing is, and I’ll try it. I just don’t want to not look like myself.
In some cultures we’re the wise women who decide who the chiefs are, who are revered. Here people are—I mean, look around this room. There’s more and more plastic surgery than ever. Because they’re chasing youth. I don’t want to chase youth. I want to chase now.
Photographed by Lauren Dukoff
Styling: Anatolli Smith
Hair: Tim Nolan
Makeup: Mark de los Reyes
Manicure: Sonya Meesh
Read all the Glamour 2023 Woman of the Year profiles here:
Millie Bobby Brown
Geena Rocero
America Ferrera
Mary J. Blige
Quinta Bunson
Daring to Disrupt Selma Blair
