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Experts in the beauty biz, asked to describe her, flex themselves and back up a little for running room in order to reach suitable heights of hyperbole. Says Brian Burdine, catalogue coordinator for Bloomingdale's: "There is only one supreme, reigning top beauty, and that is Brooke Shields." Photographer Francesco Scavullo, who has been shooting Brooke since before her first birthday, says that she "was just born beautiful, she stays beautiful, and she gets more beautiful every month." Way Bandy, perhaps the top makeup man in the fashion dodge, is reminded of Elizabeth Taylor. "They don't look alike, but the quality and magnitude of beauty are the same." Does this sublimity have a flaw? Bandy would like to tone down the shaggy eyebrows, but so far Brooke and her mother Teri, who plans her daughter's career as Eisenhower planned Dday, have refused.
"So I've asked," says Bandy, an artist kept from his easel, " 'Any time you decide to pluck them, please let me be the one to do it.' "
With decisions of such moment hanging on her graceful nod, or her mother's nod, the odds must have been heavy at one point that Brooke would turn septic, and at 15 would be spoiled and desolate. In fact she is a nice, steady, friendly kid, who, so it is said, was excited at making the cheerleading squad at her private high school in New Jersey. She studies hard when she is on location and says she got two A's and two B's in her last marking period. (Director Zeffirelli did the unheard-of, at Teri Shields' insistence, and closed down the production of his film Endless Love three times while Brooke was acting, once for her exams and twice for previous commercial commitments.)
Brooke's likability is worth emphasizing because her mother has molded her life from the beginning in ways that seem frightful when retold. Teri, 47, was divorced from Frank Shields, 39, now a vice president of a New York executive head-hunting firm, after five months of marriage. She began trotting Brooke around to photographers' studios before the child could talk in sentences, stuck her in her first movie (Alice, Sweet Alice) when she was nine and pushed her forward at eleven for the controversial role of the child prostitute in Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby. Teri had a severe drinking problem during that period, though no longer. She badly wanted money and fame for Brooke, and even now, money — the price of clothes, the price of jewelry — is a conversational obsession.
Yet she and her daughter clearly are devoted to each other. They live together in a small Manhattan apartment and a less modest house in New Jersey (Brooke keeps a horse there and one in California; these are her only evident luxuries).
Skeptical onlookers must admit that Brooke seldom misses Mass and that Teri seems to have managed her upbringing just as successfully as she has managed Brooke's career.
The feeling is, in fact, that Teri has protected Brooke too much.