There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me

by Brooke Shields

  I don’t remember much of Mom at Studio 54 since I hardly ever sat with her for any length of time. The minute I’d get permission, I’d be gone. I would basically stay on the dance floor, dancing and sweating the entire time. I felt freedom and anonymity amid the throngs of dancers. I always found a good gay dancer to be my partner and I would not stop dancing until I heard two songs in a row that I did not like.

  Mom never posed for any of the photos. I assume she knew either she’d be cut out or I’d run the risk of not making it to Page Six in the Post the next day if pictured only with her instead of being flanked by famous people.

  I always loved it when Andy Warhol was there because he was incredibly sweet to me and I could always make him laugh. He often had his camera and would click from all different angles but never look in the viewfinder and through the lens. I never saw the photos after they were developed.

  I would leave by 11:00 or 11:30 if a party was during the week or stay until midnight if it was on a weekend. I don’t recall Mom making any drunk scenes while we were at Studio 54. For me it was a fun place to go, even if Mom was drinking, because I was distracted by dancing. I’d dance. I’d sweat. I’d go home. I don’t remember signing autographs at the club, either. It was as if dancing created a force field around me.

  I’m sure there was plenty of drug use going on around me, but I never noticed. Steve must have put some kind of word out to his employees or something, because even though people always asked me about the drugs during the 54 days, I never saw any. The infamous “little cloth bag of pills” was never in my eyeline. I was like a mascot or somebody’s kid sister. I don’t know if people were scared that my mother was there, or if they just tried to shield me from the darker side of nightclub life, but I was basically exempt. Mom never smoked or used drugs. Alcohol was her sole vice.

  I don’t believe it was all about age, either. We all saw how poor Tatum O’Neal and Drew Barrymore were not able to dodge the substance-abuse bullet. They both had eccentric mothers, but they didn’t have the experience that I had of choosing to become the sole caretaker at such a young age. I was friendly with both these young ladies, but I never went out with them back then. We remain friends to this day.

  For many years, I thought I avoided addiction because my mom was an addict. But I believe there were other factors at hand that contributed to my safety. Part of it was just who I was—the spirit they could all see. Part of it was my mom, and another part was people’s desire to protect me. This last part may be a naïve assumption, but I can honestly say I never felt preyed upon or tempted.

  This period in the eighties had a fast and furious pace. Although I wasn’t personally experiencing a carefree life filled with promiscuous sex and rampant drug use, I was engaged in my own personal high-energy race. I was burning my candle from both ends, but instead of its being a negative thing, I was met with success. I was working extremely hard at school with four or five hours of homework per night, and I was either filming or modeling the other hours. I did not need a great deal of sleep and I drove myself harder than anybody else did. I believe it was during these years that I began to be a perfectionist. I saw how much I could get accomplished and how I could have two equally full lives. I felt motivated by it all. It worked for me.

  • • •

  During high school, my mom’s drinking escalated. She did not try to hide it or curtail it. It was as if we were back to the time before rehab. It was simply a consistent factor in our lives and I still tried everything I could think of to get her to stop.

  Sometimes after a particularly bad night, she might stop for a few days, but it never lasted. We fought a great deal about it, but it never seemed to have an impact. Even when Mom started an evening attempting to curtail her drinking, she’d end the night switching to vodka and getting angry. She never actually passed out and would never allow anybody else to drive us home. I never took over as the driver, strangely. I was insecure about my driving and believed her driving drunk was better than my driving sober.

  I am not sure how she managed it, but Mom rarely lost her control in front of the press. My honesty about her rehabilitation was what alerted the public to her struggles. We both did press for various projects after her stay in rehab and spoke openly about her drinking. After publicly claiming that I had loved my mother so much that I had asked her to go to rehab, I felt that I could not now say she was drinking again. It felt like such a failure. The story was just too good to refute. I adored my mother and she adored me and this young daughter was mature enough to save her own mom from the jaws of alcohol and everything had turned out well. The truth was just too sad to admit. I felt terrible upholding what was now a lie. This dilemma would only get worse.

  I buried myself in my schoolwork but we often had ugly outbursts that ended in tears. I remember once screaming at my mother during a particularly bad evening. It was the angriest I’d ever been. I remember wanting to say something—anything—to hurt her. I had a vague memory of the name of a boy. As if there was a baby before me, or some child named “baby somebody.” The mentions I recalled were usually in conjunction with a reference to this boy in one of Auntie Lila’s prayers. The word angel was often used. I never knew whom they were talking about and was too scared to come out and ask. Instead, I waited until I needed to pull out the big guns and I fired.

  I once blurted, “Well, maybe if you had taken care of me the way you took care of Baby John, then I wouldn’t be here, either, and I wouldn’t have to live with your drinking!”

  Well, she turned on a dime, and with instant, steely cold sobriety she glared at me.

  “Don’t you ever mention that name ever again.”

  I stopped cold and saw how deeply I had cut her. I felt empowered knowing what I held in my arsenal. But, like intervention, you don’t get too many opportunities to use such tactics. I would never again use this partial information in anger, and I would only find out the truth when she was on her deathbed, and not by her tongue.

  • • •

  High school basically continued with bouts of her getting drunk and then stopping for a day. There was not one major moment or birthday celebration during which she could remain sober. I learned how to plan my joy. I would front-load my birthdays with breakfast activities or plan to be with her for only the beginning of an event. Then I would go off to be with friends and know that that would be the last I would see of my mother’s real facial expressions.

  She still managed to get up every morning and get me to school. She was never the kind of drunk who passed out at the dinner or party or who stayed in bed all day with a hangover. She slept little, drank a lot, and had found a way to continue through each day. Plane rides were the worst, however, because even if she’d start off the flight with soda, she would end highly inebriated and needing help off the plane. This was before TMZ waited at the airports for celebrities, and I could usually get her through baggage claim and into a waiting car without too much fuss.

  She had her drinking down to a science and switched up her methods whenever she needed to do so. Sometimes it was red wine at dinner and an endless slide into a boozy, sad, wanting-to-sing-soprano drunkenness. Then there was the “I’m only drinking diet soda” (a.k.a. rum and Coke) at parties where people knew her issue. She had bartenders all over New Jersey who knew what it really meant when she ordered her Diet Coke.

  Then there was her new favorite: vodka bottles hidden all over the house and garage. She hid bottles everywhere and sometimes even forgot where she had hidden them. I’d find empty bottles in cowboy boots, behind cereal boxes, in purses at the back of her closet, and wedged in between folded sweaters.

  There were times when I thought I had gotten her into the car and out of the house drink-free. But just after the engine was started, she’d tsk and say she forgot something in the house. She would put the car in park and run inside to retrieve some item and make a quick pit stop for a slug o
f something. I’d demand to smell her breath and she’d either already have a mint at the ready or perform her go-to open-mouth, held-breath move.

  She’d smirk as if it were all on her own terms. She claimed she could drink socially and I guess that was not a lie. She was like a girl who claims, with all honesty, that she did not “sleep with” a certain boy because, in fact, they had had sex all night. Mom could absolutely drink socially. She drank and was social. She could just as easily drink while out and then go home and finish off half a bottle of vodka while getting ready for bed.

  I ran out of ways of asking her to quit. Tears didn’t work, rage didn’t work, pleas when sober didn’t work, and letters didn’t work. Other people tried and I prayed.

  On the day of graduation I decided to finally get drunk myself. I was at my friend Diane Coleman’s party and we were all in the pool. I wanted to show my friends that I could be “cool” and drink like they all did. I took the screw top off a bottle of Riunite and opened up the back of my throat. I poured as much as I could down my open gullet while standing in waist-deep, cool water and enjoyed the gasps and applause.

  I then looked around and knew I was going to be sick. I called my mother from the guest bathroom on the house portable phone and asked her to come get me right then. I hung up, groaned, and called her right back. Why hadn’t she come yet? It had been a long time. She chuckled and I knew she was actually sober. She said to stay calm and Mama would come and get me as soon as possible. I felt too sick to even be embarrassed and I went home. In the car I sat in the backseat and put my forehead on the headrest in front of me.

  “Are you mad at me, Mom?”

  And she actually came out with “No . . . I’m just disappointed.”

  I was unaware of the cliché and she was unaware that she was a hypocrite. Her rules didn’t apply to her. Unlike me, obviously, she could handle drinking.

  Part Three

  I hope you will see that I can’t ask you to change, but I hope you let me change. . . . It’s like pruning a tree or rerooting plants so that they all keep growing.

  —Letter from Brooke to Teri

  Chapter Ten

  Remember the Hula-Hoop

  I had always known that I wanted to go to a school like Princeton. I had a romantic view of what I thought a college experience would be like, and it included old architecture and ivy on the walls. There would be wise-looking professors and students carrying books. I pictured a big, old campus and autumn leaves. I didn’t focus on my future education as much as I thought about the entire experience of college life.

  My dad had gone to the University of Pennsylvania, where he rowed crew. But he never mentioned my going to an Ivy League college and did not keep tabs on my application plans. My mother had never gone to college at all, so she was entirely unfamiliar with the process. Both my parents were supportive but didn’t press me to follow any particular path.

  It was a given that I was going to go to college, but what I studied and where I went felt entirely up to me. When my parents divorced, they’d come up with the idea that my father would support my education until I graduated from college. I was earning my own living by this time and therefore was able to pay for myself, but my father insisted on holding up his end of the deal.

  I had always assumed I would find a college not too far from home. Despite the fact that my mother’s drinking was getting worse and worse, the idea of escape never entered my mind. I wanted to be near my home and near my mom, and I wanted to find a school that did not require a plane to get me back to visit. I was so attached to my mother that I did not want to leave her. I was also attached to saving her. Subconsciously I also wanted to remain near enough to rescue her if need be.

  I thought I had as good a chance as anybody to go to a good school. I had brought my grade point average up rather steadily over my four difficult years at Dwight-Englewood, I was a cheerleader, and I had an impressive extracurricular résumé. My life experience was rather eclectic by this point and I was committed to various charitable organizations. I approached the admissions adviser at my school and informed him that I was thinking of going to a school like Princeton but was also looking at Vassar, Trinity, and Brown.

  Right off the bat, he insinuated that I should probably just forget about Princeton, because although I was finishing with strong grades, I had not taken enough AP courses, my SATs were not high enough (I just broke 1000), and I didn’t play sports. He reiterated how hard it was to get accepted to a school like Princeton and that I should concentrate on schools that were less selective. He was the college adviser, so I accepted and heeded his advice. I figured he must have known what he was talking about.

  I began collecting applications and making arrangements to visit and interview at various schools. I put the Princeton application aside and kept the others to fill out once I had visited their campuses. I visited Trinity with a friend who was an undergrad, and John Kennedy Jr. gave me a tour of Brown. We spent the day together on campus, and I told him the sugar-cube story, carefully omitting the part about my marrying him. I had a huge crush on John and remembered nothing about the school.

  Each university was special in different ways, but they all felt a bit far from home for my comfort. I decided I could be happy anywhere as long as I was getting a college degree and rashly decided that I would just apply to Vassar early-decision and be done with the trauma of it all. I went to see the campus and didn’t feel at all as if it was the place for me. It neither had the old-school, ivy-covered charm nor fit the image I had in my mind, but by then my choices felt limited. I submitted the early-decision application and got word back almost immediately. Of course they would love to have me attend their university. The admissions team was lovely and I could tell they would help make me feel at home there. But the fact that they were so eager to have me at their school made me wary. I was put off a bit because it felt as if they needed me more than I needed them.

  I didn’t have to commit for a while, so I decided take some time to decide. In the meantime, I had forgotten that I had said yes to going to a Princeton football game with a friend of a friend who was a junior there. It was too late to cancel because he had tickets to the game and plans to show me the fun part of the school. We were going to hear the a capella singing group the Tigertones sing under one of Princeton’s echoing arches in what was called an “arch sing.” This was just a few days before applications were due, and I hadn’t even looked at my Princeton application since my college adviser’s discouraging words.

  Well, I got onto the beautiful campus and I was awestruck. The architecture was stunning and the gargoyles atop the massive library seemed alive. There was actually ivy growing up the walls that had witnessed the education of Woodrow Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jimmy Stewart, just to name a few. The atmosphere made me giddy. The campus was exactly what I’d dreamt about all these years. Surrounded by academia, I could feel an excitement for knowledge. I met up with my friend, who introduced me around and gave me some insider’s information on what it was really like to go to Princeton.

  I thought about my adviser’s advice, but I was slowly getting a different picture from these students. Maybe he was wrong about what Princeton wanted? Maybe he had just wanted to protect me from what he thought would be rejection based on my fame?

  It was time for the game, and as I sat in the bleachers, my heart started to pound. I was so comfortable with these people, who were unassuming and seemingly unfazed by my professional persona. They were extraordinarily genuine and smart, but not affected. I felt at ease and accepted. I absolutely had to be a student at this university. The only way to ensure that I would not get in was to not apply. That was no longer an option.

  Halftime arrived and I practically took off running. I explained that I hadn’t yet even applied to Princeton and that the application was due in the mail by Monday. I needed to go home and get it done.

  I went
home and fished around on my rolltop desk for the folder with the orange and black shield and began feverishly filling out the pages. My mom was concerned that I hadn’t had a good time, but when she realized what I was doing, she just let me complete my task. I was so focused on my mission that I did not notice whether she had been drinking.

  I worked throughout the rest of the weekend and had the application completed and postmarked on Monday. I went into high school that day and told nobody except my adviser. I told him I loved the school and wanted to take my chances before saying yes to Vassar. I don’t remember his reaction, but it must have involved one or two raised eyebrows.

  I guess it was my mother who called the Princeton admissions board to set up an interview for me. Mom had never pushed me to go to college, but it was always presumed I would. She supported my decision to apply to Princeton and wanted me to be happy. We also never discussed purposely taking time off from my career. It was just assumed that I would attend college as I had attended high school and continue to work on my breaks.

  Mom got me an interview and drove me out to the university on her own. I think she was more nervous than I was, but shockingly she did not drink that day. She sat in the waiting area while I went in for my interview, and she whispered, “Just be yourself, darling.”

  During the interview the dean of admissions asked me why I wanted to go to college and why Princeton. It was not a trick question but rather an attempt to address a curiosity shared by the press and the public. Why bother going to university when I already had a full-blown career?