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

by Brooke Shields

The next day promised to be a fun and very relaxed event. We had a big western BBQ, and Mom arrived like the belle of the ball. She looked happy and radiant and entered with a grand air of fabulousness.

  We were all departing. She was to take a ride down the coast with friends on their way to LA while Andre and I dropped off some relatives in LA and Vegas by plane before spending a mini honeymoon at a friend’s house somewhere in Florida. I had hugged Mom good-bye in the driveway of the beautiful hotel nestled in the midst of beautiful Big Sur and said we’d talk later that day when we arrived in Florida.

  I remember being in the back-bedroom cabin of the equally beautiful private plane that we were using to fly out of Carmel and suddenly being overcome with fear and sadness. Gavin came into the cabin and I looked him in the eye, unable to speak. I could not form a sentence. I kept shaking my head as if I had duct tape across my mouth.

  It hit me all of a sudden—I knew I had made a mistake. I did not want to be married. I wanted to have the wedding because I wanted everyone I loved to be together. I loved Andre but was not sure I wanted to live the life we had been living. I wanted to be a bride, but I should not have been married yet.

  When we landed in Vegas, I called to tell Mom we were safe, but she was nowhere to be found. I tried her friends but they said she never showed up to go on the drive. Mom had disappeared. She never left with her friends—they had waited and then departed without her. She was MIA for four days in Big Sur.

  Mom being missing added to my anxiety about all of this being a terrible mistake. I felt stuck and hoped it was just because I felt like marriage meant leaving my mother more profoundly. Truthfully, however, I believed my professional life was finally opening up and I was entering a new phase and I wasn’t ready to settle down. I had been so afraid that Andre would leave me if we didn’t get married. I feared that if I had not said yes to his proposal he would have cut me off emotionally and it would have been over. I needed more time with him and I did love him, and I wanted the idea of being his wife.

  My life and career were just beginning and I had wanted to know that I could have been OK alone before saying yes to marriage. I suddenly felt terrified and my mom was nowhere to be found. Gavin told me it would be fine and that it was just scary because it was new.

  We finally arrived in Florida and walked into a house belonging to a business associate of Andre’s. The place was a dilapidated seventies ranch house on the Intracoastal that had not been used in years. Yes, we would not be bothered, but that was because nobody would want to be anywhere near the place. There was really nothing to do and it was not relaxing or in any way honeymoon oriented. It felt run-down and I got even more depressed. I could not find my mother and I felt really lost instead of settled.

  Mom finally resurfaced. I was told she had wandered around Big Sur drunk and alone. Apparently she believed either nobody would care or that it would serve them right to be worried—she could do anything she fucking well pleased. She was Teri Shields and she was born into this world alone and would leave it alone. She answered to no one.

  The hopelessness and loneliness of the addict will never cease to amaze me. She hated being alone yet perpetually isolated herself in the alcohol. She ended up back home in New Jersey, and the cycle of my trying to keep tabs on her resumed yet again. Maybe I, too, was addicted.

  • • •

  Life on the show continued, and for the next two years Andre and I saw very little of one another. I was working so hard on the show and he was really working hard playing at various tennis tournaments. He alienated me when he lost and was on to the next tournament after he won. We did not experience much of our lives together and I had no idea we were really drifting apart. I then began to experience the other side to being an athlete’s girlfriend and now wife: the side that gets shunned after a loss. Somehow I was made to feel it was my fault. I’d get the silent treatment or a projection of disdain that cut to my core. Sometimes he would not even look at me or speak to me when he lost but instead became even more isolated. In the past he had been more open, but he was changing drastically. It felt hateful at times, but I waited it out. Navigating someone else’s moods was a task I knew all too well. This would be a piece of cake. I almost liked it, quite honestly. It was familiar and the hint of martyrdom was not a bad fit.

  Overall, the marriage was just existing, but if it felt somehow not what it was supposed to be, it was easy to avoid dealing with it. I maintain that it was not due to a lack of love as much as it was a lack of life. David gave me advice. When I told him I thought I needed a relationship that had more mutual interests and desire for intellectual discourse and shared references, he said he worried I would regret my decision to move on. I wasn’t saying I was some highbrow scholar whose intellect was being hindered or stunted. I was saying that it was becoming evident that Andre and I had less and less to talk about. Without an immediate trauma through which we needed to navigate, we floundered a bit. We had love, but it did not seem like that was enough. I always thought love was enough. But the truth was we were growing past one another. And I’m not sure if we individually enjoyed how the other liked to live.

  I mentioned it to Mom on the phone one night and she made some snide comment about Perry. I said I was not married to Perry.

  “Really? Are you sure about that, my dear?”

  Wow. Every now and then, Mom came out with a zinger like this that made you realize how much she really did intuit. She was often not productive or helpful with her knowledge, but she had it in her arsenal, perpetually at the ready, just when it was needed.

  It was at about this time that I adopted an older female pit bull. She had had litters of puppies and was older and slower and needing a home. Andre had said, “If you go get a dog, you are getting a dog for yourself only. Not for me.”

  Well, I’ll show him, I thought.

  David said I should focus on this dog. He grew up with dogs and would help. He said I had him and the dog and the show and my health, and my mother was relatively safe so life was not bad. He was right. What more did I need?

  One day I took the dog into the gym on the Warner Bros. lot to meet my favorite staff members and she wandered away. I dropped the leash and knew she’d be fine. Soon a man brought her back to me, asking if she was mine. I was flustered and began explaining that she was, indeed, mine, because my husband had not wanted a dog but I had adopted her anyway. I must have said “my husband” twenty times. He must have been like, “I get it, you’re married. I’m not hitting on you. I just thought the dog was lost.”

  I ran back to my dressing room and called my single girlfriend from college and told her I had met a guy she should go out with. “What’s his name?”

  “I have no idea.”

  I never got his name, but later learned it when he and David and I would work out in the gym together. He was a writer and had an amazing sense of humor. We all became friends. I didn’t think anything more of it at the time—I was totally cut off from my feelings. I was not technically lonely, but I was not happy, either.

  • • •

  Andre and I were supposed to take my upcoming hiatus and go on a yacht trip that Andre had won at a charity auction. I dreaded going and thought it would be a mistake. He came to LA to take me out for sushi, and I said I didn’t think the boat trip was a good idea because we would be pretending and we needed to figure some stuff out.

  He said I would go with him to Vegas, then, and he could train. I did not want to go to Vegas, either. I would stay in LA. He looked at me and asked me if I thought we would ever want to go on vacation together again. My throat closed and the tears came out in hot, thick sheets of salty, blurry despair. I could not talk and needed to leave at once. As I left, I saw Liam Neeson sitting at one of the tables. I could not have cared less.

  Andre and I drove home in silence and then he asked if I was happy. I told him no.

  He did not say a
nother word to me. He pulled in the driveway and disappeared upstairs. It was quiet and I began to panic. Suddenly I felt I was with my mother when she’d disappear and go guzzle from some hidden bottle of vodka or sneak out into the garage and take the car quietly out to drive to a bar. Sure enough, it was happening. He was leaving without a word.

  Panic rising, I ran outside. His old convertible car was loaded and he was getting in the car to drive away. I begged him to talk to me. I explained that this was when a couple was supposed to fight, and scream, and sleep in separate beds, and cry and get back up and talk all night and get closer. Plus, it was starting to rain torrentially.

  “Please don’t do this. Don’t drive away. Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  He drove off and I began to weep. The rain kept coming down and I was actually getting nervous for him. I knew the roads would be bad and this all felt so wrong. I would be lying if I said that I really wanted him to turn around and come back to make it all right, but I did not want to not try. I would never forgive myself if I did not try.

  I called his cell repeatedly and he never picked up. I used to do the same thing with my mother, except we didn’t have cell phones, so I would instead call her friends and restaurants and bars looking for her. I had slipped right back into all my old codependent habits.

  Finally, Andre phoned from Barstow and said that the rain was so bad he had to stop. I half wanted him to come back, and I was also just so relieved he was not in an accident and had pulled over to spend the night.

  I took an Ambien and went to bed. The next morning Andre called me and said he had something to tell me. My heart sank. I was instantly so scared, and I could feel my chest start to compress as if a vise was being tightened. I sat down in the window on a little window seat–like area in the kitchen.

  He said he was about to tell me something he had never wanted to tell me because he had feared I would leave him. Then why tell me now? I thought. What was it? What had he been hiding? Had he had a child with his ex-girlfriend or somebody more recent for that matter? Was he sick? Was he having a long affair? Was he gay? All sorts of ideas flooded my brain.

  I never could have guessed what he would say. He explained to me that for the whole first part of our relationship he had been addicted to crystal meth. I was shocked but immediately got hurt and insulted that he had not come to me at the time. I was the codependent queen! That was how I related to the world. I was the one who supported him unconditionally when he told me he was basically bald and had been wearing hairpieces most of his adult life. I took all of his innermost fears and had tried to quell them. Why should this have been any different? I would have been his biggest advocate and supporter in both the addiction and in his recovery.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I knew how difficult it was with your mother. I was afraid you would leave me.”

  I was really not sure what he wanted me to do with this information. None of this was about giving or getting forgiveness, so I was unclear as to the tactic involved in suddenly disclosing such information. What was I supposed to do? He was already forgiven because I had never known about it, and he attested to quitting cold turkey before our marriage. He added that he was entirely clean and had been so for quite some time. He had managed to evade the USTA and pull some kind of a Lance Armstrong so he was able to stop and get drug tested and come out clear without the embarrassment.

  I really couldn’t have cared less about how it all affected his game or his reputation. I was trying to go back and remember the mood swings and chart the outbursts.

  I feared our life together was not based in absolute truth. But it had felt that way early on, before the drugs. He had had his core confidants and his secrets, and then he had us as something different. I was relieved he was not gay and very relieved he had not fathered any kids I did not know about, but I questioned a lot. I also did not really care that he had had an addiction. Who cared if he had had an addiction? Many people have addictions, and he seemed to have gotten his life together by this point. He swore he quit before we were married but I don’t think his book (the ironically titled Open) supports these details.

  The way I remember it, I said I needed to think. He pleaded with me and said he would finally go to therapy and even resume couples therapy. We had gone briefly before getting married and were both so scared to be wed that we sought out this help.

  I told him that we should both take a moment to collect our thoughts and suggested we talk in a week. I was going to have that hiatus and I would go to New York City, where I could go to therapy and get perspective. I called David and told him everything. He was going to be back east as well.

  I called my mother to tell her that I was coming to New York instead of going on the boat trip. I did not have the energy to tell her that we were having problems. I was afraid of her response. I needed to have my own uninfluenced perspective.

  I remember calling Andre during the next week and saying that we could not just throw away five years without somehow trying. I said we should try to get help and see what needed to be repaired. I’m sure I wasn’t being completely honest with myself about wanting it to work, but I knew I would feel terrible to walk away after he said he would get therapy and he pleaded with me to try. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t making a mistake. David had planted that seed and I needed to give it my best try in order to know.

  “Why bother?” Andre said, interrupting me. “I don’t see the need to delay the inevitable.”

  Was this what my mom had done to my dad?

  Part of me was shocked and hurt that he didn’t want to try, and part of me felt he was the more truthful of the two of us. I never discussed any of this with my mother. By this point I did not feel like I could go to her to get healthy advice regarding my relationships. I felt like my stomach had just been violently punched. I got so sad and knew I could never go back.

  I went back to work and tried not to think about it and just be happy with the life we had had.

  • • •

  One night before a Monday table read I went out with some friends. I returned home to many messages from David’s mother. I had gotten used to getting these calls and then helping locate him somewhere in Los Angeles. David had had a few slips since we met and had periodically gone on a tear or two. Because of my history and our closeness, as well as my connections to the world of security and addiction, I was very familiar with situations like this and I usually became involved. I would enlist Gavin, and David always ended up showing up some place. In every case I would be up all night sick with worry, and then he would eventually show up and be fine (or not so fine) but alive.

  Tonight was the first time I did not jump on board the rescue mission. I knew I would see him the next day. We had had an event we were supposed to be going to, but because of my pending divorce, I did not feel like going out in public. The night before, David called and had suggested I join him and his soon-to-be fiancée. I had been helping David decide what type of engagement ring to get for his girlfriend.

  I explained that I was not in the mood because of the recent developments in my marriage and that I did not wish to be a third wheel. I was sure his girlfriend would have preferred to be his date alone. I begged him instead to come over to my house that night for dessert, but he said his girlfriend was asleep because she had an early call the next day. I told him to stop by on the way home. That was the last I ever spoke to him.

  David hung himself in a Las Vegas motel sometime between when I last spoke to him and when I awoke the next day.

  • • •

  The next morning when the show’s producers told me the news, something in me shut down, and I was never the same after that. I called my mom and sobbed to her. All she could do was say she was praying for him. My life was over as I knew it. I was ripped into two and no longer cared about Andre or my mother or the dog or my show or my
career or any of it. I did not want to waste my time on anybody or anything I did not want in my life. I was finished being anywhere I did not want to be.

  Nobody knew about the divorce (which took eight days to execute and nine minutes to file and be finished) just yet, and Andre and I went to the memorial as a couple. I was the only one not included in the memorial. His ex-girlfriend and his current girlfriend and his best male friend all had a part to play. I was not a party to any of it. I actually understood how I didn’t fit in, but felt desperately sad in any case. I sat next to Andre, who generously paid for all the floral arrangements, and felt like I wasn’t even there.

  My one consolation would come later at David’s family’s get-together. His dad said that his life changed when he met me and he was happy for the first time in a long while.

  “He looked at you like his sister.”

  • • •

  Not long after David died, my stepsister, Diana, called me and told me that Dad had been diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer. He would end up dying within two years of that phone call.

  As if this wasn’t enough, I had also been informed that I had had an irregular pap result and had a cervical dysplasia that was precancerous. I would have to have most of my cervix removed if I was to survive. I recalled a hurtful comment that Andre blurted out in anger: “Be thankful we never had kids because I would not have made this easy for you.” He was referring to the divorce and the fact that if we had had children, there would have been a much bigger fight. But what if I had missed the opportunity to have children at all?

  Too many things were hitting all at once and I wondered if this level of fear and sadness I was experiencing was enough to make a person just cease to exist. It was like my mother had written: “Does one start to slip from life this way, then suddenly it’s over?” I had hit a real low, and for the first time in my life, my mother had not been the catalyst.

  Chapter Fifteen