[Brooke whistling]
- You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvin's?
Nothing.
Hi, I'm Brooke Shields.
And I think that we should talk about the Calvin Klein ads.
[chill music]
[marker scratching]
Whoever was with the Calvin team approached my mom.
And my mom just said, basically,
do you wanna put on jeans and do these commercials?
When I was 15, I didn't understand Calvin Klein
in the way that he was sort of
coming into sort of the zeitgeist.
It was more about Richard Avedon coming to my mom,
and coming to me, and saying, listen,
we're doing a series of very unique commercials.
Calvin, beautiful conquerer.
So that's what happened to me.
I've been Calvinized.
It was gonna be wordplay, or historical references,
or literary references.
There was a real sort of intellectual spin
on how they were going to produce these.
Reading is to the mind what Calvin's are to the body.
The shoot itself, nobody was allowed on the set.
I think because Avedon,
it was his foray into the commercial world.
I think he was a bit nervous.
Stakes were pretty high.
And I think there was a lot of pressure.
So we did multiple, multiple, multiple takes of everything.
It's an entirely new species.
The choreography was specific and intentional.
Every single bit of it ending in
the pose with the one knee up,
which is a lot for a 15 year old to try to figure out.
But the more intense, the better for me.
Whenever I get some money, I buy Calvin's.
And if there's any left, I pay the rent.
I was just so proud that they were trusting me
with something that involved acting
as well as just the visual.
And it was either gonna strike
and be a part of the zeitgeist, or it wasn't.
I was away when they all came out.
And then started hearing, oh,
the commercials have been banned here.
And Canada won't play them.
And paparazzi, and people screaming at me,
and screaming at my mother.
How could you?
And it just struck me as so ridiculous.
The whole thing.
They take the one commercial,
which is a rhetorical question.
You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvin's?
Nothing.
I was naive, I didn't think anything of it.
I didn't think it was, had to do with underwear.
I didn't think it was sexual in nature.
I would say it about my sister,
nobody can come between me and my sister.
What was shocking to me was to be berated by,
oh, you knew this was happening.
This is what you thought.
You were thinking these thoughts.
I was a kid.
And where I was, I was naive.
I was a very protected, sequestered kind of young woman
in a bubble that my mom was just paroling the outside of.
I think the assumption is that I was
much more savvy than I ever really was.
So, in "Blue Lagoon" I had a body double.
Like I didn't...
There was this sort of disassociation that I experienced.
And I think that there was a sort of a compartmentalization
that I just had as a young girl, to my own sexuality.
Paparazzi, and press, and appearances, and Barbara Walters.
- [Interviewer] Could Brooke Shields
handle a sexual relationship?
- I don't think so.
- And I would sit down, and they would just,
I could feel it coming.
And it would always start with this sort of feigned,
oh, we're gonna respect you because you know,
you're a young woman.
- What about the people who say, she had no childhood.
And accuse you, you took away her childhood.
- But I'm still going through my childhood,
so I can't say that I didn't.
- Sitting here, like this, is going through your childhood?
- Well, I'd rather do this than not do it at all.
You know, and then it would be like really condescending.
And then they would switch from condescending to,
well no, I mean, I mean, you know, of course.
- Will you keep your mouth shut!
[everyone laughing]
- Your beautiful mouth.
- She is beautiful.
- Oh, she's a beautiful girl.
- You know, and you'd just watch them
spin their personalities like out of control.
And I would just sit there, and I would just wait.
And then I'd say like,
you might not really want my answer
because you keep asking me the same question,
hoping for a different answer.
- How have you reacted to the outrage
in some circles over the Calvin Klein jeans commercials?
- I tell you, it's so funny because I didn't even,
I didn't even know what a big thing it was.
I was like, no, I didn't think that,
there was nothing untoward the way I felt doing it.
- What was the line?
- I don't even know.
I think it was...
- [Both] What comes between me and my...
- I think it was nothing comes between me and my Calvin's.
And my mom was extremely uncomfortable
in front of the camera.
It became this literally us against the world.
And finally we just sort of stopped.
I think she naively thought that if we did enough of them,
people would come around.
And no one was ever gonna come around.
They didn't, you know, they didn't care.
Yeah, at 56 I can go back and look at the camera,
and say, oh well it's zooming in.
And yeah, it's sort of on my crotch area.
And then it comes to my face.
Like, okay.
But sex has sold since the dawn of time.
Every single cover I've ever been on,
I don't care if I was 15 or whatever,
there's something in the eyes.
If they had intended on the double entendre,
they didn't explain it to me.
If they'd explained it to me, why?
Would they have wanted me to say it differently?
It didn't phase me.
It didn't come into my sort of psyche
as it being anything overtly sexual, sexualized in any way.
I was a virgin.
I was a virgin forever after that.
Then that became the thing that people hooked into
because I was honest about having not lost my virginity.
- You feel strongly about maintaining your virginity?
- I knew it was gonna come to that.
- You knew I was gonna go right to that.
- I was gonna go, here it comes, guys.
I always thought it was odd that I could switch from
this all-knowing, coquettish, you know,
she knows what she's doing, and she's playing it,
and she plays these parts.
And then all of a sudden I'm the most
celebrated famous virgin in the world.
You're kind of like, what is it?
What is it, guys?
What do you want?
Who do you want me to be today? [laughing]
- The hardcore feminists say, and you know this,
that the ads masquerade as soft porn.
- Well Glenn, you can't please everyone.
- I feel like the controversy backfired.
The campaign was extremely successful.
And then I think the underwear sort of overtook the jeans.
And they understood what sells,
and how to push the envelope.
- If Calvin Klein wants to sell clothes,
then your son should have had on clothes.
- There's an appeal to it that is so undeniable.
And they tapped right into it.
You know, they knew exactly what they were doing.
And I think it did set the tone for decades.
- Now that could definitely come between me and my Calvin's.
- [Man] Now, why don't you push 'em down a little bit?
- No, I don't think so.
- And again, I say that the intention
is not to create pornography.
The intention is to create something that's very beautiful.
- On the one hand, I don't think you could get away
with a lot of what I did in the '80s, now.
But by the same token, so much more is done now
than we would have ever dreamt of doing.
And there is an assimilation of sexuality now,
which I certainly didn't have when I was 15.
Whereas now I see my teenagers with different body images,
and different fears, and different insecurities.
And it was, we were pretty kind of protected
from a lot of that back then.
I appreciate being so protected in my naivete
because I feel as if I was relatively unscathed.
I interviewed Calvin not long ago for a Sirius radio show.
And to hear him talk about it,
he said it changed his entire career and life.
And it put Calvin on the map in a very different way,
which was what I think they had hoped for it.
He said, you know, you changed the course
of my life and my career.
And I said, well, you did mine too.
We were in the right place at the right time.
[soft music]