Big-League Stunner or Nice Kid?

By John Skow

Unbelievably, Brooke Shields really seems to be both

Idly waiting for the show to begin, the cynical parent wonders how he would handle things. "To the school office:

Please excuse my daughter's absence for the past three weeks. She was . . ."

Sulking? Unable to find two knee socks that matched? Out of eye liner? No, as a matter of fact, the 15-year-old in question was in Manila as the honored guest of President Marcos and his wife ("Those are real diamonds in Mrs. Marcos' dress.

I think that's neat") and the star attraction at a film festival. Then she flew back by way of Rome, where she was photographed in full battle dress for the cover and a big inside feature of the Italian Harper's Bazaar. Then, since she was there and why not, she chummed around with Franco Zeffirelli, who directed her latest film, and helped Designer Valentino show his spring collection, keeping an eye out for one of his dresses to wear at the high school prom back in Englewood, N.J.

So: "... absence from school. She was having an out-of-body experience."

Brooke Shields, pretty Brookie, was already a big-league stunner when most of the models backstage at the Valentino show were still in high school, and now, rubbing slender elbows with them, she was definitely not outclassed. But she was 5 ft. 10 in. and a bit the last time anyone measured ("My doctor says I'm going to be 6 ft."); she doesn't wear heels much, and she wobbled a bit as she wandered around in a yellow strapless with a puff-sleeved jacket, waiting to be hung with jewelry. Wondrous astral bodies circulated about her; the ineffable Apollonia had got hold of some champagne, and showed up for work wearing red tights, a black tank top, a rough-trade belt, and Sony headphones over her ponytail. Iman, the gazelle-like Somalian, in silver pants and a noisy yellow top, joined her and they began dancing and laughing. Another black model, completely dressed on her bottom half in pleated silk skirt, stockings and shoes and completely bare above the waist, cantered through the room as Brooke watched in amazement.

When Brooke made her first entrance, "halfway through the show, the models backstage applauded. Onstage, as the audience clapped politely, she broke into a grin, as if she thought the whole spectacle a big giggle. If Valentino had tried to show her the catwalk glide, it wasn't evident; she simply galumphed down the runway as if she had been let out into a spring pasture.

At one point she tried a hand-on-hip flounce. As photographers lunged and snapped, she winked at the audience, grimaced wildly and, with eyes rolling toward the ceiling, indicated that she felt like a bit of an idiot. Awkward or not, she kept the onlookers on her side. She bore no resemblance to the young passionflower her merchandisers have hinted she is. But her giddy height and her astonishing face, with its hawk-wing eyebrows, deep blue eyes and full lips too fine for banalities or bubble gum, gave her what watchers have always known she had, a rare order of beauty not seen more than once or twice in a decade.

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.

The heartbreaking beauty who from Vogue's cover projects an ancient soul can act eight years old in her mother's presence. "Mommy, I have a toothache," she will whine "Oh, Mommy, my nail." Teri plays her part smotheringly: "Use that fork for your cake." "Say hello." "Say please." It is reasonable to wonder when and how Brooke might break loose.

There are few signs of restiveness. Indeed, this singular young woman is hard to fault. She keeps up an easy, loving relationship with her father, from whom, presumably, she gets both her amiability and her height (Frank Shields is about 6 ft.

7 in.; his late father Francis X. Shields, a remarkably handsome tennis star of the '30s, is the accepted source of Brooke's beauty). She often travels with her stepsister and childhood playmate Diana Auchincloss, 17. She moves easily among other teenagers, never seems to play the queen, and signs autographs with a shy smile while nibbling on a candy bar.

Can she act? After eight films, it is still not possible to say more than that there is no reason to think she cannot. Some of her movies have sunk out of sight, and one, Peter Fonda's Wanda Nevada, was never released. Director Malle guided her brilliantly through Pretty Baby, a film opulent of flesh but lacking the bone structure that might have made it great. She mugged cheerfully in a not very successful George Burns comedy, Just You and Me, Kid. (She says she wants to do comedy, but her mother, less sure, would prefer she stay with pretty pictures.) She was ridiculous in the idiotic desert island saga Blue Lagoon, possibly because she felt ridiculous; she did a lot of her acting while walking in a trench cut in the sand so that Co-Star Chris Atkins, 18, could appear to be taller than she.

Endless Love, the Zeffirelli film scheduled for release this GARRY GROSS summer, should answer some of the questions about her acting. She and Actor Martin Hewitt, 19, carry most of the dramatic burden as teen-agers caught in an obsessive love. The director is in ecstasy; he wants to start another film with Brooke (paying her $1 million and a percentage of the profit) as soon as he can. In the meantime, for Brooke, what delights does life hold? "Studies," says Teri firmly. At this point a reporter, digging deep for a question, asks whether there will be a Brooke doll, as there was a Farrah Fawcett doll. "Yeah," says the enchanted child, sounding for the moment like any put-upon teenager. "Wind it up and it goes to school." --By John Skow.

Reported by Martha Smilgis/Rome

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Rome

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.