There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me by Brooke Shields Page A

night’s imbibing, piled us in the black Jeep and drove to downtown Manhattan for my big movie meeting. Mom told me to go into the meeting room and she’d be back to get me. After basically leaving me with strangers, Mom left and took Lisanne to the station. Evidently she had two fender benders on the way, but Lisanne made her train. Mom came back to pick me up and didn’t say a thing. I didn’t know that it had happened at all until Lisanne told me years later.
    But back in the room, I was having a wonderful time. The team showed me photos of inspiration for the film and I was completely enamored of the clothing and the culture of the period. It all seemed beautiful to me. Like an old-fashioned fantasy world.
    The world seen through the eyes of E. J. Bellocq reminded me of paintings I had seen in museums my mom had taken me to. We chatted about the subject of the film. They asked me how I felt about a love story that takes place in a world of prostitution. I don’t remember if they phrased it with such articulation, or as if they were talking to an adult, but I understood the gist of their question.
    I replied that my mother had told me about the part and that I had already known about prostitution by living in Manhattan. Mom and I often talked about the different choices people make. I added that it always seemed sad to me that the prostitutes I saw on Forty-Second Street had to walk on the streets in all sorts of weather and did not have nice homes. My mom always said we should pray for them. I assumed it was because they did not have a safe place in which to live. In the movie the prostitutes all lived at home, which seemed a much more protected setting.
    I don’t remember if the question of nudity came up in the meeting, but I was later under the impression that my mom had discussed with the producers, and they had agreed on no explicit nudity. She was promised it would be filmed in a way that I would be protected.I honestly didn’t give it any thought. I think I assumed that it would all be OK. Somehow I had no qualms about any of it. I was eleven. I’d go to the bathroom with the door open in front of people and have full-on conversations. I was not conscious of my body. Never young but somehow youthful.
    Even though I was such a young girl, I always had mature and evocative looks. I was far from precocious, and that was what Louis Malle wanted. I was not in any way what Nabokov had called a nymphet or a Lolita. That wasn’t what Louis Malle envisioned for his Violet. He believed that her power rested in her wise innocence. Louis wanted a sense of duality and contradiction in his lead character. He saw the woman/child as someone with real naïveté and innocence coupled with intelligence and emotional maturity. He didn’t want savvy provocation. I was what he wanted—at once a little girl and an emotionally mature adult, all the while lacking shrewdness or a cunning persona.
    The audition/meeting didn’t last very long. I was surprised it was so easy and fast. I worried that I should have done more. My mother picked me up and we left. As I remember it, we got the call later that same day. I was offered the role. Mom asked if I wanted to do the film and I said it sounded like a fun movie to make. We would get to move to New Orleans for a few months—we had thought it would be over summer vacation—and I’d get to dress up in period clothing. We would have a whole new adventure. We accepted the part.
    Another reason Louis said he chose me was that I was not a trained actress. I had never studied acting, and he felt I would be able to just respond to situations once I understood the scene. This has always felt like the smartest approach to me.
    Production was pushed back and what was supposed to be a summer shoot ended up starting around mid-February. This would be the first time I would miss school to work, but we had signed on and the money was good and this was a famous director. It was an opportunitynot