Feeling divorced from her sexy image
Her fame grew, and so did her sultry image. When Shields was still a teenager, she was besieged by international suitors (reportedly, the son of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi sent her a diamond necklace and a nephew of Jordan’s King Hussein dispatched a diamond and sapphire ring). She also became a lightning rod for the issue of teenage sexuality. Conversely, in real life she was “kept so naïve,” she says. “My mom was probably so afraid it would change me. My brain was doing one thing, my body another, and I really became paralyzed by it. It was awkward, sexually, because I felt cut off from the neck down.” (Indeed, while she was attending Princeton, she wrote an advice book about college life called On Your Own, which included a section titled “What My Virginity Means to Me.”)While others lavished time and attention on her looks, she felt “complete detachment,” she says, as we take a seat in the museum’s café for tea and gingersnaps. She recalls being in a jazz dance class and falling whenever she tried to turn. The teacher chided her that she never watched herself in the mirror. “She said ‘Look at yourself,’ and I didn’t want to. What if I didn’t like what I saw? What if I didn’t look like I did in magazines?”
It took her first pregnancy to make her finally want to face the mirror. “It seemed important to me all of a sudden,” she says. “It was life, and my body had this purpose so far beyond just being there to look at, or tan or shave. Suddenly I realized how good it had been to me over the years, and what it had sustained.” She shakes her head ruefully. “And I was in my thirties at the time.”
