There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me by Brooke Shields Read Free Book Online Page B

low din of voices and silverware clinking. Everybody made sure to write “Don’t forget to bring the baby” on invites to dinner parties and cocktail gatherings. I had very little fear of new people, and although mostbonded to my mom, I would gladly go smile at a stranger. Some things never change. . . .
    Mom always dressed me like a little doll. I wore smocked dresses and pressed cotton bloomer outfits with matching bonnets. I was always spanking clean and all dolled up. Mom put extra effort into my looking a girl because I had no hair and people repeatedly asked, “Oh, what’s his name?” Mom taped little homemade pink mini ribbon bows to my head to ensure people knew I was a girl. But that still didn’t work much of the time. Once, in an elevator, a woman scoffed to my mother, “Why would you do that? Why would you put a pink bow on a little boy’s head?”

    Mom told stories about my babyhood just like she used to tell stories about her own life. Some were true, some a bit embellished. One example of this happened while we were living on Fifty-Second Street. Mom let me crawl on the sidewalk before I learned how to walk. Evidently, one day, on one of these jaunts, we passed GretaGarbo’s apartment building. Garbo herself just happened to be out on a walk, and as the story goes, she stopped, looked at me and then to my mother, nodded her head, and continued on her way. Mom took this as a literal nod of approval from a legend and believed I had been blessed and sanctioned as one destined to make a mark in the world. I do believe Garbo was walking and perhaps noticed this little kid crawling on her knees on the pavement and made some gesture to me, but the real meaning of the nod is open to interpretation. For all we know, the regal Garbo could have been looking disdainfully at this careless mother who was allowing her baby to rub her soft knees on cement streets. Or may be she was, in fact, envisioning the future?
    Mom and I were rarely apart from each other, and I’d do anything to make her happy and get her attention. When I was around four, she took me to a piano bar and I asked if I could go to the bathroom alone. The bathroom was a small place and tucked into an alcove. When I did not return quickly, Mom started to rise to come search for me. As she stood she started to hear my voice over the sound system. She looked at the piano and I was seated atop it, legs crossed and singing a cappella. I don’t remember if the piano player accompanied me or not, but according to my mom, my voice was heard throughout the club. I knew “Embraceable You” and “My Funny Valentine” were my mother’s two favorite songs. She would often sing them to me, so I knew the words to both. I was offered the mike, chose “Embraceable You,” and serenaded her. This particular club would later become La Cage aux Folles. We’d someday be among their favorite patrons, but I never did sing on the piano again.
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    Even before I could talk (or sing), people often remarked to my mother about my looks being rather extraordinary. My mom would boast that when I was an infant, people often stopped us to commenton my “beauty.” Of course Mom thought her child was the most beautiful child in the world, but doesn’t every mother think that?
    One day, while riding in a checker cab, Mom was given an idea that may or may not have occurred to her previously. It was about her baby’s looks and the possibility of using them to make a living. The story she told was that one spring day in 1966 a typical New York cab driver was driving her and her ten-month-old baby girl uptown in his cab. The driver glanced in his rearview mirror a few times and then exclaimed in an old New York accent, “Ya know dat liddle kid a yers? She should model!”
    Evidently he had a two-year-old niece who had become a model. “Now the kid makes more than I do by the hour. Figure dat.”
    Mom thanked the cabbie for the compliment and the