Brooke Shields you think about the wrong conversation with the deceased Barbara Walters.
“It’s also crazy that Barbara Walters asked me my ratings,” Shields, 60, said during the Tuesday, May 12, episode. Jesse Tyler FergusonThe “Dinner’s On Me” podcast.
Shields was 15 years old in 1981 when she sat down for a series of TV interviews, including one with Walters, who died aged 93 in 2022. Walters asked Shields many invasive questions about her body measurements, sexual history and more.
The Blue Lagoon star continued, “I think I, like, took everything personally, and I still do. I’m much better now at not letting it affect me too much. But … [it was] where women [didn’t have] any power and they were in the male world.”
During Tuesday’s podcast, Shields recalled the “uncomfortableness” he felt when he stood up and compared his body to Walters at the time.
“I did it. Like, I didn’t mix it up or anything,” Shields continued. “If someone asks me that now, I’ll come back with some kind of quip.”
Shields also recalled that her mother was in the room and she didn’t seem to “register” the question as “totally inappropriate” because she had a motto, “As long as they’re talking about you, it doesn’t matter what they say. … Also, that wasn’t an era where people thought it was weird.”
Shields’ interview with Walters came after she starred in a Calvin Klein TV commercial with the famous slogan, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” The ad sparked controversy as viewers criticized it for containing child sex.
During the 2021 appearance Dax ShepardOn the “Armchair Expert” podcast, Shields said the inappropriate questions Walters and other reporters asked after the ad controversy were “absolutely criminal.”
Later, during the emergence of 2022 The Drew Barrymore ShowShields recalled that she felt “taken advantage of” during her interview with Walters.
Shields also brought up the infamous Calvin Klein ad in an October 2021 interview with Voguenoting that he was “shocked” at the time when he heard about the ad being blocked by other television stations due to the dispute.
“I wasn’t there when they all came out, and I started hearing, ‘Oh, commercials are banned here and Canada won’t play.’ The paparazzi and people yelled at me and yelled at my mom, ‘How could you do that?'” she recalls. “I was naive, I didn’t think anything about it, I didn’t think it had anything to do with underwear, I didn’t tell myself it was sexual. I said about my sister, ‘No one can come between me and my sister. What scared me the most was being yelled at, ‘Oh you knew this was happening. This is what you were thinking. You were thinking these thoughts.’ I was a child and when I was there I was naive.”
