
ISSUE DATE: Feb. 9, 1981
THE BUZZ:
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.)
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