Women Who Travel Podcast: Brooke Shields on Gaining Agency and Power Through Travel

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Brooke Shields has spent most of her life traveling the world for work—but until recently, she’d never traveled solo. In this week’s episode, the actor chats with Lale about a recent trip to Florence that changed all that, her most memorable movie locations, building confidence as a traveler, and what she hopes readers will take away from her new book Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and I am very excited to be talking today to actor, model and icon, Brooke Shields, who's filmed all around the world for movies like Blue Lagoon, Daisy Winters, and more recently Mother of the Bride. Now she has a new book out all about her next stage of her life and career. I chat to Brooke about some of the themes she explores as well as family vacations and her recent and very first solo travel experience and what it was like to finally walk around the city on her own.

Brooke Shields: What was very interesting, it being one of the first times I'd ever been alone in a foreign place and the aloneness of that period was huge. When you're famous or recognizable, I should say, you're really never alone, because everybody recognizes you. If you can find a way to be non-recognizable and still alone, that's when you're really experiencing something.

LA: More about how that time in Florence empowered Brooke's confidence as a traveler later. First though, how her book is about gaining agency and power in the prime of life. It's called Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman. So how was it born? I know you've chatted with Traveler before, you told us that great story about your trip to Antarctica, which we'll get into later.

BS: Yes.

LA: You are such a traveler and an icon, and you have a new book coming out on January 14th.

BS: I do.

LA: Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman.

BS: That's the cover.

LA: There she is.

BS: I'm very excited.

LA: It's a gorgeous cover and a wonderful way to start the new year. Who's the book aimed at? Is it aimed at women of all ages and what do you want people who read it to take away?

BS: It's aimed at women, I'm going to say over 40. When your world starts to shift in a way that is rather unprecedented because you don't have a context for it. You spend all these decades finishing school, finishing this, going to do that, getting married, if that's what you want, having kids, if that's what you want, all these things that somehow they have a timeframe or a biological limitation, and then you find yourself in this era, where I'm in right now, I'm 59, so that it started really in my 50s, sort of, where the kids are going away, you're not old, you're not the young one anymore. And it's, you don't really know who you are. Your kids leave the house.

For over 20 plus, 23, 4 years you've been mom, and then that goes away overnight, and then you're either left with your partner or you're alone and all of a sudden you've got this time for yourself and this ability to focus on yourself and ask yourself what you want and who you want to be and who you can be and you don't have any references to it. For me, I was starting to feel really good, and when I say good, I mean sort of alleviated from wanting to be thinner or alleviated from wanting to look even more youthful, younger or whatever. All those things that we sort of put on ourselves or society puts on us or it's male female predominantly or whatever that is, I started talking to women about this period of time in their lives and there was such a feeling of frustration. And it's just sort of like, "Wait, what happened?" I just started coming into my own.

And it's very confusing because we're not the sexy girl at the bar, but we're also not in Depends and dentures and we're not just that. There's just like... Hollywood does it, you kind of be like the ingenue or you're, it's easier to say Jessica Tandy because she's no longer with us, because... I mean, the Helen Mirrens to me are the most beautiful of the world. So I can't even use those women today, but it used to be the old... Like The Titanic. So it's either or. And now, there's this fabulous culture of women and demographic of women from all diverse backgrounds and to me they're all fabulous, but then you look in society and marketing and beauty and advertising and all of it, they bypass us.

LA: Well, you're like, I know these women. These women are in my life. I see them on the street. I see them with my friends, but they're not in pop culture, they're not on television, they're not in movies, where are they? And who's listening to us?

BS: Exactly. And then it so quickly was like, "Oh no, they are listening to you." And I'll say, "Well, but that's just menopause." And bless the fact that we're talking about menopause, but we're not just menopause, not everything is menopause.

So to me, I wanted to start a conversation with women even before the book came about... And I started a company called Commence. And from that beginning of this company, being a CEO, being an entrepreneur, being a founder of something in my 50s was something I never thought I would do. And the agency that I'm with called me and said, "We would like you to think about writing a book about this experience." And I said, "Okay, I'm one person who has the luxury at this moment in her life to decide to start something, that's not an interesting book and it's not a relatable book." I said, "This is a bigger conversation than that. This is, who are we in this era of our lives? And what does it mean to be a woman who is considered aging even though we start aging the day we're born."

LA: Growing older can mean letting go of regrets, and I'm thinking in the lens of travel, but when you were kind of exploring this period in this book, are there places that you, or trips that you wish you had taken that you now can let go of? Do you have regrets about how you've moved around the world that you are now kind of looking back on and you think you can say goodbye to?

BS: I don't have regrets in the same way of things I... Okay, my regrets are things usually like, "Oh, I wanted to jump out of an airplane. Oh, I wanted to climb," whatever. Or, "The Great Wall was the most important thing." There were some things like that that I just held on a bucket list. Usually the physical ones are the ones that I'm sort of like, "No, I'm good. Maybe I'll stay on the ground."

LA: You're like, "Maybe I don't need to plunge out of a plane anymore."

BS: Maybe I don't, maybe I don't need bungee jumping, it's okay. It's all right. So I think that the exciting thing for me is that I can let go of the, "Oh, I wished I had gotten that role." Or, "Oh, I wish my career had gone this way." Or, "Ooh, If I hadn't been focused so much on my beauty."

It was all those things that you realize over time they don't really matter because they're not who you are. So I think that the comparisons are the things I've let go of because to be honest, travel is now something my family and I, my girls and my husband and I, we love to take a big trip. And it doesn't matter where we are, we love the idea of being somewhere none of us really have the context for and where we're just together and experiencing something and seeing new cultures and we're a good travelers like that. And we've brought the kids from, they were quite young, not too young, not so that they would forget the experience. So we're going to keep doing it and they have the similar vacation schedules, so to me, travel wise, we'll do it.

LA: Well and now they're getting older, it must be fun to start traveling in a different way as well and see them start to experience the world on their own terms separate from you as well as with you.

BS: Absolutely.

LA: Finding time to explore without feeling pressured to follow a set schedule or adhere to others' expectations after this short break.

Back with Women who Travel and Brooke Shields's journeys to Italy, Fiji, and Thailand.

Speaker 3: [foreign language 00:09:27].

BS: My older daughter went to Florence a semester of her junior year. It was so interesting to have her go someplace she had never been, and it was foreign to her and to me even. And then to go visit her and see her in an equally unfamiliar environment, that by the time I got there, she had already found her place in it.

LA: It sounds like it was really kind of a first for you to walk down the street in Italy.

BS: And get lost. I got a little panicky because no one was monitoring where I was and my whole life I've been monitored. It's like, even when we go to these foreign places with... We're in Thailand for four months, every assistant director knows how to find me when they need to find me. You know what I mean? Even if I'm walking alone, they'll find me. And so there's a comfort in that. When you're in a country, weren't in the wilderness, but I mean I was in Florence so I probably would've been okay, but all of the sudden I thought, "No one knows where I am, wow." And I couldn't tell if I felt freedom, fear, a weird sense of claustrophobia, and then I thought just breathe into it. Just be in it and don't panic, you know where you are, you know enough Italian to be able to deal with... And then you're in a public place, you're going to be okay. You're not going to be lost forever.

LA: You wrote about this in the book, it also was your sort of own introduction to solo travel going to visit her. Yeah, I think we have you reading a passage cued up if you have it to hand.

BS: Okay. Okay, I think I just found the... Okay, great passage. Okay, so here it is. Until Rowan went to Florence, my solo activities had been limited to a few hours at a time and always close to home. I went to visit her abroad at Thanksgiving and I spent days solo while she was in school. At 58, it was my first time being alone in a foreign city. I've spent my whole life traveling the world, but I was always with my mother or a bodyguard or an assistant or my husband Chris or one movie set with a handler of some kind. This trip, there was no assistant director telling me where to go. No PR person instructing me on talking points. No assistant reminding me that I have another zoom in 10 minutes, not even a family member with an obligatory agenda. I've journeyed but always with at least a girlfriend. To be roaming around Italy with no one aware of exactly where I was, it was a bit unsettling for me, but also exhilarating.

I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, which meant I blended in with most American tourists and that presented another form of freedom. I wandered into cafes and talked to store clerks and sat at the base of the Duomo with a Peroni gazing up at the stunning architecture. I got lost and spent a lot of time in Google Maps, but it felt like a long overdue rite of passage. I'm coming up on 60, but I'm still growing up and trying new things and learning about myself. And while I don't know that I will make a habit of solo travel, it's good to know that I can enjoy my own company even for long stretches of time.

LA: I love that. And it sounds like, the conversations you're having at the moment, which is that it's kind of like gaining confidence is about pushing through obstacles rather than people telling you that you're doing a good job or that you're looking great or something like that and it sounds like that was a moment where it was pushing through an obstacle and finding some sort of new piece of confidence for yourself.

BS: I think that's very well said, and I think that true confidence doesn't come from someone else telling you you did a good job, true confidence is knowing in your heart that you did a good job and feeling good about the job you did.

LA: You travel so much for work, as well as for pleasure and so far we've been talking about the pleasure side. You write about filming in locations and you say in the book that you experienced your first hot flash when you were filming Daisy Winters in Savannah. What was it like navigating that on set?

BS: I was so embarrassed that I looked like a flop sweat mess and that I couldn't power through it for the sake of filming. Everybody had to stop what they were doing because my character was unfilmable.

LA: How did you move through that moment?

BS: I didn't know what was happening, actually. I did not know it was a hot flash. I thought I was possibly dying or that I possibly had food poisoning of some kind, and it was about to be a really bad scene. And the director was the one who said, "Yeah, maybe it's kind of happening." And I was like, "What? What's happening?" She's like, "No, it's hormones." And all of the sudden I was just shocked and I was like, "The horror. What? No." It wasn't about age either, it was just something out my control.

LA: You filmed in so many amazing places that you can almost chart a lot of your career through where you've traveled.

BS: And thank God because I wouldn't have been able to go to any of these places. When I travel for work, we live in places for three, four months.

LA: Right. So I wanted to start with, I mean we won't chart every single place, but Blue Lagoon is so iconic for its location in Fiji, right?

BS: In Fiji and Nanuya Levu, which is this island that they called Turtle Island off Lautoka, which was the mainland of Fiji. And you could get off if you wanted to take a seaplane or a four or five hour boat trip, and my mom did it a few times. She would go to the mainland and bring back things like pizza for people or stuff like that.

LA: The Blue Lagoon came out in 1980 and it has some resemblance to the reality show Survivor in that it's about the dynamics of living in an isolated location.

BS: For me, it was unbelievable because we lived in huts. There's nothing on the island, so we had our mess hall, we had a built area where I would get sponged down in the morning with tanning stain. And so there were all these sort of things that we had, but we created our own world. We all lived on just one or two generators that we had and it was very isolating and kind of barbaric. And as a young girl, my mom was with me, so I didn't miss out on many of my relationships. My mom brought a few friends of mine to visit me, which was amazing.

LA: Oh, wow. Because how old were you?

BS: 15.

LA: And so you had all your 15-year-old friends join you. What was that like?

BS: It was great because I could show them how to open a coconut and I could show them the best way to climb a coconut tree and I could show them, that's a sand shark and they won't hurt you and you can actually swim closer to them. And so after work every day I would take a snorkel and I'd go out and I'd try to find shells that I liked underwater, and then I'd bring them to the prop department and they'd drill holes and I would make someone a necklace. Or if someone had a birthday, we would get together and make a poem and each recite the poem about the person, or so there was something kind of wonderful and I liked it.

LA: Do you have any kind of visceral core memories of just being on that island? What did it sound like at night? What did the ocean look like?

BS: There's a smell and a stillness and a crunch of palm fronds that have dried up and fallen that's so familiar to me that I hear it and it instantly takes me back. Or sometimes the way there would be a stillness in the air and then you'd get a slight breeze, those beautiful things, or the water was never cold, it was always pretty clear, and so you could usually see the bottom. And they were just small waves that kind of came up onto the beach and they were phosphorescent at the right time of night. There were beautiful things like that. And then there were the primitive nature of being where there's no real running water and bugs and rats, and rats that would like, you could hear them up in the rafters at night.

LA: Oh god, I bet they were huge as well.

BS: They were massive. And one day a Fijian gave me a, one of our guys, none of them spoke any English, he would just say, "Bula Bula," which is like hello. And one of them came and made me a huge sword. He gave it to me to beat the top of the bure when we heard the rats at night.

LA: Incredible.

BS: And I was like, "Oh my God." I was like, "This is... I'm not." So I started sleeping underneath a thing because I was convinced they were going to come and eat inside of my ears and I was just like, "Ugh."

LA: Yeah, you're like, "This sword isn't going to stop them getting in my ears when I'm asleep."

BS: No. I was in the sun for about a month when I lost all the pigment in my skin, so I looked like a leopard and I was completely spotted with these patches of dry that wouldn't get tanned. And so every morning at four A.M. it was cold in the morning, I had to go sort of strip down to a loincloth and I don't even think thongs were invented then and get down with this iodine stain, makeup stain stuff. Oh, it was just so uncomfortable and every morning. And-

LA: That's the contrast to the snorkeling that you were talking about.

BS: Yeah. I mean, the adults, people broke up, people had relationships, people got pregnant and lost babies, mine was a 15-year old's world. I got pneumonia when I was doing Blue Lagoon and because it was the heat, I never got over the pneumonia, so I needed to be shocked into some cold and antibiotics to get over the pneumonia, and I never really did. Those are the kind of things that you were just, you wouldn't see today because they protect people more.

LA: You more recently filmed Mother of the Bride in Phuket in a very different place in your life with a lot more life experience. How did that contrast to it?

BS: Well, we were at a resort, so that in and of itself-

LA: So you re like, "Firstly, there's no rats and there's running water."

BS: Yeah, there's no... But the heat in Thailand was so oppressive. We were by water, but we were all sort of mountain kind of bound and so there was very little breeze and most of the water we were not allowed to swim in because of E. coli. So there were all these not really romantic things that happened.

LA: Yeah, once again, it's like this superficial beauty of this place, and it's amazing. And then you're like, "Well, what people aren't seeing is that we couldn't swim in the water."

Next up, Brooke, on making time for memorable vacations with her friends and family.

We're back with Women who Travel and BS on a trip with her family to Africa.

Talking a little bit more about your personal travel again, you, up top, mentioned that you're 59. I'm not quite sure when your birthday falls, but I am interested to know whether you're planning any travels around it or just trips for next year.

BS: I don't have anything planned, but one thing I did plan is that I don't want to have a party for a bunch of people and celebrate and have toasts and have it be one night of something. I would like to go some place with people that I really care about or whoever would like to come that is in my close, close circle.

LA: Where would that place be?

BS: I feel like I want it to be some place that I haven't been before. I thought, a Morocco trip would be nice, it would be with a good group of people. I don't know if now would be the time to do it, but-

LA: I just did it.

BS: Did you?

LA: I just went to Marrakech and it was magical, truly magical. And if you want to bring friends, you can just get these beautiful riads that are hidden behind these walls. They look like there's nothing there and then you open these doors. And the one I was staying in, the whole time, I was like, "God, if you could just take this place over with all of your friends and loved ones, it would be heaven."

BS: I mean, that would be something that I would... I mean, I would almost, like if I can't be this year, I wouldn't mind planning something, even if it was after, when I was 63, but it's my 60th birthday. I don't have a real problem with that, but I want to do something that's an experience with a few very just people that I feel the most celebratory with.

LA: You talked earlier about how traveling with your family is one of your favorite ways to do it and that you guys have all traveled together a lot. I know you did a trip to Kenya with your daughters. What is it about a family trip? I mean, we all have families. We all know it's not always easy. What is it that's so rewarding about it?

BS: For me it's, phone time is way, way, way, way, way down. They can't leave us. They don't want to leave us because they've never been in Kenya and we're not allowed to leave. And there's something that it forces us to, we're never bored, but our downtime is spent in ways that you would never really do unless you were sort of isolated or someplace foreign, whether it's playing games, making up or having different conversations or dancing to different kinds of music.

And our trip to Africa, an extraordinary thing happened. We were in the most isolated place I've ever been. We were by Lake Turkana in this camp and it was just us and one other family, and they tried to make a big celebration of New Year's Eve and it was like, that wasn't going to happen. We had a nice dinner and it was so, so hot. And Rowan came up to me, my older one, and said, "Can I DJ?" And I said, "Yeah, who's going to stop you? Sure." And she started this thing with this big boombox that they had and she started dancing. Before you knew it, it was just a couple of families, but we were all doing it and it was just an expulsion of just energy. And it was so funny, Like a Virgin came on and my husband jumped up on the icebox and crossed his feet like Jesus. And I was like, "My God, my husband is standing on a ice cooler." He's ripped his shirt off and he's imitating Jesus.

LA: And you're like, "How did we get here? How are we in the middle of nowhere in Kenya listening to ‘Like a Virgin?’"

BS: And it was just so... But she took this initiative and it's stuff like that. It's a shared experience with your children who start to really experience life and you see it through their eyes.

LA: I mentioned at the beginning, and I just want to squeeze it in, even though I know we have no time, is that trip to Antarctica that you talked to Traveler about, just top line takeaway, why was it so memorable?

BS: It was terrifying, and it was so cold. I've never been colder in my life and I realized I had claustrophobia, and yet it was the most magnificent sight to see these icebergs and glaciers and to be somewhere for 20 to 23 hours a day darkness was, it was so out of my sensibility. And I realized I don't want to do it again, but I'm so glad that I witnessed it. It just stuck with me because not only did I feel so lucky that I live in the civilization that I do and I have access to what I do have, but it made me appreciate the beauty of blue ice, it's so pure, it's blue.

LA: The book comes out in mid-January. Will listeners be able to catch you on a book tour? Is there an audiobook? Are you reading the audiobook?

BS: There is an audiobook, I have just completed the audiobook.

LA: Fabulous. Brooke, I have to mention, when we were talking about you being obviously recognizable on the streets of New York, many years ago we sat next to each other at the Clam in the West Village. And the reason why this is so memorable to me is that it was quite late at night, I at least had had quite a bit to drink and we both had black handbags and we reached through each other's bags and we took each other's handbags when we were leaving.

BS: I remember that at The Clam, they make really good margaritas and that... Wait, when did we realize we had the wrong bag?

LA: This was like... Oh my God, it was probably like 2015.

BS: No, I mean, I don't think I made it home with the wrong bag.

LA: No, no, no, it was walking out. It was, yeah. No.

BS: And then all of the sudden I was like, "Ah, [inaudible 00:29:02]."

LA: [inaudible 00:29:02], "This isn't mine."

BS: Yeah, we were sitting at the bar then.

LA: It was a very funny memory. And when I knew I was going to talk to you, I was like, "Oh my God, The Clam."

BS: The Clam. I like the Clam.

LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi. And special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler