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Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi in Los Angeles in 1998.
Brooke Shields is sharing a backhanded compliment then-husband Andre Agassi made years ago, saying it made her “spin a bit” at the time.
In chapter 6 of her new book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, Shields, 56, looked back on how her time in the spotlight gave her body image issues.
“I was very specifically told I was not runway worthy, because I wasn’t skinny enough,” she wrote. “Being told you are ‘the face,’ you begin to believe that’s all you are — a face. From the neck up, I was Brooke Shields, but it was like my body existed in a different reality.”
When she shared her body image concerns with tennis pro Agassi, whom she married in 1997, he wasn’t as supportive as she’d hoped.
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Brooke Shields looks back on her life in her new book, “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old.”
Related: Brooke Shields Reveals How She Chose the Title for Her Newest Memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old
“When I would profess my insecurities to my first husband, he would always say, ‘I wish you could see yourself the way I see you,’ “ she wrote. “However when I said, ‘Will you still love me if I’m big and fat?’ (I meant once I got pregnant — an unfair question for anybody to ask another person I know!) I could never have expected his response.”
Shields said that Agassi told her, “‘I love you too much to let you get big and fat!’ “
“I definitely did not see that coming and must admit I started to spin a bit,” she wrote. “But we all know how that relationship turned out,” she added. (The two divorced in 1999.)
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Brooke Shields in New York in January 2025.
Related: Brooke Shields Recalls the Insulting Question Asked by 2 Male Doctors After Her Grand Mal Seizure
Shields — who shares two daughters, Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18, with husband Chris Henchy — writes that she’s “glad” she and Agassi never had children — but it was because of something she recalls him saying when they were splitting up: “‘Be thankful we didn’t have children,’ he said, ‘because I would not have made this easy for you.’ ”
Shields will always remember that. “It would have been a disaster. When we got divorced, he made that very clear,” she wrote in chapter 7.
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