The photos would be the subject of litigation and two days of shattering testimony in court a few years later. Shields was not even ten years old when she began posing nude in provocative poses.
Even as a child, Shields knew to expect her mother to be drunk in the afternoon and learned how to avoid or care for her as needed. Laura Linney, a childhood classmate of Shields', talks about visiting their apartment after school. Teri was an all-consuming combination of micro-management and instability due to alcoholism. That one meant tuition at her private school. In an archival interview clip, she says that if she ever felt like not going to work, her mother would say, “Let’s take the phone off the hook and go to the park.” But now she also says that her mother always made clear the connection between her every job and their lifestyle. From then on, she was the financial support for her two-person family.
Shields had her first professional modeling job before she was a year old.
