Brooke Shields never had a baby with her ex-husband, Andre Agassi — a decision she says turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
“I’m glad I never got pregnant with my first husband because it would have been a disaster,” Shields, 59, wrote in her latest memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, published on Tuesday, January 14. “When we got divorced he made that very clear.”
Shields claimed in her book that Agassi, 54, told her to “be thankful we didn’t have children” when they split “because I would not have made this easy for you.”
“Well, thank you for that tidbit, I thought,” Shields quipped in the memoir. “You just made this particular transition much easier!”
Shields was married to Agassi from 1997 to 1999 and spoke at length about their tumultuous relationship referencing it on multiple occasions in this book. (Agassi, a former professional tennis player, has been married to Steffi Graf since 2001.)
“One of the reasons I married Andre was that I liked being in a relationship with someone more famous than I was,” Shields explained elsewhere in the memoir. “After a lifetime of always being the focus, it was a relief to be able to slink into the background a bit. He was a gallant guy, too, and I loved that.”
On the other hand, Shields called her marriage a “controlling, rigid relationship” and shared a discussion she had with Agassi about her body.
“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.’ However, when I said, ‘Will you still love me if I’m big and fat?’ I could never have expected his response,” Shields wrote, noting that she was referring to herself as a pregnant woman.
Agassi’s reply, according to Shields, was: “I love you too much to let you get big and fat!”
Shields acknowledged that this was “an unfair question” to ask but she “definitely did not” anticipate that reply.
“I started to spin a bit,” she continued. “But we all know how that relationship turned out, so let’s move on.”
Following their divorce, Shields moved on with Chris Henchy. She met Henchy in 1999 “at the gym on the Warner Bros. lot” while she was still married to Agassi.
“We became friendly because we’d see each other at that gym from time to time — I was working on Suddenly Susan, he was writing for a show on the lot — but we didn’t start to date until the following year, after I’d gotten divorced,” she wrote.
Shields and Henchy married in 2001 and share two daughters, Rowan, 21, and Grier, 18.
Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old is out now.
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