Brooke Shields explained the controversy behind her “Do you want to know what comes between me and my Calvin?” 1980s advertising campaign “ridiculous.”
Speaking candidly with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” about the once-banned ad on the CBS network, Shields said she didn’t understand why some people felt her catch phrase was sexual when In fact it was not so.
“All the ads were very intelligent. They were using literary references and historical references,” said Shields when shown a picture of one of the ads Colbert ran when he was 14. “In one ad I said, ‘ Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvin?” Then I look at the camera and say, ‘Nothing.'”
Shields said she had a sense of what she did but the goal was to sell jeans, a phrase she used to say all the time but had no sexual nature to it. Nevertheless, it received too much backlash from some networks to ban it altogether.
Shields said, ‘We were banned. “I felt inappropriate. ‘How can I tell if something is coming between me and my Calvin?'”
“It was a phrase. It wasn’t ‘I’m not wearing underwear,'” Shields said. “Or come on wasn’t spelled differently. It came up I’m like, ‘What’s the problem?’
Colbert asked Shields what she did about the ad’s controversy when she was a teenager. Shields said he thought it was absurd.
“It was ridiculous to me,” Shields said. “The idea that you could take that one line and that set the precedent for revolutionary ads. And it was amazing to me that they always seemed to me, they would take out the lowest common denominator.
The interviews she did at the time were uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with the media asking her questions about her size and sex life when she was a minor and the over-sexualization of children being investigated.
To watch that portion of the interview and more of Shields’ conversation with Colbert, watch the video above or Click here,