Brooke Shields called the controversy behind her “Do you want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” ad campaign from the 1980s “ludicrous.”
Talking candidly with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” about the ad that was once banned on the CBS network, Shields said she didn’t understand why some felt like her catch phrase was sexual when in reality it wasn’t.
“All of the ads were very intelligent. They were using literary references and historic references,” Shields said as Colbert showed a picture from one of the ads that ran when she was 14 years old. “In one of the commercials I said, ‘Do you want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?’ Then I would look into the camera and say, ‘Nothing.’”
Shields said everything they did had an innuendo but the goal was to sell jeans, that the phrase was something she said all the time but didn’t have any sexual nature to it. Nevertheless, she received a lot of backlash with some networks banning it altogether.
“We got banned,” Shields said. “I was deemed inappropriate. ‘How can I talk about something coming between me and my Calvins?’”
“It was a phrase. It wasn’t ‘I’m not wearing underwear,” Shields said. “Or come wasn’t spelled differently. It was c.o.m.e. I’m like, ‘What’s the problem?’”
Colbert asked Shields what did she make of the controversy surrounding the ad when she was a teenager. Shields said she thought it was absurd.
“It was ludicrous to me,” Shields said. “The thought that you could take that one line and have that set the precedent for what were revolutionary commercials. And it was amazing to me that they always seemed to, with me, they would pull out the lowest common denominator.”
Interviews she had done at the time were uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with the media asking her questions about her sizes and sex life when she was minor at the time and the over sexualization of children was being investigated.
To watch that part of the interview and more of Shields’ talk with Colbert, watch the video above or click here.
