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'Hollywood is insane now'

BROOKE SHIELDS is trying to do a telephone interview from the kitchen of her New York apartment, talking about her new television series, "Lipstick Jungle," and things aren't going well.

Blame 2-year-old Grier Hammond, who wants her mommy's attention in the worst way.

"My baby just pointed to her eyes and said, 'Crying! I'm crying!,"' Shields says, laughing. "She wants to make it clear that I shouldn't be on the phone when she's hysterical. It's just judgment, all the time!"

Crash course

The actress adds that Grier should know better, because she's getting a crash course in show business. "Grier has been coming to the set of my series," Shields says, "and now she runs around the house saying, 'Ki-yet!' That translates into 'Quiet,' which is what they say on the set a lot to a young girl who doesn't like to be ki-yet."

The series in question is "Lipstick Jungle," which NBC will launch on February 7. Based on Candace Bushnell's best-selling novel, the drama casts Shields as Wendy, a harried mother and movie-studio executive. Lindsay Price and Kim Raver play her best friends, also powerful career women who juggle family life and workplace strife.

Frenetic aspect

"Wendy is the totally harried one," Shields says. "Every morning she has the family and the kid to get out the door. Then she steps into the frenetic aspect of her work life and being a studio executive she has to jump on things immediately and take care of everything at a pace that's beyond fast. But, when she does things with her family and her husband, she has to turn that side of her down.

"I appreciated that she's not bitchy," the actress says. "She's fair. She loves her job and her family. There is no male-bashing. It's just that she has got a lot on her plate and she just deals with it all.

"I had this huge attachment to the book and Candace's whole way of writing about people living in New York," Shields adds. "I just think her writing is so incredibly honest, and I love the fact that these women really speak their minds."

Inevitably the show has drawn comparisons to "Sex and the City" (1998-2004), also based on Bushnell's writing and also about a group of women juggling busy lives and loves in New York.

Kitschy way

"We're a completely different show," Shields says. "The one thing we do have in common, though, is that we show stuff women really do go through, and we're not making it up in some sort of kitschy way. I'm a mother who runs meetings where millions of dollars are on the line while worrying if her child is having a good morning. I think the show is a real testament to the capability women have to multitask."

As an actress, a wife and a mother, Shields knows about multitasking firsthand. "What's funny about my own life is that I even amaze myself with how much I do," she says. "My girlfriends are the same. The men in our lives look at us like, 'You're nuts. How can you do everything in one day?' They really don't get how much a woman can do in one morning.

"I know that, if I'm not doing 10 things in one day, then something is wrong -- I'm having an off day," she says. "In fact, if I'm only doing five things at once, it's like I'm leading a life of leisure and I get angry. I think, 'I want to do 10 things."' Even so, Shields says, she finds time to relax.

Life of leisure

"You get pockets of time," she says. "That's what is great about living in New York: You stop and grab a coffee and see your friends. You grab the time." It's hard to believe that the former child model and teen actress is now 42, especially since she seems at least a decade younger.

"I think I've grown up with everybody for so long that my changes are incremental," Shields says with a laugh. "No one really notices them. But, if you go back to pictures of me from 10 years ago, then you'll notice!"

She's certainly changed since the 1980s, when she reigned as one of the world's top models and a budding movie star. Shields grew up in New York, where she began modelling as a little girl, and has been a star since "Pretty Baby" (1978), a film in which she played a child raised in a brothel whose virginity is auctioned off. The film spurred considerable controversy, which only increased when, at 15, she starred in a series of suggestive jeans ads for Calvin Klein.

At 15 she was the youngest model ever to appear on the cover of Cosmopolitan, and a year later she was on the cover of every major fashion magazine, including Elle, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Seventeen and Vogue. She also was a familiar face on movie screens, starring in the teen hits "The Blue Lagoon" (1980) and "Endless Love" (1981).

Unlike many of today's hot young stars, though, Shields managed to make it through her teen years without any rehab stints, jail time or ill-advised marriages. "Hollywood is insane now," she says. "I think it was very different times when I was a teenage star. There wasn't this instant access of the Internet, where your every move could be documented."

It helped that her mother, who was also her manager, kept close tabs on her daughter.

Got in trouble

"My mom had an uncanny, even bizarre way of maintaining my innocence," Shields says. "My mother protected me in a very difficult industry. She didn't let anyone get near me. "I was almost painfully and frighteningly naive for so long," she says, "so, when I did eventually go out on my own, I was shocked. Even with journalists, I thought, 'Oh, they'll just be kind.' Then I realised, as an adult, 'What? You're going to be mean to me? You don't care?'

"My mom never even let me read any of my own press in those days," she says. "Thank God she kept me away from it. Of course, Mom was the one who became an alcoholic and got in trouble. She took the falls while I was able to stand tall." Looking at today's young stars, Shields is stunned by how much they are left to their own devices.