Rising star: Brooke was American Home's Thanks-giving, 1975.

Pretty Baby, it deals with the emotional and physical development of a young girl born in a brothel in the old Sioryville district of New Orleans. The film explores her relationship wilh her mother (played by Susan Sarandon), the apparently natural way she takes to a prostitute's life, and the attachment she forms for Bellocq, the perennial outsider. It's like Lolita, only in period costume and much more explicit.

While Paramount is relying on Louis Malle lo bring off the film with taste and intelligence, Malle is relying on Brooke Shields, child model and herself twelve years old, to play a girl who lakes to sex as readily as a duck takes to water. For Brooke, the latest of the Hollywood nymphets, this is either the chance of a lifetime or yet another example of Hollywood's corruption of the innocents.

"She's just like any other tweive-year-old, just a regular kid." says Brooke's godmother, "Aunt" Lila Wisdom, her chaperone on the set since Brooke's mother, Teri Shields, left. Lila's laconic, twangy voice rides easily on the steamy southern air as she continues her monologue, "We try to keep Brooke away from the sex scenes as much as possible. She doesn't really understand them.