Uma Thurman thought about 75 cents would buy the red high heels she’d spotted in a shoe-store window. Instead, her attempt to pay for them ended with police trying to get her home.
Recounting the childhood outing to Jimmy Fallon on October 21, 2026, Thurman said she was about 3 or 4. Her family had just arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a teacher, and she’d noticed the shoes as they drove through town to their new faculty housing.
The next day, while her mother napped, Thurman took the coins from a table and set out to find the shop. She assured the shopkeeper her mother would join her, tried the heels on and offered him her money. His questions eventually brought the police.
Thurman couldn’t give the officers her new street’s name, though she insisted she could get back herself. An officer held her on his lap in the rear of the squad car while they drove around looking for her home. By then, she couldn’t recognize the house.
“I remember it so well, because I’ve never been so scared in my entire life, because I really thought I was getting arrested,” Thurman recalled. “And I sort of was.”
They eventually spotted her mother in the street, screaming, with hip-length hair and a muumuu. Thurman compared her to Miss Clavel, the caretaker in the Madeline stories. The shopkeeper, she added, “knew me for the rest of my life after this.”