1981-1984 Brooke Shields

7/7/09, Brooke


Brooke Shields says she “instantly became friends” with Michael Jackson after meeting him when she was 13.

“Nothing was jaded about him. I just was so impressed by his sweetness,” Shields tells Rolling Stone’s special commemorative issue on the King of Pop, on stands Friday.

“He was thoughtful, sensitive, sweet, and had a funny sense of humor,” she goes on. “If you got to talk to him about music or about the future of technology, his voice would get deeper, he would start talking, and it was as if he was this genius.”

Sexuality didn’t play a role in their relationship, she explains..

“As he grew older and the more he started to change physically, the more asexual he became to me,” Shields says. “It was easy for him to be a friend to me, because I was the most celebrated virgin ever; it’s ridiculous, but I was America’s virgin.”

“You saw women who were more sexual, who wanted to throw themselves at him and feel like they were going to teach him; we just found each other, and we didn’t have to deal with our sexuality. As I grew up and started having boyfriends, I would share with him, and he was like a little kid who talked about the bases- what first base was, what second base was, and it sounded very odd to the outside, I can imagine, but to the inside, to someone who’s never really left his bubble, you can understand how he would be curious.” Shields continues.

“There were times when he would ask me to marry him, and I would say, ‘You have me for the rest of your life, you don’t need to marry me, I’m going to go on and do my own life and have my own marriage and my own kids, and you’ll always have me.’ I think it made him relax. He didn’t want to lose things that meant something to him,” she adds.

She last saw Jackson at Elizabeth Taylor’s 1991 wedding.

“He seemed like his own funny self,” she says. “We snuck in and took pictures of ourselves next to her dress. We always seemed to revert to being little kids. It was a sanctuary for him, because he knew I never wanted anything from him but his happiness.”

Shields is expected at the Staples Center memorial at 10 a.m. PST.

Michael Jackson Remembered, Rolling Stone, July 13th 2009


Everybody was always confused by our relationship. Nobody got it, and I didn’t really care. My mom was always very positive in a sweet way about him, and he loved my mom. My mom would joke with him and rib him like he was a little kid, so he always got a kick out of her. He used to say, “It’s great you can be that close with your mom,” because she was also my manager at the time, where he had a very different relationship with his father, and I think he envied that.

We maintained our relationship for so long because it was never not real. People expect anything in entertainment or Hollywood to be transient, and it’s not as interesting a story for us to have been lifelong friends. People want sordid details or they want big blowups, and the truth of the matter is, from the time we met when I was 13, we understood each other and became very good friends, and that was it, we didn’t need to make it into anything else. I went to high school and college and I forced that into my life, and he didn’t have that luxury. He would laugh, I would tell him about whatever happened at college or high school, and I think he just always felt it was too unattainable for him, so vicariously, I would share with him football games or cheerleading.

What did I think of his marriage to Lisa Marie? I think we’re not dealing with convention, so somebody like Michael, he’s not going to just fall in love with somebody and get married. I think there were a few people that he could identify with, and what I know about Lisa Marie, she was very sweet, she could identify with him, they could talk about things that I’m sure she understood with regards to her father. So I think he tried to create a convention for himself. There were times when he would ask me to marry him, and I would say, “You have me for the rest of your life, you don’t need to marry me, I’m going to go on and do my own life and have my own marriage and my own kids, and you’ll always have me.”

He never actually formally proposed to me, though. He would sort of say, “Why don’t we adopt a child together? The way your heart works is what I want in my life,” and I said to him, “You’re always going to have my heart, we don’t need to adopt a baby, and I think it’s wonderful that you want to have children, adopt a child.” I wanted to fall in love and get married and have my own babies, and I said, “I don’t think that you need to necessarily do that.” This was just before he married Lisa Marie in the Nineties, I guess. He had discussed it with me, and I said, “I don’t think that’s the best thing to do for me.” I was just out of college, and wanting to fall in love and have a fairy tale, I was holding on to that. He just felt so bad that there were so many little children in Romania in these orphanages, and he wanted to try to give them homes, and I really wanted to be able to do that with him, but it would have divided my life too much.

I hope when you write this, it doesn’t sound freakish. What it was was a young man who kept reaching to try to find happiness. I think he wanted to take his resources and make a difference to other people in their lives, and he knew that I wanted to do that in the world, too, so he would reach out to someone like me and say, “How can we make a difference, it’s easier to adopt a child if you’re two people.” He never said, formally, “Will you marry me,” it was never that for me, he never was that definitive, but I think he was a guy who kept searching for happiness.

The problem is when you try to bring that out and in this society, it turns into a tabloid sentence, which is, “He wanted Brooke Shields to live with him and adopt babies,” and it sounds ridiculous. And it never was that clear-cut. He found people he loved in his life and he didn’t want to let go of them and he wanted them all to live together because he didn’t want to go out into the outside world, which was so cruel and too much to handle, and it makes sense. I’ve seen many people in this position where they try to bring people into their circle, because going out of their life, just walking outside on the street is too much for them. That’s why he created Neverland, because he wanted to bring people in so that he didn’t have to leave and he could feel their happiness and he could somehow regain something that he felt he’d lost. So of course I was going to be one of the people he was going to call.

I can’t really guess why his last years were so challenging. I think just cumulatively, when you distance yourself that much for that long, and if you don’t have the healthy outlet creatively, because there was a period of time when I think his music was his strength, and that was where he could filter and pour himself into it, and it was clear, and he knew what to expect and he could make it what he wanted. His life, I think, was very hard to grasp, and I don’t know if the people around him were helping at all.

I don’t think he was surrounded by healthy people. I think he just created a world that he felt safe in, and we went out to dinner a lot less. We used to go out to restaurants — it was madness, but at least we could get to a restaurant and be at a table. Entering and leaving the restaurant was a mess, but we could at least do that, and slowly but surely, he stopped going out to restaurants. And he got thinner and thinner … at first, he made fun of me because when I was in college, there would be keg parties or whatever, and he was like, “I can’t believe you were drinking,” and I would say, “It’s college, that’s what you do in college, you drink, you get sick, and you don’t want to drink anymore, that’s the way it happens,” and he swore off all alcohol and he swore off everything, and he was so clean. He would make fun of me because I wasn’t as healthy.

My heart broke for him because once he felt the need to run — I felt like he ran. I was worried about him financially, I was worried about the kids, I was worried about his health. I always worried about his health, because I thought he was just too skinny. He would make fun of me, especially when I was in college, because I gained weight in college — what freshman doesn’t gain the freshman 15? — and I’d say, “I know you’re going to think I’m fat, but …” and it was a joke, but he also became very, very conscious of everything, and I used to say, “I think you’ve lost too much weight.” So I started worrying about his health from the thin standpoint.

I saw him less and less as our lives became different. At every major event in my life, he reached out to me, whether if it was when my dad died, when I had my first daughter, and had severe post-partum, we’d speak, and then it got more and more difficult to reach him, and some of the people in his life that I could call to get him, they were fired or they left or they went away, and in the last few years, it was harder to get the right number to get through to him.

I like to think that I was a good friend to him. That’s the way it always was, and our friendship never altered, it just stayed the course. No matter what was happening, the one thing that whenever we got on the phone with each other, he would just giggle or laugh and say, “Oh, Brooke,” and I was consistent, and I think that was important for both of us. I wanted him to know my kids, but it became harder to take him out and bring him into … it was just a trauma. I feel like he shouldn’t have gone that way. I’ve always maintained what a pure soul he was.

January 11th, 2010, Access Hollywood
http://www.accesshollywood.com/brooke-shields-breaks-her-silence-on-emotional-michael-jackson-memorial-speech_article_27586


LOS ANGELES, Calif. –

Brooke Shields has broken her silence, speaking out for the first time about the emotional speech she gave during Michael Jackson’s public memorial in July.

Brooke opened up exclusively to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush as she hosted the launch of LG’s Lotus Elite mobile phone at Las Vegas’ Palms Place Hotel and Spa.

“Did you see me shaking?” Brooke asked Billy, referring to her time on stage, which all the world witnessed over the summer at Michael’s memorial.

“That was a really riveting moment,” Billy said.

“Well, they didn’t tell us that the coffin was going to be there,” she said.

“I thought — because there was a fantasy moment in my head — that he was going to jump out and start the concert.”

But fantasy quickly turned into sad reality for Brooke during her emotional seven-minute speech about her special friendship with Michael.

“They had written me something,” Brooke said. ” I didn’t… I wrote my own thing and just had to do my own thing. But it was… I felt honored to be a part of it.”

Brooke explained it was someone very close to Michael’s heart who asked her to be a part of his memorial.

“His mom [asked],” Brooke told Billy.

But Brooke confirmed she and Michael hadn’t been in touch in a while.

“I had not only not spoken to him, I hadn’t seen him in years,” she said.

“There must have been many times where you wanted to pick up the phone and call him and say, ‘Can I help you? As a friend, can I come see you? Do you need someone to talk to?’” Billy asked.

“I did that, you know, 20 years ago,” Brooke said. “I mean… the rhetoric didn’t change, you know, I did that way back when, but anyway, I did my best.”

“You did a beautiful job,” Billy said of Brooke’s memorial speech.

“I hope I did a good job,” she said. “I tried.”

Brooke, Splash News, March 4 2010


Actress Brooke Shields has revealed that Michael Jackson thought he was dying and that she wasn’t surprised by the King of Pop’s death.

The former Suddenly Susan star, 44, made her comments in a US magazine.

She said: ‘He [Jackson] thought he was dying already.’

And while she was devastated by her famous friend’s death last June, Shields said that she was not surprised.

She said: ‘They were killing him – the people and the press.’

The Lipstick Jungle star also spoke out in defence of Jackson who faced child-sex abuse charges and a high-profile trial in 2005.

The mum-of-two said that she never believed the music legend was a child molester and that she warned him that his sleepovers with young boys would be misunderstood, telling him: ‘Michael, the world’s not going to get it.”

The former child star, who started modelling at the age of 11 months, also revealed that she doesn’t want her two daughters – Rowan, six, and Grier, three – to go into showbiz.

She said: ‘It’s a high like you can’t imagine… But, no, I don’t want them involved. Every day you’re told what you are not – you’re not short enough, you’re not thin enough, you’re not pretty enough.

‘You’re always losing out.’

Brooke Shield Introducted to Man In The Mirror: Michael Jackson by Ron Galella, released 2010


In February 1984, Michael called me about a week before the Grammys to ask me if I’d go with him. Although it wasn’t much time, a week was actually longer than he’d usually give me to get ready for one of our outings. He told me he really wanted me to be with him, and that Emmanuel Lewis would probably also be with us. That was also not unusual because the three of us often did things as a team: the odd-but to us perfectly normal-version of the Three Musketeers. We were all quite famous and had been working basically our entire lives. Emmanuel was much younger and we called him ‘Rubba” because he had this adorable face with chubby cheeks, and he could make funny faces and move like he was made of rubber. We would all laugh so much our sides would hurt. I think Michael and I simply appreciated the freedom we felt when we were together. We could laugh, act silly, and not have to be the professional adults we were normally expected to be.

I think Michael wanted me with him at this particular Grammys because of how groundbreaking Thriller was, and how huge it was for his career. I believe he felt safe with me around, and he knew I never wanted anything from him and that I would take care of him. Events like the Grammys can be daunting for anybody, especially somebody nominated for over seven awards. He knew I was familiar with the spectacle that accompanies such events and that I would not get star-struck or lose sight of him in any way.

I’m not sure if he thought he was going to win as many awards as he did. When I said congratulations on the numerous nominations, he just kept saying ”It’s crazy isn’t it?!” I joked with him that he probably would have gotten even more nominations if he had put me in the video instead of the girl he chose. He just got this mischievious smile on his face that I had seen so many times before and said,”Oh Brooke!”

Michael seemed to take all of it in stride. That evening he just kept getting up to accept another honor. He had such humility and grace, and although he was almost maniacally ambitious and perfectionist, he never gloated about his success. He would just look ahead and try to find ways in which he could be even better. He wanted to be the best at everything, including being a friend. Nothing was ever about ego. It was about his heart and how that motivated him. Even getting eight awards seemed to just make him more humble.

Anyway, he asked me and, as usual, I said I’d be glad to join him and help in any way I could, I promised we could would have fun no matter what. On Grammy night I found a fancy Mary McFadden dress in my closet that I had been given as a gift, I did my own hair and makeup, and waited for the bell to ring. The car arrived and we were on our way. Michael had a way of making you want to care for him. Hopefully that is what I did that Grammy night.

Brooke Shields, Love Magazine, UK, Autumn/Winter 2010


In the remarkably candid interview, Shields also discusses her relationship with Michael Jackson and described the King of Pop’s father, Joe Jackson, as the “devil incarnate.”