George. H.W. Bush was considered an old-fashioned and boring President.
But there was a side to him that Americans never got to see.
And a Hollywood starlet confessed to asking George H.W. Bush this wildly inappropriate question.
Brooke Shields once asked George H.W. Bush for dating advice
Actress Brooke Shields had a surprising source of relationship advice for a Hollywood celebrity.
She reportedly struck up a friendship with President George H.W. Bush.
Shields called Bush her “confidant” during an event for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy in New York City.
“I call him Papa Bush. I was dating somebody [whose father] was an ambassador in Bermuda,” Shields said at the event. “He was my confidant about this boyfriend.”
Shields dated Kelly Gaines in the early 1990s who was the son of Eb Gaines who served as Bush’s Consul General to Bermuda.
Bush and his wife, former First Lady Barbara Bush, were like “grandparents” to Shields.
The actress eventually married director Chris Henchy in 2001, who got Bush’s seal of approval.
Shields once received a call from Bush out of the blue in 2010 when she was filming a movie in Boston, which is a two hour drive from the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
“I pick up the phone — no introduction or nothing. ‘Rumor has it, you’re close to Kennebunkport. If you do not come and visit me young lady, you’re in big trouble,'” Shields recalled. “I said, ‘OK sir, thank you. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’ I call my husband, and I’m like, ‘We’ve got to go to Kennebunkport.’”
Henchy ended up playing golf with Bush and CBS play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz.
“My husband arrives late, and I go, ‘You have to play golf.’ I think he played three times in his life,” Shields added. “We get there, we get out and, of course, he’s playing with the sports commentator [Jim Nantz]. Papa Bush gave him his clubs carved with every country, carved with monuments.”
George H.W. Bush and Brooke Shields had a special relationship
Shields revealed that Bush took her for a spin on a golf cart at Kennebunkport and asked her about her family.
“I hear, ‘You’re in this cart with me, young lady.’ He’s driving the cart,” Shields recalled Bush saying. “We’re driving around, and he’s like, ‘So, tell me how the relationship is. Good kids. I like the guy’ . . . My husband must have lost 40 pounds just from nerves.”
The actress thought of George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush as grandparents to her.
“I don’t have really many relatives. He was that symbol to me,” Shields explained. “I looked up to her so much . . . Your grandparents for me were very important in my youth and in my life and in my dating days.”
Shields recalled the Bushes asking her to join them while they watched TV when she was staying in Kennebunkport.
“‘Maybe [you] can answer the question — come in here.’ They’re each in their lounger chairs with the TV dinner in front of them, watching a ‘CSI’ or something. [He said,] ‘Who do you think did it, Brooke?’ I sat there for 40 minutes watching CSI on the floor . . . It was one of the sweetest moments of my entire life,” Shields recalled.
