How Brooke Shields Ended Up in Jenna Bush Hager's Grandparents' Room During a Flood
The actress told the unbelievable story about George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush during her co-hosting gig on TODAY with Jenna & Friends.
What do you get when you put Brooke Shields and a former President and First Lady in front of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit? The ultimate midnight distraction, apparently.
The first President Bush was like a grandfather to Brooke Shields
Co-hosting TODAY With Jenna & Friends, actress and model Brooke Shields told host Jenna Bush Hager the most adorable story about her special relationship with Bush Hager's grandparents, the late President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush.
"I met your grandparents in the ‘80s. I was so young,” Shields told Bush Hager of a visit to The White House. “I never had a grandfather, so since I was quite young, he would give me boy advice and say, ‘Okay, I like that one. I don’t like this one.’ It was a very sweet relationship that I needed to have and hadn’t had with anyone else.”
For Bush Hager, this came as no surprise, as she remembered her gramps as a surrogate family figure for anyone who needed one. "It’s so interesting, he was that person for a lot of people," Bush Hager told Shields. "He was a surrogate dad for President [Bill] Clinton who didn’t know his dad."
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How Brooke Shields ended up watching SVU with the Bushes while their house flooded
Their friendship continued into her adulthood, Shields revealed while co-hosting the March 20 episode of Jenna & Friends. “I was doing a movie in Boston, and I get a phone call. Doesn’t say who he is. Literally says, ‘Excuse me, young lady. I hear you’re in the area. If you do not come to Kennebunkport [Maine], you are in trouble,’“ she recalled. “And it, of course, was Papa Bush."
Shields took her young daughters up to the Bush home, only to find that seaside houses come with their own set of problems. “I sneak downstairs to do the puzzle, go get a beer, and as I get a beer, water is flooding into the living room from the ocean, from over the rocks,” the star said. After shutting the doors and doing her best to staunch the flood with towels, she remembered, "I go to the downstairs bedroom and with the fear of God…”
Thankfully, she wasn't quite interrupting their sleep. “They had their little TV dinners, their little barcaloungers, their little La-Z-Boys, they were watching SVU,” Shields said, though she noted that Mrs. Bush was in her "dressing gown." In a funny twist, instead of panicking, the Bushes invited their guest into the room to finish the episode.
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“[Barbara] goes, ‘Okay, ask her, ask her.’ And [George] goes, ‘Well, who do you think did it?’...And I was like, ‘I don’t know who did it, but it’s probably the person who you think least did it.’ And I sat there in between [them] and we watched the rest of SVU and I was like, ‘This is a moment of my life that was so special.’" Just goes to show, it doesn't matter how important or famous you are, or even if your house is flooding. When Mariska Hargitay comes on the screen, you simply gotta stop and watch.
