Brooke Shields was at the Calvin Klein show during New York Fashion Week when a young woman turned to her. It was Paris Jackson, Michael’s daughter. She was 19 and had signed with Calvin Klein in 2017, the same label whose jeans ads made Brooke famous as a teenager. She also fronted a Calvin Klein Jeans campaign with Millie Bobby Brown. Brooke had known Paris’s father for most of her life. Paris had no memory of Brooke at all.
The two of them had a history Paris couldn’t have known about. Brooke met Michael when she was 13, and they hit it off right away. “From the time we met when I was 13, we understood each other and became very good friends,” she told Rolling Stone in 2009.
Both had been working in front of cameras since they were small. When they got together, they finally got to be kids. They “joked about how silly people were and watched movies and ate candy,” Brooke told People in 2014. “We felt really safe.”
The friendship lasted well past those early years. Once Brooke went off to college, she’d call Michael with stories from campus, a life he never got to have. “He would laugh, I would tell him about whatever happened at college or high school,” she told Rolling Stone. When she phoned, he’d pick up and say, “Oh, Brooke.”
Then life pulled them in different directions. Michael became a father, and by Brooke’s own account she saw his daughter only when Paris was a baby. By the night of that fashion show, Michael was gone. The baby had grown up, and she was the one who spoke first.
Brooke told the whole story to Andy Cohen on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live” in February 2018. “I recently met Paris at the Calvin Klein show,” she began. “She turned to me and she said, ‘So you’re my dad’s friend.'”
Paris didn’t place her, and Brooke understood why. “I’d only seen her when she was a baby and she didn’t remember me,” she explained, as quoted by Yahoo Entertainment. “So I said, ‘Yes, I am.'”
She didn’t say anything more right away. “I waited awhile, looked back at her,” Brooke said.
“I said, ‘I really miss your dad,’ and she looked at me and she goes, ‘Me too,'” Brooke told Cohen. “And it was just a pure moment.”
It wasn’t the first time Brooke reached for that word when Michael came up. Back in 2009, she told Rolling Stone, “I’ve always maintained what a pure soul he was.” Nearly nine years later, the same word fit a quick exchange with his daughter at a fashion show.
Brooke tells Andy Cohen how Paris spoke to her first
Brooke starts the story at 0:00 with the Calvin Klein show. Paris’s first words and the “Me too” moment both come in the first 31 seconds.
In the same interview, Brooke talked about the last time she heard from Michael. When her own father passed away in 2003, Michael sent her what she called “a beautiful, beautiful floral arrangement.” “I still have the vase,” she said.