Brooke Shields: I'm Your Man

It was her mother’s idea, apparently, that she should date George Michael. He was one of a number of “more gentle” men that her mother trusted when it came to her daughter’s innocence. She lists John Travolta and Michael Jackson (with whom she was just good friends) as two others.

Sure enough, George Michael made no attempt to pressure the 18-year-old Shields into bed. “No one had ever been willing to move so slowly,” she writes.

Did her mother know he was gay?

“I don’t think so. If I were doing a one-woman show, that would be the humour of it,” she says. She would talk at length about how miraculously happy he was to spend the whole time shopping. “But can you imagine what it must have been like for him, not to be living truthfully?”

The alternative interpretation is that he was a pop star who needed to appear straight, and you were America’s sweetheart, whose virtue was guarded around the clock. And he thought: “Aha.”

“Of course. I was such a known virgin. It was perfect,” she says. “We were both at this crazy height of fame. It made sense.” ...

Brooke Shields in The Times Magazine.