Brooke Shields is setting the record straight.
During her Thursday night appearance on Watch What Happens Live, Shields was asked about her fling with John F. Kennedy Jr., whose last years and marriage to Carolyn Bessette were dramatized in the FX series Love Story. “We dated,” she acknowledged, when asked by fans for her take on the series since she had her “own love story” with Kennedy. The pair were romantically linked in the 1980s.
She clarified, however, “I didn’t have a love story. I had a crazy, crazy crush.” She then added, “We dated, but I never slept with him, so I don’t know if that counts.”
The star, 60, who rose to fame as a child high-fashion model, was at the height of her fame when she and Kennedy went on their one real date, at a ski resort in Aspen, she told Howard Stern in 2023. She gave Stern plenty of details during the interview. Shields said she had the “best kiss I’ve ever had in my life,” when she went out with President John F. Kennedy’s son, but didn’t want to pursue the relationship further when it seemed like intimacy was on the table.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, you’re falling in love, and if you sleep with him, he may not talk to you again,’” she recalled to Stern. “I wasn’t playing a game, I really was just so afraid of being really hurt,” she continued, “Because if I slept with him, I would have given him my entire universe, my heart, my everything.” She added that her mom would say, “That’s the boy you’re going to marry.’” Ultimately, she “kind of loved him too much” to go there, which led her to find her own way home.
“I had to get a cab home, which was a little less chivalrous, in my opinion,” she said.
Shields claimed that when she saw Kennedy again afterward, he “showed his true colors” in that “he didn’t look at me and he didn’t talk to me.”
“On the one hand, I was like, ‘S--t.’ On the other hand, I was like, ‘Oh, thank God, because he still might not have talked to you’” if things had gone further. On Thursday, however, Shields said that Kennedy “was lovely to me.”
The actress, who was name-checked in the series as one of Kennedy’s prior flings, said she’d watched Love Story and thoroughly enjoyed it. “I watched it start to finish. I loved it. I thought the acting was amazing,” she gushed. The star and her daughter, Rowan Henchy, 23, who worked on the series as a production assistant, joked about the bit of history on TikTok in March.
“I wonder if JFK Jr. was a good kisser?” the screen says as Henchy mouths the words to Charli XCX’s “Boom Clap.” When the camera pans to Shields, the screen reads, “One of the best.”
