Brooke Shields got some friend advice from George HW Bush

When Brooke Shields needed dating advice in her single days, she consulted the 41st President of the United States.

The actress, author and model revealed that George HW Bush used to be her “confidant” and that she considered him a surrogate grandfather – so much so that she had a nickname for him.

“I call him Papa Bush. I was dating someone (whose father was an ambassador to Bermuda…He was my confidant for that friend),” Shields told the crowd at the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy’s New York Reading Celebration at the Lotos Club on the Upper East Side Wednesday night.

Lauren Bush Lauren – the host of the event – laughed as she remembered her late grandfather: “He loved a good gossip.”

In the early ’90s, Shields dated Kelly Gaines, whose father, Eb Gaines, was head of the US Consulate in Bermuda under Bush – and she once said Kelly could kiss better than JFK Jr., telling Redbook in 1991: ” When I kissed him, I had a tingling feeling in my stomach that I didn’t have when I kissed John Junior.”

Shields, 59, told the audience at the Lotos Club that “Papa Bush” approved of her now husband, film director Chris Henchy, whom she married in 2001.

“The Blue Lagoon” star said she received a call from the former POTUS in 2010 while filming a movie in Boston – a two-hour drive from the Bush family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

“I pick up the phone – no introduction or nothing. “Rumor has it you’re near Kennebunkport. If you don’t come see me, young lady, you’re in big trouble,” she recalled Bush telling her. “I said, ‘Okay, sir, thank you. I’ll be there as soon as possible.’ I call my husband and say, “We have to go to Kennebunkport.”

“My husband is late and I say, ‘You have to play golf.’ I think he played three times in his life,” she added. “We get there, we get out and of course he plays with the sports commentator (Jim Nantz). Papa Bush gave him his clubs with every country and monument engraved on them.”

Then Bush turned to Shields to get the message.

“I hear, ‘You’re in this car with me, young lady.’ He drives the cart,” she said of the former president. “We’re driving around and he says, ‘So, tell me what the relationship is like.’ Good children. I like the guy’… My husband must have lost 40 pounds just from nerves.”

Shields added that Bush and his wife Barbara felt like “grandparents” to her.

“I don’t really have many relatives. He was that symbol for me. “I looked up to her so much… Her grandparents were very important to me in my youth, in my life and in my dating days,” she told Bush Lauren at the event, held to raise support for the statewide literacy work of the Barbara Bush Foundation to collect.

She also recalled looking into the couple’s quarters during their stay in Kennebunkport to tell them it was raining in the house – and Bush saying, “Maybe you can answer the question – come in here.” She everyone is sitting in their lounge chairs, dinner on TV in front of them, watching “CSI” or something. (He said,) ‘Who do you think did it, Brooke?’ I sat there watching CSI on the floor for 40 minutes…It was one of the most beautiful moments of my entire life.”

Shields was joined on Wednesday by best-selling authors Jessamine Chan and Kirsten Miller, as well as Miss New York 2024 and literacy activist Abigail Quammen, MSNBC host Ali Velshi — and via video, the Bushes’ granddaughter and “Today” co-host Jenna Bush Hager.

The actress discussed her own book, “Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old,” out in January, which explores aging and the stereotypes women face later in life.

“When I went to the publisher with the title, I thought they would never let me do this title. It quickly became a book about age, choice, and where society puts us, where marketers put us, and where the beauty industry puts us. “It became a broader study of women and aging in our society,” she said.