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Her face breaking into a wide smile, the pretty teenage girl in the cowboy boots watches gleefully as a pair of foals chase each other around the paddock at the ramshackle old horse ranch.
It’s hard to believe this seemingly carefree teen is Paris Jackson, the troubled daughter of the late King of Pop, who attempted suicide last week in a dramatic cry for help.
Now, as she prepares to be released from a Los Angeles hospital — the 15-year-old is expected to be discharged as soon as today — she is reportedly hoping to return to the place where the photos were taken, the place where she is truly happy.
Paris will likely spend the summer with Debbie Rowe, 54, her horse-breeder mom, in the dusty high desert town of Palmdale, Calif., far removed from the privileged but suffocating luxury of the Jackson family compound in upscale Calabasas.
The mother and daughter reunited in Palmdale (population, 152,750) earlier this year after an estrangement that began almost as soon as Paris was born. Rowe was attacked from every corner as an absent parent, but those who know her insist the criticism was unfair.
“Everyone knows that Debbie is a huge animal lover,” Rowe’s one-time confidante Gillian Scanlon tells The Post. “It’s hard to imagine that this woman who loves four-legged creatures so much couldn’t hold equal warmth for humans, especially her beautiful daughter, who clearly needs her so much.”
So Paris will bid farewell to the luscious lawns, ritzy tennis clubs and designer boutiques of her privileged ZIP code and hello to Palmdale, with its stooped Joshua trees, parched wastelands and strip-mall diners like Scramblez, her mom’s favorite breakfast spot, where the speciality is a California omelet stuffed with avocado, bacon, tomato and cheese.
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Her days will be filled with riding practice, low-key lunches at one of the five local malls and visits to the increasing circle of friends she has made in the area.
The extended vacation has been sanctioned by Katherine Jackson, mother of Paris’ late father and her co-legal guardian alongside cousin TJ Jackson. Katherine now believes the troubled schoolgirl should have a relationship with her biological mother, especially after a judge ordered a probe into her welfare. The court will likely have to approve Paris’ visit to the 2-acre ranch.
“It will be a shock to [Paris’s] system because it’s a dirt-like existence in Palmdale, and she’ll be really screwed for other things to do there,” says Rebecca White, a former Rowe confidante and sometime guest at the ranch. Plus, Debbie seems to prefer animals to people. The mat outside her front door says: Pets welcome. Children must be on a leash.
“But it seems Paris has real talent with horses so it will be something she and Debbie can bond over,” White adds.
“Horses are Debbie’s life — she calls them her ‘babies’ — and if Paris shares even a tiny bit of her enthusiasm, they’ll get along fine.”
Debbie’s friends are confident it will be mutually beneficial for the pair to spend a few consecutive months together. Just weeks before the suicide crisis, Paris gushed about her blooming friendship with Rowe, writing on her Web site: “So glad I bonded with my mother. It’s like we have this really strong relationship.”
She was thrilled to observe that, despite their obviously different body shapes, many features, such as a pixie chin and slightly slanting eyes, are the same. “Did I mention, I kind of look like her?” Paris noted excitedly in an April tweet. “It was so amazing to see my mom after all these years. Love her.”
In an interview earlier this year the UK magazine “Event,” she explained that she enjoys their meetings because it’s often just the two of them. “When I’m with my mom, we don’t really have security with us,” she said. “Which is really nice.”
For Paris, who isfollowed around by bodyguards 24/7, that means a lot. Even a visit to the hair salon ends with minders sweeping up her hair trimmings in case any one steals them for a paternity test.
Buckley, her $33,400-a-year private high school in Sherman Oaks doesn’t give the teenager much room to breathe either. It lacks the all-important “in loco parentis” approach, where teachers act like guardians offering moral and ethical support. A source tells The Post that Paris regards herself as a misfit among the other kids at the school, mostly from WASP families, who include the children of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
On June 5, Paris downed a full bottle of Motrin and slashed her wrists while talking to a suicide hotline. She was rushed to the hospital and kept under a 72-hour watch before being transferred to the UCLA Medical Center, where her father died almost four years ago. She remains there until her release.
Now, the best thing for Paris will be therapeutic bonding time at the ranch, says another source who knows Debbie, speaking to The Post on condition of anonymity.
“It will be wonderful for both of them to be together for a reasonable amount of time, hopefully, even permanently.
“Despite what people think about Debbie ‘abandoning’ Paris and her brother, Prince, 16, when they were newborns, she is a very nurturing person. Her profession was nursing and she extends the same compassion to all animals, including humans.”
Testimony to this caring side of her character is the presence of an elderly relative, known as “Uncle Bob,” who has lived in Debbie’s cluttered 1,750-square-foot residence in recent years since she purchased it in 2004 for $250,000.
The 70-something sleeps in the spare bedroom — a third currently serves as an office but will likely be converted into Paris’ room — and spends much of his time in an armchair petting Debbie’s menagerie of pets, including at least 10 dogs, a collection of parakeets and a lizard.
“He is a gentle, affable old man who Debbie dotes upon,” adds the friend. “He’ll sit there smiling and nodding as she talks.
“Their favorite pastime is watching reality TV shows like ‘American Idol’ together. It’s really touching to see them laughing and joking.”
The insider says Debbie battles loneliness and tends to treat friends like a replacement family.
Her own family has been through a fair amount of upheaval. She was adopted as a baby by a service couple — her father was in the US Air Force — and moved every 2 ½ years with her older sister and younger brother to states including Alaska and Nebraska.
The California valley became the family’s permanent home when she was 18. She trained as a nurse and was later employed by Dr. Arnold Klein, the LA dermatologist who fatefully introduced her to Jackson in the early ’90s.
She agreed to bear the star’s two eldest children — Prince was born in February 1997 followed by Paris the next April — but the odd couple divorced in 1999, and Rowe reportedly received an $8 million settlement and also gave up her parental rights, claims which she denies. (Nobody knows how that money dried up so fast, but the horse breeding business is known to be an expensive one.)
Despite their shared obsession for horses, Rowe never got on with her own mother. (Asked what her mom did for a living, she tersely replied to her former friend White, “She was breathing. Let’s just leave it at that.”) But she is close to her sister, who settled in Arizona. Fiercely protective of Rowe, who has frequently been cast in the media as a delinquent mother, these relatives refuse to give interviews.
Indeed, those who know Rowe in the horse community have nothing but praise for the 54-year-old whose specialty is breeding quarter horses, the original mount for cowboys, whose skills are displayed at “reining” competitions, a popular Western-style of riding.
“She works with some of the best trainers in the country,” says Heidi Allyn, of the LA Equestrian Center in Burbank, where Rowe stables six or seven of her younger horses at any one time. “She keeps herself to herself, but it very nice and normal. She is very pleasant to everyone she meets.”
Although they no longer work together, reining expert Tom Foran (son of the late Dick Foran, the Oscar-nominated singing cowboy star of the ’30s and ’40s) teamed with Rowe for several years, helping her train horses for reining contests.
He told The Post that, for all of her love of the equestrian world, she is reluctant to get on a horse herself.
“In the beginning, she expressed a desire to ride and to do reining, but I was never really able to get her in the saddle,” recalls Foran. “Reining isn’t for everyone. There’s a lot of sweat involved in learning how to do it well.
“I think she enjoys the breeding best and watching the horses in competition.”
Now, with Paris’ growing interest in the sport, Rowe clearly has ambitions to see her daughter succeed where she did not.
Only last month, she tweeted that she hopes Paris will want to compete in reining as, “She’s a natural on a horse.”
Rowe raised eyebrows recently with her mama bear-style defense of Paris on her Twitter feed. When Paris was attacked by cyber-bullies who tweeted insulting remarks about her dad — Rowe wrote back: “If you think her father is so bad, why are you following her? Oh, that’s right, you’re an oxy MORON.”
Before her emergency hospital admission, Paris also took to the Web to publicly defend her growing relationship with her mother. “I know that she wouldn’t use me cuz I’m her daughter,” she wrote. (Her brother, Prince, reportedly wants nothing to do with their mom, for the moment.) Rowe’s detractors suspect that she is reuniting with Paris after all these years to get her hands on her $300 million fortune. After all, if Rowe were ever granted permanent custody of her daughter, she would receive a slice of the estimated $50,000-a-month that grandma Katherine is paid by Michael’s estate for the upkeep of his three children, the youngest of whom, Blanket, 11, was born to an unidentified surrogate.
Anyone who visits Rowe’s unkempt property with its battered “Casa de Canine” sign nailed to the front door and faded garden ornaments can see that the money would come in handy.
But, as the anonymous friend insists: “Debbie has never been motivated by cash, so this doesn’t even enter the equation.
“She genuinely wants to bond with Paris, help her get through this difficult period of her life and make up for lost time.”
What is not in dispute is Debbie’s capacity for love.
“She always struck me as a warm and nurturing person,” says Scanlon, who became close to Rowe in the year before Jackson died. (After his death in 2009, Rowe broke off contact with many of her acquaintances, including White, whom she sued for $27,000 in damages — a default judgment, as White never answered the complaint.)
“I remember thinking that she must have been a very strong and single-minded person to have walked away from what a life with Michael Jackson could have offered, not least her own two children,” Scanlon continues.
“But perhaps what she saw ahead frightened her so much that she consciously chose to give all that love to her animals instead.”
jridley@nypost.com