PERFECTLY PALTROW

With five films in the can and a look that would have made Hitchcock
weep, actress Gwyneth Paltrow is a lot more than just Brad Pitt's
girlfriend. Jesse Kornbluth sits down with the coolest cool breeze
in Hollywood. 


After a long, hot morning of filming The Pallbearer at a Long Island
cemetery, no one is readier to break for lunch than Gwyneth Paltrow.
Along with enough members of the crew to field a softball team, she
wedges herself into a van; as we head slowly out of the cemetery to
the Queens nightclub that is the production's canteen, she dials a
cellular phone and begins to talk to someone as if she's alone. Her
caller interrupts. "Oh, I'm sorry," she says, genuinely mortified. "I
love you too."

It is, as I say, a hot day on Long Island, but as I realize that the
person who's uttered "I love you" first is Brad Pitt, I get a little
shiver. For this is the daughter of Blythe Danner, one of our most
durable and sophisticated actresses, and Bruce Paltrow, the
accomplished television producer -- she should know better than to
chatter on as if Brad Pitt is the cute guy next door instead of the
heartthrob anointed by People as "the sexiest man alive." And if this
22-year-old actress, who already has the Creative Artists Agency in
her corner, has somehow forgotten that she lives in a tabloid world,
she must surely remember a recent embarrassment -- a nude romp with
Pitt on a hillside that somehow resulted in photographs of the duo
plastered over the Internet.

But Paltrow continues to talk candidly on the phone, and when she
hangs up, she shares a funny story about Brad and his dog that a
malicious assistant could surely turn into a lurid tabloid item. And
I shiver again, for I'm starting to suspect that this gangly child-
woman isn't a loose cannon who will bore me by telling me far too
much about her young life -- she's a cool breeze. One of a kind. An
adult-in-training who's decided she's not really interested in
protecting herself so completely that she doesn't have a life.

Gwyneth Paltrow proves this theory almost as soon as we settle
ourselves in a corner of a club that seems to have been designed by
Quentin Tarantino. In this odd setting, we begin to review her
schizophrenic teen years: weekdays at the exclusive Spence School
in New York, weekends of heavy partying, and enough attitude, as
she's said, to justify a noon curfew. All that -- particularly the
attitude -- is firmly in the past, she insists.

"My dad told me the other morning that he loves being with me now,"
she says. "But then, I'm becoming my parents. I'm very calm now --
I don't go running out late. A few weeks ago, there was this thing
in the Star: 'Brad Pitt doesn't like his girlfriend leaving the
house, but Gwyneth loves the Viper Room, so he bought tapes from
the Viper Room's DJ.' That's ridiculous! I've never been to the
Viper Room! My idea of an evening is pretty much the same as Brad's:
to cook dinner at home with friends. I'm living my version of my
parents' marriage, which has survived for twenty-five years."

Such longevity drives her to wonder how it's done: "At a certain
point after a relationship ends, I try and figure out what went
wrong." With, say, actor Robert Sean Leonard? "That wasn't so
serious a relationship. Bobby Leonard and I are good friends.
Sometimes you date people because they're great and you don't
realize that what you're supposed to be is friends." She brightens;
she has, she says, arrived at an approach that seems to work. "I
think I see now that all you need is to find the right person --
and improvise."

Improvisation is a novel idea for Gwyneth Paltrow. Her life has
been more about destiny: recognizing it, accepting it, and
embracing it. "I could have been something else," she says. "I
would have loved to study art history, and then get an internship
at the Guggenheim collection in Venice. But this is what I'm
supposed to do."

That was by no means clear when she was growing up in Los Angeles;
she could have gone the child-actress route, but never even dabbled.
And when 11-year-old Gwyneth moved to New York with her family, her
interest in theater seemed to go no further than a single acting
class at Spence. Not that she was a dedicated student of the core
curriculum. "I'd have spurts of diligence, spurts of sloth," she
admits, without apparent guilt. "But the move to New York was
wonderful for me. No American education I know of compares to what
you get in a New York private school -- you get fed so well. And
then you add what you learn just walking down the street."

Her commitment to higher education was not, however, enduring: "I
chose the University of California at Santa Barbara because I had a
romantic picture of a quiet school in a quaint beach town -- wrong!"

The catalytic moment came at a summer theater in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, where she was acting in Picnic with her mother. They
had been talking about Gwyneth's taking a permanent sabbatical from
higher education; her father had opposed it. Then Bruce Paltrow saw
her performance on opening night. "Afterwards, he told me, 'Don't go
back to school,'" she recalls.

The first thing she did was get an agent. "Rick Kurtzman took me on.
Everyone thought he was crazy. You know how it is in L.A. No one
gets excited until everyone gets excited; it's like sheep. But Rick
signed me at caa although I'd only done Williamstown and a pilot of
my dad's -- little nepotistic things. So I'll never leave him."

The next thing she did was to see The Silence of the Lambs with her
father, Kate Capshaw, and Steven Spielberg. "While we were standing
in line, Steven just turned around and asked me if I'd like to play
Wendy in Hook. And I said, 'Certainly.'" That dream of a launch was
followed by a critically acclaimed performance as James Caan's
girlfriend in Flesh and Bone, and a Tallulah Bankhead- like
character in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.

Then came the deluge: "I did Jefferson in Paris last spring and
summer, then went to Williamstown forty-eight hours after we
finished filming to do The Seagull for five weeks." The week after
that finished, she went to Toronto to start Moonlight and Valentino,
a comedy starring Elizabeth Perkins and Whoopi Goldberg, in which
she played a chain-smoking nyu film student. She went straight from
that into Seven, playing a homicide detective's wife opposite Brad
Pitt, and before Seven wrapped, she began work on Sydney, a noirish
drama in which she portrays a cocktail waitress cum prostitute. Next
came The Pallbearer, a black comedy in which she plays the
unrequited love interest of David Schwimmer of the TV sitcom
Friends. "And as soon as I'm done here," she concludes, "I go to
England to do Emma" -- playing the title role in Doug McGrath's
adaptation of the Jane Austen classic.

Hard to find a pattern in those roles.

"There's no pattern. I'm not interested in that. The reason I'm
doing this is me. It's not for the money, though I like the money.
It's got nothing to do with fame, which is the great evil of
mankind. Billing? Hype? What's the point? Who cares? Actors who are
hung up on those things haven't been raised by people who love and
support them. I was. So I don't have that Hollywood version of penis
envy. For me, it's all about acting. I mean, I'm beyond interested
in acting; I get completely lost in the moment."

She looks so like her mother -- from the bone structure to the
intensity -- that I have to wonder if she ever gets lost in that
moment.

"Sometimes I watch myself and think, 'I am my mother,'" she says,
with measurable pride.

That, I suggest, must make it hard to learn from seeing herself on
film.

"I can't watch myself with pleasure. Not yet. I do learn about
myself, but in an odd way. You don't get the acting lesson until
the film is finished."

There is a price for this ascendancy and the parts that fall like
leaves upon her, and it is a lack of time for the self. She doesn't
exercise: "I smoke, I drink coffee, I'm terrible." She's not crazy
about Los Angeles -- "I thrive there, but I don't do well there" --
so she lives in a rented New York apartment with her 19-year-old
brother. She'd like to buy a place of her own and have a domestic
moment, but cannot see that as more than an item on a to-do list.

"Work," she says matter-of-factly. "All I do is work. And when you
work so much, you don't lose your sharpness -- you lose your
personality. Something has to give."

There's no bitterness in that remark. Neither is there a sense of
exuberance that goes beyond the satisfaction of doing each scene
well. And this is puzzling, for Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't seem like
a young woman who would lash herself to the mast of her career
simply because she is besotted with acting. There's something
more -- something like urgency.

And then, as we play New York geography, I get it.

It's death.

At Spence, she knew Courtney Steel, the daughter of Bette-Ann
Gwathmey and stepdaughter of the architect Charles Gwathmey, killed
at 17 by a hit-and-run driver. That leads me to ask if she knew
Harrison Kravis, son of Hedi and Henry, dead at 18 in a car
accident. Her eyes go very soft -- Harrison Kravis was one of her
best friends.

"I'll never recover from Harrison's death," she says, leaning in.
"Or the death of my 23-year-old cousin Keith from cancer the spring
before that. At first, I missed Harrison in a tangible way. As time
goes by, I miss him in a different way, and I resent the fact that
I've gotten used to him not being alive."

This ever-present awareness that nothing is assured is, she
continues, why she has a hard time seeing herself as this year's
favorite flavor, the "young" actress. "I'm living a full life," she
says. "I'm more content than I've ever been. And I think that's
partly because death has shaped the way I perceive things."

And I think that's the key to Gwyneth Paltrow. She's not a
careerist, using work to fill a hole in her past. The work mostly
comes to her. It comes to her because producers and executives see
first that she is lanky and blondish and camera-friendly. Then it
comes to her because they see that she is talented and dependable
and a team player -- because she is what can only be called a "good
person." And then it comes to her because she senses very little of
this, because she is, as she says, living her life so completely
that she's not keeping score.

So it makes a kind of sense that Brad Pitt could care deeply for a
woman who's not around much. Who's even a bit of a stickler about
measuring out trips to be with him -- since the deaths of her
friend and her cousin, she's afraid to fly. She's just back from a
long weekend in California. Now, she says, "It's Brad's turn to
come here."

Her confidence that he'll show up isn't something she notices;
she's more wrapped up in their fantasy weekend. "Brad's never seen
the East. I hope we can drive up the coast." In her mind, she sees
New Hampshire lakes, the shoreline of Maine. No photographers
there. No limos, either. Just rocky beaches and blue-black water,
platters of seafood, long talks over cigarettes. And privacy.

An original romantic fantasy? In no way. But in its simplicity lies
its appeal -- and hers. Gwyneth Paltrow's strength, in her life as
well as her work, is that she's not reaching for the deliberately
idiosyncratic, she's not trying to be noticed by being "different."
In a crowded field, she's working only on being herself. And by that
standard, she's already a success.