The Luckiest Girl Alive


(by Charles Gandee)
As the girlfriend of "the sexiest man alive," Gywneth Paltrow is the
envy of the free world. As the Well-born star of this month's Emma,
she establishes herself as a player in Hollywood. Charles Gandee
follows the 23-year-old actor to a cabin in the Virginia woods,
where she talks about movies, babies, and yes, Brad.

Contrary to what you may have read standing in line at the A&P, it
isn't true that Brad Pitt once wore a pair of Gwyneth Paltrow's
panties to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night. Nor is it
true that over the past few months THE SEXIEST MAN ALIVE has been
busily collecting his superfluous sperm in a Dixie cup, and then
turning it over-to Melissa Ethridge and her partner, Julie Cypher.

Also false are the published reports that Paltrow is pregnant with
Pitt's "love child," that Paltrow and Pitt are engaged, that Paltrow
and Pitt are already married... that Paltrow and Pitt have "set the
date." Although it is true, to linger on the questino of marriage,
that Paltrow and Pitt have, as she says, "kicked the idea around."

It's 8:30 A.M. on a Sunday, and Gwyneth Paltrow is on the fiftieth
floor of the Rihga Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where 64 journalists
from around the world have gathered around eight tables deployed
throughout eight suites-tape recorders at the ready. Each table has
been allocated precisely 25 minutes with Paltrow-obstensively to ask
her questions about her work on The Pallbearer, the film the 23-year-
old "actor" )"you don't say "architectress," do you?) is here to
promote for Miramax. but the press junketeers have few questions
about The Pallbearer, and many questions about "Brad." Endless
questions about "Brad." Still, Paltrow never loses her considerable
cool. Which is remarkable, considering it's 8:30 A.M., and she's
being asked to confirm that "Brad," who's home in bed in the couple's
SoHo sublet, did indeed grow up eating macaroni and cheese in
Missouri. Which she does.

The only time Paltrow begins to falter is en route from the sixth to
the seventh suite. Standing in the hotel corridor, stealing a minute
to speed-smoke a Camel Light, she turns to her publicist and in a
voice riddled with panic, says "I'm losing personality here-fast." To
which her publicist says "only two more, Gwyneth. And then we'll have
lunch before the MTV interview, which, did I mention, is in Queens."

"In Queens!" screams Paltrow. "Tell me you're kidding." he's not. So
Paltrow the pro stubs out her cigarette, smooths out the creases in
her black leather jeans, and strides into lion's den number seven,
where she's asked what she thinks about the series of nude pictures
of her and "Brad" frolicking poolside in St. Barts, which some
intrepid photographer snapped with a 600-millimeter lens-and then
not only published in a tawdry little magazine called Celebrity
Sleuth but also uploaded onto the Internet. "I think they could have
used a bit of airbrushing," Paltrow tells the reporter.

You don't have to spend all that much time with Gwyneth Paltrow to
understand that she has what used to be called poise. "there's a
Grace Kelly-Audrey Hepburn quality about her," says Gucci's Tom Ford,
who met Paltrow at Vanity Fair's post-Oscar party in L.A., and who
has been sending her garment bags filled with clothes ever since.
"She has a slightly removed elegance, a chic quality that we haven't
seen in a long time." Calvin Klein, who has known Paltrow for
considerably longer than Ford-which is to say, he's been sending her
garment bags filled with clothes for quite a while-adds "There's no
pretense about Gwyneth, none of the things that sometimes come with
celebrity. She's modern and refined and she's beautiful and she's
intelligent and she's fiesty, all of which make her an absolute
pleasure."

Steven Spielberg, who calls from a car phone in L.A. to say that he
has known Paltrow since "before she was born," chalks up her self-
assurance to her family. "Gwynnie has always been a very confident
person," he says. "But then she's coming from a very secure place...
she's got her mom and dad's head on her shoulders."

Gwyneth's mother, of course, is Blythe Danner, who first made her
name in 1969 on Broadway in Butterflies Are Free, and then went on
to distinguish herself not only on stage but in film (The Great
Santini, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, The Prince of Tides). Gwyneth's father,
Bruce Paltrow, is a writer-director-producer best known for two
television series-The White Shadow and St. Elsewhere. By her own
account, Gwyneth's childhood was a charmed one. Home was an "immense"
house in Santa Monica "with a pool and a garden and a guest house and
a big old tree in the backyard with a tree house."

Perhaps because Danner grew up outside Philadelphia and was educated
at Bard College in upstate New York, she was adament that her two
children be raised not in L.A. but on the East Coast. So when Gwyneth
finished grammar school in Santa Monica, her parents bought a
townhouse on East Ninety-second Street in Manhattan and enrolled her
in Spence, a tony private girls' school. "The girls were so
advanced," recalls Paltrow/ "You cannot believe the classes-law and
physics in the seventh grade! I was at sea.

I mean, I would have had an easier time trying to translate Hebrew.
I'm not kidding. It was hard." Although academically little Gwyneth
didn't flourish, socially she did just fine. "I remember my first
day," she says, "All the cool girls talked to me. It was clear I was
in tight."

Her second year at Spence, she says, "disaster struck" in the form
of puberty. "My mother kept telling me how beautiful I was, but I
wasn't. I was skinny and gawky, and boys did not like me." By high
school, of course, the duckling had been transformed into a swan.
"Suddenly, I was, like, a babe," says Paltrow, noting that being a
babe has a downside: "Around the eleventh grade, when the hormones
started kicking in, I started getting in lots of trouble. there were
parties in hotel rooms-you know, stuff
like that."

If Paltrow was an adventuresome teenager, she was not a thoughtless
one. For example, on those nights-and there were many-when she
sneaked out of her house when her parents had gone to sleep, she
would always leave a note on her pillow that read "I snuck out. I'm
at Dorrian's [the infamous Upper East Side bar where Robert Chambers
met Jennifer Levin that ill-fated night in 1986]. You can punish me
in the morning."

And then there was Mike, a six-foot-three blonde surfer from
California who, Paltrow reports, was so "gorgeous" that she, unlike
her father, didn't mind a bit that "Mike said "How's it goin'" a
lot." "Oh, my God," swoons Paltrow, "the love that I felt for that
boy." But Mike broke her heart when he cheated on her with a girl
named Kristen. And after that, she says, "the ship had sailed."

Because of her exhausting social schedule, Paltrow's grades at Spence
were, to put it charitably, uneven-meaning that colleges didn't
exactly come clamoring. "Vassar turned me down," she says, noting
that the only way she finally got into the University of California
at Santa Barbara was by having Michael Douglas, a friend of her
parents (and a UC Santa Barbara alumnus), make a phone call. But the
lecture hall held little allure for party-down Gwyneth. "I was very
busy having a good time, plus I was auditioning a lot. I'd gotten a
small part in a movie [Shout], and I kept having to drive into L.A.
to reshoot the ending."

The summer after her freshman year, she got another part, courtesy of
her mother, in Picnic at the Williamstown theater in Massachusetts.
"I think Mom was trying to make sure I didn't get into any trouble
that summer," says Paltrow, who clearly rose to the nepotistic
occasion-after the play, even her father, graduate of Tulane, agreed
that if she wanted to leave college and pursue acting, she should. To
ensure her seriousness, however, her parents made it clear that if she
left school she would be expected to support herself.

Maybe it has something to do with my mother," says Paltrow," but as
far back as I can remember, acting is the only thing I ever wanted to
do." So after Williamstown, she returned to L.A., found herself a
little apartment in Oceanpark, and made ends meet by taking
reservations at DC-3, the then-hip restaurant at the Santa Monica
Airport. "I had no money," she recalls. "I could afford cigarettes and
I could afford Starbucks, and that was it." Although "Uncle Steven"
(Spielberg) helped out by casting her as the young Wendy in Hook,
financial salvation came in the form of a 1993 television miniseries,
Cruel Doubt, for which she was paid the princely sum of $48,000. And
then came Deadly Relations, a made-for-television movie that Paltrow
would rather forget, altough the $50,000 she was paid for the three
weeks of "vicious, vicious work" bought her freedom from the restaurant
business.

It has only been three years since Paltrow took her last reservation at
DC-3, but during that time she has completed nine movies-Malice, Flesh
and Bone, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Jefferson In Paris,
Moonlight and Valentino, Seven, The Pallbearer, Emma, and the as-yet-
unreleased Sydney. And while none of these movies has done for her what
Pretty Woman did for Julia Roberts, collectively they have positioned
her as a player. "Gwynnie's a classical actress," says Spielberg.
"Which means that, like her mom, she's going to be able to play great
characters every single part of her life." And then Spielberg adds,
"you know, Gwynnie's a great kid. She hasn't changed a bit, except that
she doesn't throw up on me any longer."

Paltrow's professional profile may change this month with the release
of Emma, the latest Jane Austen novel to make its way to Hollywood.
Director Doug McGrath, best known as the co-author of Woody Allen's
Bullets Over Broadway, reports that he asked Paltrow to read for the
title character after seeing her play Jinni in Flesh and Bone. "I
thought she was mesmerizing," says McGrath. "She had a perfect Texas
accent-a perfect regional Texas accent. And I grew up in Texas, so I
know. And that made me think, If she can do that, she can do an English
accent. Plus, she was charming, intoxicatingly pretty, and intelligent-
all of which the character needs." So McGrath set up a reading, and
"the minute Gwyneth started speaking, I felt like I was looking at the
perfect Emma."

Like McGrath, director Alfonso Cuaron finds Paltrow almost eerily
convincing. "I was trying to cast Estella in Great Expectations," says
Cuaron, who begins shooting his modern adaptation of the Dickens novel
this month in Sarasota, Florida, "and Doug was very generous to let me
see pieces of Emma. And I was just hypnotized. Because it was not
Gwyneth in the film. Every single inch of whoever was there was Emma.
And it's very rare that you see an actor where every single moment,
every single breath is the character." Needless to say, Paltrow will be
spending the balance of the summer in Sarasota-along with Ethan Hawke,
who plays an updated Chip.

But before packing up for Florida, Paltrow has to wrap up Kilronan,
director Jonathon Darby's psychological thriller, which began shooting
outside Charlottesville, Virginia, the morning after The Pallbearer
press junket. On the second day of shooting, Paltrow is having a
difficult time getting back into work. "I've been off for six months,"
she says," And you get rusty. Yesterday I thought, God, maybe I just
can't do it anymore. but today was better." Playing her fiance' in
Kilronan is heartthrob Johnathon Schaech. "Yes, of course, I think he's
handsome," says Paltrow, who hastens to add, just in case anyone might
get the wrong idea, "But he's not my type."

Paltrow's type, as everyone in the free world knows, is Brad Pitt, whom
she met in February 1995 on the set of Seven. Of that meeting, she
says, "I guess I had a few preconceptions. The "sexiest man alive"
thing had just happened, and altought I didn't think it was that major,
everyone around me kept saying "Oh, my God. You're doing a movie with
Brad Pitt." And that made me think it was like a big deal. Of course, I
thought he was very handsome from movies-you know, the way people are.
But I also thought, Oh, he'll just be one of those young Movie Star
Boys. but he's not. He's a really good person. And I knew it that first
day on the set. And then I got nervous." Asked if it was love at first
sight, Paltrow says, "Umm...oh...gosh...no...well, I mean, for him,
more-but it took me a little bit longer."

Since Seven, Paltrow and Pitt have become Hollywood's poster couple
their every move, as the infamous St. Barts pictures suggests, a photo
op. In Los Angeles, home is Pitt's Arts and Crafts-style house in the
Hollywood Hills; in Manhattan, it's the SoHo sublet, at least until they
can find a co-op. Which is turning out to be a problem because Paltrow
has her heart set on a penthouse in a prewar building in Greenwich
Village. "But there are only so many of those apartments," she says.
"And the people who have them don't want to sell-no matter who you are."
Suddenly overwhelmed, she sighs, "Oh, I don't know where we're going to
live."

An hour later, at a little rented cabin at the end of a dirt road in
Virginia where she is living during Kilronan, Paltrow is stuffing a
chicken into the oven, pouring herself a drink-"You know, I do like a
vodka tonic after work"-and talking about her career. "I love acting,"
she says. "I do. But it's not the most important thing to me." And then
the subject turns to children. Paltrow would like to have four. The
obvious question is, When? "In the next few years," she says. "I mean,
the thing that I'm in, you know, with Brad, is really good-really,
really good. And if it stays like it is, I think we'll do it. But life
is funny. You never know. Still, if you're lucky enough to find someone
you fit, well, it's an amazing thing to feel like one-half of something.
It makes me feel safe. And that's why even out here in the woods, I
don't get lonely."

And how does Pitt feel? "God, that's such an embarrassing question,"
says Paltrow. And then she takes the final sip off her vodka and tonic,
and says, "He thinks I'm pretty good, you know? He always says, "You're
an amazing woman." Another hting he always says-oh gosh, this is so
incredibly embarrassing, but another thing he always says is "My girl's
got class."" And then, perhaps to prove that she has, Paltrow turns
crimson.