It's all enough to make a struggling young Manhattan lady--eating her
take-out sushi alone at night as she flips through another magazine
citing a "Best Dressed" win for Gwyneth--feel mighty sensitive.
Gwyneth's idlest comments about her own life are now mistaken as
insults. "At our fifth reunion, she kept dropping Brad Pitt's name
and nobody was biting," says a Spence classmate. "'Well Brad's in
town,' 'Oh.' I mean, like, she could have been saying 'Uncle Joe's in
town.' I mean, we're not stupid, okay?"
IN THE LOWELL'S TEAROOM, THE TALK HAS TURNED TO match- making--
another of Emma's foibles. Gwyneth undoes her loose bun and lets her
hair cascade across her shoulders. McGrath and I are smiling like
idiots. "My friends are always saying, 'Don't you have any cute guys
for me?'" says Gwyneth.
"For some reason, all my friends think I know a hund- red perfect,
cute guys."
"They're hoping Brad has a hundred cute brothers," McGrath offers.
"Clones," Gwyneth says, twisting her hair back again carelessly.
GWYNETH'S MEMORY OF SPENCE DIFFERS FROM OUR MISS BATES'S, though it
is no less Austenesque. "I had braces and I was skinny and little and
I had a bad haircut." Gwyneth wrinkles her perfect nose. "And there
was one girl who did terrible things to me, and she was like the head
of the whole class. Sometimes we would be friends, and sometimes
she'd just be like, 'I have the power over you,'"
"You woke up and you were in a women's prison," Mc- Grath embroiders.
"The things she would do!" Gwyneth continues. That girl, she says,
used to go on a campaign to have other girls call Gwyneth and that
popular boys at St. David's wanted to date her, when it was all just
a big lie. "One day in seventh grade, I thought we were having a nice
conversation about California, where I was born, and she said, 'Oh,
do you like California better than New York?' and I said, 'No I love
New York now that I'm used to it--I'm having a wonderful time,' and
she said, 'Good, because I was going to say if you like California
better than New York, than you can just go on back there.' And I was
like, 'Oh...my...God...'"
"She's in the military now," says McGrath, riffing.
"I heard she's a zealot-a (member of a cult)," says Gwyneth. She
sighs ironically. "God will have to save her." Gwyneth acknowledges,
though, that she, too, has a bit of a mouth. "Sometimes, I can get
into trouble for it," she says, picking plump green grapes off a
custard tart be- fore us on a stacked tray, with fingernails painted
slate. "I should learn better manners," she says, chewing happily.
"I can be very impatient, and I'm too opinionated."
"You have very good manners," McGrath replies. "You always had very
strong opinions on the movie, but it wasn't about winning an
argument. You'd say, 'No that's not what should happen,' and you
would explain why, and you would be right."
"Sometimes I was wrong," Gwyneth insists.
"Yes, but when you were wrong," McGrath says, continu- ing the love
scene, "then I'd say, No, you're forgetting about this.' And you'd
say, 'Oops you're right,' and that would be the end of it."
"That's true," says Gwyneth. "But I don't know when to stop, and I
can get whiny because I have to express every emotion that I have
every second that I'm having it."
"Which I think is bad," she adds. Her eyes, which are the blue of
a flame, narrow slightly. "But at the same time, you don't have to
guess with me."
WHEN HER "BAD HAIR" DAYS IN HIGH SCHOOL BECAME TOO "painful,"
Gwyneth says, she retreated into avid movie watching-and books.
With her friends, the intellectuals, she "would sit around smoking
tons of cigarettes and drink- ing tons of coffee discussing our
Russian-existentialism class and whose Raskolnikov's-dream
interpretation was better."
"We were crazy," she says, laughing. "We were so pre- tentious. In
these private Upper East Side schools, the em- phasis becomes all
about whose remark is more insightful or wittier or more analytical."
In the past interviews, Gwyneth has freely given the impression that,
deep down, she's just a bit of a bad girl, but take it or leave it,
and aren't you missing out if you do leave it. In Flesh and Bone,
Steve Kloves's gloomly little 1993 movie about drifter angst in west
Texas, she slithered leggily on to the screen as Muddy Waters sand
"Bad to the Bone." Some critics thought she should have won a Best
Supp- orting Actress nomination for her performance as a grave-robb-
ing con artist. She stole the movie away from Meg Ryan, any- way,
whose cheerleaderish cuteness she chewed up and spit back at her
like a mouthful of damp pom-pom. "I'm not a nice girl," Gwyneth tells
Ryan at one point in the film, with a smirk, "but I bet that you
are...aren't you?"
Gwyneth now says reporters blew her badness way out of proportion.
"I was just finishing puberty when I said that; yeah, I was wild
because I snuck out of the house and went to a bar." She fires up
another Camel, blowing smoke out of her nose impatiently. But she's
not mad. She seems rather amused by all this. "And now, like, I read
in the Star I'm, like, a boozer. I was not wild. I was a normal
teenager. I snuck out and went to bars."
"And then after the murder, she really went on the straight and
narrow," interjects McGrath, playfully.
GWYNETH DID ONCE HAVE A BAD HAIRCUT-"FOR ABOUT FIVE minutes," one
of the young women who is not Gwyneth recalls, though she can't
recall the awkward geek girl Gwyneth remem- bers herself as. By
ninth grade, the consensus appears to be, Gwyneth had blossomed
into her present state of stunningness, and took to wearing a
leather jacket and hemming her school uniform well above her knees-
the better to show off her colt- ish legs around the corner on
Madison Avenue, where she would escape to smoke cigarettes and
flirt with passersby. "I mean we all did that, okay? But she wore
her skirt a little too short."
Even then, they all lived in the shadow of Gwyneth.
"She was always this badass. She wore cowboy boots."
"She was always six feet tall with blonde hair down to her waist."
"I heard all those stories about how she stole other people's
boyfriends."
Gwyneth rolls her eyes. "I kissed somebody's boyfr- iend when I was
15," she says, maybe a little perturbed.
THE CONVERSATION TURNS, ONCE AGAIN, TO THE CLASSICS.
"That scene in Annie Hall with the black soap?" Gwy- neth laughs.
"What are you, joining a minstrel show?" She does a fair Woody
Allen, almost as expert as McGrath's. ("She is the world's best
mimic," says producer Haft. "One day on the set she was doing Emma-
as Woody. Or Woody as Emma. It was riotously funny.")
"Will you call Woody and ask him to write me a roman- tic comedy?"
Gwyneth asks McGrath. (She's kidding I think.)
IT WASN'T BOYS, OR EVEN BOOKS, THAT MOST INTERESTED YOUNG Gwyneth-
it was acting. "I always knew I wanted to be an actress," she says.
"I always knew that it was just a matter of time." ("She was not
one of the biggest actresses in our class," says a Spence graduate
who was, and who now works in retail.)
Gwyneth did have a role as Titania, queen of the fair- ies, in a
Spence production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (a part she seems
born to play). Her love of performing was nurtured each summer,
too, at the Brown Ledge acting camp in Vermont. "If you ever have
a daughter," she confides, sounding like an Upper East Side matron,
"send her to Brown Ledge. It's the best."
Gwyneth credits her parents--actress Blythe Danner (The Great
Santini, The Prince of Tides) and TV writer-prod- ucer Bruce
Paltrow (St. Elsewhere)--with giving her self-confi dence. "I grew
up in a house," she says, "with two very intel- ligent people who
always led me to believe that whatever I thought was valuable. If I
said something, it was 'Oh, why do you think that, that's very
interesting.'"
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