Gwyneth Bares All
(by Cathy Horyn)
Gwyneth Paltrow arrives for lunch in the garden of Verbena wearing large
black shades and a fine patch of stubble under her cigarette-thin arms.
She sort of glides into the restaurant on New York City's genteel Irving
Place, not as a star, with a tense bobble of hair and a 150-watt smile,
but as a downtown girl, worldly yet somehow undefined, a celebrated sylph
in blue jeans and floppy shower sandals. Gwyneth-even her name hints of a
vanishing world-is so pale and blonde and thin she seems to fade before
your eyes like a film dissolve. And yet onscreen she is irresistible, her
effect somewhere between old-fashioned spitfire and ice-cold, bluestocking
goddess, what director Sydney Pollack calls, succinctly, "Gwynethness."
Pollack coined the term after watching Paltrow's tight-slacked performances
in 1993's Flesh and Bone, in which she calmly played a human vulture named
Ginnie, and then last year's Emma, the 19th-century gal picture that
allowed the now 25-year-old actress to establish herself as a star. To
Pollack, who produced Flesh and Bone, as well as the upcoming Sliding
Doors, an intriguing story about fate from director Peter Howitt, Paltrow's
talent is allied with genuine screen magnetism. "There's a kind of hypnotic
thing that happens with real movie stars that makes it difficult not to
watch them," Pollack says, "and she has that quality. You could say it in a
million different ways. You could say she's waiflike. You could say she's
gamine. You could say she's gorgeous. You could say all those things, and
they would be true, but it's the particular mixture-and the
nonspecificness-that makes her fascinating. We saw that first in Flesh and
Bone. As soon as she came on the screen, you thought, who the hell is
that?"
At the restaurant, Gwyneth's entrance goes almost unnoticed as she takes
her seat and immediately produces a pack of Camel Lights, one of her few
apparent vices. Although she loves clothes, and can easily be wooed by a
designer into wearing his latest satin slip (Calvin Klein remains a
favorite, followed by Dolce & Gabbana and Prada), the 5-foot-10 actress
scrupulously avoids being seen as someone's prized clothes hangar and
isn't at all the type to exit a magazine photo session with designer
clothes slyly stashed under her own, as one famous Hollywood couple did.
Gwyneth wouldn't presume to take such blatant advantage of her stardom,
and she hopes, somewhat naively, that nobody else will either. At one
point she tells me, "It's very flattering when people say they would
love to dress you, but I remember reading an article once while I was
getting a manicure and a New York designer was quoted saying, 'Oh, we'd
love to dress Gwyneth Paltrow. What a mannequin!' And I thought, I don't
really know how to take that." She did know, of course, for in addition
to being beautiful and poised beyond her years, Gwyneth has been in the
spotlight long enough to know how to take everything. Especially the
perception that, until last summer, she was one half of Hollywood's
coolest couple.
Hmmm. Do I try cozy familiarity and refer to the former boyfriend as
Brad? Or do I tread lightly on that delicate subject and refer to him
stiffly as Mister Pitt? The question lingers hazily over my mind as I
eye small blini rolled with caviar and try to gauge whether one will fit
into my mouth all at once. "Do you think I can eat this in one bite?" I
ask her. Gwyneth's manners are so perfect I wouldn't want to be seen
struggling with a blintze.
Omelettes arrive, loaded with wild mushrooms and Gwyneth's off-the-menu
addition of chevre, and she plunges into a discussion of her recent work.
There are three films, actually, the first being Alfonso Cuar鏮's much
anticipated update of Great Expectations in late December, in which
Paltrow plays the coldhearted Estella opposite Ethan Hawke's love-struck
Pip, now imagined as a painter in the present-day New York. Then comes
Sliding Doors in early 1998, followed by Hush, Jonathan Darby's
psychological thriller about a young country bride who gradually realizes
that her mother-in-law, played by Jessica Lange, is-surprise-no Mrs.
Walton. Gwyneth admits that her enthusiasm for that film faded after
multiple script changes and says, "It was just one of those things where
you go to work for the wrong reason. I really wanted to work with Jessica.
She's so brilliantly talented and such a terrific woman, and in that way
it was an excellent experience. But it was just the silliest character."
Gwyneth frowns. "I mean, it was not a character."
Given Estella's literary pedigree, Gwyneth says that she felt on firmer
ground, and she created a modern character whose splintered heart is
perfectly ensembled in an ultrachic wardrobe. This is a lush production,
set in downtown Manhattan and seedy Florida, and it's apparent from her
grown up performance that Gwyneth loved playing the aloof object of a
young man's desire. She is equally enthusiastic about Sliding Doors, a
film about a London woman's life as it is - and as it might have been,
has she not missed a particular train. "It's so well written and funny
and heartbreaking - and so good," declared Gwyneth, whose own life of
late has thrown her some unexpected curves. "I think the moral is that
you always make the right choice," she says. "Even though it sometimes
feels like, Wow, I've really made the wrong choice here, there are very
specific and clear reasons why you go through the things you do. Then,
in the end, it's all the way it's supposed to be. We constantly second-
guess the choices we make, but then it's all part of God's plan. Which
I believe."
Hollywood, which occasionally thinks of itself as God, has decided that
Paltrow is a star. Harvey Weinstein, the cochairman of Miramax Pictures,
recently said, "She is somebody I think about for every single movie."
With her aristocratic good looks and breezy confidence, not to mention
her endless energy (12 pictures in the past four years, as well as stage
and television work), Paltrow certainly makes everything look easy.
Jeremy Northam, her costar in Emma, tells me, "I remember her ability to
switch in a nanosecond from 1815 to 1995. She would snap out of her take,
go straight into a thick New York accent, ask for a coffee, and do a
devastating impression of Woody Allen." Brad Pitt, who fell in love with
the actress while they were making Seven, used to say of her, "My girl's
got class." Admittedly, it was the sort of small-town remark that might
make a Spence girl cringe, but the plain-talking Pitt was merely stating
the obvious. Gwyneth does have class, heaps of it. And she has put it to
imaginative use, in characters as diverse as the uppity virgin in
Moonlight and Valentino and the grifter in Flesh and Bone, whose
toughness gave her a kind of cool prestige.
But I wonder how even a level headed person can remain unfazed by this
mounting hype, and I suppose the answer is that Paltrow doesn't take it
seriously. "It's obvious she has a good understanding of the profession
from her parents," says Ethan Hawke. "She takes the work ethic seriously
and, at the same time, treats it as just that." Paltrow and her younger
brother, Jake, a fledgling director in Hollywood, had the advantage of
growing up on both coasts, with lively movie sets in between; Gwyneth
(who was named after an English child her mother befriended as a young
girl in Philadelphia) says one of the happiest times of her childhood
was the many months she spent in Beaufort, SC, where her mother was
filming the 1979 movie The Great Santini with Robert Duvall. She was
crazy about Spanish moss and one Hugh Patrick, a fellow third grader.
There were summers in Williamstown, MA, lots of dogs and a townhouse in
the East 90s, where the Paltrow-Danner household settled when Gwyneth
was 11. Because of the intelligent way her parents shaped her life-
insisting, for one thing, that she be a child and not a child actor -
it's easy for Gwyneth to say, "I don't think I can do everything, and
I refuse to regard myself as this very accomplished person. As soon as
you're comfortable with what you can do, what you expect of yourself,
then that's all you're going to give. But if you're scared or don't know
what you're capable of, then you can't do anything."
"That sounds optimistic," I tell her.
She laughs. " I think I'm ridiculously optimistic. And sometimes the
worst of times brings that out in me even more strongly. I always see
the upside. Or understand the human aspect...And it's not as if you can
shut off the pain of life and what it brings you. But I think if you
face it head-on, with an open heart and open mind, you can surmount
anything. I really believe that." It doesn't take a mind reader to know
that in some small, necessary way, she is talking about the end of her
relationship with Brad Pitt, a breakup that seemed to those who followed
the romance from set to set, premiere to premiere, coo to happy coo -
well it was surprising. They appeared to be Hollywood's golden couple,
perfect in every way, talking about marriage and babies, her chicken
recipe, his dogs, their house, and then, sink, it was over. So the
question lingering in my mind since the start of lunch now has its
opening, and I proceed awkwardly to ask her about the man who everyone
thought was "the One."
Gwyneth looks away. Her cheeks flush. The words, when they come out, are
as stiff as cardboard. She begins. "I woke up this morning and began to
formulate - this is true - what I was going to say. I sat down and
thought about it a long time. And the conclusion I reached was that I
don't have enough perspective yet. It's too soon." She knew all about
the rumors, rumors that placed him in the arms of another woman, rumors
that said she was constantly correcting him...the "right" fork, that
sort of thing....
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