Gwyneth Paltrow never grew up

Gwyneth Paltrow is not much for confrontation, which is to say, if she doesn’t like you, she probably won’t tell you to your face. Instead, her signature move is as follows: she’ll wait until your back is turned, catch the eye of your mutual friend, and stick a finger down her throat to mime like she’s throwing up.

This jejune tic is a recurring motif in Gwyneth, the hotly anticipated, unauthorised, and extremely hefty new biography of the actress and wellness empire founder by journalist Amy Odell. And somewhere between the second and third time that Gwyneth was pretending to puke with loathing, I started to think about why biographies like this are written, about who is considered worthy of one — and about the difference between having had an interesting life, and being an interesting person.

A skilled biographer, which Odell is, can craft a narrative compelling enough that it almost elides this distinction — and Gwyneth is, indeed, a piece of expertly woven and compulsively readable storytelling. But eventually, over the course of 448 pages, it’s hard not to think at least a bit about the question above and to notice that Paltrow is very much the former thing, and extremely not the latter.

The buzz surrounding Gwyneth suggested that it would make a meal for audiences dying for revelation, desperate for dirt, and aching for a glimpse of the real, human woman behind the $600 exfoliating peptide with foaming seaweed extract sheet mask. Certainly the press dutifully hyped it up, publishing sneak peeks and buzzy lists with titles like “The top ten most shocking revelations from the unauthorised Gwyneth Paltrow biography.” This, despite the fact that the contents of these lists were either not revelations at all — Gwyneth declined to participate in the biography, and so the quotes from here included therein are culled from the thousands of interviews she’s sat for over the years — or, if they are, not the slightest bit shocking. She’s grossed out by fat people, yeah, we know. She was popular in high school, obviously. She allegedly enjoyed being teabagged by Ben Affleck, who she described in a recent podcast appearance as a “technically proficient” lover… This seems far-fetched, but if true, it’s silly. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the book is that after she once had a falling out with fellow celeb and frenemy Winona Ryder she nicknamed her “Vagina Ryder”, and this only because you’d expect someone of Gwyneth’s pedigree to be a little more inventive in her cruelty.

But this, too, goes back to the fact that being born into rareified circumstances does not necessarily a rareified person make.

Much of the book traces Gwyneth’s trajectory from privileged childhood to Hollywood breakout. Born to actress Blythe Danner and powerhouse producer Bruce Paltrow in 1972, Gwyneth was a darling of the prestigious Williamstown Theater Festival as a child and, as a teenager, attended the famous Spence School in New York City. She was both popular and rebellious, and rarely suffered consequences for the latter — partly because she could charm her way out of trouble, partly because she simply didn’t care if she got into it. She was an underachieving student — for lack of intelligence or trying, unclear — and made it into college only after her dad pulled a string or two. She also didn’t stay there long: it was shortly after matriculating at the University of California, Santa Barbara that her acting career took off. She dropped out, got famous, and never looked back.

Insofar as the book contains anything juicy, it’s in these early pages. The time Gwyneth got suspended for doodling an erect penis on a wall in the library; the time she lashed out at a friend after learning she’d been rejected from Vassar. Insofar as it reveals anything crucial about its subject, that’s here, too — not because this information was unknown, or unknowable, but because it’s the first time it’s all been assembled in one place, and into a narrative through which one can clearly discern both the contours of Gwyneth’s character and the eventual shape of her future.

Partly the chapters about her childhood allow the reader to understand just how long Gwyneth has been doing what she does — how for her, acting and celebrity was less a dream to be chased than a birthright to be claimed. But it’s also possible in these pages to pattern match the vaguely entitled teenager Gwyneth was to the billionaire empress of celebrity wellness she is now, to see how inevitable this all was. Gwyneth is not untalented, but her talent is secondary to her success, which has been almost entirely a function of her proximity to the right people. Before she was ever a household name, she was the child of famous parents, and then the girlfriend of various famous men. Her acting career flowed directly from her having figured out how to work these things to her advantage, and from an intuitive understanding passed down from her parents that all the world’s a stage. There’s an especially vivid anecdote on this front from her Spence years: on the first day of school, Gwyneth realised that her outfit — a Breton striped shirt and loafers — wasn’t attracting the right kind of attention from the most popular girls in her class. She went home, changed clothes, came back — and found herself immediately welcomed in. It was an early lesson in the importance of a well-timed costume change, of the importance of looking the part. In some ways, one could argue, it was the first successful audition of her life.

To give Gwyneth credit, this is a skill, no less impressive for the fact that she was evidently born with it. Acting at its best is not just a pantomime of feeling; it’s the ability to show people what they want to see, to persuade whoever is watching that you are this other person, that the character you’re playing is real. But as an origin story, it is hardly the sordid unauthorised bombshell the culture was clearly and dearly hoping for. The best celebrity biographies stir our emotions, revealing previously hidden depths beneath the famous faces we know so well. But there is no secret trauma or childhood tragedy here, no behind-the-scenes breakdown that reveals Gwyneth to be better, more complicated, more human, than she appears on TV — and nor does she come off as a scheming, magnificent villain, more evil than you could possibly imagine. Instead, Gwyneth’s life has turned out exactly as one might expect for a girl born to privilege, godfathered by Hollywood royalty, and savvy enough to turn these things to her advantage.

And if her personality has developed to be somewhat less stellar than her career, this, too, is also more or less what you’d expect from a woman whose ability to relate to other people never evolved beyond the confines of a high school cafeteria. If the distasteful aspects of this are obvious enough (Vagina Ryder, anyone?), it’s also been undeniably to her benefit. More than once, I found myself wondering how much Gwyneth’s uncanny ability to cultivate attention, to emerge unscathed from everything from a scandalous breakup to a box-office bomb to a social media firestorm over jade vagina eggs, is owed to social strategies developed in the fishbowl that is the social scene at an elite New York City high school.

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But if this is the ironic source of Gwyneth Paltrow’s success, it’s also a little bit tragic in that what allows a person to flourish in the celebrity world tends to stunt their growth in every other milieu. It’s not just her, of course: fame has always created perverse incentives, and Hollywood, the original attention economy, is not exactly known for encouraging the kind of personal growth that makes for emotionally mature adults with a healthy sense of perspective.

Still, to see Gwyneth’s life laid out like this, it’s striking how much the woman herself hasn’t changed even as she’s moved from moviemaking to motherhood to managing the GOOP empire. The obsession with thinness — oh, excuse me, wellness — remains potent as ever. She continues to hold people at arms’ length, or freeze them out like a cool queen bee if they cease to be useful to her. And certainly, it casts some moments from her more recent years, like the one in which she famously paused on her way out of the courtroom where she’d just won a civil suit against a man who sued her after they collided while skiing, in a somewhat stark light. What she said that day, as she leaned in to speak to him, was, “I wish you well.”

But one suspects that what she really wanted to do — and perhaps did do, later, out of sight of the cameras and the crowds — was wait until his back was turned, and then stick a finger down her throat to mime throwing up.

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