Guests attending a reiki workshop at Goop’s wellness summit. Tickets to past summits have ranged from $500 to $4,500.Credit Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
We talked about this one morning at a suite at the Carlyle, where she lay across a sofa like a poem. She wasn’t wearing shoes. (I had taken to, when barefoot, extending the sesamoid part of my foot without pointing my toes, so that my feet looked like Barbie feet, which created an arch where I had none. “See?” I’d say to my husband in bed. “This is what her feet look like just regular.”)
She didn’t know why people felt the way they did. She said the decision to stop acting and pursue Goop was not difficult, but it had nothing to do with her reputation. “I really liked acting,” she told me. “But at a certain point, it started to feel frustrating in a way not to have true agency, like to be beholden to other people to give you a job, or to create something, to put something into the world.” She was doing three or four or five movies a year, and the primary relationship in those films was with Harvey Weinstein. “The one time that Harvey propositioned me was really almost the least of it in terms of how onerous that relationship was, and it was very quid pro quo and punitive, and I always felt like I was on thin ice, and he could be truly horrible and mean and then be incredibly generous. It was kind of like a classic abusive relationship.”
When she and Chris Martin separated via something that they called “conscious uncoupling,” she was blindsided by the backlash. What people heard, she thinks, was that even her divorce was going to be better than theirs. “I was really saying we’re in a lot of pain, we failed at this; we’re going to try and do it in a different way. But I was so raw that I didn’t anticipate.” She trailed off. “I think that was an instance where it really hit me that an insouciance with language from me is different than from somebody else.”
What can she say? It’s hard to talk about herself like this. How can she really understand who she is in the culture anyway? She’s the only one who can’t see herself clearly. All she knows is what she hears, and she once heard that she eats in front of the mirror naked.
The hatred used to feel personal to her, but it doesn’t anymore. Now it feels as if she’s watching a soap opera. She remembers the week that Star Magazine called her the most hated celebrity in the world. “I remember being like: Really? More than, like, Chris Brown? Me? Really? Wow. It was also the same week that I was People’s Most Beautiful Woman. For a minute I was like: Wait, I don’t understand. Am I hated to the bone or am I the world’s most beautiful?”
Anyway, this was an old conversation, she insisted. “I really notice as the business grows, there’s a lot less of that, and I think people are like: Oh, this is real, and I feel like that’s sort of, you know, a nine-months-ago story. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t. I was introduced to G.P. through Bill Burton, a communications strategist known for his work for Barack Obama. That’s not really how stories about start-ups or celebrities typically get done. I have a Google alert for her (as I do for everyone I’m writing about), and each day, that alert goes off and is somewhat filled with pictures of her in a bikini on a yacht but is mostly filled with pus and bile — for her supposed smugness, her jade eggs, her ability to smoke a cigarette without becoming an addict. Bloggers at New York magazine’s The Cut regularly mock Goop’s gift guides (to which G.P. said, “I don’t know what The Cut is”).
So this is why people hate her? “Because I have discipline?” she said. She remembers reading that Michio Kushi, the father of macrobiotics, smoked cigarettes sometimes. She wanted to be like that. It’s something she cultivated.
I said, don’t you see? The last cigarette she had was in February, sitting on the floor next to her chimney with me. It was June. I smoked now. I walked down the street sucking on cigarettes the way I did in my youth. I recently got into bed with my poor son, and he told me that I “smell like the city.”
She doesn’t understand it. She doesn’t think she’s perfect. She is the way she is because of hard work. How could people hate her for that? It’s just hard work. It’s just intention. The content is free, and it’s all right there. Go to her website. Do some meditation. Just eat more produce. Take some time for yourself. Hydrate.
We’re so hard on one another, G.P. said. We’re so hard on ourselves, too. “That’s all we do as women,” she said. “We just kick the [expletive] out of ourselves. It’s like that inner critic is so vicious, and it’s like: Why do we do that? It’s so nuts.” She continued: “People say that there’s no link between emotions and consciousness and physical illness. And yet look at the plethora of autoimmune diseases around you. One man to 10 women have autoimmune. We literally have turned on ourselves.”
The In Goop Health summit was perhaps the most gracefully and elegantly executed event I’ve ever been to. There was food everywhere — small plates of ancient grains and salads and not a brown avocado in the bunch. There was keto food (which create ketones), vegan food (which doesn’t use animal products), paleo food (made out of, I don’t know, dinosaurs). Syringes of CBD oil. Coffee with pea milk. Nothing was rushed. Everything was plentiful. Somewhere during my reporting, I had stopped thinking about food deserts and people who didn’t even have access to ancient grains.
Reply With Quote