A new biography about Gwyneth Paltrow reveals that the actress was not a goody two-shoes in middle and high school.
Born into privilege as the daughter of a famous, respected stage and screen actress (Blythe Danner) and a Hollywood TV and film director (Bruce Paltrow), young Gwyneth began attending the Spence, an elite and expensive all-girls prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in seventh grade. Already striking and preternaturally confident years away from her film debut, “she had a strangely potent charisma” writes Amy Odell in her upcoming book Gwyneth: The Biography, as revealed an excerpt exclusive to Us Weekly:
She established herself as an interesting person — someone people wanted to hang out with,” recalled the head of the middle school at the time, Kate Turley. “It was easy for her to make her way. But other students seemed to feel threatened. One classmate recalled, “Not one person had a doubt that she was going to be famous.” After all, she might spend a weekend with someone like [her godfather] Steven Spielberg. But she was also polarizing.
Polarizing for students — and teachers too. Apparently eager to poke at Spence’s posh, prim-and-proper rules, the Shakespeare in Love star wasn’t above X-rated humor or graffiti … but she didn’t enjoy the consequences when she got caught drawing an “erect penis” in the school library. As Odell writes:
Though she had her mom’s WASPy look, Gwyneth had acquired her dad’s bawdy sensibility. One day, Spence’s rather humorless librarian approached [head of school and Gwyneth’s advisor James] Dawson, outraged that a student had drawn, on the partition of a study cubicle, an erect penis. She sent all four girls — Gwyneth among them — who had been in the library at the time to Dawson. Dawson made an ominous threat: “All right, folks, this is completely uncalled for and obnoxious, so I’m going to suspend you all and put it on your college record.” “I didn’t do it,” said one girl, who left. The second girl said she didn’t have anything to do with it either. Down to the third girl and Gwyneth, Dawson doubled down on his ultimatum, prompting the other girl to insist she wasn’t responsible and leave. Dawson now faced just Gwyneth. “Gwyneth, you drew the erect penis in the library,” he said. “I’m not really sure what you’re talking about,” she said. He presented a picture the library had given him of the masterpiece. “Oh, that penis,” Gwyneth said. “I wasn’t sure what we were talking about.” Dawson pointed out that the other students had had to suffer through the confrontation with her. “Come on, where’s your sense of humor?” He often found her amusing, but replied, “In the library, are you kidding me?” Gwyneth became annoyed when she had to clean it up.
Gwyneth’s time on her parents’ Hollywood sets since early childhood likely encouraged that naughtiness, too. While in tenth grade, for instance, she visited her mom Danner on the Florida set of her TV movie Judgment, where she befriended makeup artist Sheryl Berkoff, future wife of Rob Lowe.
“Gwyneth already thought Berkoff was cool for dating her celebrity crush, Keanu Reeves,” writes Odell. “She became even cooler in Gwyneth’s eyes when she joined her to smoke behind a trailer, where Berkoff, Gwyneth recalled, gave her ‘blowjob lessons.’…’I’m sure that I implemented it in the first chance I got,’ Gwyneth later recalled. ‘It was so cool to have someone treat me like an adult and see me as, like, a young woman and someone who was sexual.’”
A few years later, when she first moved to Los Angeles, Gwyneth would spend more time with Berkoff and her then-boyfriend Lowe when she briefly lived in the guest bedroom of their swank home in the Hollywood Hills.
“Gwyneth was seduced by Lowe’s world, including the other young celebrities she was encountering in Hollywood, who were more dynamic than her
parents’ older celebrity friends,” Odell writes.
Gwyneth: The Biography will be released on July 29 and is available for pre-order now.
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