Gwyn goes from Goop to nuts
Inside wacky debut health summit
LOS ANGELES — Gwyneth Paltrow’s inaugural healthand-wellness summit on Saturday kicked off just as you’d expect: well-groomed women wearing yoga pants and carrying expensive handbags hooking themselves up to IVs and oxygen tubes in a parking lot, experiences otherwise associated with the glamour of getting triaged at a disaster site.
This is Paltrow’s peculiar gift — or grift — and it was on full display at In Goop Health, her daylong event meant to bring her Web site’s “most requested and shared wellness content to life.” By last week, all 500 tickets, ranging from $500 to $1,500, had sold out; another is planned for New York City in January.
Attendees were told via email to arrive at 9 a.m. The summit wouldn’t actually begin for another hour, which allowed enough time to shop inside a cavernous industrial space for Goop-branded products such as water bottles ($35 each), hoodies ($100 per) and a “G.”-branded flight pack consisting of four thin nesting canvas bags containing some magnesium packets, a sleep mask, earbuds and moisturizer. Priced at $198, it was the physical manifestation of the day to come: For those willing to spend so much on so little, Paltrow will happily take your money.
SHE introduced her first speaker, Dr. Habib Sadeghi on “cosmic flow,” by explaining her own interest in wellness — or, in her parlance, “healing modalities.” It began in 1997, she said, after her beloved father died of cancer, and given her brand’s origin story, it seems naive at best, craven at worst, for Paltrow to commodify junk science and dangerous information. Even the affable late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who had Paltrow on his show Tuesday night, couldn’t play along. He asked about a recent Goop post claiming the scientific benefits of going barefoot. “What is Earthing?” he asked. “I don’t really know that much about Earthing,” Paltrow admitted. “There’s this type of electromagnetic thing that we’re missing, and it’s good to take your shoes off and walk in the grass . . . I don’t know what the f- -k we talk about.”
What about the $66 jade eggs she tells readers to insert in their vaginas?
“Is that something you believe in?” Kimmel asked.
“I don’t know!” Paltrow said. “I never read that before.”
Those eggs, of course, were available for sale at her summit.
In the day’s first lecture, Dr. Sadeghi spoke for nearly 90 minutes about “integrative photosynthesis,” “spiritual Wi-Fi,” “laterality to the body,” “neurovegetative signs” and “the ontological experience called your life.”
He spoke of June 4, 1997, the day Paltrow first reached out, as the most important of his entire life, more so than his marriage or the birth of his two children. He has saved every e-mail she ever sent him, and spent half an hour walking the audience through a detailed explanation of Paltrow’s first bloodwork, her then-recurrent urinary-tract infections and an ovarian cyst that, he said, threatened to blow out her back. (One of the enduring mysteries of Paltrow’s success as a health and wellness guru is her endless stream of medical ailments.)
Sadeghi went off on some interesting tangents. “What makes water wet?” he asked, more than once. “I nearly got a masters in electric chemistry asking that question.”
He stated that we still don’t know how birds fly, despite the Wright brothers inventing the airplane by observing birds in flight.
“I am probably one of the most authentic human beings you will ever meet,” he said, a pronouncement usually reserved for anyone working a con. About 50 women, most exasperated, streamed out during his lecture, and it’s not hard to see why: By middle age, most everyone has had an experience with catastrophic illness, and there’s no reconciling Sadeghi’s nonsense with that.
Finally, after plugging his forthcoming book, Sadeghi wrapped it up.
“This is not a convention,” he said. “It’s a pilgrimage. We are here to hold the light, the consciousness, for a different way of being.”
NEXT up was a panel on gut health. Here we were instructed that kale, superfood of the millennium, can be extremely dangerous, that vaginal birth is the new breast-feeding (a delivery system for essential nutrients that will determine your child’s fate), that taking one Advil or Aleve “is like swallowing a hand grenade,” that cancer does not exist among wild animals (it does, according to the Wildlife Con- servation Society, and at similar rates to humans), and that we Americans are not meant to eat nightshades, such as tomatoes and potatoes, because “everyone immigrated from Europe, Africa or Asia” where there are no nightshades — despite the Irish fleeing the Great Potato Famine, tomatoes composing the bulk of the Mediterranean diet for centuries, or France and Belgium’s ongoing quarrel over which nation, 300 years ago, invented french fries.
Also, we should use frog venom to treat burns, bad luck and cancer.
Next up was “The 10-Minute Facelift with Dr. Julius Few,” a room-clearing demonstration in which Few sliced holes in a volunteer’s face. After explaining that his patient was under a local anesthetic, he punctured a threaded needle through his volunteer’s left cheekbone to her lower jaw, then reversed course while tugging tight.
Those who remained groaned and gasped. The doctor was unfazed.
“I do think Gwyneth and I are alike, in that we think the best things in life are simplest,” he said, dabbing up the wounds. “This procedure starts at $3,500 and lasts two to three years.” Few’s quick addendum: Blindness is a potential side effect.
The event was now four hours in, yet there was no break in sight. Instead, we were subjected to another panel discussion: Paltrow interviewing two of her favorite shrinks. Dr. Phil Stutz and Barry Michels ex-
We were instructed that kale can be extremely dangerous, that one Advil “is like swallowing a hand grenade” and Americans are not meant to eat tomatoes or potatoes. — At Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop summit
plained that we are all mere pawns of something called The Field, which Stutz described as “the invisible force that makes things happen that you can’t do on your own.”
The enemy of The Field, they claim, is Part X: “a devil living inside you, a demon. He wants to f- -k you up any way he can.” But by closing our eyes, visualizing what we want and calling on The Universe™ to deliver it, we can have whatever we want. It’s a cynical mash-up of Freud’s personality theory, the Jungian shadow self, comparative mythology and “The Secret,” capped off by Stutz and Michels telling an audience member upset with her boyfriend to wish their problems away.
Finally, the crowd broke for lunch, with those who paid $1,000 availing themselves of private workouts. The highest tier lunched with Paltrow and select panelists. The proles were relegated to wandering around the warehouse and converted parking lot for two hours, getting solicited by dream interpreters or standing in endless lines for free blowouts or manicures — services promptly halted once the panels resumed, no matter that some had spent well over an hour in line.
“Sorry,” one Goop staffer told a disgruntled guest. “We can offer you a $20 gift certificate.” The attendee walked away.
THE 3 o’clock panel was “The Mother Lode,” described as “an exploration of the mother wound and ways to re-parent ourselves.” Dr. Oscar Serrallach, the lone male on the panel, elicited groans when he compared his work on the mother wound to “a reporter in a war zone, [seeing] all this carnage around me.” Dr. Robin Berman claimed that “the word ‘mother’ is transgender.” Dr. Sherry Sami, wife of Paltrow’s first speaker, hit the crowd’s marrow, listing the great stressors of upper-class motherhood: “Preschool interviews, what camps they should go to — what kind of nanny is going to bring the right consciousness into their life?”
Children are here, Sami continued, to teach their mothers how to be “a great digestive enzyme,” to help their children “metabolize their experiences” while leading the mother toward her “divinity.” Seems a lot for a toddler, but the crowd loved it.
Next was a sex panel featuring therapist and author Esther Perel, sexpert Nicole Daedone and Jenni Konner, showrunner for HBO’s “Girls.” “I don’t know how I got on this panel,” Konner said, and she struggled through a painfully earnest discussion of “the nourishing approach to orgasm” and “the value of [the] body.” A clearly uncomfortable Konner spoke to the industry-heavy audience about femalecentric production crews and the way women work in male-dominated writers rooms. Konner’s cohort Lena Dunham, billed as a star attraction, did not appear, and Paltrow offered no explanation or apology — a rude omission for anyone who had paid so much in hopes of seeing her.
After a short break, Paltrow’s trainer and business partner, Tracy Anderson — a controversial figure whose financial practices and approach to fitness led, in part, to a falling-out with Madonna — took the stage for a brief, awkward Q&A. She spoke against cross-training (regarded by most physiotherapists as extremely beneficial), boasted that she worked with Microsoft to open her viewers’ “neural pathways” so they’d connect with her online presence, then rushed offstage.
As we rounded 5 o’clock, the final panel took the stage: Paltrow and her celebrity friends Cameron Diaz, Nicole Richie and Miranda Kerr. In the middle sat Tory Burch, the lone true businesswoman, and at times she looked ready to gouge her eyes out. Yet this was the only panel that transfixed the entire crowd, and it was clearly what they had come for: the chance to see and hear Paltrow and her peers gush over each other’s fabulousness, marvel at how each of them does it all (with no nods to nannies, personal assistants, household staff, managers and agents) and reinforce the notion that every woman out there, if only they wish hard enough and buy enough GP-approved products, can be a member of her clique, too, an inhabitant of her world — and there’s no denying that Gwyneth Paltrow is on her own planet.
It’s one where those without more pressing concerns can leisurely embark “on a journey,” face “obstacles” that help them “remake paradigms” to create more authentic selves that, in turn, so generously make the world a better, more healing place. Yet it’s one with Paltrow’s trademark snobbery and class consciousness: Although all attendees were promised postsummit drinks — “Let’s face it,” Paltrow’s editorial director, Elise Loehnen, told Vanity Fair in April, “everyone’s going to need a cocktail at the end of the day” — those who paid just $500 were hurried out of the venue as a voice came over the loudspeaker asking everyone else to join Gwyneth and her friends for a cocktail in the garden. In Paltrow’s world, you get what you pay for.