Commoners, listen up!
Starving actress and lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow has something vital to teach mere mortals who bear unsightly belly fat, thunder thighs and messy anger issues: how to undo something as sloppy as marriage.
The Best Actress Oscar winner (for 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love”) and her rock-star hubby, Chris Martin, announced Tuesday, with all the pain of one of Gwyn’s Botox injections, that the couple is not just splitting up. Rather, the pair is engaged in “Conscious Uncoupling.” So reads the loopy, new-agey, psycho-babbly headline on Gwyn’s greatest love, the smug and snotty Web site Goop.com, on which the devoted vegan sells $495 slip-on skate shoes by Diemme made of real pony hair. (I’ve read they’re actually made of cow hair.)
The mini-essay sets a new standard for coldly describing the marital bust-up of a couple that evidently hasn’t coupled in years.
“It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate,” the Goop announcement reads. “We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much, we will remain separate.”
The Goop garbage continues with a mention of the couple’s two children.
“And we hope that as we consciously uncouple and co-parent” — someone call a copy editor immediately! — “we will be able to continue in the same manner.” It’s signed “Love, Gwyneth & Chris.”
The breakup of the actress, 41, and the Coldplay frontman, 37, comes after more than 10 years of wedded misery, grammar challenges, two kids — the unfortunately named Apple, 9, and Moses, 7 — and chronic rumors of alleged infidelity by Gwyneth. She is a vegan health nut who told Harper’s Bazaar last year that she smokes one American Spirit cigarette each Saturday night. But the psycho mommy is so terrified of canned dairy products, she told a British TV host, “I’d rather smoke crack then eat cheese from a tin.” At least crack has no calories.
Neither do face-scorching lasers and Botox shots.
In September, Gwyneth was photographed smooching with ex-boyfriend Donovan Leitch at an LA Dodgers baseball game she attended with her kids, but no husband. (Her rep denied the two were involved.) In October, it was reported that Vanity Fair magazine was set to run a story that Gwyn shacked up with Miami-based billionaire Jeff Soffer, 44, in 2008, now married to Australian-born and formerly British-based model Elle Macpherson — awkward at those London dinner parties. (It was also denied by Gwyneth’s people.) But the piece was killed after Gwyneth e-mailed her Hollywood pals and ordered them not to cooperate with the mag, which led editor Graydon Carter to write in this month’s issue that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “couldn’t have issued a more blanket demand.”
There is a bright side to this epic uncoupling — Gwyneth’s kids might finally get to eat.