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In those two years, however, Paltrow's life changed completely. Her father Bruce, whom she idolized, died unexpectedly. Shortly afterward, she fell for a cute guy. Suddenly there were all sorts of eerie resonances with her character in Proof. And just as abruptly, Paltrow started seeing things differently. "It was kind of like my life going upside down and the dust settling and things being really clear to me," she says. "I do not want to waste time. I want to do things that are really inspiring and that I feel are going to give something to the world. But they don't have to be sad. They can be something silly and highly comedic."
"Silly and comedic" is a pretty good description of one of the new things Paltrow is trying: directing a short film. She wrote the film for a Glamour magazine project called Reel Moments with her childhood friend Mary Wigmore (with whom she used to throw toys off the balcony of her home into the neighbor's chimney). Dealbreaker details the reasons a young woman breaks up with various boyfriends. The climactic scene involves a man, a bathroom visit and unused toilet paper. Shakespeare in Love it ain't. "Basically it's filthy," says the auteur. "Poop filthy." But Paltrow says the film reflects her real character more than the soigné woman she sees in magazine profiles of herself.
That is, she likes potty humor, not that she casts off guys like toilet paper. In fact, ever since she and Brad Pitt broke off their engagement in 1997, Paltrow has trod gingerly on the subject of her men. "I learned my lesson at 24," she says. Thus, although she dated tabloid catnip like Ben Affleck, there was no "Beneth." There wasn't even a "Pittrow." "It would be a lot easier on Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston now," she says, "had they not talked to the press about each other and everything to begin with."
But for a power couple like Paltrow and Martin, keeping the press at bay isn't easy. As Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein puts it, nicely capturing the paradox, "They are as ordinary as you can be and be in one of the best rock bands in the world and be one of the best actresses in the world." Mr. and Mrs. Martin do not appear together at big public events. They do not like to be photographed together. "When I presented at the Oscars last year," she says, "everyone would say to me 'Where's your husband? Is there trouble in the marriage?' And I was like, Why on earth would I bring my husband?" After she got pregnant, the couple reportedly had a friend take paparazzi-style shots of them to give to magazines so that photographers wouldn't stalk them. "Our marriage is between us. If we decide to continue being together or not, it's our business," she says.
The desire for privacy, the peripatetic life of a rock-star wife, her newfound contentment and, most of all, motherhood are all conspiring to keep Paltrow out of movies, or at least the sort of glossy romances she became famous for. She has a couple of tiny roles coming up and another film, Running with Scissors, in the can, and that's it, at least for now. "I could not have fathomed working Apple's first year. I look at certain women, and I think, How do they just go and do films back to back to back?"