Gwyneth Paltrow Came of Age With an Assist From Rob Lowe’s Wife

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By Kenzie Bryant

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Ah, to be 15. Driving around with a friend who just got her license just because you finally can and also it’s night and you don’t want to go home yet. Cory’s cousin moved back home after college and has an apartment by the mall that no one goes to anymore, so you go there and he has something bright and disgusting to drink. You’re always wondering what’s next because next is all there is, really.

It’s regular coming-of-age stuff, you know. Take Gwyneth Paltrow, regular girl who once experienced a coming-of-age too. Hers was a little different, of course, but also, in the way it always is with those stars, the same too. She was chatting with Rob Lowe, a man with a chin, on his podcast this week. They discussed, among other things, the role of Lowe’s wife, Sheryl Berkoff, in Paltrow’s teen years. “I met Sheryl when I was 15 or 16,” she said. “She was doing my mom’s makeup on this TV movie, and I went down to visit. It was in Florida. I met Sheryl and I was, like, immediately obsessed with her.”

Ah, meeting the older girl in Florida. Everything is sunny and new, and Disney, that monument to your youngest youth, isn’t far away. “First of all she was dating Keanu Reeves, who was my celebrity crush. And she was so cool,” Paltrow said. So, that’s a little different. Dating Keanu, eh? A little different from normal coming-of-age stuff, but understandably something to get a bit saucer-eyed about. “And she knew that I was sneaking cigarettes, and she would come smoke with me behind the trailer, and she taught me how to give a blow job and, you know, all the classic Sheryl stuff.”

All the classic Sheryl stuff. All the classic older, cooler-girl stuff. Yes, the one with the boyfriend who had the hair and played Heaver in Youngblood. The one who had, you know, knowledge to share and cigarettes to smoke. The one who spoke to you like you were a whole person just as you are. “She was so awesome to me. And I was a high school kid. Like, the fact that she’s loved me that much before I was anyone or anything, you know?” she said. And we do know! Because despite the fact that Berkoff was a makeup artist on Paltrow’s mother’s set, it’s a familiar tale as old as John Hughes at least.

Eventually that 15- or 16-year-old would found a medical-adjacent, sometimes sexual recommendation site built around her célébrité. But back then she was just a girl, standing in front of Rob Lowe’s future wife, talking about oral sex.

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