There was a time when being among that 1% — a white, thin, blonde, beautiful, wealthy and famous movie star — was enough.
No more.
Today, the most coveted job description in America is “lifestyle guru,” and a gaggle of aging actresses, careers waning, are jockeying for your money and your envy.
Here’s Kate Hudson, a glittery trail of rom-com bombs in her wake, suddenly reinventing herself with her dubious athleisure line, Fabletics, and a new book called “Pretty Happy: Healthy Ways to Love Your Body.”
It’s been out for one month, and despite the book’s utter vapidity — “connect with your best self” as you begin “any journey” and “persevere despite obstacles” so you can “embrace all the ups and downs” — it’s a bestseller.
Cameron Diaz, whose last film was 2014’s abysmal “Annie” remake, has also transformed herself into a health and wellness expert. “The Body Book,” which Diaz released in 2013, was a bestseller, and her next, “The Longevity Book,” will be published on April 5.
“Getting to know yourself on the smallest cellular level is so empowering,” she recently said. “I want women to understand their own journey and be prepared for it.”
Diaz is a high-school dropout who believes women who don’t stress about menopause will suffer less and that deodorant can cause cancer.
“I haven’t used it for almost 20 years,” Diaz said in 2014. “Let it go and just trim your armpit hair so it doesn’t hold on to the scent.”
‘In our Instagram era, there is no more valuable currency than good taste, and living the carefully curated life, 24/7, is the ultimate luxury.’
And then there is the queen, Gwyneth Paltrow, unrivaled both in niche-carving and idiotic pronouncements.
Since founding her lifestyle blog Goop in 2008, Paltrow has warned that bras cause breast cancer, that shampoo can cause cancer in babies, that sunscreen can do more harm than good, that the body needs regular detox cleanses, and that vaginal steams are necessary to regulate female hormones.
All of these assertions are untrue — and in fact, cleanses and vaginal steams can actually be harmful.
The body has “its own amazing detoxification systems: the liver and the kidneys,” Ranit Mishori, a doctor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, told NPR. “Unless there’s a blockage in one of these organs that do it day and night, there’s absolutely no need to help the body get rid of toxins.”
Yet Paltrow thrives, with a new line of Goop beauty products, two bestselling cookbooks and a third, “It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook,” out April 12.
But this, Paltrow writes, is not just a cookbook. It’s “a road map: a self-help book for the chronically busy cook.” She claims the idea was sparked by all her stressed-out, overworked mom friends — like Jessica Seinfeld, Stella McCartney and Beyoncé — who never have enough time in the day to whip up a healthy meal for their families.
“I had been polling my friends,” she writes. “They wanted to find themselves in the kitchen at the end of their overextended day and be able to prepare something delicious and quick.”
Stars: They’re just like us.
“My primary goal for going into this business was to raise money,” Fonda wrote in her 2005 memoir, “My Life So Far.” By the mid-1980s, she had earned $17 million, and was having a completely new experience of fame, this time as a guru.
“You become part of people’s lives in a personal way, different from movie stars on the big screen,” Fonda wrote, “and this was affecting how people reacted to me. They felt they knew me.”
Today, the Internet and social media have collapsed that membrane between celebrity and civilian. You can tweet to your favorite celebrity and they might just tweet back. Stars post photos of their homes, children, vacations, dinner plates, all without the protective shield of a publicist or editor. This creates a false sense of intimacy, the idea that we’re all having an ongoing dialogue, with celebrities so generously sharing how you, too, might live as they do.
Paltrow said she started Goop for that very reason. Her readers, she said, want to know “Where is that great bar with organic wine? Where do I get a bikini wax in Paris? People know I know that.”
In our Instagram era, there is no more valuable currency than good taste, and living the carefully curated life, 24/7, is the ultimate luxury. So rather than give away all their health and beauty secrets to magazines, for free, celebrities have created entirely new revenue streams that loop back directly into their narcissism.
“I’m often asked how I stay in shape,” Hudson writes. “How I seem to effortlessly lose 10 pounds in preparation for a new film role. How I look and seem so healthy.”
And it’s not just Paltrow, Diaz and Hudson: Reese Witherspoon has Draper James, her clothing and home décor line. Lauren Conrad, late of MTV’s “The Hills,” has a lifestyle blog and two bestselling books; her latest, “Lauren Conrad Celebrate,” is out March 29. Lena Dunham has her own newsletter, Lenny, a sort of proto-feminist Goop. Blake Lively tried, and failed, with her year-long experiment Preserve.
Lively admitted that thinking “ ‘I’m a celebrity! People will care what I have to say!’ became the crutch” that doomed her brand. “It’s not making a difference in people’s lives,” she told Vogue last year, “whether superficially or in a meaningful way.”
The ne plus ultra has been Jessica Alba, whose Honest Company currently has a $1.7 billion valuation. She claims to sell eco-conscious, toxin-free baby and bath products.
Alba took a hit Friday when the Wall Street Journal revealed that a chemical the company promised never to use, sodium laurel sulfate — derided by Alba as a “toxin” — is in the company’s detergent.
The Honest Company denied the finding, but Alba has built her brand on scientifically specious claims.
“We identified this huge problem — the rise of toxic chemicals in our homes — with the rise of all these serious problems: ADHD, autism, obesity, childhood cancers,” she said at a 2014 AdWeek conference. “So, what’s the solution? What brand can you trust?”
Alba, too, has a book. “The Honest Life: Living Naturally and True to You,” was published in 2013. “I’m a mom on the go,” she said while promoting the book. “I have to do a million things. I’m not going to sit there and read every single ingredient on every single package I buy, and I don’t think other parents are either.”
It’s unclear when we decided that other people needed to tell us what to do and how to live — it goes against the very DNA of our nation. Perhaps we were never the same after Oprah, who introduced the phrase “Living Your Best Life” and who turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.
These overly-privileged celebrities who bray about what’s best for us are Oprah’s direct descendants, and their success makes a perverse kind of sense. In a terrifying, stagnant economy, Paltrow and her cohort are selling stuff that’s ostensibly free: health, wellness, inner peace, means of self-care. Left unmentioned are all the personal trainers, nutritionists, chefs, hair colorists, make-up artists, dermatologists and plastic surgeons that help build the perfect celebrity guru.
But that’s OK, because their message is to look within.
“We yearn for that lost aspect of life,” Paltrow writes, “before media in all its forms made you so aware of what everyone else was doing that the magic of solitude gave rise to fear of missing out.”
Something to ponder while perusing the book’s endless pictures of Gwyneth, barefoot and swaddled in cashmere, or biking though Paris, or casually dropping gold jewelry next to a plate of spring veggie avocado toast — which requires fresh pea shoots.
“If,” Paltrow writes, “you can find them.”