Róisín Ingle meets the effervescent Goldie Hawn, whose memoir is full of the corny but endearing wisdom you might expect from the original 1960s flower child
The little girl in Goldie Hawn is never far from the surface. At the moment she is stretched out on the sofa in her suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Dublin twirling her luxurious locks in her fingers, playing distractedly with her impossibly floaty white skirt and wiggling the toes at the end of her dancer's legs which, due to all the girly skirt fluffing, are on almost constant show. There is music blaring from the RDS showgrounds below and Hawn jumps up like a girl of 16 rather than a grandmother rapidly approaching 60 to close the window, remarking that because she has just got off a flight, her ears are blocked. "You'll have to excuse me," she growls sweetly, adopting a vague look and shaking her head from side to side. "It's like bleeugh in my head, I'm halfway between ground zero and 60 feet in the air. I still haven't landed yet."
It's this kind of unselfconscious, slightly dippy display that has, over the past four decades, won Hawn so many adoring fans across the world and across the generations. Whether she was earning a best supporting actress Oscar for her first major film role, Cactus Flower, becoming an instant icon as the pixie-haired clutz in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, making soldiering sexy in Private Benjamin or living it up in the First Wives' Club, she has consistently turned in memorably comic and often affecting performances. Overboard, for example, in which she starred with her long-term partner Kurt Russell, is an often overlooked jewel in the romantic comedy crown, which still bears repeat viewing almost 20 years after it was made.
For all that, when you tell people you are going to interview Goldie Hawn - who also enjoyed several directorial and production credits when there were few women in Hollywood taking on those roles - there are two responses. "Ask her how she has managed to hold on to that gorgeous Kurt Russell all this time," says one friend. "Ask her has she had any 'work' done, and if she hasn't yet, ask her if she ever would." In fairness, no one seems to have a bad word to say about Goldie but it's her relationship and her views on plastic surgery that are top of list of things they want to probe.
Promotion of her new book, The Lotus Grows in the Mud, is the reason she is in Ireland, ears popping while she sucks on a sweet. It is not autobiography, she says, and she is right, it isn't - at least not in the style of your usual unexpurgated Hollywood tell-all. The chapters have titles such as Compassion, Fear, Life's purpose, Grief, Death and Fate. At the beginning of each chapter there are sayings, printed in pale pink ink, similar to those pearls of wisdom you might find on greeting cards, or those ubiquitous desk calendars. "Life is a dance with the cosmos", "The smile you give is the smile you get back" and "Our lives are a series of concentric circles".
Hawn nods vigorously, her trademark sensuous smudge of a mouth curving into a smile, when I put to her the fact that the book could sit just as easily on the self-help shelves. Was she concerned about the cynicism that might greet this unapologetically New Agey approach to memoir?
"It is a book of philosophy more than anything, so yes, absolutely, there was no doubt but that I took a great chance. I mean, what would Goldie Hawn know about life, right? I am completely aware of people's cynicism but it has never stopped me from being who I am or giving what I have to give or in any way opening my heart up to experiences and to people," she says. "I've done a lot of soul searching and I think it was valuable. This book is to be taken by those who are interested in reading stories about these things. Those who are more cynical and really don't believe that anybody can offer them stories to illuminate their life won't take to this book. It's as simple as that."
The notion of Goldie Hawn the philosopher won't sit easily with everyone but she says she wouldn't have been happy telling her life story in the traditional way. "I wanted to do something that was bigger than me, bigger than just my life. To me those autobiographies can be self-serving in many ways and are often not much of a gift to anyone except the person who wrote it. I figured if I could connect these small stories of my life in an odd mosaic form so I would be able to talk about the issues that we all as humans deal with, well, then there would be a reason to write the book."
She uses the book, which she wrote with novelist Wendy Holden, to explore her relationship with her parents - her father was a dreamy musician who inspired her to "take left-hand turns" and her mother instilled "strong ethics" and "maternal guidance". She had a secure and happy childhood growing up in Takoma Park outside Washington DC, where she felt geeky and ugly but loved.
This period was marred, but only briefly, by a sexual assault in her home one Christmas Eve by a friend of the family. "I told that story because I wanted to show how wonderfully my mother dealt with that. She told me the boy was sick and that I was okay and I managed to develop compassion for him. She made me feel like everything was going to be alright. When bad things happen to children, I don't think it's good to keep reinforcing how terrible it is and making them feel like victims. I learnt so much from the way my mother handled that."
In the book she explores the low times before and after she became famous: when she danced on tables as a go-go girl in New York, the panic attacks she suffered when she was plucked from the chorus line and catapulted to stardom in her early twenties, her two divorces and the trauma of almost losing her first child, Oliver. As mother to two children with ex-husband Bill Hudson, Oliver and actress Kate Hudson, and two with Russell, stepson Boston and her youngest son, Wyatt, motherhood and the inevitable relinquishing of that role figures hugely in the book. But she is at her most intriguing on the subject of relationships. In a chapter called Keeping the Flame, she hints at how she does exactly that.
"Women have the power to diminish," she writes. "I have watched it happen in my own home. It is far better to respect a man who has his own life, his own excitement, his own passion. The next time you ask, 'Why didn't you call?', 'Why were you late for dinner?' or continue to jab at what you view as his weaknesses, ask yourself: 'Is this what you want to end up with? Is this your intention, to tame the beast?'"
This passage seems to suggest that Russell goes untamed by Hawn, and that's what keeps them together, but when I suggest she sounds a bit like a Surrendered Wife - another self-help guide for married women - she looks at me blankly. I'm not sure if she genuinely doesn't understand what I mean or if she is choosing to look as though she doesn't understand. She happily elaborates on her theory, however. "What is important is understanding the nature of the beast. We are different to men. They don't remember things, they are more linear, they are not always as compassionate as you'd like them to be, they look at other women, they have this need to be constantly adored," she says. "We women are caretakers, we do the food, we look after children, we do all these things and we often these days have high-powered jobs. And it's these differences that men and women often get at loggerheads about instead of just accepting that's who we are and getting at peace with that." Sometimes Goldie Hawn sounds like she has swallowed Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus whole.
She describes her partner - contrary to popular belief, they aren't married and have no plans to get hitched - as "a typical alpha male". She says they are very different people, explaining how she has studied neuroscience and various religions and has a particular fondness for Eastern mysticism. The title of the book comes from a discussion she had with a Tibetan monk who told her the lotus flower unfolds petal by petal in a muddy pool because it needs the dirt to grow. It's a metaphor for how the obstacles in life are essential for growth. Hawn loves that imagery, whereas Russell gets his kicks in other ways.
"I like talking about equanimity and what goes on in the mind. He seems to wake up happy every day and isn't as frenetic as me, always needing to be doing something. He likes to unwind by getting into his aeroplane and flying. But he is very supportive and interested in what I do." This includes the Bright Smile Foundation, an international organisation founded by Hawn which helps school children deal with stress, trauma and conflict.
She has been going to India on and off since the 1980s, has met the Dalai Lama countless times and has a meditation room in her Manhattan apartment where, even if she doesn't always meditate, she visits daily in order "to reflect".
"I cry a lot in my meditations. We don't realise how much tension we hold in the heart and when I meditate I relax that part of me and I breathe and these things come out, it's a release. I asked the Dalai Lama why I cry so much in my meditation and he said 'I cry too sometimes' and I thought, well, Goldie you must be on the right track." She continues to produce and direct and act. Her latest project is one she wrote herself about a woman her age who goes to India to spread the ashes of her dead husband. "When she is in India she loses the ashes and finds something else. I am going to play the woman and Kurt is also going to be in what will probably be our last movie together," she says.
It's hard not to like Goldie Hawn. She laughs easily, calls you "honeybunch" and "sweetheart" as though she means it and gets up in the middle of the interview to bend over double and do a few yoga stretches, chatting all the while. Her face is covered with fine lines and her skin is papery but her lovely eyes - the eyes she felt were too big for her face back when she was a self-conscious ballerina, - are a quite extraordinary bright blue.
And by the way, Hawn says she hasn't had any "work" done. Still, after a long rant about now "terrible" The Swan programme is and how plastic surgery must not be confused with internal beauty, this eternal girl is honest enough to confess she wouldn't rule it out. "As long as you don't think it's going to change who you are inside then I think it's okay," she says.
She does rule out marriage, however, and sounds somewhat sick and tired, after 14 years with Russell, of being asked the question. "People seem to think it is the key to a relationship but the real key is the intention, every day, to enjoy each other and to make the effort to do that. To have the intention to be happy. To let the other person be who they are and not try to change them into something else."
You leave her hotel room thinking Kurt Russell may be gorgeous but he is also a very lucky man.
A Lotus Grows in the Mud, by Goldie Hawn with Wendy Holden, is published by Transworld Publishers, £18.99