Bantam £18.99 pp447

Look, I don’t mind a bit of yoga myself, which may be why I misread the title of Goldie Hawn’s autobiography. Why, I wondered, would anyone want to perform a lotus position in the mud — and then realised, with a sinking heart, that the real title is a signal that we are in the wonderful world of metaphor. A Lotus Grows in the Mud is packed with them, for when Hawn is not following the yellow brick road she is discovering that she would rather be at the bottom of the mountain looking up than at the top looking down.

Boy, as Goldie herself might say, does this become exhausting. The book is co-written (with the journalist Wendy Holden) in a breathless first person that includes apparently verbatim conversations from 30 or 40 years ago. It is a typographical nightmare, in which the text is interspersed with “postcards”, printed on blue paper and decorated with pink circles like a schoolgirl’s diary. From these we glean such pearls of wisdom as “giving back is a path to joy”, always assuming we have not brained one of our loved ones with the book in a state of uncontrollable exasperation.

It is hard to believe that Hawn, an Oscar-winner who later became famous for mildly feminist movies such as The First Wives’ Club, launched her career on the satirical American TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. I know Hollywood breeds self-obsession; I know that any number of actors have turned to Buddhism or the Kabbala (yes, Hawn has been there). But seldom have I encountered anyone who, while giving the impression of being quite a nice woman, seems to have embraced just about every wacky theory since the 1960s. Let me offer you a selection, my own postcards from the life of Goldie Hawn, if you like.

Naturally she has a guru. Not just any old guru: this one is her stepson, Boston, who was “created from the union” of the first marriage of her fourth companion, the actor Kurt Russell (pay attention at the back). This must be handy for consultations but Hawn’s relentless search for inner truth does not stop there. On a trip to Israel, she visits a spiritual guide who asks her to visualise a fire burning near an ancient cave, write all her hopes and fears on a piece of paper and throw it into the flames.

In a motel in California, she undergoes a rebirthing session in which she experiences the struggle of childbirth and the joy of merging with the earth, air and life. On a trip to India, she is reunited with a blind elephant she encountered on an earlier visit and is thrilled to find it has given birth, provoking reflections on the circularity of life: “My elephant will have another elephant, and the elephant will have another, and so the cycle will continue.”

When her mother is seriously ill, Hawn asks a renowned Chinese healer, Master Lu, to visit her. The master waves his arms in the air, as though conducting an invisible orchestra — actually redirecting energy fields or something of the sort — until Mrs Hawn is able to stand for the first time in months. Goldie is thrilled but when the master leaves, all signs of improvement disappear and she demands to know what happened to his energy. “He took it with him,” her mother responds in a rare moment of humour.

Crammed between these credulous anecdotes, some of which go on for pages, are some genuinely interesting stories. Hawn trained as a dancer and there are some startlingly frank accounts of her early career as (in the dated vocabulary of the 1960s) a go-go dancer. One particularly surreal event involves a potential employer with an artificial leg whipping out his flaccid penis as she auditions in his apartment, while another finds her stranded in a truckers’ café in New Jersey where the only friendly-looking member of the audience masturbates as she gyrates.

Yes, Hawn has had her share of hard times — God, I hope this prose style isn’t catching — but mostly she has worked with wonderful people and even the ones she falls out with, such as the director Jonathan Demme, become reconciled with her later on. Demme directed Swing Shift, a movie about American women who gave up their jobs and returned to suburbia after the second world war, which did not live up to Hawn’s expectations. “What happened to the honour of the women in this movie?” she demanded when she saw the first cut, leading to a row and expensive reshooting.

The process is so painful that Hawn has to drive into the desert and attend a ritual corn dance at a Hopi Indian village to get some perspective — although it does not help her reputation, undeserved in her view, for being difficult. She may well be right in suggesting that this is part of a larger Hollywood problem, in which assertive women are frowned upon, but she is so determined to be nice that she veers away from rigorous analysis.

The only analysis Hawn favours is the predictable sort — psychoanalysis, or what she characterises as enrolling in “the University of Goldie Hawn, the best college I ever attended”. It took nine years in all, which is a lot longer though not much more arduous, I suspect, than the experience of reading this magnificently awful book.

LOST LOVE

Married three times between 1969 and 1980, Goldie Hawn has lived with Kurt Russell since 1983. Her first marriage, to Gus Trikonis, lasted just five years, and foundered on the fame she found almost as soon as she was wed: “That is what destroyed my marriage to Gus,” she explains, “and that alone.”

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.19 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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