When the author Amy Odell approached Gwyneth Paltrow’s publicist about her plans for a biography of the actor, Goop founder and wellness pioneer, she was told that Paltrow would be glad to participate – if she was allowed to “factcheck” the book.
Odell didn’t agree. Her line to Paltrow eventually fell silent, and her book, Gwyneth, has just been published to much buzz, without the star’s participation. Paltrow, a source claimed to Odell, “invented ghosting”.
Now, post-publication, you can picture dozens more being cast out of her golden glow. Odell spoke to more than 220 people for her book, on and off the record; more rebuffed her. “Many were terrified to talk about Gwyneth,” she writes.
The result is nonetheless thoughtful, fair and fastidiously researched – even without Paltrow’s oversight. It is also brimming over with gossip. Here are 10 standout topics.
Gwyneth Paltrow may be the signature nepo baby
Paltrow’s pedigree makes many of the “nepo babies” (lately singled out for having been given a leg-up into Hollywood) look like competition winners. Her mother, Blythe Danner, is a critically acclaimed actor of stage and screen (best known to a younger generation as the mother in Meet the Parents). She met Bruce Paltrow when he was producing one of her plays.
Gwyneth and her younger brother, Jake, grew up in a five-storey brownstone close to Central Park in New York. She attended the Spence school, a private girls’ school on the Upper East Side, along with Mick Jagger’s daughter Jade and the princesses Alexandra and Olga of Greece (“their last name just ‘of Greece’,” adds Odell).
Her parents’ connections came into play before she had even finished school. For her senior project, she covered a Bonnie Raitt song – accompanied by Steely Dan’s singer, Donald Fagen. Soon after, at 19, she landed a speaking part in Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg – her godfather, “Uncle Morty”. (He called her “Gwynnie the Pooh”.)
Many years later, Paltrow would tell Vanity Fair that fame had felt to her “like a predestined thing” – that she had known her “whole life that this was going to happen”.
Her parents tried to give her a normal childhood. Sort of …
Blythe and Bruce weren’t as confident that acting would work out, Odell writes: they wanted their daughter to have “a backup plan”. After Paltrow was rejected from Vassar College, her parents asked their friend, two-time Academy Award-winner Michael Douglas, to put in a word at his alma mater. She was accepted by the University of California, Santa Barbara (Douglas gets it done!), but ended up dropping out. Studying film, she had been dismayed to find Uncle Morty on the syllabus. “I’m sitting here learning about people I know,” another aspiring actor recalls Paltrow complaining.
Bruce cut her off financially, and she was forced to get a waitressing gig (though again, through her parents’ connections). “I remember she was so mad about it,” the actor told Odell. Years later – after she had won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, broken off her engagement to Brad Pitt and gone, according to one account, “totally Hollywood” – Bruce sought again to keep his daughter humble, telling her she’d become “kind of an asshole”. Paltrow was “devastated”, she said, but eventually grateful for the course correction. Fame had gone to her head, she admitted: “There is nothing worse for the growth of a human being than not having obstacles and disappointments.”
It pays to know your beluga from your oscietra
Pitt and Paltrow met in 1993, auditioning for Legends of the Fall. She was passed over for the part but made an impression on Pitt, who went on to suggest she play his character’s wife in David Fincher’s Se7en. Paltrow had also been offered Feeling Minnesota alongside Keanu Reeves. As she dithered, a helpful friend suggested: “Who do you want to date, Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves?” Paltrow said yes to Se7en. Not long into filming, she and Pitt were together – delighting her father, who reportedly crowed to a friend: “Can you believe my daughter? It’s fucking Brad Pitt!”
According to Odell, Paltrow was never so certain, finding Pitt – from a southern, conservative, religious background – a bit beneath her. “When we go to restaurants and order caviar, I have to say to Brad, ‘This is beluga and this is oscietra,’” she told an interviewer.
After two years together, they broke off their engagement. She went on to date Ben Affleck, who she found to be more her intellectual match (not to mention – as she disclosed only in 2023 – a “technically excellent” lover). But Affleck’s addiction issues, penchant for video games and what one of Paltrow’s friends remembers as his “kind of miserable” vibe prevented the relationship from progressing.
Before there was Brad, Ben or Chris, there were cigs
Cigarettes may have been Paltrow’s first love. She started smoking in her first year at Spence, much to Bruce’s displeasure. Seeking to get his teenage daughter to quit, he once again leaned on his connections, calling in a favour with his friend’s son’s new wife – AKA Madonna – asking her to “write a note to Gwyneth to discourage her”. According to Odell, Madonna happily played model, describing her average day: “I wake up, I don’t smoke … And I go home a happy healthy me. … PS: Good girls live longer.”
Gwyneth showed the letter off at school, then displayed it, framed, in her bedroom – and continued to smoke “a pack a day, probably” until she was 25. She eventually quit in September 1997 after spending three days marooned on a deserted island in Belize. Paltrow had requested the experience as a condition of guest-editing an issue of Marie Claire. Magazine budgets were bigger back then.
Paltrow was Weinstein’s ‘golden girl’ – before she helped bring him down
Odell describes Paltrow as being ambivalent about fame – and scornful of “tacky, pointless, big, fluffy, unimportant movies”. She found her professional home in Miramax Films, Harvey Weinstein’s production company, after being cast in the 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Odell describes Weinstein working hard to make Paltrow a star, throwing his formidable weight and influence behind her Oscar bid for Shakespeare in Love. Her 1999 triumph over Cate Blanchett (nominated for Elizabeth) was later attributed to Weinstein’s intense campaign. Even Paltrow had her doubts, betting a pair of CAA agents $10,000 she wouldn’t win. (She made good, going to the bank the morning after the ceremony.)
But being Weinstein’s “golden girl” didn’t come without costs, least of all pressure to do lacklustre parts or press. As Paltrow told the New York Times for their seismic #MeToo report, early in her working relationship with Weinstein, he made a pass at her at a Beverly Hills hotel. (Weinstein disputed her account.) In their book She Said, the journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey describe Paltrow’s pivotal role in their investigation. “When so many other actresses were reluctant to get on the phone and scared to tell the truth … Gwyneth was actually one of the first.”
She was one of the first women we love to hate
As well as having been born rich, beautiful and well connected, Paltrow is described by Odell as possessing some “exceptional, if hard to define” X-factor, registering as far back as her school days. This worked against her as much as it did in her favour. Even before becoming an Oscar winner aged 26, Paltrow feared overexposure in the press. Her tearful acceptance speech, coupled with news that her father bought her the diamond necklace she’d been loaned for the ceremony, turned the public against her.
Building women up before tearing them down is now a well-worn cycle, Odell notes, pointing to Anne Hathaway and Blake Lively (you might also add Jennifer Lawrence and Taylor Swift). Paltrow was one of the first victims, if not the blueprint. In 2013, she was named Star magazine’s most hated celebrity, 19 spots above Chris Brown, who had been arrested for assaulting Rihanna four years earlier. “Gwyneth would never manage to outrun” the contempt, Odell writes – perhaps influencing her subsequent decision to make it work for her with Goop.
It is interesting how different people’s bodies are
Paltrow was ahead of the curve with many modern movements and trends; body positivity was emphatically not one of them. Schoolmates recall her evident “disdain for fat people”. One remembered changing into swimsuits next to the “naturally skinny” Gwyneth, and her comment: “Isn’t it interesting how different people’s bodies are?” In her senior yearbook, alongside Gwyneth’s chosen quote from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, editors specified her nightmare: “Obesity”. Later, when she was famous, she allegedly paid for a school friend to undergo an abdominoplasty (or “tummy tuck”).
Paltrow’s defining interest in healthy eating, alternative medicine and “wellness” began after her father was diagnosed with throat cancer. While caring for Bruce, she began researching preservatives, pesticides and environmental toxins; she started following a macrobiotic diet and doing nearly two hours of yoga before dawn, six days a week. Meanwhile, she was also shooting Shallow Hal, “spending her working hours in a fat suit”, Odell observes. Doing press, Paltrow described the film as a “love letter”, and the experience of making it as edifying. “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.”
Paltrow invented wellness – for Goop and bad
Along with her passion for “alternative” ideas of health, the seeds for Goop had been sown years earlier, on the sets of Jefferson in Paris and The Talented Mr Ripley. In Paris and Ischia, Paltrow tapped local crew for their recommendations for the best hotels, restaurants and shopping on location – insider info around which she would later build a lifestyle brand. In 2007, she shot a public television show about Spanish cuisine – “a novel premise” at the time, Odell notes (and one that riled the late Anthony Bourdain, who said of the series: “Why would you go to Spain with the one bitch who refuses to eat ham?”).
Paltrow was married to Coldplay’s Chris Martin by then, with two young children, and she was beginning to tire of acting. After the success of Iron Man in 2008, she turned to her side project: an online newsletter. Goop sought to “nourish the inner aspect”, but timing was not on its side. The website launched the week after the stock market crash; Jezebel declared Paltrow “about as publicly savvy as Marie Antoinette”. Yet she was proved right in her instinct to let them eat banana-nut muffins (her inaugural recipe). In 2008, the wellness industry “was barely even measured”, Odell writes; today it is valued in the trillions.
There’s no controversy you can’t style out. Even an ‘eccentric stone sex egg’
Paltrow was probably one of the first celebrities to conceive of herself as a brand, paving the way for today’s saturation of product lines and endorsement deals – and shaping consumer culture. Among the trends and treatments she helped to popularise were Spanx, cupping, gluten-free diets and, more recently, mouth-taping.
Even the bonkers ones took off with Goop’s endorsement. After a “vaginal steaming” treatment featured in its 2015 Santa Monica city guide, bookings doubled. Odell describes Paltrow being unfazed by controversy, and even relishing it as good for business. In 2017, Goop went viral for featuring an egg-shaped stone, designed to be inserted vaginally and worn (?) overnight (!) so as to “balance the cycle” and “invigorate our life force”.
In a staff meeting, Paltrow was reportedly staunch in the face of ridicule: “Goop defined the concept of modern wellness … Let’s own it.” Once again, she was right. The company had ordered 600 “Yoni” eggs; after the backlash, the waiting list to buy them, for about $60 each, was 2,000 names long. When Goop was sued the next year by regulators for making allegedly unlawful health claims, Paltrow chose to pay $145,000 to settle, without admitting wrongdoing; the claims about the eggs disappeared from Goop’s website, but they were still on sale earlier this year.
Dubious claims pay – and Paltrow always wins
Odell notes the irony: for all Paltrow’s enthusiasm to factcheck her biography, she was not so exacting or hands-on with the articles published on Goop. Among the famously dubious claims platformed by the site were the healing powers of celery juice and raw (unpasteurised) goat milk, a possible link between bras and breast cancer, and every word uttered by Anthony William, the so-called “medical medium”. (“We used him when we needed page views,” one former Goop employee admitted to Odell.)
Odell makes a valiant effort to factcheck every claim she references in her book, quoting medical experts and Paltrow’s many critics to counterbalance all the Goop. But, at a certain point in the narrative, you sense it become futile: wellness is no longer a celebrity foible, a trapping of “Gwyneth’s extravagant and eccentric life”, but the water we are all drowning in. On social media, influencers – many in Paltrow’s image – spread advice with little oversight or regulation, while trends have had to become more extreme to cut through the noise. After 20 years of Goop, the world has become harder to shock, more receptive to “alternative” ideas of health and medicine, and even sceptical of science. Today the wellness industry is as big as the US pharmaceutical and agricultural industries combined.
By stoking fear about “toxins”, encouraging people to “do their own research” and seeding distrust in the medical establishment, Paltrow – Odell suggests – paved the way for the conspiratorial, anti-expert, post-truth thinking now embedded in Donald Trump’s White House. Both Paltrow and Robert F Kennedy Jr – Trump’s vaccine sceptic secretary for health and human services – are avowed fans of raw milk; the real harbinger of end-times will be if she starts eating red meat.
Meanwhile, Paltrow continues to sail through with the seemingly untouchable self-belief that has made her such a compelling celebrity to adore, abhor and emulate. “She is fucking borderline brilliant,” Odell quotes a former Goop executive as saying. “GP knows exactly what she’s doing.”
