Vagina eggs, naked cooking, KissCam gags: what's next for Gwyneth Paltrow?
Media coverage of this event has put it up there with the moon landings on the unforgettable 'Did you see?' chart. It's a cultural happening so we should have predicted that sooner or later Paltrow — the ultimate cultural influencer, not to mention the ex-wife of Coldplay's frontman, Chris Martin — would pop up to put her spin on things.
In the spoof ad Paltrow appears alongside the caption 'Temporary Spokesperson' supposedly to answer some of the 'many questions Astronomer has been getting in recent days' (starting with 'What the actual f ***?'). It's not really funny (don't bother googling), but it demonstrates the power of Gwyneth's reach.
Like it or not, we live in a world where roughly once a month Paltrow makes some intervention, posts a picture or gives an interview that confirms her position as Woman With Her Finger on the Zeitgeist. In April she was on the cover of Vanity Fair talking about her wellness brand Goop and supposed rivalry with the new lifestyle peddler Meghan Markle, taking care to wish her well in the spirit of David Attenborough endorsing the efforts of a fourth form biology class.
In June she posted on Instagram a video of herself standing in front of a cooker naked but for a pair of boxer shorts, rustling up her trademark 'boyfriend breakfast' (and we've only just stopped talking about whether shorts PJs work on fiftysomethings). This week brings an unusually big Paltrow dump as Amy Odell's (unauthorised) biography hits the shelves on Tuesday and while we've definitely heard a lot of it before, everyone's craning for titbits.
I don't like it, as it happens, and I try not to look. I am very much in the category of low maintenance women who think: Gwyneth Paltrow, who cares? Quite good in Emma, lost it around the time of the vagina egg, got the unshakeable American confidence that they love on chat shows (does anyone remember the time she called her grandmother 'a real c***' in a Chelsea Handler interview?) but that makes our toes curl. She's hard to love, let's face it, but she's got the can't look away factor. We want to know more and added to that we're keen to pick up some conclusive dirt to justify our suspicions that behind the wholesome image Gwynnie might be a mean girl.
• How Gwyneth Paltrow rescued Astronomer over Coldplay scandal
Ideally, I'd like to hear that she had a hair-pulling fight with Jennifer Aniston; wears gloves and a surgical balaclava in bed; fired four nannies in the space of four months — that sort of thing. This is a fat biography, which has been serialised in the Mail, so surely the bumper muck rake we've been hoping for.
Top of the shock revelations is that Paltrow's nickname for her ex-friend Winona Ryder was 'Vagina Ryder'. She smoked! Until Madonna told her not to. When she was going out with Brad Pitt in the mid-Nineties she was irked by his lack of sophistication and complained that when ordering caviar she had to explain 'This is beluga, this is oscietra' (hate that). She told Aerin Lauder years after their break up that 'he's dumber than a sack of s***' and there was a rumour that people thought she may have cheated on him with John Hannah while making Sliding Doors.
Hmm. Bit harsh, but so far not a lot to go on if you're trying to work up some good old-fashioned celebrity loathing. She was just 22 when she was dating Pitt, and I've interviewed him and can confirm that while he's very charming and easy on the eye you wouldn't want him doing the map reading.
There is some evidence of a lack of empathy and GSOH, however. Her father once told her she was turning into a bit of an arsehole, and there was that stuff about how she would rather die than let her kids eat cup-a-soup (what next? Angel Delight? Dairylea?).
• What the Coldplay kiss cam couple tells us about the rich
Likewise, you cannot warm to a boss who finds pee on the loo seat in the ladies at work and feels moved to write 'someone tinkled' in the company Slack channel, as Gwynnie did. Goop's chief content officer, now retired, has talked about developing a 'critical and punishing attitude' to her body while working for Paltrow's company and you don't have to be a vaginal egg refusenik to know that's legally checked speak for Paltrow can be a difficult perfectionist. What else would you expect from the 52-year-old pioneer of Big Wellness?
But she can be funny. We're reminded in the book of the Utah ski accident trial in 2023 — which Paltrow attended wearing a stealth-wealth wardrobe that sold out every day, looking bored and haughty — that she managed to charm the jury. No one at home didn't smile when she explained, deadpan, that she had suffered because, 'Well, I lost half a day of skiing.' Odder still, by the end of the trial the details of her family holiday (the resort bill came to $9,000) seemed normal for not normals and everyone was willing her to win so she could get back to being unashamedly rich, successful, hoity toity and in control.
The jury's still out as to whether we like or don't like her. We've sort of agreed to admire her.
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Times
3 hours ago
- Times
Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop a ‘noxious and chaotic' workplace
Robert F Kennedy Jr might be the one trying officially to 'Make America Healthy Again', but Gwyneth Paltrow is the original 'Maha Mommy'. Back in 2017, the Oscar-winning actress took a break from Hollywood to launch her wellness brand Goop, which has offered women spiritual salvation via vagina candles, coffee enemas and $15,000 sex toys. But behind the scenes, Paltrow ran her brand like a high-class Hunger Games, according to a book published on Tuesday. Gwyneth, by Amy Odell, who wrote the bestselling 2022 biography of Anna Wintour, portrays the 52-year-old actress as a semi-sociopathic, privileged ice queen who courts people she needs with her charm, only to use and manipulate them for her advantage — and spit them out mercilessly when she's done. Take Andres Sosa, whom Paltrow hired in 2018 as her chief marketing officer from the Outnet, Net-a-Porter's online retailer. Sosa lasted seven months at Goop after Paltrow 'quickly became dissatisfied with his performance … and before long she was rolling her eyes and making her classic vomit face behind his back', Odell writes. Like many gifted founders, Paltrow is portrayed as clueless when it comes to managing the people who helped turn her business into a $250 million company. Within the past two years, Odell notes, Goop lost at least 140 employees, including its chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief revenue officer, general counsel and chief content officer — Elise Loehnen, who, after surviving seven years at the wellness company, released a book, On Our Best Behaviour: The Price Women Pay to Be Good, that renounced the cleansing culture she helped Paltrow create with her book. Goop's office culture was 'noxious and chaotic', Odell writes. 'Executives struggled to navigate Gwyneth's impatience and perfectionism.' Professional women, Odell writes, would act like 'they were on The Real Housewives. They seemed threatened by each other, based on whom Gwyneth was favouring in any given moment. Paltrow could be warm and caring, but also cold.' Describing Paltrow as having a 'capricious and indirect' leadership style, Odell writes that 'currying favour was the only reliable way to secure one's position' at Goop. Paltrow, who was born in Los Angeles to a director father and actress mother, was notoriously cheap with employees at Goop, Odell writes. Rather than hire freelancers, food editors were expected not only to make Paltrow her lunch, but deliver food to Brad Falchuk, who is now her husband but at the time lived miles away, she writes. The 'erratic' Paltrow would become 'childishly unhappy' when anything went wrong and 'failed to empower experienced people to do what she'd hired them to do', according to the book. This was also true of people who took care of Paltrow personally, the book claims. In the foreword for her 2011 cookbook, My Father's Daughter, Paltrow praised her assistant Julia Turshen as the woman whose 'tireless, artful assistance' she 'literally could not have created this book without'. But one year later, Paltrow unceremoniously dumped Turshen after The New York Times revealed that she ghost-wrote the cookbook, Odell writes. Long before she launched Goop, Paltrow proved she could be snobbish and childish to the people closest to her, Odell claims. Paltrow's former fiancé Brad Pitt, whom she met during the filming of the 1995 movie Seven, is offered as one example. After the couple broke up in 1997, Paltrow told an interviewer that 'Brad and I had very different upbringings. So when we go to restaurants and order caviar, I have to say to Brad, 'This is beluga and this is ossetra.'' Later, Paltrow allegedly told the cosmetics scion Aerin Lauder that Pitt was 'dumber than a sack of shit'. Paltrow also gossiped about the actor Ben Affleck, whom she dated on and off from 1997 to 2000, Odell writes. Though Affleck apparently was a terrible boyfriend who struggled with addictions to alcohol and gambling, Paltrow was attracted to his intellect, Odell writes. 'Affleck at times seemed more interested in playing video games with the guys at his house than being with Gwyneth,' she writes. And yet, 'she spoke openly about how much she enjoyed their sex life'. Ben Affleck and Paltrow at the 1999 Golden Globes RON WOLFSON/GETTY IMAGES Even Paltrow's onetime best friend, Madonna, comes in for a flogging. The pair, who had been besties for ten years, fell out in 2010 after 'Madonna showed up to an island where Gwyneth and Chris Martin [the Coldplay singer who was Paltrow's husband at the time] were vacationing,' Odell writes. 'Madonna seemed to know that Gwyneth would be there, which Gwyneth seemed to find strange … Madonna then insisted Gwyneth and Martin join her for a big group dinner at a long table where Madonna went off on her daughter Lourdes. Gwyneth and Martin were disgusted by the behaviour. 'I can't be around this woman any more,' Martin told Gwyneth. 'She's awful.' Gwyneth agreed that Madonna was toxic and ended the friendship.' But although Paltrow is portrayed as vain, selfish and childish, it's true that she was born with her finger on the zeitgeist. Even today, she can change the national conversation and bask in its spotlight with a single appearance or social media post. A commercial she recorded for the tech company Astronomer last week went viral, capitalising on the attention from a cheating scandal involving the company's chief executive and chief people officer at a Coldplay concert. It was only the latest example of her power. As Odell notes, 'Whatever happens with Goop, Gwyneth will be fine. She has a way of emerging victorious from any calamity … She has convinced the public at every turn to buy whatever she's selling.'
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell review – Gwyn and bear it
Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow's general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery as her marketing rocket fuel. (In case you need a reminder: this was the $66 jade egg Paltrow sold via her lifestyle brand Goop that promised various health benefits upon insertion.) Amy Odell's book, billed as delivering 'insight and behind-the-scenes details of Paltrow's relationships, family, friendships, iconic films', as well as her creation of Goop, takes no particular stand on this, nor on many of Paltrow's more divisive episodes, instead offering us what feels like an earnest jog back through the actor and wellness guru's years of fame. The author writes in the acknowledgments that she spoke to 220 people for the book, in which case we have to assume that a great many of them had little to say. To be fair to Odell, whose previous biography was of Anna Wintour, another difficult and controlling subject – although Wintour did give Odell some access – Paltrow's world is notoriously hard to break into if she's not on board with a project; the author quotes numerous hacks tasked with profiling Paltrow for magazines who found themselves iced out of her networks, and the same happens to her in the early stages of research. Odell's task only gets harder in the second half of the book, which tackles the Goop years. Since, she claims, many of its staff signed NDAs, those sections lack even the modest stream of gossip that enlivens the first half. Which, by the way, is perfectly enjoyable. I ripped through Odell's account of Paltrow's youth as the simultaneously indulged and benignly neglected daughter of two showbusiness big guns, the actor Blythe Danner and the producer and director Bruce Paltrow. Danner is prim and unemotional; Bruce Paltrow is more demonstrative but still emotionally evasive, and Odell reheats some well-documented episodes between father and daughter, such as the trip they made to Paris when Paltrow was around 10, during which Bruce told her: 'I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you, no matter what.' (Paltrow, in interviews, has always offered up this story as a moving tribute to her dad's love for her.) Odell also tells us the (I think) new detail that, when Paltrow was older, 'her dad once gave her lace underwear as a gift'. It's a small addition but it stands out against what feels like the book's trove of reconstituted material. In 1984, when Paltrow was 12, the family moved from LA to New York. We learn that she felt out-classed at Spence, the Upper East Side private school where the money is older and the blood bluer than in the Danner-Paltrow household. We also learn that, in spite of this, Paltrow – whose biggest nightmare is listed in the senior school yearbook as 'obesity' – manages to form a clique around herself that may or may not have been involved in the drawing of a penis on the library wall. It's small potatoes but we'll take goes into great depth about the Williamstown theatre festival – presumably because the old theatre lags actually agreed to talk to her – a storied annual event in rural Massachusetts where Danner takes her daughter every summer, first to watch her mother on stage, and later, to act herself. I liked these passages, in which you get a real sense of a summer stock scene that has always attracted top actors and their nepo babies. At one point, a barely teenage Paltrow takes the assistant director's seat and the head of the festival fails to ask her to move. Paltrow is entitled, wan, sometimes foul-mouthed, intensely focused and in these scenes, really comes alive. By studying her mother on stage, she learns how to be an actor. And so on to the Hollywood years, where everything becomes less fresh and more familiar. We slog through the background to productions of Emma, Shallow Hal and Shakespeare in Love and then we get to Harvey Weinstein, who during the first flush of #MeToo, Paltrow accused of making a pass at her. Odell quotes from Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's book, She Said, but there's not much more to be harvested on a story broken and pursued by such good reporters. What's left is a trawl through a lot of things we already know – although there is one very funny motif from those years, which involves Paltrow miming throwing up behind the backs of people she dislikes, one of whom is Minnie Driver. (Team Driver all the way, here, obviously.) Also an old friend of Paltrow's claims 'she invented ghosting', which sounds about right. Finally, Goop: this was a story I hadn't been paying much attention to lately, and so a genuine surprise of the book is to learn that the company founded by Paltrow in 2008 has been a much shakier business than advertised. We know that Goop paid to settle a lawsuit brought by the California Food, Drug and Medical Device Task Force over false claims about the health benefits of the vaginal eggs. And we also know it accepted judgments by the National Advertising Division about other false claims. But, as Odell puts it, Paltrow's 'middling run as the CEO of Goop' has ensured that the company 'hasn't experienced sustained profitability … and has lacked a clear business strategy as it ping-pongs from one of Gwyneth's ideas to the next'. Here's a reveal: that Paltrow is such a massive cheapskate she used Goop's food editors to cook for her. 'In the office,' writes Odell, 'it was common knowledge that the food editors would go to Gwyneth's house after work and make her dinner under the guise of 'recipe testing'. When she and Brad Falchuk were living apart, the food editor would bring dinner to his house, too, which wasn't a light lift in LA traffic.' She also asked vendors to donate their services to her and Falchuk's wedding in return for advertising. The difficulty with all this is that Paltrow is a charmless subject who never rises to the level of monstrous. She's an OK actor, a so-so businesswoman – Kim Kardashian, as Odell points out, has had much greater success with her company, Skims. The story, then, is less about how Paltrow became this figure in the culture than why on earth she was elevated in the first place. Odell doesn't have the time or the inclination to get into this, instead offering pat lines such as, 'love her or hate her, for over 30 years, we haven't been able to look away'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion At the very end, Odell draws a line between Paltrow's peddling of pseudoscience on Goop and Robert F Kennedy Jr, 'a fellow raw milk drinker' and Trump's vaccine-sceptical health secretary, which feels like a sudden turn towards a more interesting and confident authorial voice. If only it had piloted the whole book. Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Hollywood nepo baby is the spitting image of her heartthrob dad... but do you know who she is?
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