Gwyneth: The Biography review - Gwyneth Paltrow's world is notoriously hard to break into. This book takes a shot
Author
:
Amy Odell
ISBN-13
:
9781805465713
Publisher
:
Atlantic
Guideline Price
:
€15.99
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 Odell 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.
[
I'm pulling the Goop plug – no jade eggs are going in my yoni
Opens in new window
]
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 show business 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 about 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 outclassed 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 it.
READ MORE
Odell 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 US 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 pingpongs 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.
Gwyneth Paltrow at a special screening of The Goop Lab in Los Angeles, California, on January 21st, 2020. Photograph:The difficulty with all this is that Paltrow is a charmless subject who never rises to the level of monstrous. She's an 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'.
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. – Guardian
Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is published by Atlantic
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
17 hours ago
- Irish Times
Bob Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy as Boomtown Rats play All Together Now 2025
The Boomtown Rats Something Kind of Wonderful stage, Sunday ★★★★☆ It has been a year of anniversaries for Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats. Half a century has elapsed since Geldof and bandmates emerged, spluttering and snarling, from the Dublin punk scene. But 2025 is also the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, the moment Geldof the frontman with the crazy hair was replaced in the public imagination by sweary St Bob of telethon immortality. Both sides of the singer are on show during The Boomtown Rats' agreeably splenetic Sunday-afternoon set at All Together Now . The hits arrive at a steady clip, starting with Rat Trap, a neurotic slide tackle of a tune informed by Geldof's experience working in a Dublin slaughterhouse during the dead-end 1970s. [ Bob Geldof: 'I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say' Opens in new window ] Looking professorially grey at the age of 73, Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy. His voice isn't what it was, and there are stretches when he rasps rather than sings – while his body language is that of a stick insect with a few things to get off its chest. The songs – including the beautifully bittersweet Someone's Looking at You, from 1979 – are evergreen, however, even if the rockabilly epic (She's Gonna) Do You In is stretched to snapping point. 'This is the Pink Floyd bit – it goes on for f**king ages,' Geldof explains. All Together Now 2025: Bob Geldof, Doc O'Connor and Pete Briquette of The Boomtown Rats onstage on Sunday. Photograph: Kieran Frost/Redferns The singer recently spoke out against Israel's action in Gaza . He repeats the message at All Together Now, pausing during I Don't Like Mondays' 'the lesson today is how to die' beat to talk about the women and children dying in Palestine and about those giving their lives on the frontline in Ukraine . As he talks the video screens show the Palestine flag. Fifty years in, Geldof is still an expert at big gestures and at combining pop and protest to theatrical effect. These rats have some scurrying left in them yet.
Irish Times
18 hours ago
- Irish Times
The hidden Jewish history at the heart of a Kyiv painting
The oil painting shows a carnage of darkness and menacing sharp edges, stricken through by a lightning bolt. Curled at its centre: a vulnerable fragment of text in the Hebrew alphabet, its significance buried by history. Painted in Kyiv in the turbulent years of 1918-1920, El Lissitzky's painting, titled Composition, is one of dozens of artworks secretly transported out of Ukraine under heavy bombardment after Russia's 2022 invasion. They toured top international art museums as the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. This was for safekeeping, as bombs rained on Ukraine and museums in occupied territories were looted. It was also an act of 'cultural diplomacy', in the words of curator Katia Denysova, aimed to cement international acceptance of a specifically Ukrainian chapter of art history, distinct from that of the invader. READ MORE The fact that these paintings could be viewed at all was, in itself, a remarkable story of survival. Most had been slated for destruction, caught on the wrong side of Stalinist ideological intolerance in the 1930s, and were hidden for decades in a secret cache in a museum basement. The collection includes the works of leading Ukrainian modernists, such as Oleksandr Bohomazov and Vasyl Yermilov, as well as those like Lissitzky who worked in Kyiv before becoming famous elsewhere. El Lissitzky, Composition (1918-1920). Photograph: Naomi O'Leary I first saw Lissitzky's Composition when the exhibition came to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The fragment of text caught my notice. Though abstract, the painting was infused with a violent energy, and the placement of the text cradled in its centre seemed significant. I took a close-up photograph of the lettering. I wanted to find out what it meant. The exhibition curators, I was told, did not know. 'The National Art Museum of Ukraine, they have some experts looking at it, but no one has been able to decipher and find out where this text is coming from yet,' Denysova told me at the time. Had it been lost to history? There was something about this secret at the heart of the painting that stayed with me. I was determined to figure it out. My first breakthrough in identifying the text at the centre of Composition came from asking friends who know Hebrew if they could read it. They could not. It was in Yiddish, the language traditionally spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe, which is Germanic but uses the Hebrew alphabet. That pointed to a very specific place and time. Composition was created during a brief moment of cultural flowering in Ukraine in the early decades of the 20th century, amid the tumult of the collapse of empires, the Ukrainian war of independence, and the emergence of the Soviet Union. It was a time of terror for Jewish communities, which then made up 12 per cent of Ukraine's population, as the instability unleashed brutal mob violence against them that killed tens of thousands. But amid the carnage was a period of relative cultural freedom. Tsarist prohibitions on the Ukrainian language fell away, and new literary movements sprang up in Kharkiv and Kyiv. A ban on printing in the Hebrew alphabet ended with the 1917 Russian Revolution, and new theatre and publishing incorporating Jewish themes boomed. It was a time when ideas of nationhood, not least in Ireland, were inspiring struggles for autonomy and cultural movements dedicated to celebrating and furthering national identity. Lissitzky began his career in this environment, travelling to Jewish towns and villages to record their ancient artefacts and illustrating Yiddish-language children's books. He cofounded the art section of the Kultur-Lige in Kyiv in 1918, a cultural organisation dedicated to fostering Yiddish-language theatre, music, art and intellectual life. The aim of his circle was to develop a distinctly Jewish modernist art, just as Ukrainian-language artistic groups were fostering their own 'national culture'. In these early years the Bolsheviks accommodated the use of local and minority languages, seeing this as a way to unite the diversity of the emerging Soviet Union and embed communism within its many ethnic communities. Lissitzky was swept up in the moment of optimism, depicting the revolution as God's will and creating a poster encouraging Jews to support the Bolshevik side in Russia's civil war. But the moment of liberation was to prove short-lived. Josef Stalin in 1936. Photograph:In 1919, Jewish organisations were designated enemies of the revolution, as part of a general crackdown against religion. Synagogues and Jewish cultural organisations were ordered to close, and the Hebrew alphabet was denounced as anti-communist. Lissitzky stopped incorporating Jewish themes in his art, left behind Yiddish book illustration, and abandoned his Hebrew name, Eliezer, becoming 'El'. As Josef Stalin built his totalitarian dictatorship from the late 1920s, artistic independence increasingly became impossible. Much of what had been celebrated before was now denounced as 'formalist' or 'bourgeois nationalism'. The statue Girl with Ears of Grain at the National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide in Kyiv. Photograph: Oleg Petrasyuk/EPA Ukrainian intellectuals were an early target. The man-made Holodomor famine killed millions, hollowing out Ukraine. The generation of artists and thinkers killed during the Stalinist purges came to be known in Ukraine as the 'executed Renaissance'. Soviet realism became the only officially approved art style. Unacceptable art was seized from public view and museum collections. Hundreds of artworks were marked for destruction and hidden in a secret archive, the Spetsfond, kept in the basement of the Ukrainian state museum. But the process of destroying them was slow, perhaps with the connivance of museum workers who still saw value in the art. A close-up of El Lissitzky's Composition, showing a fragment from Simon Dubnow's General Jewish History. Photograph: Naomi O'Leary Once I knew the text was in Yiddish, my next step was to look for help with transcription. I found it in David Nathan-Maister, a rare book collector who was able to extract most of the words from my photograph. This revealed four lines that were clearly a fragment from a larger text, their meaning difficult to interpret without the rest of the page. But a reference to 'Chaldea', an ancient term for an area in the Middle East, indicated a biblical commentary or history, Nathan-Maister suggested. He shared his work with his community of fellow bibliophiles, and this produced another breakthrough. A user of X with the handle kommdaweg – who did not respond to my messages asking for their name, to credit them – ran a search for the transcribed words in online databases. There was a result. There it was on page 23 of A General Jewish History, by Simon Dubnow (1920), a Yiddish-language book that had been digitised and uploaded in a searchable format to the Internet Archive by the non-profit Yiddish Book Centre. Visually comparing the fragmented text in the painting with the words on the page confirmed an exact match. The words, and the arrangement of the lines on the page, were identical. Seeing the unbroken sentences revealed the meaning of the text. It describes the ancient wanderings of nomadic Semitic tribes in the lands that are now the Middle East . The preceding paragraph recounts the command of God to Abraham to leave his homeland, promising that from him, a great nation would come. He and his family 'decided to go to Canaan, or Palestine', the text recounts, and there God promised Abraham to give the land to his children. It's the 'promised land', the foundation myth of Israel. Zionism was born in Ukraine, as a response to the persecution of Jewish people. Manuil Shekhtman, Pogrom Victims (1926), in the Modernism in Ukraine exhibition at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Photograph: Naomi O'Leary The ferocious attacks on Jewish communities by street mobs in the lands that made up the Russian empire between 1881 and 1884 gave rise to the Russian word 'pogrom'. It also inspired students in Kharkiv to found a group called BILU. It was the world's first political organisation intent on the systematic colonisation of Palestine. It sent its first settlers in 1882. They founded what later became the Israeli city of Rishon LeZion, and town of Gedera. Each further wave of persecution convinced more Jewish people that they needed their own homeland to thrive. Zionism was popular in Ukraine at the time Composition was created, but it had not yet become a dominant ideology. Dubnow's General Jewish History – the text at the centre of the painting – lays out an alternative vision of Jewish nationhood. The book is intended as a 'history of our nation', Dubnow wrote, showing how throughout the 'violent crises' of thousands of years of history, the Jewish people survived to organise their own 'autonomous national life'. It's a Jewish national text, but not a Zionist one. Dubnow was the leading advocate of an 'autonomism', an alternative to Zionism. It argued that Jewish communities should be self-governing wherever they resided, rejecting assimilation with the local culture. It was cultural nationalism, without a territory. The Jewish people were a 'spiritual nation', Dubnow wrote, their lack of a land meaning that, unlike the nation states of Europe at the time, they could 'never become aggressive and warlike'. It took the calamity of the Holocaust to tip the scales in favour of Zionism, convincing Jewish survivors and international powers that a state of Israel was the only way. Composition is a survivor. Along with the other works of the Modernism in Ukraine exhibition, Composition outlived the brutal Nazi conquest of Kyiv, the death of Stalin in 1953, and now Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Understanding the text at its centre adds a richness of meaning to the painting. It is a portrait of the survival of the Jewish people, clinging together as a community amid violence and destruction. It's a postcard from the past that was somehow prophetic of the horrors of the century to come. Unexpectedly, it links the two conflicts that define the present day: in Ukraine, and in Palestine.
Irish Times
a day ago
- Irish Times
Prince Harry denies giving Prince Andrew bloody nose at family gathering
Prince Harry has denied he gave Prince Andrew 'a bloody nose' during a fight at a family gathering in 2013. According to an excerpt from a new biography of the disgraced Duke of York, published in the Daily Mail on Saturday, the pair had a heated argument that escalated into a physical altercation. 'Punches were thrown over something Andrew said behind Harry's back', the author Andrew Lownie claimed. The alleged fight began when 'Harry told [his uncle] he was a coward not to say it to his face. Harry got the better of Andrew by all accounts, leaving him with a bloody nose before the fight was broken up.' Lownie's biography, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, also claims Andrew told his nephew that his marriage to Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, would 'not last more than a month'. He allegedly 'accused Meghan of being an opportunist and thought she was too old for Harry, adding that his nephew was making the biggest mistake ever,' and told his nephew he had gone 'bonkers', accusing him of not doing 'any due diligence into her past' before they got engaged in 2017. Late on Saturday, a spokesperson for Harry and Meghan said: 'I can confirm Prince Harry and Prince Andrew have never had a physical fight, nor did Prince Andrew ever make the comments he is alleged to have made about the Duchess of Sussex to Prince Harry.' The duke and duchess have sent a legal letter to the Daily Mail over the publication of what their spokesperson described as 'gross inaccuracies, damaging and defamatory remarks'. Prince Andrew fell from grace after a disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019 about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein , the late American financier and convicted sex offender. The duke was stripped of his royal and military titles in 2021. The book claims Harry and his brother, William, had 'problematic' relationships with Andrew for years and that Andrew was also rude about William's wife, Catherine, the Princess of Wales. King Charles has allowed his younger brother to stay in the Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park owned by the crown estate. However, last year the king ended Andrew's allowance, estimated at £1 million annually, raising questions about future arrangements. The source quoted in Lownie's biography claims the Prince of Wales is keen to 'evict' the duke and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, who lives with Andrew though the couple divorced in 1996. According to Entitled's source, '[William] also loathes Sarah ... and can't wait for the day when his father throws them both out. If Charles doesn't, I guarantee you the first thing William does when he becomes king is to get them evicted.' Harry broke ties with his family citing the 'toxicity' of royal life and alleged racism towards his wife, moving with his young family to Canada and then the US in 2020. In 2022 he published a memoir, Spare, in which he detailed strains in his relationships with his father and brother. Earlier this year he told the BBC he had forgiven his family and would 'love a reconciliation'. – Guardian
