2 days ago
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.'
