How did Gwyneth Paltrow go from ingenue to junk science entrepreneur? | Canada Voices

After 30 years in the spotlight, Gwyneth Paltrow has lived through enough eras to rival Taylor Swift: From ingenue to It girl to fashion plate to Oscar winner, to entrepreneur to professional lightning rod and purveyor of junk science. These days the phrase “love her or hate her” is affixed to Paltrow like luxury cashmere, and it was this polarity that celebrity biographer Amy Odell set out to explore.

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In Gwyneth: A Biography, Odell maps out her subject’s formative years as the privileged daughter of Hollywood royalty and an occasional New York society mean girl, and connects those early days to Paltrow’s more recent iterations as the CEO of Goop. The book, which Paltrow and her team declined to participate in, hit the bestseller list out of the gate. Odell spoke to The Globe about getting deep into the Goop.

The book begins on a topic that will be familiar to most Paltrow observers: the jade yoni eggs. Goop’s recommendation that women should insert these crystals vaginally to promote hormonal balance and prevent uterine prolapse got the company sued by California’s consumer protection office. Why was that the right starting point?

When you first start writing a biography, you know you’re telling someone’s story, but you might not know the thesis or the take-away that you want a reader to have. In the epilogue I write that Gwyneth showed the world how much money people will spend and how much effort they will undergo to be well, no matter what science tells us. I think the jade egg was the biggest controversy that ever emerged about Goop, and it also shows the tension of the company and Gwyneth as its leader where she is selling things that she seems to believe in and then you have experts saying no, these things don’t work, and may even be harmful. So what is it about Gwyneth’s life that made her into someone who believes in these things, and why has she been so successful selling them?

Before this book, you worked on a similarly thorough biography of Anna Wintour. With that project Wintour did not do an interview, but she did connect you with sources and participate in the fact-checking process. Were you initially hopeful that it would be the same with Gwyneth?

You never know what the access is going to look like when the project starts. Anna made her sources – friends and colleagues – available to me and the whole process was just a lot more straightforward. With Gwyneth I really had to dig to find people who would speak with me. I went back and forth with her people over the three years that I worked on the book, asking repeatedly, does Gwyneth want to be interviewed? It was only as I was wrapping up that I finally got an official no from her representatives.

As a biographer, are there pros to not having your subject participate?

Gwyneth is someone who has been interviewed so many times for so many different profiles. We’ve heard from her in the context of these very PR-managed stories and less from the people around her. I interviewed more than 220 sources, people who worked with Gwyneth at Goop, people who worked on her films, friends from over the years. All to find out what she’s really like when the cameras are off. I was surprised to hear her described as cold and icy and aloof. I was surprised to learn about how her acting experience has helped her as the CEO of Goop. When she was meeting with VCs trying to raise money for Goop she was able to remember what to say and deliver it like recalling lines on a script.

She is also a lot raunchier than I would have guessed.

That was another surprise. Particularly having come up on her movies in the nineties: Emma, Great Expectations, Shakespeare in Love, A Perfect Murder. All of these elitist upper-crust ice princess roles that hewed closely to her life growing up on the Upper East Side. But her friends talked about her as someone who was so funny, a big curser, someone with a very bawdy sense of humour.

She talked about a favourite sex act with Ben Affleck that I can’t name in a newspaper.

She’s someone who has talked openly about her sexuality, and monetized it. The vagina candle and the whole sexual wellness business that she brought to Goop. She wanted to take the stigma away from women’s sexuality and, to be clear, I think that’s a great thing.

It seems like this sort of deeply researched portrait of a celebrity has become less common in an era where celebrities control their own images on social media, they get interviewed by their best friends, they produce their own Netflix docs. What is the value of critical analysis?

I interviewed R.J. Cutler, who did the Martha Stewart documentary, as well as The September Issue, which is a doc about Vogue and Anna Wintour. He told me that when he worked on these projects he made it clear who had final cut. This book is me having final cut. I do think the changing media landscape – celebrities controlling what they share through social media and feeling like they have to engage less with the mainstream press – is a big backdrop to Gwyneth’s story. She was doing endorsement deals with Estée Lauder, American Express. This was the early 2000s when it was still considered kind of tawdry for actresses to do these endorsement deals. And then she was one of the first celebrities to say hey, why am I using my image to promote these other brands when I could promote my own brand?

Of the 220 interviews, was there a subject you were particularly pleased to land?

It was really fun to talk to John Madden, who directed Gwyneth in Shakespeare in Love. There is that whole famous rumour about Winona Ryder [Gwyneth allegedly stole the script, and ultimately the role, from her then-friend], but I talked to a lot of people at Miramax, none of whom recalled Ryder ever being a serious contender, and John Madden told me that he only wanted Gwyneth.

Your reporting on Paltrow’s time at Spence, the upper-crust private school for New York society, felt like an origin story. Was it hard to get people from that period to talk?

Definitely people in that world are very tight-lipped. Spence was Gwyneth’s entrée into New York society. One person called it the thoroughbred horse of girls’ schools. Unlike the schools Gwyneth had attended in L.A., there weren’t a lot of entertainment families at Spence, so she’s in this environment with people who weren’t necessarily impressed by the entertainment industry. Her Spence friends all went onto college. Gwyneth didn’t get into Vassar, which, according to a source I spoke with, would have been an easy school to get into for a Spence grad. I was told that it bothered her that she never finished college. And even when she ascended to the heights of her industry, wins an Oscar, that didn’t really register with the people she grew up with.

Do you think that rejection pushed her away from traditional institutions?

I did wonder if that experience was a driver for her as a business person and an entrepreneur.

Is there a question about Paltrow that you hear most often?

A lot of people asked me whether she believes in the things that she’s selling, and I think she does. But there is a contradiction: Many people talked about how she picks things up really quickly, whether that’s archery for her role in Emma or reading a spreadsheet at Goop. She is this smart person, so why does she believe these gurus like Anthony William, the Medical Medium?

Any theories?

I think that when you’re a star – and she was the biggest movie star in the world at one point – people don’t tell you no; obstacles are removed from your life. So if you find people who are offering magical thinking, people still aren’t going to question you, and you think you’re never wrong, so …

You write about Paltrow’s tendency to downplay her ambition. Given how unabashed she has been about other things – her distaste for Cheez Whiz or drunk women – why is that the thing she was disinclined to show in public?

One explanation could be that the world has not always been kind to ambitious women, and certainly, she was subjected to some coverage that was sexist, particularly in the aughts when people decided they were getting tired of hearing how perfect she was after she won the Oscar. Going back, it was kind of crazy to see how quickly people turned on her. The internet was coming up so maybe there was a need for stories that people would click on. And then partly it was a reaction to her privilege, particularly when she wore the diamond choker to the Oscars and then talked about how her “daddy” was going to buy it for her – that was something people really seized on.

The headline of a 2018 New York Times profile read, “How Goop’s Haters Made Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company Worth $250 Million.” Is leveraging hate something Gwyneth had done consciously, or was it more an obliviousness that worked in her favour?

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I think a bit of both. At Goop, I know they would plant things – wellness products and stories – to try to get the internet audience going. A controversy like the jade egg would get a lot of traffic and then the people who went to the site might buy something. But the outrage wasn’t something you could recreate, necessarily. They tried an energy clearing kit, and nobody seized on that, and then the jade egg – nobody saw that coming.

You interviewed Jen Gunter, the Canadian gynecologist who has very publicly challenged Paltrow on many of Goop’s most dubious health claims. Gunter draws a direct line from Goop to the modern Make America Healthy Movement. Do you agree?

I asked all of the medical experts I spoke with if they saw a connection between Gwyneth and MAHM or the rise of RFK Jr., and for the most part, they did, I think because Goop has sown a distrust of science and Western medicine, and established research much in the way that Kennedy has. Dr. Gunter is one of the only critics who seemed to really bother Gwyneth. After Gunter criticized the jade eggs, Gwyneth rallied this whole team together to produce this response, a letter that she shared on social media that started, “when they go low, we go high.” My sources told me that they told Gwyneth not to respond because it would only draw attention, and Dr. Gunter has talked about how she was just a chick with a WordPress trying to get accurate information to her patients.

She said something that really crystallized a lot about Gwyneth and her story to me, which I included in the epilogue, which was, “Imagine if Gwyneth had been out there talking about abortion access.” She said it’s interesting how people use their privilege, and I think that’s a really good point. Gwyneth is impactful, and she was early to wellness, giving it a rhetoric and a language and this gorgeous, aspirational aesthetic. I think it’s fair to say she is responsible for creating an archetype of what a wellness company can be, and we’ve seen it copied countless times all these years later.

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That’s not a good thing, is it?

If you look at where we are today, at least in the U.S., I don’t think a distrust in science is helping us. And if you look at the evaluations, The Global Wellness Institute puts the wellness industry at US$6.3-trillion, whereas Pharma is between US$1.6-trillion and US$1.7-trillion. So wellness is bigger than Big Pharma. It’s Big Wellness.

Maybe Paltrow should have stuck to her banana nut muffins.

The recipes on Goop are really good.

I love Goop’s black pepper chicken.

She has a turkey burger recipe that is on regular rotation in my house.