\n<\/p>\n
G<\/span>wyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow\u2019s 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\u2019s book, billed as delivering \u201cinsight and behind-the-scenes details of Paltrow\u2019s relationships, family, friendships, iconic films\u201d, as well as her creation of Goop, takes no particular stand on this, nor on many of Paltrow\u2019s more divisive episodes, instead offering us what feels like an earnest jog back through the actor and wellness guru\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To be fair to Odell, whose previous biography was of Anna Wintour, another difficult and controlling subject \u2013 although Wintour did give Odell some access \u2013 Paltrow\u2019s world is notoriously hard to break into if she\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Which, by the way, is perfectly enjoyable. I ripped through Odell\u2019s account of Paltrow\u2019s 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: \u201cI wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you, no matter what.\u201d (Paltrow, in interviews, has always offered up this story as a moving tribute to her dad\u2019s love for her.) Odell also tells us the (I think) new detail that, when Paltrow was older, \u201cher dad once gave her lace underwear as a gift\u201d. It\u2019s a small addition but it stands out against what feels like the book\u2019s trove of reconstituted material.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 whose biggest nightmare is listed in the senior school yearbook as \u201cobesity\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s small potatoes but we\u2019ll take it.Odell goes into great depth about the Williamstown theatre festival \u2013 presumably because the old theatre lags actually agreed to talk to her \u2013 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The story is less about how Paltrow became this figure in the culture than why on earth she was elevated in the first place<\/p>\n 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\u2019s book, She Said, but there\u2019s not much more to be harvested on a story broken and pursued by such good reporters. What\u2019s left is a trawl through a lot of things we already know \u2013 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\u2019s claims \u201cshe invented ghosting\u201d, which sounds about right.<\/p>\n Finally, Goop: this was a story I hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s \u201cmiddling run as the CEO of Goop\u201d has ensured that the company \u201chasn\u2019t experienced sustained profitability \u2026 and has lacked a clear business strategy as it ping-pongs from one of Gwyneth\u2019s ideas to the next\u201d.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a reveal: that Paltrow is such a massive cheapskate she used Goop\u2019s <\/strong>food editors to cook for her. \u201cIn the office,\u201d writes Odell, \u201cit was common knowledge that the food editors would go to Gwyneth\u2019s house after work and make her dinner under the guise of \u2018recipe testing\u2019. When she and Brad Falchuk were living apart, the food editor would bring dinner to his house, too, which wasn\u2019t a light lift in LA traffic.\u201d She also asked vendors to donate their services to her and Falchuk\u2019s wedding in return for advertising.<\/p>\n The difficulty with all this is that Paltrow is a charmless subject who never rises to the level of monstrous. She\u2019s an OK actor, a so-so businesswoman \u2013 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\u2019t have the time or the inclination to get into this, instead offering pat lines such as, \u201clove her or hate her, for over 30 years, we haven\u2019t been able to look away\u201d.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n At the very end, Odell draws a line between Paltrow\u2019s peddling of pseudoscience on Goop and Robert F Kennedy Jr, \u201ca fellow raw milk drinker\u201d and Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell is published by Atlantic (\u00a320). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6737,4528,6736,1001,6739,5900,6738,1085],"class_list":{"0":"post-13040","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-amy","9":"tag-bear","10":"tag-biography","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-gwyn","13":"tag-gwyneth","14":"tag-odell","15":"tag-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}