At first it seemed that Gwyneth Paltrow had ignored the recent unflattering account of her altogether. When Amy Odell published Gwyneth: The Biography, in July, it was revealed as an unflinching (and unauthorised) bombshell of a book on the Goop CEO and A-list actress and became an instant New York Times bestseller.
Odell, who said she’d interviewed over 220 sources over three years, including Paltrow’s current and former friends and colleagues, had included some zingers about her.
She reported that her car parking space at work said “Reserved for G-spot”; that Goop was chaotic and Paltrow would scold her underlings for replying to her emails with the words “on it” (a waste of her time — she simply assumed they were “on it”); that the Goop food editors were roped in to help out of hours around Paltrow’s house, cooking her dinner under the guise of “recipe testing”. And that her magnanimous “conscious uncoupling” privately shocked Paltrow’s old friends.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VENETIA SCOTT. STYLING BY STELLA GREENSPAN
Now it seems Paltrow is dreaming up a new, better book of her own. She wants to write it on conscious uncoupling. “I cannot tell you how many people come up to me and thank me for that, and for helping to create that template. I feel like there needs to be a book, because it was real trial and error … We f***ed a lot of things up and then we got a lot of things right.” Strap in for another bestseller.
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As for her thoughts on Odell’s opus, for months she’d been keeping a dignified silence. Had Paltrow, the ultimate Hollywood royalty — father a director/producer, mother an award-winning actress, godfather Steven Spielberg — adopted a “don’t complain, don’t explain” royal maxim? Turns out not.
She was just waiting for British Vogue to pitch up at her house in the Hamptons. They were there for her November cover interview, to ask about her return to acting, Pepper Potts aside, after a long break, with a role in Marty Supreme, a forthcoming cosy tennis comedy.
Instead, sitting cross-legged on a magnolia sofa and “floating on a cloud of good taste”, Paltrow served up more of an icy thriller. In her “hypnotically flat, upscale American tone”, she described Odell’s book as written with the help of “ChatGPT”, “just bad” and “really badly written”. She shrugged more than once. “Boring,” she said.
Had she even read the book, Vogue asked. “Oh God no,” she said. Still, her husband, Brad Falchuk, had “flicked” through it (deliciously dismissive, that). They decided that Odell had “missed everything, the truth of who I am, what my impact is”.
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Worse still, “I think it’s very sexist. I was, like, ‘OK, hang on a sec. Why do the men get Walter Isaacson [Elon Musk’s biographer] and I get this hack?’ You know?” she said.
Ouch. What would Odell make of this take-down? The response was short and delivered, like all good modern feuds, via the medium of social media. Odell’s Instagram Stories has a post of the Vogue cover with the words “Here we go with the Oscar campaign”. Surely not suggesting that Paltrow is attention-seeking?
Odell’s last book made Anna Wintour the subject, and for it Wintour reportedly gamely gave her biographer some access. Paltrow gave none. Still, the critics liked it. But for Paltrow it was the portrait of Goop that rankled the most. “That bothers me. ‘Oh, Goop has a toxic culture.’ That drives me insane because we have never had that,” she said.
If anything, she insisted, she was too soft. “Granted we’ve had a couple of toxic people and, because of my fear of confrontation, maybe I didn’t deal with it quickly enough. That does cascade down and I totally take responsibility for that. But we are such a good culture. We are,” she said.
Interview by Giles Hattersley. Styling by Stella Greenspan. Photographs by Venetia Scott. See the full feature in the November issue of British Vogue, available via digital download and on newsstands from Tuesday 21st October.