Gwyneth: "We're Flying 'No Class'?"
We talk to Amy Odell about her new biography of the actress and "wellness" leader who apparently once farted on someone's head?!?
We’ve been reading (and linking to) Amy Odell’s work for years, and you may have, too: her Substack, Back Row; her posts as a founding writer at The Cut, which is when we first met her, during our time covering Fashion Week for them; her book Tales From The Back Row; and of course her seminal Anna Wintour biography, Anna. Amy as a person is funny and thoughtful and full of insight, so it’s no surprise that her writing is, too — all talents she’s most recently applied to Gwyneth: The Biography, the new unauthorized compendium of stories and research about the life and times of the deeply polarizing Paltrow, a book which by all rights should be Amy’s second New York Times bestseller, and which comes out today. You’d better believe we jumped at a chance to ask her about how she pulled together a project of this magnitude, and over on Go Fug Yourself today, we’re giving away a copy if you haven’t ordered yours yet. (Or even if you have! Give someone who loves gossip the gift of Gwyneth.)
This interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Drinks With Broads: Anna was a smash hit. Was there always a plan to do another biography? How did this come about, and how long of a break did you give yourself between these two massive projects?
Amy Odell: I got this assignment the day before Anna came out. My publisher and I had been thinking about who might be interesting and relevant and we settled on Gwyneth, for reasons that will probably be obvious to your audience. Love her or hate her, she's been in the public eye for 30 years and I think she's someone who has really impacted culture in a number of ways. I think most significantly with the wellness industry, which we can talk about. But she's someone who people have been magnetically attracted to. She's someone who people have found incredibly polarizing. And all the while, she's influenced a number of industries. She's influenced entertainment, she's influenced fashion, beauty, and as I said, wellness.
Drinks With Broads: In some ways, she's the truest definition of influencer. She really does have an impact in these areas — and in a way that was more organic than many people who brand themselves as influencers.
Amy Odell: Exactly. I think you could argue she was the original influencer. Because when she started Goop in 2008, as I'm sure you guys remember — we were all writing about it — as an email newsletter sent from her kitchen table in her London home, which I want to say was 33 rooms or something crazy. It's like a double mansion that she combined her mansion with the mansion next door when she was with Chris Martin. But when she sent that newsletter out, social media was brand new. And it's not like celebrities were on it. Celebrities didn't want to be there, and she was doing it and sending out a newsletter — and now we're all fucking writing newsletters.
Drinks With Broads: I'll never forget the time she wrote her newsletter about her friend “William Joel,” and we all made fun of “William Joel” for the next 15 years. But that's staying power. And it was travel guides from somebody who you'd never take travel advice from, because she's in totally different tax bracket than you are, but there was something really ogle-able about it all. She was early Substack.
Amy Odell: She had an inkling early on that she could use her image to start her own brand. I mean, she did really want to start Goop to share her knowledge and recommendations with the world, which I think says something about her personality. She thought she had this amazing knowledge. And her dad was like that too. He was the kind of guy that he'd be like, “What are you doing this summer?” “I'm going to Paris.” “Oh, you have to go here, here, here and here and do this, this, this, and that.” Just very forceful about his opinions, and she's very much like that as well. So yeah, she really wanted to share her knowledge. And then she saw with Goop, they did deals early on with brands like J.Crew where she would be wearing J.Crew in the emails, and then J.Crew would see a traffic spike and things would really sell. So that was an early affiliate deal, but nobody called it an affiliate deal then. And now, again, that's all over the place. That's a massive, massive industry. So she was really early on that stuff.
Drinks With Broads: Related: This is a question we had, but it's also a question we heard from a lot of our readers. They said that it must be impossible not to have a preconceived notion of people like this. When you start writing about them, do you find that difficult to set aside, or does it matter?
Amy Odell: That's a good question. I guess we all probably have an opinion about somebody like Gwyneth, but when you start doing really, really deep research and you learn new things, it evolves. But as the writer of the biography, I present it objectively. I mean, that's the goal. So that the reader can make up their mind. I present the facts, the most interesting, salient, relevant facts that I can find in my three years of reporting and interviewing more than 220 sources, and allow the reader to make up their own mind about the person.
Going into the book, I knew the broad strokes of her story, that Steven Spielberg is her godfather, that she came from a Hollywood family. I had no idea what it really means to have parents like that. So it was fascinating to really see how nepotism works in Hollywood, which is something she's kind of bristled against. You guys may remember when she talked to, I think it was Hailey Bieber on YouTube, and Hailey asked her about being a nepo baby, and Gwyneth gave one of her tone deaf-sounding answers where she was like, “You have to work twice as hard and be twice as good.”
So what I learned about nepotism, because Blythe [Danner] and Bruce [Paltrow] were so well respected and so well connected, people knew that Gwyneth was around. You know what I mean? Casting agents knew that there was a Gwyneth Paltrow, and then when they hear that she's going to audition, they want to see her, and they want to break out the next Blythe Danner. Blythe Danner is in league with Meryl Streep. She is one of the greatest American actors. You know what I mean? So they really wanted to break [Gwyneth] out. And I had never considered this because I don't come from Hollywood royalty, but they said that these kids of these prominent people, they've just been around this stuff their whole lives. Gwyneth was watching her mom on stage and going to movie sets, and her dad's TV show sets, from the time she was a little tiny baby nursing. So that environment, it just didn't faze her. Whereas if you were trying to make it, if you're Brad Pitt from Missouri, you're not used to that. It might seem like a really big deal to you. You might get kind of freaked out or intimidated. So that appealed to casting directors too.
Drinks With Broads: Right. Not only are the barriers to entry lower when you're a nepo baby, but they don’t even see those barriers. You wouldn't even confront it as a barrier. You'd just be like, “Oh, whatever. I know exactly how to navigate this.”
Amy Odell: And I wonder if she even knows how much her parents really impacted her success. There are so many examples in the book, where Gwyneth was up for a part and they're like, “Oh, well, we knew her parents,” and the doors opened for her. That said, she still had to deliver in the room and she could deliver in the room. People said she was really talented. In the case of someone like Gwyneth, if you're getting a sense of stability and good sense and also talent from the gene pool, then you're going to be like, “Well, yeah, why would we not go with a reliable quantity?”
Drinks With Broads: How difficult is it, going into a project like this, knowing that everybody has feelings about her, or Anna? Do you set that aside or treat it something that you have to try to fight against?
Amy Odell: When I'm working on the book, I think about what's going to be interesting to the reader. I don't write the book for myself. You write it for people to read. So you have to have an instinct for what people want to read about, and what are the aspects of her story that you want to talk about and which ones you're not going to talk about. So that's more how I think about it. And then you'll find things that really stand out. When she gave that quote to… she was doing an interview, she was dating Brad Pitt, and she said something like she was trying to explain how she and Brad had different upbringings, and she says, “I have to say to Brad, This is beluga and this is osetra.”
Drinks With Broads: How somebody tackles a project this big is fascinating. How long was the research phase? Was there a clean break between, “Okay, this is my research phase, and now I'm shutting the door and I'm going to start writing?”
Amy Odell: Yeah, that's always tricky to know. The first thing I do is read. I spent about a year just reading everything I could. You have to whittle down a news archive too. You can't read absolutely everything, but I read as much as I could. She's been profiled a gazillion times, and, once I started calling people, especially, I felt like those stories really just barely scratched the surface of who she is. And a lot of those stories are sort of doled out from her PR, right?
Drinks With Broads: I'm sure that becomes ever more obvious the more you're in them, where you're just reading through an archive of her career and magazine covers or something, you're probably like, “Oh my God, that PR angle here is so obvious.”
Amy Odell: Yeah, exactly. I mean, she was always promoting something. So she did so many interviews. And then when she had Goop, she had to do the interviews so that people would go buy stuff. I just started with reading and that took about a year. You make a really big timeline of the person's life. I pulled out any quotes from her that I might want, or anybody else that I might want to fold in. You start thinking about questions that you want to ask people. You look for names of who you could call. The nice thing about writing about Anna is that magazines have mastheads. So that gives you a really good base, people who were around her in her professional life. And [for Gwyneth], we have IMDb with credits on it, so you have a base of where to start from and then you start making phone calls, basically, and putting feelers out there. I didn't really stop reporting even when I was writing, because there would always be something where you would have to call someone back and ask a question. So I don't remember when I started writing. I think I wrote it last summer mostly, and then the editing process takes some time from there. I think maybe I finished it in the fall. I only totally finished the book1 around this part Memorial Day weekend. So it was all in about three years, and I was lucky that we get to publish it right away.
Drinks With Broads: And I'm sure with something like this also, you're like — I don't want to jinx it, but God forbid Gwyneth Paltrow falls into an active volcano this weekend. I'm sure you want to get this book out.
Amy Odell: I do not want that to happen!
Drinks With Broads: I'm not jinxing her. But my point is, I feel like if I were in your shoes, I would be very nervous if I had too long of a wait between my finishing the book and the publication of the book. You want it to be as up to date as possible, presumably.
So, how did you approach sources for this, especially if it was a source where you were not really sure how willing they were going to be to talk? How do you pitch to them and make them feel comfortable that what you're doing is not a hit piece? That it's actually a measured, researched project?
Amy Odell: Well, I had written Anna, so I had an example. I just say to people, “I am writing this biography of Gwyneth Paltrow. Would you answer some questions?” I always try to call people. It's better to talk to them. And I think I was able to interview a lot of people who probably had never been asked about her before, because this is not a book that was controlled by her PR. So it was up to me to find people who might have something interesting to say. And I found a lot of people who worked with her on so many of her movies. I couldn't cover all of her movies in detail — she's done so many —but lots of people who worked on movies, friends, former friends, lots of people who worked at Goop. So I got a really big range of people.
Drinks With Broads: How deep on the call sheet are you going? Are you reaching out to the costume designer, hair and makeup, first AD in that situation? How deep do you have to dig?
Amy Odell: I mean, it just depends, because you always ask somebody, “Who else should I talk to?” So it depends on if somebody suggests somebody way down on the call sheet. I think obviously people are interested in her style, including her onscreen style, Like Sliding Doors. I think people have fond memories of Sliding Doors. So I was happy that I got to talk to those costume designers who gave me an amazing anecdote: When they were filming Sliding Doors, I guess Leonardo DiCaprio had convinced her that meat is gross, and factory farming is dirty and bad. [So] when she was filming Sliding Doors, she was eating McDonald's burgers without the meat. Her and the costume designers. They were like, “Oh, yeah, she turned us on to McDonald's burgers without the meat.” I was like, “What is that?” And they were like, “It's everything except the meat.”
Drinks With Broads: So it's like mustard, ketchup, chopped onions and a pickle.
Amy Odell: Like lettuce, tomato, cheese. I don't know.
Drinks With Broads: Is this a Big Mac without meat or a Quarter Pounder? I have so many questions. I am just imagining the saddest two-cheeseburger meal in the world. It's like two four inch buns and a sad slice of cheese. That's very funny.
When you were reaching out to people, did you get any nos that were disappointing that you can tell us about?
Amy Odell: Well, people always tell you no. I mean, every biographer. That's just part of the problem. That’s every story, though. You just get kind of used to that. I did a story about Victoria's Secret for Time Magazine that I got so many nos. I was like, “Wow, this is weird. What is everybody hiding?” I didn't expect that to be so challenging. I think that's just part of journalism. Not everybody you want to talk to is going to talk to you
Drinks With Broads: On balance, did you find that you got more yeses than nos?
Amy Odell: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. I didn't count, but people are generally nice. Do you know what I mean? I got people who were close to her and I got a lot of people who were close to her at various points in her life. So I think that helped me tell a really complete story.
Another funny story — someone told me I should put this on a t-shirt, as though I have any time to make t-shirts — but one of her dad's friends told me about how Gwyneth grew up going between LA and New York, because she went to Spence on the Upper East Side for seventh grade on up. She had started out in Santa Monica. She went to another private school there, and then Blythe was like, “They need an East Coast education,” and they uproot and they go to New York in seventh grade. Gwyneth lands in Spence, and she's so cool and charismatic that the seniors want to be her friend.
Drinks With Broads: Oh my God.
Amy Odell: Yeah. Anyway, her dad was working on St. Elsewhere and all his projects, and they kept their home in LA, so they would go back and forth. And Bruce, her dad, he was into the finer things in life, so that helped me understand her taste, her courtroom style. That seems to have come from Bruce, because Blythe went to a Quaker high school. She was less materialistic maybe, but he would wear Zegna suits and carry a Bottega briefcase and wear cashmere socks. He was a well-appointed man, and when he flew with the kids, Gwyneth and her brother Jake, they would fly first class, and when Blythe flew with them, she would fly them coach. So I guess one time Blythe took them on the plane, and Gwyneth goes, “You mean we're not flying first class? We're flying NO class?”
Drinks With Broads: [laughs] Honestly, you should sell that t-shirt just because it's possible SHE will sell that t-shirt. She's pithy.
Is there anything in the book that you found really surprising? Is it even possible for someone like Gwyneth Paltrow, or Anna Wintour, for that matter, to surprise us, someone who's that famous?
Amy Odell: Yes, I was very surprised by so many of the conversations I had. But I think the most surprising thing overall is just that we all have seen Gwyneth on talk shows. We have such an image of her — and that wasn't the same person that so many people who have worked with her or known her saw. Yeah, she can be warm and bubbly and charismatic, and when she needs to make you feel like you are her best friend, she can do that. But she can also be cold, icy. People compared her to Anna Wintour. There are a couple moments in the book where she's talking to somebody in the office or at a party, and then they turn around and she makes a barf face.
So there's a side of her that you don't see in those curated media appearances. And people said at Goop, she had a lot of people working there who had been around the block, who had worked at Condé Nast, who would work at fashion brands, and they were like, “Yeah, she was just any busy editor-in-chief.” The way I would expect Anna Winter to be, you walk in her office, she's looking down, she wants you to just ask your question and she'll give you a quick answer, and then you'll leave and she'll go back to what she's working on. She apparently would tell people if she gave a directive and then they replied “thanks” or “on it,” she would be like, “It's a waste of time to send those emails.” She's very efficient with her time. This was something that she didn't like about working on films. Obviously she pulled back from film, and at a certain point in her career, she didn't like having her time wasted because when you go to a movie, you're sitting around all day. I guess that's why Sarah Jessica Parker has time to read two books a day or whatever.
Drinks With Broads: That's interesting. I could see that too, because her part in the Marvel movies became so tiny, I feel like that probably only made it worse. I'm here and I'm hurrying up and waiting to say three lines.
Amy Odell: Yeah, she's very efficient. She's very sensitive to having her time wasted. I mean, as we know, she takes on a lot. Goop has done so many things that so many media companies would've liked to do. They built their newsletter. They have a podcast, they have a media business — well, maybe less so now, but over its history, they had a book imprint. They had live events, various sponsorship deals, and Netflix shows. All these product lines. Any media company would've killed to have had all that action.
Drinks With Broads: How many times did you have to approach her for comment, and did you have to do it or did the publisher do it on your behalf?
Amy Odell: No, I went back and forth with her various reps over the course of the process, because they changed, and I would ask for an interview, might not hear back for a while and then ask again. They would reach back out, or I would reach back out. I don't know how many times they asked, but they formally declined as I was sort of nearing the end of the process. They said, “She's not going to do it,” or she's “not going to be available,” whatever. I mean, they decline politely.
Drinks With Broads: And that can't have been surprising.
Amy Odell: You never know who's going to talk to you. I don't know! I didn't know how it was going to shake out — but it did drag on a long time before they finally were like, “No, thank you.”
Drinks With Broads: I remember you and I chatted right before that Vanity Fair cover came out, and the timing was real inconvenient. You were trying to wrap up the book and it was a new interview, and she had new, semi-thoughtless quotes and some new spins on wellness and whatnot. Were you able to incorporate any of that in the book?
Amy Odell: A little bit of it, yeah, because I thought what she said about RFK and raw milk was particularly relevant because I sort of end the book talking about the impact of Goop on the wellness industry and the wellness industry's impact on the world. Because I think that that's really what her legacy is going to be, that she created this company, Goop, which jumpstarted the wellness industry. It was almost like a template for the wellness industry. She gave wellness this gorgeous, aspirational, luxurious aesthetic, and turned it into a world that people wanted to be a part of. People wanted to pay money, a lot of money, to be a part of that world. And then she also gave it a rhetoric and a language that I think sounds very familiar to people today. She was talking about toxins and how we need to purge toxins from our life. What is a toxin? I don't know how you really define that, but she was fixated on that in Goop and clean living and clean eating and clean beauty, really popularizing that. It's just part of the vernacular. I mean, obviously the things that she promoted, they didn't hew to science quite often, and she was unapologetic about that. And I interviewed her critics and experts who find this extremely frustrating. Dr. Jen Gunter, who is a vocal critic of hers and also writes on Substack and has written so many great stories about Goop over the years, she said that she thinks that Gwyneth's impact is showing how profitable pseudoscience can be, basically. And another expert said to me, “Facts aren't profitable.” And I think that's just so true, because it's harder to get facts to travel around the internet than insane, just fantastical, stuff. And Goop has posted some really fantastical stuff. There's this guy, Anthony William, the medical medium, who says he talks to spirits to diagnose cancer and stuff like that. They published a bunch of articles by him. You can't fact check that. But they got really good traffic. And the reason that was a good business model is because if they got a traffic spike, people might buy stuff on Goop. It could be a sweater, it could be a wellness product, a jade egg, but the more people you have coming there, the more orders you're going to get.
Drinks With Broads: I think it was a late night interview where she was sort of laughing off the Goop stuff, all, “I don’t know what the fuck we talk about,” and admitted she’d never done the jade egg. It is fascinating that she is so responsible for this boom. And yet at the same time, she seems both aware of the pseudoscience and unapologetic about it, or thinks it's funny.
Amy Odell: I don't think she's laughing at those people. I think that she believes this stuff is interesting. Another expert I interviewed who's so good,2 and he's always on social media debunking things — it's like a whole genre of creator now. It's just these people who go online and tell you the actual facts about health because it's become so confusing, even for well-educated people. He is an expert in health misinformation, and he wrote the book about Gwyneth called Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? He has visited all of these health and wellness gurus, and he studies this issue. He's a professor, and he said that research suggests that people who have narcissistic personality traits believe in this stuff, because they think, "Only I can find the truth." So it's like that's his informed speculation, I guess, about Gwyneth. But that makes sense.
I thought it was fascinating to learn about acting. To really ask people about what it's like to be a movie star. When you're a movie star, people just remove obstacles from your life. They remove problems. You go out to dinner, someone just gets the check for you. Your car doesn't show up, someone says, “Take mine.” You want to go throw your friend a bachelorette party? A movie studio says, “Take our plane.” Just the catering to is very extreme when you're someone like Gwyneth. And then also nobody tells you no, because people just want to be your friend, or they want something from you. They want to be your good side. And also when you're on a movie set and you're a big famous star, people just do everything in their power to make sure that you're happy, not only as a star, but also so that you deliver your best performance. So they're very careful about how they treat actors. Something that came up again and again is, as someone said to me, there's a reason actors are on that stage waiting for that applause. They need it. So a lot of them can be very insecure. I'm sure there's secure actors out there, so don't be offended at me if that's you. But yeah, so they just tiptoe around you. So people stop telling you “no,” and all the obstacles are removed from your life. Nobody tells you you're wrong.
I can see how you might come to see someone like Gwyneth if you're in that situation. And then also, her father died when she was 30, and it was really terrible and sad. And when he was diagnosed with throat cancer, she went looking for answers. Why did this happen? I think a lot of us do that. I lost my dad when I was 27. It was sudden and it was impossible to fathom. And it is just like a nightmare. And you just think, when am I going to wake up? And you just want an explanation and there's not one. But I think that she may have found some answers or some comfort in wellness.
Drinks With Broads: That's a generous take. And I mean that as a compliment. I agree with it. I disagree with her on so many things that and I tend to be a little cynical about her motives and her attitude. It is nice to have something more human presented.
Amy Odell: At the same time she is running a business. I don't get the sense that she thinks she's pulling the wool over her customer's eyes, but she is trying to sell things. She is running a business, and she does do the things that the wellness industry does well, which is instill fear in women about this dish soap or that shampoo and like, “Oh, instead buy our products, buy our more expensive products that are clean.” One expert was like, “If a product calls itself clean, that's a sign you should not buy it.”
Drinks With Broads: People want to be influenced. People want to buy stuff and hope that that will change their life, essentially.
Amy Odell: Exactly. The wellness industry in particular has fomented a real fear and people are scared. They spend money on what they think the solution is going to be. But the other thing point I really want to make about the wellness industry is that we're used to hearing about Big Tech and Big Food and Big Ag and all of those industries, but we really need to read wellness as Big Wellness because it's a $6.3 trillion industry globally. The global pharmaceutical industry is $1.6 trillion. A lot of the people in the wellness industry vilify western medicine and pharmaceuticals and healthcare generally for being profit motivated. One of the guys that Gwyneth has featured is Shaman Durak, who wrote in his book that doctors prescribe chemotherapy to cancer patients in part because they make money from it. So it's like sowing this distrust of western medicine. It's not to say that these industries are perfect, they're obviously not. There's obviously a lot of room for improvement, but we're not going to fix it with pseudoscience.
I just think it's crazy how big it's grown. It's only going to grow bigger. And the stuff that Goop was talking about, jade eggs and vagina steaming, all of that, that just seems tame by comparison to what's on social media now. I'm sure you guys see just the silly wellness content that's out there. Some of it's disturbing.
Drinks With Broads: Totally. “Don't eat any vitamin A, vitamin A toxicity will get you,” or whatever, like, where did you get that? And who are you? You're someone who “did the research.”
Amy Odell: Exactly. Or, “You need to be in the sun. Sunscreen is chemicals.” And that stuff is really dangerous because of, you know, skin cancer. You search “raw diet” on Instagram, you will see people chugging a dozen raw eggs and eating all kinds of raw meat. It's wild to me. So it's just gotten to be so much more extreme. I mean, I saw somebody eating a whole raw lamb kidney.
Drinks With Broads: Geez, you guys, that is bad for your pancreas. You need some vegetables.
Amy Odell: I asked one of my experts, I was like, “Tell me about raw milk.” And she was like, “All it's going to do is increase your risk of food-borne illnesses.”
Drinks With Broads: Sort of as a left turn, how do you literally keep all this research organized? I mean, do you have a serial-killer bulletin-board situation with string? How do you do it?
Amy Odell: I keep a spreadsheet of who I talk to and what we talked about. It's a lot of work because you make your timeline, and then you have to read through all the transcripts, and then you have to make an outline of your book pulling from the transcripts, and the timeline that you made. And then I write from there.
Drinks With Broads: How do you outline something like this? I'm assuming the book is more or less chronological.
Amy Odell: It's more like figuring out what you're going to put in and what you're not going to put in. That's the hard part. And then figuring out intros is always tricky. Those are the hard parts that you really want to nail. I feel like the intro and first chapter always gets rewritten.
Drinks With Broads: My theory is that it’s because when you sit down to reread your work, you always have the most energy when you're at the beginning and you're like, “Oh, I can fix this.” And then by the middle you're like, “Ugh, it's fine, I’m tired.”
Amy Odell: And I had editors, really good editors to talk through things with me, what makes sense to open with and close with.
Drinks With Broads: Your intro is the one time where you can abandon the chronological format too. You need the overview before you start getting granular.
Amy Odell: That's why it's so difficult. Because you have to open with something that's going to grab people right away, that's going to pose some questions for your reader that our book is going to hopefully answer. So I opened this with the jade egg. It's Gwyneth coming to her team after the jade egg controversy blew up, and her speaking to her team and saying, “Two thousand people are on the wait list.” And she's just like, “This shows the power of Goop. We're telling people about things.” I'm paraphrasing. So framing it as this big win, when experts are concerned that she's publishing this stuff and she's selling this product. And they got into trouble for this with regulators, but claiming that it can solve all these health issues.
Drinks With Broads: How long did the book take in terms of fact-checking? What does that process look like? Are there a team of fact-checkers or lawyers?
Amy Odell: You do fact-check and legal read. I have a great fact-checker who [also] worked with me on Anna. It's very intense. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of facts! There's a lot of facts in a book and a biography, which is good. That's the goal.
Drinks With Broads: Was there anything that just breaks your heart that you didn't get to include? Or was there anything that had to come out because in the end they didn't feel comfortable enough that it was checked or corroborated or whatever?
Amy Odell: The things that legally I couldn't put in, I can't tell you. But on the record, I did have some reporting that I thought was interesting. Her dad, who I said was fancy, he liked to go to Aspen to ski, and he would go once a year with his buddies, and once a year with his family, including Gwyneth. And when he would go to Aspen, he didn't like the restaurants. There was nowhere good for him to eat. So he asked his chef that he liked in LA if he would go to Aspen and open a restaurant there, so that when he went to ski, he had a good place to eat. So they opened the restaurant. He invested, I don't know. I mean it wasn't a small amount of money. Let's say a couple hundred thousand dollars. And this was in the eighties. So, inflation. So, they invest in this restaurant and Gwyneth would go with her dad to the restaurant to visit the chef, and she would, like, see his kids and she would sometimes answer the phone. She's precocious. So she would, like, take reservations or whatever. And he remembered a time when she farted on his daughter's head as a joke.
Drinks With Broads: Oh my God, that's great. That is a treasure.
Amy Odell: Getting into the whole story of that was just taking up a lot of space.
Drinks With Broads: I can't wait until that wellness trend comes from Goop. Passing gas on someone: It does wonders for someone else's skin!!
Let’s make a real conversational turn: What is your bet on whether Gwyneth gets a Vogue cover for her Oscar campaign [for Marty Supreme3], and do you think it's going to be strategically timed or structured to offset this book or in its own way, refute or address it?
Amy Odell: I am just thinking back to Oscar campaigns and if a Vogue cover figures into them. Isn't it more now about doing Actors on Actors? She's going to do Actors on Actors with Dakota Johnson or something.
Drinks With Broads: Yes. Of course. They can talk about Chris Martin. That's a great idea.
Amy Odell: You're welcome, Variety, for my idea. I feel like that's going to happen because Dakota had a buzzy movie.
Drinks With Broads: I'm just curious, even if it's not Vogue, what we think that's going to look like for her and if she's going to try to use it as damage control. I was sort of imagining her getting like this filmy “Gwyneth is going back to acting” October Vogue cover.
Amy Odell: So here's the thing though, with that. I don't think that puts her business in a great position, because if she's going back to acting, why would anyone buy Goop? I think the best case scenario for Goop is that it gets acquired at this point, which seems like it's going to be tough. But what I do know about Goop is that when Gwyneth promotes products personally, they sell a lot better than when she doesn't. I have a story in the book about how when Goop first launched, they had this LL Bean-esque white leather tote and no one was buying it. I mean, it's a white leather tote. And then she was like, “Oh, do I need to be photographed with it?” And then she was photographed with it and then they basically sold out of it. So that's how important she's to the company. So I think that would be risky.
Drinks With Broads: Do you think, as a human, she would rather move back into acting? You talk about the fact that wellness is her legacy and it's kind of a complicated and shady legacy at this point. Do you see her trying to do what she can with the company and then get away from it and try to recast herself?
Amy Odell: Well, I know she makes a lot of money from endorsement deals. She went to speak at a Saudi Arabian film festival and she got between one and $2 million to do that.4 My understanding is that she understands that the more visible she is in movies and stuff like that, the more endorsement deals she's going to get, and also the more visibility she'll get for Goop. So, I don't know. But I just think that Goop is kind of a risky acquisition, as many celebrity brands are, because it's a celebrity. Celebrities obviously have options. So if they decide to move on, you know what I mean? Is it a desirable business to acquire? I think she could turn it into a licensing business if she wanted to. And she wouldn't need to have all the infrastructure in the office, and all the staff probably. So it wouldn't cost as much to run. But will she do Vogue? I don't know. Because Anna's leaving. There's going to be so much pressure on [her replacement] to break with Anna's Vogue.
Drinks With Broads: That's a very good point. Gwyneth feels very Anna Wintour.
Amy Odell: She feels very much like that era, right?
Drinks With Broads: Absolutely.
So next, we wrote a little game. It's like This or That, but for Anna or Gwyneth. Number one being, which of them would you rather work for?
Amy Odell: … Anna? Anna. I always think Anna. Anna's more of a titan of industry.
Drinks With Broads: Which subject surprised you more?
Amy Odell: Gwyneth.
Drinks With Broads: Who would you rather be stuck in an elevator with?
Amy Odell: I'm going to say Gwyneth.
Drinks With Broads: Whose insult would hurt your feelings more? Who do you think could just really cut you?
Amy Odell: Anna.
Drinks With Broads: Which one do you think is most likely to have secretly read the biography, or who will secretly read the biography?
Amy Odell: Anna.
Drinks With Broads: Which one is more likely to have a Finsta, particularly one that makes fake complimentary comments about themselves?
Amy Odell: Okay. Well, I know that Anna has a Finsta.
Drinks With Broads: (loud squealing.) That's good gossip! That's really funny.
Amy Odell: I bet she doesn't comment, she's too busy for that. But I know she has a Finsta.
Drinks With Broads: Among the people that you interviewed, who seems the most respected even by the people who may not like them? Anna or Goop?
Amy Odell: That's tough. Probably Anna. Light edge for Anna.
Drinks With Broads: Which woman has a thicker skin?
Amy Odell: Gwyneth has received more hate, I would say. Maybe I'll take Gwyneth because she has received a lot more hate and a lot of it was just so sexist. I mean, Anna did too for sure. But I think with Gwyneth it was more acute and she really brushed that off.
Drinks With Broads: Anna feels a little more protected in an ivory tower, too. She’s in her skyscraper. Who do you think is most likely to still have their current job in five or 10 years? Gwyneth or Anna?
Amy Odell: I'm going to say Gwyneth. Anna turned 76 in November, and she's already taking a little step back. It's like a baby step back. But 10 years is a lot. Five years, I could see her maybe still being up there. Whereas Goop, it's had some bumps, but Goop could go on for a long time. You know what I mean? I don't really see Goop just folding up tomorrow.
Drinks With Broads: Who was harder to get people to talk about?
Amy Odell: Well, Anna gave me more help. She made access to her sources easy. But that said, it's always tough. Can I tie or no?
Drinks With Broads: You can tie on this one.
Amy Odell: I might say tie. Maybe Gwyneth, only because Anna provided help more with sources, and here I had to really dig.
Drinks With Broads: This last question comes from a reader, Andrea: Gwyneth seems to be an expert on sharing what she feels is strategic, like sex anecdotes, while not actually sharing much about herself, like her politics. It’s brilliant PR stuff. How will this book impact her strategy of controlling the message while maybe pretending she doesn't, or doesn't care?
Amy Odell: Your readers are so smart. You know, I don't know if it will impact her. I think that she'll continue doing what she's doing, which is, I mean, so far, I don't know what she thinks of it. You would have to ask her, but I don't know. And you never know what's going to be the most picked up item from a book. Because with the Anna book, I didn't think that her lunch order would be so viral. But that probably got talked about more than anything.
So with this book, I don't know. Is it going to be No Class? That's something she can embrace and lean into, right? Because it's fucking funny. And whenever I fly, I'm always in coach, so I'm like, “No class to Austin!” So that's something that could catch on in the culture. And then other stuff she, I dunno. She'll probably just ignore it.
Drinks With Broads: That's the thing that I think makes her such interesting subject material and I think why she's so compelling to people. I could see two outcomes. I could see her totally ignoring [the book] and moving on as normal and never really batting an eye. And then I could see her panning over from her breakfast table on Instagram to you wearing a t-shirt that says No Class and drinking mimosas. I really genuinely feel like either of those outcomes is equally plausible with her, because sometimes she really delivers a sense of humor and self-mockery and sometimes she doesn't.
Amy Odell: Well, yes. Maybe that's my destiny in life. It's to start a t-shirt business with Gwyneth Paltrow with "No Class" on it.
Drinks With Broads: Can't wait. It's going to be amazing.
Amy Odell: Maybe we could do a tote bag too. It'll be leather, it'll be white. It'll cost a lot of money.
Drinks With Broads: This is great. We knew her when, you guys!
Gwyneth: The Biography is out today, at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Bookshop, and — best of all!! — your local independent bookstore.
ICYMI…
Last Call
— Brandon Routh, onetime Superman and former Legend(s) of Tomorrow, was papped paying for parking on what appeared to be a date with Rachael Leigh Cook. She is teeny! He is so tall! But she is also All That. I’m happy for them. — H
— The original screenwriters of Bend It Like Beckham are collaborating on a sequel, to (ideally) be timed for both the film’s 25th anniversary in 2027 and the next World Cup for women’s teams. I initially side-eyed this the way I do all such revivals, but it’s true that the women’s game has changed a LOT since 2002 and they’re consulting with USWNT coach Emma Hayes, so maybe they’ll come up with something great to say? Gurinder Chadha says the original stars are aware but waiting to see a script before they sign on, so it’s being written on faith right now. Write like the wind! (Also, you know they’d be able to get REAL Beckham for it this time, not just a lookalike filmed on a high-up Heathrow walkway.) — H
— Elle UK had a great piece with Winona Ryder, in which she mentions that even female directors are telling her she needs Botox (!!), recalls the time she essentially threw herself at Al Pacino (her words), says great things about Laura Dern, and tells a story about a total shithole director: She remembers telling the producers of a movie that the director was being inappropriate with her and asking if they could talk to him. ‘The next day I had a big scene,’ she says. The director approached her on set to discuss said scene, then changed his tone to a whisper. ‘He came up to me, and he was like, “OK, so, um, if we just try it like – you f*cking c*nt, I’m gonna destroy your f*cking life.” OK? So let’s just do it like that?’ And I had to f*cking act. She is too nice to name that name, but she did note that her brother was a PA on the movie, so:
If it’s her brother Uri Horowitz, he’s credited as a PA only on 1994’s Reality Bites, directed by Ben Stiller, who was also Winona’s costar; don’t think it’s Ben because she made a cameo in Zoolander years later.
If it’s her half-brother Jubal Palmer, then he’s credited as a PA on 2002’s Mr. Deeds (director: Steven Brill) and 2000’s Lost Souls (director: Janusz Kaminski)5, and as “additional crew” on 2006’s A Scanner, Darkly (Richard Linklater). I’m putting my money on Brill because it would not surprise me if some of those early Adam Sandler sets were total boys’ clubs, but that is purely a guess.6 Thoughts? — H
This would include final copy edits and pass pages, etc.
Timothy Caulfield
Or as I call it, Timmee Chalamet Ping Pong Sex Movie — H
And she just got paid, presumably, to pretend to be the spokesperson for Astronomer, a.k.a. the Coldplay CEO’s company — H
Best known for being Spielberg’s genius cinematographer, I cannot IMAGINE it’s him.
Brill was also INSANE during this whole drama with the movie Fanboys. It’s GOT to be him. — J
Fantastic interview from everyone; thanks so much for this! I can laugh at a lot of what Goop pushes on her site, but the woo-woo wellness crap enrages me. Shaman Durak can fall into a bottomless pit with his "chemotherapy is prescribed so doctors make money" nonsense. No, chemotherapy is prescribed because it saves lives like mine. Without my various protocols, I'd have been dead years ago.
I cannot wait to read this book later today!
Mostly I am here for the 90s gossip, but the wellness part is very compelling, and alarming. I can see where women become interested in that space, given the statistics on female pain being ignored, for example, or how medical studies focus more on men, but clearly we have gotten to a dangerous place (vaccines, raw milk, general mistrust of medical experts). I keep wondering what it will take for wellness to lose its toehold and am afraid the answer will turn out to be something catastrophic, like a huge number of kids dying of measles. It’s awful.
Winona, please name names!