Author Amy Odell on Chronicling the Life of Gwyneth Paltrow, From '90s Fashion Icon to Wellness Mogul, in Gwyneth: The Biography

0:10Welcome to the Who What Wear podcast, your direct line to the designers, stylists, beauty experts, editors, and tastemakers who are shaping the ever-evolving world of fashion. I'm Who What Wears co-founder and chief content officer, Hillary Kerr. And today I'm speaking with the fashion and culture journalist and author, Amy O'Dell. Amy first joined me on the pod in 2022 to chat about her biography of legendary Vogue editor, Anna Wintour. And now she's back to discuss her newest book, Gwyneth, a page turning biography of the Oscar award-winning actress and Goop founder, Gwyneth Paltrow. In this highly researched and detailed account, Amy goes behind the scenes of Gwyneth's life of cultural influence, from 90s style icon to polarizing wellness mogul.

1:01But how do you write a biography about a woman who won't agree to an interview? How do you find sources when so many people are afraid to go on the record? How do you paint a full picture of a complicated woman who is loved and triggers so many people. Amy's here to answer all of those questions and more. It's all coming up on Who, What, Where.

1:28First of all, welcome back to the show. I am so excited to have you here in no small part because one, you're a fascinating guest, but two, because we are here to talk about your newest project. I have been feverishly reading, like cannot put it down, Gwyneth the biography. It is so fabulous and hugely compelling and thought provoking. And I have been harassing my husband with tidbits from it and our company Slack with information from it. It is so good. So I just wanted to say personally, thank you for writing such an excellent book. This is a delight.

2:06Amy Odell:Thank you. You're making me feel like a million bucks. I mean, it's an amazing book. Your last biography, the incredible intimate biography of Anna Winter was phenomenal as well. Why did you decide to focus on Gwyneth Paltrow for this project? Yeah. So there are not that many people who have had real cultural impact and Gwyneth Paltrow, love her or hate her, has had real cultural impact. She's been in the public eye for 30 years. She's someone who people have been magnetically attracted to and who has also been very, very polarizing. And I interviewed more than 220 sources from people who worked with her at Goop, people who worked with her on films, friends.

2:50Amy Odell:And I wanted to pull back the curtain on who she really is because countless glossy magazine profiles have been written about her, as you and your listeners well know. And what I learned is that those profiles really only scratch the surface of who she is. So talk to me about that number, 220 people you interviewed for the book, which is close to the number of sources you spoke to for Anna, the biography. I mean, it's such an overwhelming number. So talk to me about the process this time and how it differed from writing about Anna. When I wrote the book about Anna Wintour, she made access to her friends and colleagues easy.

3:29Amy Odell:And for this book, I really had to dig. But I interviewed a lot of people who I think had probably never been asked about Gwyneth before. And I think that the book reveals a person who is really complicated and multifaceted. I think a lot of the profiles that have been written about her, it's a lot of her voice coming through. And her voice is in the book, obviously, through the primary sources that I found and the deep archival research that I did. But we also hear a lot from the people around her. And I was really surprised to hear from those people that the Gwyneth Paltrow that I thought I knew from watching her so many times on talk shows and reading so many of these stories, it just wasn't really the same Gwyneth Paltrow that a lot of these people saw.

4:10Which I think makes sense in so many ways because I think there has to be a performance aspect to anyone who's in the public eye. Who were you pleasantly surprised to get on the record?

4:20Amy Odell:I talked on the record to directors of A Perfect Murder, Shakespeare in Love. she put forward two on the record sources who are included in the book. I think to your point, like it completely makes sense that when she's not on a talk show, she's not going to act the way she does when she's on a talk show. Like we have different modes when we're in public and when we're not. And when she's running Goop as the CEO, she can be really cold and aloof and icy. And people compared her to Anna Wintour kind of for that reason. And they just said, you know, the way that I would expect Anna Wintour to be busy if I had a question for her in the middle the day and I worked for her.

4:55Amy Odell:That's just how it was with Gwyneth. She's in her office. She's busy. She's running the company. You might come in and the attitude is kind of, ask her question. Let's get it over with. Let's move on because I have other things to do here. So I think that's kind of her office persona. Which to be honest, feels like something that is just a CEO persona to a degree. A CEO is busy and has a lot of stuff to do and might not necessarily have time for everyone's question. It's something I've seen throughout the course of my career as well. You also mentioned just a minute ago about your deep archival research.

5:32Obviously, you did an insane amount of reading and sleuthing for this. How do you go about finding all of that archival research? What was your process like?

5:41Amy Odell:Yeah, so you just read everything you can in a news archive, like LexisNexis or something like that, as unsexy as that sounds. I love LexisNexis. It's very sexy. you go through and you make like a timeline basically and that timeline is longer than the book and I pull out any quote from her that I think could be used any quote from anybody else and just like the broad strokes of what was going on when the movies were released what the reviews were I pulled out quotes from the reviews that I might want to use so that you get a sense of like how the movie did so that alone took about a year and then when you're done with all your interviewing you have to put your two timelines together like everything you got from all your interviews and the archive and turned it into a book.

6:19Talk to me about finding that wide web of sources that you spoke to. Where did you start? How complex was it? Was it like certain people got you to other people or was there sort of a white whale where you were trying to get X to go on the record or whatever it may be?

6:35Amy Odell:I think all of the above. Biographies are never easy and they require a lot of legwork and a lot of phone calls and follow-ups and all of that. You know, as I said, I was able to get people from all aspects of her life, from her childhood, from her film career. She's had so many different phases to her life and her career. And I feel like I covered all sides of it from her parents, because you have to start with her parents. And Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner, very successful producer and renowned actress. And you have to be able to understand them if you're going to understand Gwyneth. So starting from there and going up to the present day, I actually only finished the book about two months ago.

7:17Amy Odell:So it's pretty up to date. So Gwyneth declined to be interviewed for this, but was sort of dangling it up until the last second. And her team did offer to participate if they were allowed to fact check the book, which is so fascinating. If she had said yes to an interview, what were you most interested in asking her directly? There was a question that I asked a lot of people for each book that they kind of struggled to answer. With Gwyneth, the question was, what drives her? What motivates her? And I heard a lot of different answers to that question. And maybe the actual answer is a combination of these things.

7:54Amy Odell:Some people said money. Some people said she likes being CEO. She likes going into her company every day and running the show. Some people said she thrives in a way on being in the public eye and wondered if she knows herself without being in the public eye. She's always been in it to some degree. For 30 years. Yeah. I mean, I will say her parents did keep her and her brother Jake away from cameras, I guess, to the extent that that was possible because she wanted to be a child actor. And they said, no, you need to go to school and be a child. When you're an adult, if you want to be an actor, we'll support you.

8:28Amy Odell:And as I described in the book, the road to that was a little bit more fraught than the way I just described it. Yeah, and her dad cut her off and said, you have to make your own way. I mean, there's always some net to it. But I thought it was really interesting that she had all of these sort of small-time jobs and was sort of piecing it together, which I was not fully aware of that. And I thought that was such an interesting tactic that he had taken and that he was really upfront with her about certain things that maybe other people couldn't be. Well, she went to Spence on the Upper East Side of New York, seventh grade through senior year, and graduated from there.

9:01Amy Odell:It's a very elite, prestigious school. She was rejected from Vassar, which would have been maybe an easy school for many Spence students, but she was not academically inclined. She always knew she wanted to be a star and an actor, and she wasn't interested in academics. So they called in a favor through their family friend, Michael Douglas, so that she could go to UC Santa Barbara. She does basically a semester there and she just wants to act. One summer before she started at Santa Barbara, she went to Williamstown Theater Festival because her mom wanted to keep her out of trouble that summer because she liked to party.

9:34Amy Odell:She does this play, it's called Picnic, and she's so good in it that her dad says, you were so amazing in this play. And I think that you should leave school and like now's the time to pursue it. She had been working with a manager leading up to that named Joanne Horowitz, who I talked to, who also represented Kevin Spacey. And she told me that Bruce was furious that she was working with Gwyneth because he wanted Gwyneth in school. And he viewed her as leading Gwyneth away from her education. But her parents, having worked in the entertainment industry, they know how fickle it is, how hard it is.

10:13Amy Odell:So they wanted her to have that fallback plan. But then also to strike while the iron was hot. Exactly. Her dad cuts her off. She says she's scrounging for quarters to buy Starbucks and walking to save on gas money. At the same time, she was offered a part in a Vanilla Ice movie. Her parents were like, you don't want to be in this. Basically, it's trash. I'm paraphrasing, but they wanted her to do highbrow stuff like they did. So she says no. And it's like, huh, that's interesting. You're scrounging for change, but your destiny is so clear that you feel like you can turn down this movie. Which I feel like is interesting because the topic of nepotism comes up quite a bit in the book, and it's a little bit of a chicken or the egg situation.

10:58It sounds like there was natural talent there, but then also she was raised in a very unusual environment after spending so much time researching her upbringing. What's your take on it?

11:11Amy Odell:So I think there were a couple of things going on. One, she did have talent, so that was not in dispute. But, you know, as the daughter of Blythe Danner, people were telling me about how she did a production of The Seagull at Williamstown Theater Festival in the mid-70s when Gwyneth was about two. And they were between, for the part of Nina, Blythe Danner and Meryl Streep. And the staff at the festival thought Blythe Danner was the best. So that just tells you the level that Blythe Danner is on. And Bruce Paltrow, her father, his biggest hit was probably St. Elsewhere, the 80s TV show about Boston Hospital.

11:46Amy Odell:And it wasn't the most watched show, but it was regarded for its quality and its great writing and things like that. So I think that helps you understand how Gwyneth ended up starting out in indie films and like working with Miramax and doing highbrow stuff to get her start in her career and why she was really loath to do these mass market movies like Iron Man, which of course she eventually did do. But she would say things in these early interviews like, oh, I don't want to be Sandra Bullock or something like that. I was so surprised to read that too. I was like, oh, that's an interesting name check.

12:15But what I will say is,

12:16Amy Odell:so, you know, given that this is her pedigree, she knows all these casting directors just from being around her parents and going to these theater festivals and movie premieres. And her godfather. Her godfather is Steven Spielberg. So this is her milieu. So these casting directors know her when she's auditioning for parts, like they want to see her. And the way it was described to me is like you always saw the kids of these people in the entertainment industry who were successful because you knew that they were going to be comfortable if they got the job. They wouldn't arrive to a movie set and like freak out and get nervous because they've been around it their whole life.

12:48There's an understanding of set etiquette that they had that takes years to develop that they just had from day one because of growing up on sets, right? Yeah.

12:57Amy Odell:And I also think that if you're a casting director, of course you want to discover the next Blythe Danner. And why wouldn't you assume that her daughter could be that person, which I think she was in a way, you know? So nepotism definitely helped her. And there's instances in the book where people are bitter about that, you know, this is how the world works. And I also feel like nepotism opens the door, but being talented and being interesting is what keeps you there because it can't keep you in a career if you stink. That's right. She had to deliver and she did. You're not going to win the Oscar just because you're someone's kid, right?

13:36True, true. I also thought it was so interesting. I loved reading all of the details about her adolescence, about her time at Spence, about the way that she would style her uniform, about the high school years. It's so deeply revealing. And it felt like she had a level of confidence turning up at school when she felt like it, not when school started. And that obviously could have a polarizing effect on people. Of all of the stuff that you uncovered about her early life, what was the most surprising?

14:05Amy Odell:I was just kind of intrigued about the general dynamic at Spence, which I think informed her character in an important way, because her earlier life was in California, where her parents were working. They had a house in Santa Monica. She went to a school there where there were a lot more Nepo babies, for lack of a better term. And coming to New York, the Nepo babies were different. They were like finance Nepo babies or like big law Nepo babies, billionaires, heads of state Nepo babies, literal princesses from Greece. One of them interviewed Queen Elizabeth for their senior project. So very different milieu, but also you get a great education there.

14:46Amy Odell:And a lot of those girls go on to Ivy leagues. And I was told that Gwyneth was kind of bothered by the fact that she never got her degree because there is the scene in the book when she goes to her Spence reunion and she seems to feel kind of insecure about it. And by this point, she had been engaged to Brad Pitt. She was so successful. She'd won an Oscar. Yeah. And it didn't feel like enough. And I think that this group of people, they didn't act impressed by her. I just don't think it carried the same weight kind of in the world of the Upper East Side. I love the bit. It's like her somewhat high school nemesis.

15:20It's like, oh, what have you been up to? And that cut so deeply, like, what do you mean? What have I been up to?

15:25Amy Odell:And this is something interesting about the dynamic of her being a CEO of Goop. When you're an actor on that level, people just remove problems and obstacles from your existence. If you go out to dinner, someone picks up the check. If you want to take your girlfriends for a bridal shower in St. Bart's, a movie studio gives you a plane. When you're on set and you have to film your scenes, everyone makes you feel amazing and caters to you and pampers you so that when you get in front of those cameras, you deliver your very best and you feel like a million bucks. And that's the world that she was living in.

15:59Amy Odell:So that if you go to your reunion and people are like, oh, you're my high school friend, instead of like, oh my God, it's quite it. You know what I mean? Not fan behavior. So I feel like everyone knows the big main beats of Gwyneth's life, the Oscar win for Shakespeare in Love, the relationships with Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck and Chris Martin, her goop era. Was there an era of hers that you found particularly fascinating when you were doing your research or felt like had not been really examined or explored as much? I was interested in the period after she won her Oscar because that's when the press really turned on her.

16:36Amy Odell:And she tried to shift her image, albeit, I think, unsuccessfully. So she had done these period films, Shakespeare in Love and Emma, which came out in 1996. And she really succeeded in these movies where she played kind of an upper crust, aristocratic, ice princess type person, like in A Perfect Murder. She's a trophy wife who lives on like an Upper East Side, glamorous, enormous duplex, married to a super rich guy carrying a Kelly bag and Great Expectations. She's the rich girl who falls in love with like the guy who's not rich. She wanted to show a different side of herself. So my sources said, you know, she would curse a lot and she has this like kind of foul mouth and it was so fun to hang out with her.

17:20Amy Odell:And she wanted to show the world that she could do that as an actress too. So she tries comedies. She decides to work with the Farrelly brothers and she does Shallow Hell. And she thought that that movie would draw attention to fat shaming, although it did, but I think not in the way she intended for it to. Can I say another part that I was sort of surprised by, and it makes sense, but didn't really dawn on me until reading it in the book, which is I didn't realize how much sorrow and loss and the trajectory of losing her father, how tied up that was with how much she was working and what she was working on.

17:54and was like winning the Oscar, but also having her father who she loved so much being ill. And then, you know, like we all love the talented Mr. Ripley, but she was sort of stuck on set for a long time when her dad was ill. All of that era where it was like such a professional high and then the difficulty around it and then losing her father. I didn't realize how closely all of those things were happening as well as like a big breakup with Ben Affleck had just preceded that win. And looking back, she was so young and that is so much to process all at once. I think at the time we certainly weren't having these more nuanced conversations about women, actresses, the hardships that go along with it, like maybe that people weren't really as understanding.

18:40And my heart felt so sad for her to have this amazing professional experience. And then also this heartbreak bouncing up so close against each other.

18:49Amy Odell:Absolutely. So she won the Oscar. She was 26 years old when she won, which is so young to reach the pinnacle of your industry. And part of the reason I think she broke down is because her father had been ill and I don't think it had been really public yet. So people didn't know. And I think the tears seemed rather melodramatic, but there was a lot going on there. And I have real empathy for her. I lost my father when I was 27 and she lost Bruce when she was 30. I know what it feels like to lose somebody unexpectedly and not have any explanation for it and how hard that is. And I think that she went looking for answers as many of us do, and she found them in wellness.

19:29Which is really an attempt at control when you feel out of control. So while Gwyneth is unquestionably polarizing in many ways, I think that if you are a fashion person, there is a very strong likelihood that you have had at least one image of her pinned to a style mood board at some point in your life. I know I have had many of those. And I loved how you trace the history of her personal style all the way back to her childhood. I love the details about how she would customize her uniform at Spence and how she understood how to navigate relationships with Calvin Klein and with Valentino. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about her style trajectory from school uniforms to those minimalist 90s style icon days.

20:17And I also think it's worth noting she did a lot of that work without a stylist because that just wasn't the standard. Wasn't a thing. Yeah.

20:25Amy Odell:She had to wear a uniform to spend. You could wear like a gray skirt or gray trousers and a white top and she would find a twist on the uniform. I guess they all hiked up their skirts, but she would wear something with lace or cowboy boots. And she has said that having to wear a uniform informed her sense of minimalism because a uniform is spare. And she just got used to that. And I also think her dad influenced her because her dad had really good taste in clothes and home interiors. He studied art and painting at Tulane and he carried Batega of briefcases, wore cashmere socks, Xenia suits. So I think Gwyneth is also an extension of him and her sort of refined stealth wealth taste.