Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial biography: From her turbulent sex life with Ben Affleck and disdain for Brad Pitt to an iron grip on Goop

She’s barely over 50 years old, but Gwyneth Paltrow is such a significant figure in popular culture — Oscar-winning actress, controversial businesswoman, daughter and goddaughter of Hollywood power players, girlfriend and wife of celebrities, a ubiquitous figure on social media — that her career is ripe for a biography. And the first complete book about her, simply titled Gwyneth: The Biography (Gallery Books), hit bookstores in the United States on Tuesday, July 29, just in time to become one of the summer’s blockbuster hits; before it was even published, it was already at number 1 in its category on Amazon. Because the book in question about the star, at a whopping 448 pages, delivers everything a good biography should: love, sex, luxury, drama, family trauma, workplace conflict, and a glittering world only accessible in Hollywood.

To add insult to injury, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t an autobiography, nor even an authorized biography: it’s a book written by Amy Odell (also the author of a well-known memoir about another indecipherable icon of recent decades, Anna Wintour), but without Paltrow’s permission. The Texan journalist claims to have based her work on some 220 interviews with various people close to the actress’s circle — not with her, or with her family and friends, but with acquaintances and current and former employees. Even so, it was enough to construct a complete and complex portrait of Paltrow.

The author hasn’t spoken to her subject, she admits, but she has tried. “I was in touch with her team over the course of the three-year process,” Odell explains in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. “Does Gwyneth want to talk to me? Right when I finished, I got a no,” she said. She also doesn’t know if she’s read it: “I have no idea. You’d have to ask her.” But Paltrow, of course, doesn’t answer that question. She’s had enough of seeing her name in the headlines of most American media recently, from the gossip classics Page Six and People to AP, The Washington Post, and The Cut, New York Magazine’s lauded trend magazine, which recently ran a headline: “Fine, I’ll read the Gwyneth Paltrow biography.”

The truth is that they reveal stories about Paltrow that help us understand a little more about her. For example, her family history. As a well-off child, the daughter of an actress and a producer (Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow), she always had access to the world of cinema, and from a young age she took to the stage at the festivals where her mother performed, with great success. She was raised among the Hollywood elite: Steven Spielberg is her godfather, Madonna had been a close friend since high school — until, according to the biographer, at a dinner party, she and Chris Martin got fed up with her daughter Lourdes’ rude behavior and broke off ties — and, after being rejected from the prestigious Vassar College, thanks to Michael Douglas and a few words of recommendation, she managed to get into the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she began a degree course that she never finished (something that, apparently, she now finds frustrating).

Odell says that when she was very young, she once had to fly economy with her mother and threw a tantrum. “She’s always lived this very glamorous, luxurious life,” Odell noted. “But she’s never really apologized for that. She’s just like, ‘This is who I am, and this is what I know, and you can take it or leave it.’”

The death of her father in October 2002 was an insurmountable, excruciating blow for her. She suffered as his throat cancer progressed, until Bruce Paltrow passed away while she was with friends in Rome, celebrating her 30th birthday, something the author says affected her “enormously”: “She has called her dad the love of her life.” The fact that he couldn’t eat and was living with his illness made her “look for answers,” Odell says; hence her interest in alternative and holistic treatments, which have made her the entrepreneur she is today thanks to Goop.

For Odell, it was her father’s death, combined with her friends beginning to formalize their relationships, that led her to marry Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, in December 2003, without telling her family or friends. But for the author, they were never the couple they were made out to be. “Paltrow was in a particular place because she was grieving,” Odell recounts, as reported by Page Six, and Martin “was there for her at a really difficult time… people said they just didn’t seem to really gel or really have the best chemistry or have that much in common. Her friends were settling down and she wanted that too and so she found that with Chris.”

The actress broke new ground with her marriage, and also with her separation and the famous “conscious uncoupling” that went around the world. So conscious that she got rid of the bed they shared as soon as she could: “I definitely didn’t want that mattress around,” employees heard her say at the Goop office, as Odell reports. “I had to get that energy out of the house. I had to change that mattress. Ew.” Her current husband, Brad Falchuk, he says he’s delighted to be the famous actress’ partner and is enthusiastic about his role.

But before those marriages, Paltrow had two highly publicized relationships. First, with Brad Pitt, whom she dated from 1994 to 1997, after meeting on the set of Seven. Apparently, she had the option of doing that film or another with Keanu Reeves, and her agents basically presented the choice as who she wanted to date next. She chose Pitt. And, although at one point she considered him the love of her life, she was ultimately disappointed by him. According to Odell, Paltrow despised him; she thought he was “dumber than a sack of shit”: “She thought she was smarter, better educated, more sophisticated,” than Pitt, who was raised in the American Midwest. In fact, she ended up falling for Hugh Grant on the set of Emma. Although they eventually became engaged, Paltrow left Pitt because she didn’t feel ready for marriage.

Then came Ben Affleck. As the author implies, their relationship was tremendously sexual; in fact, Paltrow once said on a podcast that he was “technically excellent” in bed. That relationship brought out her most sexual side. “It was the raunchy side of her that her friends knew well, but the public didn’t see,” Odell writes in her book. But although she boasted about their sex life — American tabloids have even delved into her preferred practices — he “didn’t always reciprocate her affection,” and the actress’s friends warned her as much. “Their physical chemistry couldn’t overcome his self-destructive impulses, which may have even included cheating on her,” the author recounts, explaining that Affleck was also going through a difficult time at the beginning of their relationship, when he “struggled with alcoholism and a gambling problem.” She grew frustrated when he preferred to play video games rather than going out with her.

This sexual side of Paltrow isn’t entirely unknown. The creation and growth of her company, Goop, have demonstrated how she’s known how to play with and capitalize on everything related to sex, such as extremely expensive jade eggs for vaginal insertion. “She’s someone who has monetized her sexuality and her sex life,” argues Odell, referring to her most famous product: “She sold a candle called ‘This Smells Like My Vagina,’ and she’s talked really frankly about getting [oral sex] lessons.” Her parking space at the Goop offices in Santa Monica, California, is called G. Spot. When she launched her travel app, she made a similar play on words, under the slogan “Call it G. Spotting.” She herself told a company executive: “Everybody will make fun of me for being an idiot and we’ll have the 10,000 downloads we need right there.” And so it proved.

Goop is perhaps her greatest achievement. According to Odell, neither she nor the rest of the Goop team are bothered by criticism, ridicule, or lawsuits. When people question whether she’s really in charge or just providing a name and face, Odell is clear that she is. In fact, sometimes she’s more than a little bit in charge: when someone left a few uncomfortable drops of urine on the office toilet seat, she sent a message in the company group chat: “Make sure to clean up after yourselves.”

According to her employees, the work environment was sometimes oppressive, with low pay and long hours. Paltrow can be as charismatic and charming as she is controlling, and at times, somewhat distant, or even unfriendly; for example, she doesn’t like it when her employees mispronounce her name, or are annoying or flattering toward her. Some report feeling “intimidated by her perfection and reluctant to assert themselves.” “Either way, almost no one — Goop’s board included — was willing to tell her no,” says Odell. There isn’t a “lot of tolerance for imperfection,” she asserts.

For the author, in fact, it’s more this entrepreneurial side to her that will make her go down in history, rather than her acting career, although she seems to be returning to it. She also says Paltrow’s greatest hope is for her 21-year-old daughter, Apple, to inherit her legacy. It remains to be seen whether she’ll ever manage to fill her mother’s shoes. Because you either “love her or hate her,” Odell reflected in Vanity Fair. “She has been a cultural influencer for 30 years.” It’s only natural that she considers writing about her a “fascinating experience from beginning to end,” as she told People, stating that she was “surprised by what my research revealed, and I can’t wait to share it with readers.“ Those 448 pages are now available.

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