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The Who What Wear Podcast
Author Amy Odell on Chronicling the Life of Gwyneth Paltrow, From '90s Fashion Icon to Wellness Mogul, in Gwyneth: The Biography
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- [00:00]
Hilary Kerr
Foreign.
- [00:11]
Amy O'Dell
Welcome 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 Hilary Kerr, and today I'm speaking with the fashion and culture journalist and Author and Amy O'. Dell. Amy first joined me on the pod in 2022 to chat about her biography of legendary Vogue editor Anna Winter. 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. But 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?
- [01:29]
Hilary Kerr
First 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, I 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.
- [02:07]
Amy O'Dell
Thank you. You're making me feel like a million bucks.
- [02:11]
Hilary Kerr
I mean, it's an amazing book. Your last biography, the incredible intimate biography of Anna Wintour, was phenomenal as well. Why did you decide to focus on Gwyneth Paltrow for this project?
- [02:23]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah, so there are not that many people who have had real cultural impact. And Gwyneth Paltrow, love her or hate her, has had 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, you know, people who worked with her at goop, people who worked with her on films, friends. 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.
- [03:05]
Hilary Kerr
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.
- [03:23]
Amy O'Dell
When I wrote the book about Anna Wintour, she made access to her friends and colleagues easy. 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.
- [04:10]
Hilary Kerr
Saw, which 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?
- [04:20]
Amy O'Dell
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 of the day and I worked for her, like, that's just how it was with Gwyneth. Like, she's in her office, she's busy, she's running the company. You might come in and the attitude is kind of ask your 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.
- [05:13]
Hilary Kerr
Like something that is just a CEO Persona to a degree. Like 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 said seen throughout the course of my career as well. You also mentioned just a minute ago about your deep archival research. Obviously 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?
- [05:42]
Amy O'Dell
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.
- [05:50]
Hilary Kerr
It's very sexy.
- [05:52]
Amy O'Dell
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 stripes 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 turn it into a book.
- [06:20]
Hilary Kerr
Talk 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?
- [06:35]
Amy O'Dell
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. 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, so it's pretty up to date.
- [07:20]
Hilary Kerr
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 to directly?
- [07:40]
Amy O'Dell
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. Some people said money. Some people said she likes being CEO, like, 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.
- [08:11]
Hilary Kerr
She's always been in it to some.
- [08:12]
Amy O'Dell
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. And as I describe in the book, the road to that was a little bit more fraught than the way I just described it. Yeah.
- [08:34]
Hilary Kerr
And like, 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 interest that she had all of these sort of like 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.
- [08:55]
Amy O'Dell
Well, she went to Spence on the Upper east side of New York, seventh grade through senior year and graduated from there. That'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. 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. So they wanted her to have that fallback plan, but then also to strike.
- [10:17]
Hilary Kerr
While the iron was hot.
- [10:19]
Amy O'Dell
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. Like, basically, it's trash. I'm paraphrasing. But they wanted her to do high brow stuff like they did. So she says no. And it's like, huh, that's interesting. Like you're scrounging for change, but your destiny is so clear that you feel like you can turn down this movie.
- [10:50]
Hilary Kerr
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. Like, it sounds like there was natural talent there. But then also she was raised in a very unusual. After spending so much time researching her upbringing, what's your take on it?
- [11:12]
Amy O'Dell
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 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. 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 high brow stuff to get her start in her career. And why she was really loathe 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.
- [12:12]
Hilary Kerr
I was so surprised to read that too. I was like, ooh, that's an interesting name check.
- [12:16]
Amy O'Dell
But what I will say is, 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.
- [12:48]
Hilary Kerr
There'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.
- [12:57]
Amy O'Dell
Right? Yeah. And I also think that if you're a casting director, of course you want to discover the next thing. 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.
- [13:17]
Hilary Kerr
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.
- [13:28]
Amy O'Dell
That's right. She had to deliver and she did. You're not gonna win the Oscar just cause you're someone's kid, right?
- [13:37]
Hilary Kerr
True, 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. She turning up at school when she felt like it, not when school started. And like 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?
- [14:06]
Amy O'Dell
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.
- [14:32]
Hilary Kerr
Billionaires, heads of state Nepo babies.
- [14:35]
Amy O'Dell
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, 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.
- [15:17]
Hilary Kerr
I love the bit. It's like her somewhat high school nemesis is like, oh, what have you been up to? And that cut so deeply. Like, what do you mean, what have I been up to?
- [15:26]
Amy O'Dell
And this is something interesting about the dynamic of her being a CEO of goop. You know, when you're an actor on that level, like, 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. Barts, 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. So then 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 Gwyneth.
- [16:04]
Hilary Kerr
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?
- [16:31]
Amy O'Dell
I was interested in the period after she won her Oscar because that's when the press really turned on her 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. 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.
- [17:38]
Hilary Kerr
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. And the trajectory of losing her father, how tied up that was with how much she was working and what she was working on. It 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 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. And 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.
- [18:49]
Amy O'Dell
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, which.
- [19:30]
Hilary Kerr
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 traced the history of her personal style all the way back to her childhood. I loved 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? And I also think it's worth noting she did a lot of that work without a stylist because that just wasn't.
- [20:23]
Amy O'Dell
The standard, wasn't a thing. Yeah, 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, you know, 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 Bottega briefcases, wore cashmere socks, Zegna suits. So I think Gwyneth is also an extension of him and her sort of refined, stealth, wealth, taste. But her first real designer sort of alliance was with Calvin Klein, where she encountered Carolyn Bessette, who wasn't yet Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Carolyn Bessette was dressing the VIPs, and Calvin Klein liked dressing Gwyneth. She was dating Donovan Leach and he did some work for them. So she was around. And Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who was working with VIPs, and that's how she met JFK Jr would work with Gwyneth I guess that Gwyneth annoyed her. So they would see pictures of Gwyneth in the newspapers and she would make cutting remarks about them. But can we also talk about. Because nobody's asked me about this yet, and I really want to talk about it. Her MTV Movie Awards red suit. That's so famous.
- [21:48]
Hilary Kerr
Yes, that's my next question. So one of the main looks that I had on my mood board growing up was the red velvet and powder blue shirt. It was Tom Ford for Gucci for the VMAs in 1996. That changed the chemistry of my brain in some way. What was your favorite part about that story or that look or that information coming together?
- [22:10]
Amy O'Dell
That look is totally iconic.
- [22:13]
Hilary Kerr
And a rejection of Harvey, right?
- [22:15]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah. So Emma came out that summer. That was her first leading role. And Miramax was trying to make her a star. And Harvey was kind of dangling the idea of her getting an Oscar for Emma. So his team was like, well, if she's going to be a movie star and she's going to win an Oscar, a lot of people need to go see this movie. And they thought that the audience for the movie was the teenagers and their moms. Which resonates with me because I probably went and saw it with my mom. Yes. And loved it, obviously. So how do you get teens interested? MTV. So the VMAs wanted her to go, but they wanted her to go with Brad Pitt, who she was dating at the time. So Miramax was like, well, we don't want this to be about Gwyneth and Brad. We want to be about Gwyneth and Emma. So they agree with MTV that she's going to go by herself. So Gwyneth goes, and Harvey says he wants Gwyneth to wear something sexy by Tom Ford, who was at Gucci and obviously the hottest thing in fashion. So she goes to Tom Ford and they come up with a pantsuit that sort of makes her look like a male rocker.
- [23:19]
Hilary Kerr
Like, not even that fitted in the grand scheme of things.
- [23:22]
Amy O'Dell
Like, it skimmed her body. She kind of unbuttoned it, but it wasn't like there was cleavage. It was just so cool.
- [23:29]
Hilary Kerr
It was giving. Like Mick Jagger or something.
- [23:31]
Amy O'Dell
Exactly. And Harvey sees her and he says to his staff, look at what she's wearing. He was not happy. And one of the women on the publicity team was like, yeah, that's it. Like, she looks great.
- [23:43]
Hilary Kerr
So interesting because she was dressing, if anything, for the female gaze, perhaps, rather than certainly for the Harvey gays. And it looks like she played the game right in that because it is a look that we are all still talking about all of this time later. I also loved some of the story details around the pink Ralph Lauren ball gown that she wore for her win at the Academy Awards. And I feel like you finally got all of the story out about why it didn't fit the way I think anyone watching it would have hoped for. Talk to me a little bit about getting those behind the scenes details.
- [24:16]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah. So for the Oscars, when she was nominated for best actress in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love, she had a vision of looking like Grace Kelly. So again, she's not going like a sexy route. She has this classic movie star image in her mind. And her publicist approached Ralph Lauren and said, gwyneth would like to see if you would come up with a dress for her. And she went back and forth with Ralph Lauren a lot about, like the color pink. And at the time, as you said at the beginning of this episode, she didn't have a stylist. The celebrity fashion industrial complex, like, did not exist really. And he didn't do a lot of celebrity dressing. And like, I heard this repeatedly, like, Calvin wasn't necessarily all that interested in it either because these guys felt like they would send these gowns to stars and then they would just decide at the last minute not to wear them. And that would kind of bug them.
- [25:08]
Hilary Kerr
Understandably, I guess, because it's expensive and time consuming.
- [25:11]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah, exactly. She kept asking for changes to the dress, like she wanted it lower cut, she was losing weight. Ralph Lauren is kind of like, oh, like, I don't know if I even want to send this dress to her. And his team is like, just send it to her. So he agrees to send the dress. They basically send it in pieces to la, like, shortly before the Oscars. And it's only like maybe two nights before that she actually officially decides that this is what she's going to wear. Because she also had options from Michael Kors and Versace, I was told. So she decides to wear the Ralph Lauren gown. They sew it together in LA and she was supposed to wear it, one of my Ralph Lauren sources told me, with kind of an inner detachable corset. And for some reason she didn't. So when they saw her step out onto the carpet, I mean, she looked beautiful and, you know, iconic and it's so memorable. But the Ralph Laurentine was like, why doesn't this fit? And I remember, like, not really noticing it, but then watching Fashion Police, as one would have done back then. Yes, and them talking about it.
- [26:10]
Hilary Kerr
Well, I think it's also so interesting that she wanted this Grace Kelly look, but then kept asking for a lower and lower and lower neckline. And that is something that's also quite noticeable about the dress. Like, it's very plunging for what is, in theory meant to be this, like, old Hollywood look, which I feel like is sometimes that dynamic that you get in some of the way that she dresses. Like, they'll be in such great taste, and then there'll be something like a little bit radically sexy about it.
- [26:37]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah.
- [26:38]
Hilary Kerr
So we also have to talk about goop, because how could we not? As someone who has come up quite close to the business, and it's a business that I admire in a number of ways. You came up with so many details that I had never heard or read. What was the most interesting thing that you uncovered about the GOOP empire?
- [26:58]
Amy O'Dell
I think what fascinates me by it is how a celebrity founder is both an asset and how that can also make it, I think, more challenging for both the people who work there and maybe for the CEO. I think Gwyneth has a lot of strengths as a leader and founder of the business. She was one of the first stars to say, hey, why am I using my image to promote other brands like Estee Lauder and American Express when I could use it to start my own brand? And she launched Goop in 2008. Social media barely existed. Instagram launched in 2010. And it wasn't necessarily a given that stars, particularly actors, were going to go be on social media and build up online. Audiences and actors in particular were pretty resistant. So she was really early in saying, hey, I'm going to build my business online and start a newsletter. And in that way, I think she was sort of the original influencer. Yeah. But I think that where it gets tricky for a celebrity founder, it's kind of that dynamic I was talking about earlier, where you're used to living in a world where the problems are ironed out for you, and running a business is all about solving problems. And that's something that she had to adjust to. And also because she has very powerful, strong charisma, and when she shines her light on you, it feels amazing. And when she takes it away, people get very stressed out, and people have a really hard time telling her no. And that might not be that uncommon with a lot of bosses, but there were instances where I think that made working there really challenging. Just in addition to the stressful environment in general, I also thought it was.
- [28:35]
Hilary Kerr
So interesting to read about all of her wellness ideas that she is, you know, in many ways responsible for seeding. And I remember following along with it early on, and there was a lot of stuff that I thought was interesting and take it with a grain of salt. But then there's also like a pretty strong connection to the Maha movement through all of this. Talk to me about that reporting and how you connected all of those dots.
- [29:00]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah. So I think Gwyneth did two things for the wellness industry that were really important. One, she gave it a rhetoric and a language talking about toxins, clean living, clean eating, clean beauty. Two, she gave it a gorgeous, aspirational, luxurious aesthetic. She essentially commodified wellness as a luxury good. And that made people want to pay a lot of money to be a part of that world. Unfortunately, something that GOOP also did is so a distrust of western medicine, of established science, of trained experts. And we see the same thing happening with the Maha movement and with RFK Jr. As our secretary of Health and Human Services, places in this country sowing a distrust of established science and experts. And something that the wellness industry does very well is vilify for profit industries like the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, because they make money. Wellness, it really should be called big wellness the way we have big tech and big ag and big food. Because wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry.
- [30:04]
Hilary Kerr
And those supplements are not regulated, unlike the pharmaceuticals.
- [30:07]
Amy O'Dell
Exactly right. So supplements are regulated like food. Whereas a drug company has to spend an average of a billion dollars in 10 years to bring a new drug to market because they have to actually prove that it can help you. Supplements, they don't have to do anything for you. Wellness products don't have to do anything for you.
- [30:22]
Hilary Kerr
Steaming your vagina doesn't have to do anything for you.
- [30:25]
Amy O'Dell
Exactly $6.3 trillion. And the pharmaceutical industry is 1.6 or 1.7 trillion, depending on the different estimates that you look at. So it's really big wellness. And I think that GOOP really provided a potent mod what a wellness company could look like and the kinds of products and services they could promote.
- [30:46]
Hilary Kerr
It's also been really interesting from the outside to watch how she has iterated the business over and over and over again. Like there's the fashion line, there's the wellness piece of it, there's the events, the cookbooks, and then there's GOOP Kitchen now today, which I unfortunately order more than my budget would like me to of seeing all of the different areas that she has delved into. What do you think has the biggest legs long term.
- [31:12]
Amy O'Dell
I think that even though Goop is not the most successful wellness business in the world today and has kind of pulled back from it, I think that that's the company's biggest cultural impact in terms of what could be the most successful as a business. I mean, the fashion line, maybe the beauty line, but there's also examples of celebrity beauty and fashion lines that are far, far, far outpacing goop. One thing that people told me was maybe a problem for Goop is that, you know, Gwyneth, to her credit, is very ambitious. I think ambition is a great thing, and she wanted to do everything and do it perfectly and very well. And the problem with that is that it gets very expensive, which may be why we saw some layoffs last year in 2024.
- [31:56]
Hilary Kerr
It eats your margins.
- [31:57]
Amy O'Dell
Exactly. It's expensive to build out a beauty team and then a fashion team and then a content team and then a live events team and a media team and a wholesale team. So that gets expensive. Now, of course, they have bags and they have menswear, but it's still in the fashion lane. Skims. She started with shapewear, and then she branched into T shirts and swimwear and all of those different things that we've seen. Rhode, Hailey Bieber, you know, that's like the big acquisition of the year. She did a billion dollar deal with Elf Cosmetics. For Rhode to be acquired with like.
- [32:28]
Hilary Kerr
13 SKUs or something insane, like, very few numbers, but was making 200 million in revenue.
- [32:34]
Amy O'Dell
But that's all they were doing was those beauty products, the peptide lip balm or whatever it may be. And she was promoting them really relentlessly. And they have a CEO running the company alongside her. So there are examples of it working, and there's probably tons of examples of it not working too.
- [32:49]
Hilary Kerr
I think that the food is the underlooked piece in all of this, in the grand scheme of things, not by you, but like, by the larger world. I own the cookbooks. The cookbooks are actually great. Like, I've made all of the recipes. Goop Kitchen, I think, is a smash success in terms of execution. Flavor. It's really good. They've nailed that sort of fast casual. I just feel like there are very few people who I think have won. Like, that food piece of it. That still feels aspirational and it's culturally influential too. Like, it's made me think differently about food. Not in a bad way, actually, in a positive way. I always feel like she doesn't get enough credit for that, but I think, like, the Goop Kitchen seems to be a success so far.
- [33:29]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah. So that's a unique part of the business because they run it with Dom Food Group, as I understand it. And it's almost like a licensing deal, I think. So the main thing she does is promote it. But she does have genuine culinary skills. I mean, people who have had her cooking say she's, like, absolutely amazing in the kitchen. And I agree. Those cookbooks are great. Her turkey burgers are in the rotation at my house.
- [33:48]
Hilary Kerr
Oh, they're so good.
- [33:50]
Amy O'Dell
I.
- [33:50]
Hilary Kerr
It's, like, made me think differently about ground chicken.
- [33:52]
Amy O'Dell
I never think to buy that.
- [33:53]
Hilary Kerr
Yeah, no, never. Okay. So I imagine that when you started this book, you had certain areas of focus in mind, but as you spoke to more and more people, new avenues appeared, new questions arose. What didn't you solve? Or, like, if you could write an update to this book in five years, what would you want to know?
- [34:10]
Amy O'Dell
I think the biggest question I have is, where does she go? And therefore, where does Scoop go from here? Because she is going to be in the movie Marty supreme that comes out towards the end of the year, and the timing suggests it's gonna have an Oscar play. And she has said she would literally never, using those two words, go back to acting. But what I learned in reporting the book is that she rediscovered some things she liked about acting, and she feels like it's also good for her business just to get the visibility that she gets from being in movies, which is probably true. And that she'll also get more endorsement deals for non goop brands, because, of course, she's always endorsing something, be it Astronomer, which saw over the weekend, or CopperFit or Saint Laurent.
- [34:53]
Hilary Kerr
That astronomer endorsement was very interesting. What did you make of it?
- [34:57]
Amy O'Dell
Some people speculated that she was trying to distract from press around my book, and I have no idea about that. But she knows how to create a viral moment. She knows how to stay in the public eye.
- [35:07]
Hilary Kerr
She's also funny, and that was a funny thing to do.
- [35:10]
Amy O'Dell
Yeah, she can be very funny. And people say she can be really fun to hang out with. I mean, as long as you're not one of the people that she. She's planning to fire from goop. I had someone tell me that a turnover was so high that they would joke about who was gonna get fired every Friday. So I think, yeah, as long as you're not one of those people, yeah, it's great to hang out with her.
- [35:26]
Hilary Kerr
Well, I heard from a very seasoned publicist that it might have something to do with your book as well, which I thought was interesting.
- [35:31]
Amy O'Dell
Oh, that's so funny. Well, I think all it did was keep her in the news for me, so I don't know.
- [35:38]
Hilary Kerr
Well, it all works out well. Amy, thank you again for sitting down to talk with me. Thank you for writing such an interesting book. Beautifully written. It's so thoughtfully researched and reported and I just found it as well done as it could be. So of course this is great journalism and great reporting, but also just a really excellent read. I welcome anyone who is listening to this. Please go and buy it, preferably from an independent bookstore if I'm going to be asking. And congratulations on all of the future success for it because it's an excellent, excellent book.
- [36:09]
Amy O'Dell
Thank you so much and thanks for having me back on the pod.
- [36:12]
Hilary Kerr
Of course.
- [36:12]
Amy O'Dell
My pleasure.
- [36:19]
A huge thank you to journalist and author of Gwyneth Amy o'.
- [36:24]
Dell.
- [36:25]
Make sure to subscribe to our show wherever you listen to podcasts so you.
- [36:29]
Hilary Kerr
Don'T miss an episode.
- [36:30]
Amy O'Dell
And while you're there, I'd also be so grateful if you'd rate and review us. If you have any guest suggestions or any other feedback, drop us a line atpodcastwhowhatwhere.com or you can find us on social at whowhat where. See you next Wednesday on the who what Where Podcast. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Raven Yamamoto, our editor is Ko Takasuki Chernovin. Our audio engineers are at Glenn Canyon Audio, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.