The House of
Beckham: The explosive new 2024 biography of the Beckhams from the bestselling
author of Revenge Hardcover – 20 Jun. 2024
by Tom Bower
(Author)
The
explosive new book from Britain’s leading investigative biographer, Tom Bower
As one of
the most famous and influential couples in the world, David and Victoria
Beckham have attained iconic status. The ultimate power couple have together
built a multi-billion-dollar global brand. For decades, adoring fans have been
captivated by the glamorous world they have created, while their unrivalled
fusion of showbiz, fashion, football and celebrity has been cultivated
alongside the image of a strong marriage.
When the
much-trailed Netflix documentary Beckham aired in 2023, viewers were offered an
even more intimate insight into their private lives. Produced by the Beckhams
themselves, the series raised many questions, not only about their success and
personal relationship, but also about the ruthlessly successful management of
their image in the media. Are their lives really as perfect as the Beckhams
would like the world to believe?
Through
extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders, Britain’s
most celebrated investigative biographer, Tom Bower, has unearthed a succession
of revelations that give surprising insight into the reality of ‘Brand
Beckham’. Exploring the couple’s relationship, and the truth about their
football and fashion careers, their finances and their new life in Miami, The
House of Beckham unravels the extraordinary reality of the business-savvy
cultural icons to tell an engrossing, often astonishing story of money, sex and
power.
The House
of Beckham by Tom Bower review – a sex-obsessed hatchet job
The
journalist’s supposed exposé of David and Victoria Beckham’s gilded lives is a
hilariously bitter hybrid of tabloid gossip, old news and sloppy writing
Anthony
Cummins
Sun 23 Jun
2024 07.00 BST
Nobody
imagined that last autumn’s Netflix series Beckham was a warts-and-all
confessional. “There were some horrible stories that were difficult to deal
with,” said David, alluding coyly to reports in 2004 that he’d done the dirty
with Rebecca Loos, not named in the film. “It was the first time that me and
Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure in our marriage. Ultimately,
it’s our private life.”
This new
book from renowned investigative journalist Tom Bower exists simply to say:
“No, it isn’t.” Forget the summer-hazed scenes of amateur beekeeping and
opening up about OCD: Bower’s top line is that we should see David as a
tax-avoiding serial shagger who was never even that good at football – and as
for Victoria, she’s a talentless nonentity who’d probably be divorced if she
didn’t need to monetise their marriage and feed her addiction to the limelight.
Such is the
gist of this hilariously bitter book, best understood as a silent howl of rage
for the litigation-muzzled dogs of Fleet Street; Bower might as well have
scrawled “not fair” in crayon when he tells us that Beckham’s lawyers put paid
to the Sun’s interest in a long-lens snap of him on the Med with “a beautiful
unnamed blonde” in his lap.
As a tale of
dosh and sex, the emphasis is firmly on the latter. Bower tries gamely to nose
his way through the cul-de-sacs of Beckham’s accounts, truffling through
earnings and investments in Madrid, Miami and Dubai, but the best he has on the
tax stuff simply recycles a seven-year-old scoop in Der Spiegel, when hacked
emails revealed the extent of Beckham’s ire once concern from HMRC nobbled his
longed-for knighthood (“unappreciative cunts”).
The book’s
main purpose is to piggyback on the Netflix doc while spewing all over it the
regurgitated contents of every tabloid story ever to print Beckham’s name
beside that of another woman, whether decades-old tabloid kiss-and-tells or
nudge-wink gossip about him attending parties with models Helena Christensen
and Bella Hadid. “True or not, the report was damaging” is the kind of
formulation Bower appears to favour, which muddies the waters somewhat. Kate
Beckinsale was “suspected of getting too close to David, although no evidence
ever emerged”. Beckham and Charlize Theron “barely took their eyes off each
other” at the draw for the 2010 World Cup. He’s even been “at parties where
others enjoyed cocaine”, which no journalist would ever do.
Another
source confirms that Beckham once advertised fish fingers: hardly a clandestine
activity, by definition
Even if you
think celebrities are fair game, The House of Beckham fails on its own grubby
terms, because it’s all old news. I’ll admit that when I first heard of this
book I was cynically wondering what skeleton in the closet might have made
Beckham queue so long to see the Queen in pre-emptive atonement. But fresh dirt
is conspicuous by its absence, despite Bower vaunting the “previously untold
aspects of this extraordinary story” – which are what, exactly? Of more than
1,000 endnote references, all but four point to sources in the public domain
(overwhelmingly, old tabloid tales) and of those four “confidential sources”,
well… One of them is used to stand up a quote that Victoria’s early
dress-making relied on “fabrics, seamstresses and pattern makers” from the
designer Roland Mouret – which is something Vogue reported in 2008 after, er,
her own PR team put it out. Another source informs Bower that Beckham, filming
his first ad in 1997, was “quiet. There was nothing polished about him at all”
(hold the front page). Another confirms that Beckham once advertised fish
fingers: hardly a clandestine activity, by definition.
Those fish
fingers really bother Bower. “As a child, announced the advertisers, Beckham
had eaten fish fingers. That was disputable. Neither Beckham nor his mother had
ever mentioned him eating that particular food.” The lying bastard! He once
said he didn’t use a body double in a Guy Ritchie-directed H&M ad – but he
did! Visiting Victoria in hospital after his third son was born, he drank
Coca-Cola, “despite being paid to promote Pepsi”! In the end, Bower has to
resort to telling us three times over that, by agreeing to become an ambassador
for Qatar’s World Cup, Beckham “ignored its funding for Hamas”.
Beckham
exploited his appeal to gay men, “big spenders on underwear”, says Bower,
nothing if not a man of the world. His fame apparently stems from our
“nostalgia for a tattooed lad enjoying his manly bravado” – what? – yet he and
Victoria failed to comprehend that “there was a limit to the public’s
fascination with two aspiring people from Essex” – a tin-eared self-own if ever
there was one.
Bower isn’t
incapable of conjuring a nicely feline phrase capturing the absurdity of his
subjects’ lives (“On one critical matchday he was in London having dinner with
Geri Halliwell after another miserable attempt to relaunch Findus”), but for
the most part his writing is ludicrously bad here: “Famous among music fans as
a June weekend of drink, dance, dalliance and a great deal more, David Beckham
was enjoying three days of hectic partying at the Glastonbury festival.” That
chapter ends with the suggestion that the Beckhams were there in 2017 to
cynically stage their coupledom for the press – but when he says “rekindling
memories of the Darkness in 2003 was forbidden”, he means Rebecca Loos, not
Justin Hawkins opening the Pyramid stage.
A failure of
research and craft, it’s also a failure of humanity. He’s constantly needling
Victoria, “never the prettiest”, for her acne and “Cuprinol tan”, for how it
was intolerable to be among other players’ wives, “many better looking than
her”. “Few men would have resisted Rebecca Loos,” Bower writes. I shudder to
imagine just how much pleasure he got from solemnly reporting that, in 2003,
Victoria was voted “the world’s best-dressed woman for the second year running”
– by readers of Prima. It’s ugly stuff: the reunited Spice Girls might have
been renamed the Geriatrics because they were “all over-30 mums with boob
jobs”. No doubt Bower would say Victoria plays the press, but never does he
pause to reflect that she’s operating in a world in which a guy nudging 80
years of age can feel securely on the high ground peddling innuendo about
eating disorders.
Bower, whose
previous subjects include Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and the fraudsters
Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, is absurdly unreflective here. He recounts how
Andy Coulson, then editing the News of the World, “relying on a variety of
sources” (lol) was “fired up against the Beckhams still selling the image of
their happy marriage”. Coulson, another Essex lad who coincidentally happened
to be cheating on his own wife at the time he broke the Rebecca Loos story, was
later jailed for conspiracy to hack phones; Neville Thurlbeck, the reporter who
brought him the scoop, was also jailed; as was the story’s broker, Max
Clifford, later imprisoned for sex offences. Bower tells us that Coulson’s team
celebrated an early splash with a knees-up in Mayfair: “First editions of the
newspaper had long been on sale outside King’s Cross station when the
celebrating journalists staggered into the dawn.”
That kiosk
doesn’t even sell newspapers any more; meanwhile, Beckham’s dog has a devoted
following on Instagram. I might, instinctively, have found that cause for
regret, somehow – but then I read the petty, nonsensical, slipshod crap Bower
gives us here. Then again, it probably isn’t meant for anyone but the Beckhams
themselves, as a kind of bad-minded re-edit of the Netflix film, left
gift-wrapped on the door of their $5m Burj Khalifa condo. When Bower devotes a
paragraph to reciting the testimony of a Bosnian woman who claimed to have
slept with Beckham five times in 2007 – “utterly untrue”, Bower adds – it can
be there for no other reason than to annoy them. It’s the trajectory every
investigative hack dreams of: start by writing about fugitive Nazis, end by
trying to piss off Victoria Beckham.
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