David’s affairs, Victoria’s rage – this Beckham book is all allegations, no joy
The old joke about book reviews is that some poor sod reads something so that you don’t have to. Regarding The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power by Tom Bower, please allow the poor sod in question to insist: “Look, you genuinely don’t have to.”
I say this as no slight on Bower. A former reporter for the BBC’s Panorama, he’s distinguished for his critical, unauthorised biographies of powerbrokers such as Robert Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed and Simon Cowell, plus an award-winning investigation into corruption in English football.
Brand Beckham is indeed an empire. Behold, then, this tale of epic self-aggrandisement, benefiting from tabloids desperate to flog papers. The talents in question seem limited: a patchy sporting career, from Manchester United via Real Madrid to LA Galaxy, plus some degree of physical beauty (David); an ambitious gift for merchandising, plus vulgarity marketed as “humour” (Victoria). All this is set against a backdrop of allegations of multiple infidelity, breast enlargements, high heels, hair extensions, flopping music and questionable style status.
In terms of research and truth-telling, The House of Beckham must score highly. Yet Bower never gets beyond the ghastliness of his subjects, while the narrative is oddly flat – nothing here feels new. Instead, years of Fleet Street rumours, and plenty of tabloid stories published but unknown to a younger generation, are one by one regurgitated. David is stingy, squeaky-voiced and volatile. Victoria is a tuneless, furious-faced WAG whose fashion line is a much-puffed vanity project.
Their PR machine trades off a happy-families image, but their relationship is portrayed as a devil’s bargain. Victoria directs her energies into competing with her spouse for airtime; David’s chief prowess seems to lie in the sack, as it’s claimed that he enjoys a string of sexual liaisons from Rebecca Loos downwards, and simultaneously projects the image of “world’s best Dad”.
Very occasionally, there are magic moments. Victoria hires and fires actors to play real people in a car-crash NBC documentary, 2007’s Coming to America, behaving so capriciously that her frustrated crew are said to have chorused: “So tell me what you want, what you really, really want”. Simon Fuller, the Spice Girls manager-turned-Brand Beckham manager/investor, is known as “Simon Fullers--t”. Paul Key, New Zealand’s future prime minister, refers to David as “thick as bats--t”.
But in the main, The House of Beckham is dull and repetitive. Bower portrays the couple as increasingly reliant on deflecting attention via a posse of unprepossessing nepo babies: their children, principally Brooklyn, and his young wife Nicola Peltz. Even in paraphrasing, I’m making it sound more absorbing than it is.
In fact, it’s a curiously enervating experience: tawdry, dull and depressing. A tale of a power-hungry couple, not, in this case, told by an idiot, but certainly full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Will this spell the failure of their campaign to become Sir and Lady Goldenballs? On the evidence of Bower’s book, one is left in sincere hope.
The House of Beckham is published by HarperCollins at ￡22. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
