Affairs, rage, tears: is this the true story of the Beckhams?
An explosive new book claims to lift the lid on a relationship that, over 25 years of marriage, has led the couple to build an $870m brand.
Once upon a time, OK! magazine paid more than it had ever paid for some photographs. Its cover talked breathlessly about the wedding of the decade: the beautiful pictures and intimate interviews, the order of service, the dress, the rings, the feast, the tears, the laughter, the doves.
That wedding took place 25 years ago, on July 4, 1999, and in 16 days’ time, as they do every year, David and Victoria Beckham will post loving tributes to each other and their 121 million followers on Instagram. Happy anniversary, Posh and Becks. As the bride herself pointed out wryly a couple of years ago: “They said it wouldn’t last.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that Tom Bower has written a 384-page book alleging that it very nearly didn’t. Given that Bower’s previous books include Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors, No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone and Boris Johnson: The Gambler, it was never going to make for entirely comfortable reading chez Beckham.
But while the allegations of somewhat opaque tax affairs have, over the years, been of interest to HMRC and the honours committee, Bower’s allegations of infidelity and furious marital rows may prompt little more than a roll of the eyes. The thread that unites all the rumours and allegations is the couple’s willingness to deny them, hold hands for the cameras, shout at each other in private and crack on.
According to Bower, the affair with his former personal assistant Rebecca Loos, which David has never admitted, was one of several, and others allegedly included a beauty therapist, a bikini model and a socialite. He claims that in the wake of the birth of Romeo, their second son, when David was playing for Real Madrid, Victoria told a friend: “I’m worried David doesn’t love me any more. I think he’s going to leave me.”
Later, between 2016 and 2018, he claims the marriage was in crisis once again. David, Bower alleges, went to Glastonbury in 2017 and failed to answer the phone to his wife because he was partying until 5am with his friend Dave Gardner and the socialite Lady Mary Charteris. When Victoria arrived the next day the couple had a furious row, he says. “They looked quite miserable,” an eyewitness told Bower, “but they managed to pose for the cameras.”
The year after, she posed for Vogue with her children in a boat on a lake while, according to Bower, David complained that “his children should not be exploited for the brand”. Bookies had at first slashed the odds on a Beckham divorce, then stopped taking bets on it altogether. Victoria’s representative dismissed the rumours as “Chinese whispers”.
“There is no impending statement, has been no statement and there is no divorce,” the publicist said in June 2018. “Fake news fuelled by social media.”
At the Vogue wrap party that night, David left after ten minutes, Bower claims, but Victoria remained, ending the evening standing on a sofa belting out the Spice Girls hit Wannabe. He adds that she was furious when David told an Australian TV program four months later that their marriage was “hard work”.
“His truthfulness had destroyed her efforts to conjure up an image of happy families,” Bower writes. “Why, she sobbed, would David embarrass her?”
FEUDING PR MACHINES
At one point, he claims that their publicists briefed against each other. On another occasion, he says they attempted to deflect attention from marriage rumours by releasing CCTV footage of their Oxfordshire house being burgled, to the astonishment of the police.
And yet 25 years after the champagne corks popped, the good ship Beckham sails on. Footage of the couple in a recent documentary suggests that it could be for the simplest of reasons: they get on. The debut episode of the four-part film, Beckham, was viewed by nearly four million people in its first week, Netflix’s biggest audience of the year.
It accrued 145 million hours of viewing time in its first three weeks, with people fascinated to see the utterly normal dynamic – the banter, the pressure, the graft, the family pride – of this most scrutinised of marriages. The whole family posed together on the red carpet to publicise its release.
“We are much stronger, the six of us, than we would be if we were individuals,” Victoria said. “The family unit is key.”
FAIRYTALE WEDDING
When Victoria Adams and David Beckham exchanged vows at Luttrellstown Castle, near Dublin, he was 24 while she was 25 and had recently given birth to their first child. They hired a party planner who had worked for Princess Anne and a florist who had worked for Queen Elizabeth. They arrived at the venue in his’n’hers Bentleys.
The bride wore a solid gold crown and a cream silk strapless gown by Vera Wang. She walked up the aisle to music from Wagner’s Lohengrin, to where the groom waited with their four-month-old son, Brooklyn. Father and son wore matching cream-coloured outfits, accessorised in Brooklyn’s case with a baby cowboy hat. The happy couple later changed into matching purple outfits for photographs on matching velvet thrones. The best man, David’s Manchester United team-mate Gary Neville, described the groom as “besotted”; the bride’s father told guests it was hard to think of anything to say that hadn’t already been said by the News of the World; and the whole shebang was rumoured to have cost 750,000 ($1.4m).
“I will love and look after Victoria and treat her like a princess,” David promised her parents. “Victoria wakes up every day and she seems to get more beautiful every time I see her.”
Their first dance was to Frank Sinatra’s It Had to Be You. The editor of OK! claimed that scuffles had broken out in newsagents as people fought to see the photographs, while Victoria later described the his’n’hers outfits as “naivete”: “We didn’t know about fashion, we were just having fun with it, which to be honest is kind of the way it should be.” David later expressed incredulity that he’d commissioned a purple top hat.
On her Goop podcast last month Gwyneth Paltrow asked Victoria about the secret of their marriage. “We enjoy each other’s company. We have so much respect for each other,” she replied. “I couldn’t do what I do without my husband, who is so supportive. I want to make him feel like the best version of himself. We work hard, but we like to have a laugh. I love him more than when I first met him. We have grown together.”
For his part, David said on Desert Island Discs in 2017 that they had since renewed their vows and their secret was simple: family. “Of course you make mistakes over the years and we all know marriage is difficult at times. It’s about working through it.”
‘ABUSED EVERY SINGLE DAY’
The year before he got married, David had been left “broken” by the vicious public reaction to his sending-off in the 1998 World Cup, which Victoria recently revealed happened the day after she told him she was pregnant. “Wherever I went, I got abused every single day,” he recalled in the Netflix documentary. “I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I was a mess.”
“He was in pieces,” Victoria said. “Absolutely clinically depressed. It pained me so much, I still want to kill these people.”
They first met in 1997, after a match at Old Trafford, United’s stadium. A year later they got engaged. He’d seen her in a Spice Girls video and told Neville: “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” She has no interest in football “then or now”, as she told Netflix, but she’d seen his photo “and he was obviously a very good-looking boy”.
A journalist recalled going to meet them in the early days of their marriage, at David’s flat in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, where he was cooking pasta for Brooklyn and Victoria was lying on the sofa. Romeo was born in 2002 and the next year, David transferred to Real Madrid – a situation Victoria later described as “less than ideal”. While at first she stayed in England, David complained that he was lonely in the Spanish capital.
The couple spoke in the documentary about the impact that the Loos rumours had on their relationship. “I don’t know how we got through it, in all honesty,” David said. “But we’re fighters and that time we needed to fight for each other, we needed to fight for our family and what we had was worth fighting for.”
“I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was and how it affected me,” Victoria said. “It was a nightmare.”
The marriage survived. Cruz, their third son, was born in 2005. By 2007 they were living in Los Angeles, where David had a contract with LA Galaxy. Victoria loved it there, she told Paltrow, filling the house with crystals and enjoying the outdoor lifestyle, before launching her clothing brand the year after. “We used to hike all the time. LA is really when I accepted and began to love myself.”
THE HOLLYWOOD LIFE
Tom Cruise threw them a welcome party, and remains a friend. Last month he was a guest at Victoria’s 50th birthday party in London, where she said how proud she was of her children for giving speeches in front of him. Describing herself as a strict parent, she added that her children are “sweet, kind, funny and humble”. “We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing possible,” David says. “When you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mum that’s Posh Spice, they could be little shits and they’re not.”
After an abortive career as a photographer, Brooklyn, 25, is now married and attempting to establish himself as a TV chef. Romeo, 21, is a footballer; Cruz, 19, is, according to his mother, into music; and their daughter Harper, 12, is still at school. The family eat dinner together when they’re all in London, where they live in a £30m white stucco double-fronted villa in Holland Park.
Victoria, by her own admission, does not eat much. She once celebrated her birthday with a “cake” made of watermelon and maintains her figure by weight training for nearly two hours every day. She insisted recently: “But I enjoy life as well.” She eats grilled fish and steamed vegetables with no butter, oil or sauce, and her idea of a treat is a piece of wholegrain toast with salt on it. David once reminisced fondly about the time when she was pregnant with Harper and shared something from his plate. “It was one of my favourite evenings.”
Over the years, the couple built Brand Beckham. According to The Sunday Times Rich List, they are worth a combined £455m thanks to advertising deals with brands like Adidas and Armani, sponsorships, commercial deals and tie-ups. Victoria collaborated with Range Rover to do a special edition of the Evoque and flew to Beijing to launch it with an eight-month-old Harper in tow. I interviewed her there, and while an assistant held the baby behind the scenes, she put her game face on and was the ultimate pro.
BUSINESS MOGULS
Today, David has his own whisky brand and Victoria her fashion brand, which now includes cosmetics and fragrance and recently turned a profit for the first time after years of losses. The couple have made investments – including to Victoria’s company – and now have interests in business, property and sport.
David recently bought Lionel Messi, the greatest player of his generation, for his Inter Miami football team, and the family engage lucratively in cross-promotion: Brooklyn filmed a cookery video wearing an Inter Miami baseball cap, which attracted 10,000 views in 12 hours. The couple own the rights to, among other things, Elvis Presley’s music, and made a profit of £15m on the sale of their LA home 11 years after they bought it.
Asked about Brand Beckham, Victoria questioned whether either of them would be in the position they were had they not met and married all those years ago. But it was, she insisted, about family. “We know each other better than anybody,” David says of his wife.
Alongside a savvy social media strategy, the couple have also developed a nice line in self-mockery. “Wow,” David wrote on Instagram next to an image of a young Posh and Becks wearing matching head-to-toe black leather Gucci. “We really did this.”
Similarly, when Victoria posed for Vogue to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her brand, she filmed an accompanying video. “Today we’re here at Vogue and we are shooting a cover story celebrating the rich and inspiring history of one of the most enduring style icons of all time,” she deadpanned. “Me, Victoria Beckham.” When the stylist is filmed saying that Victoria is bringing some of her own pieces to the shoot, the camera cuts to Posh standing on the street outside, in jeans and sky-high scarlet stilettos, directing a lorry full of clothes reversing into a loading bay. Dressed in a cream silk dressing gown with VB on the pocket, she tells the editor of Vogue to “spice up your life” and ends by mocking her own lack of singing ability. Is the microphone turned down, or off altogether, she asks, like it usually is, so people can’t hear her?
“People have been making things up about our relationship for 20 years,” Victoria has said. “David and I are pretty used to ignoring the nonsense and just carrying on as normal.”
REGAL COMPANY
Edward Enninful, then Vogue’s editor in chief, described the Beckhams as “Britain’s second royal family”, while Victoria sent herself up in a PVC catsuit doing her signature one-leg-pointing upwards pose. As for her husband, when not in Miami running his football team, David is reinventing himself as a gentleman farmer, planting roses on Instagram and soliciting advice last weekend about spring onions from Alan Titchmarsh.
The couple now count royalty as friends – they went to the weddings of Prince William and Prince Harry. More recently, David was photographed with the King shortly before it was announced he would become an ambassador for the King’s Foundation. Charles’s aides appear to have read the room on David’s popularity and decided that the House of Windsor can do business with the House of Beckham, as Bower’s book is called. Cynics have said that it’s a blatant audition by David for a knighthood, which he was thought to have been denied after controversy over his tax affairs.
According to Bower, though, snobbishness and jealousy may also have played a part. He writes that the head of the honours committee at the time, Bob Kerslake, was “irritated” by the “notion of Lady Victoria” and found their “opulent” lifestyle grating.
Last month, David gleefully posted pictures to his Instagram feed of his meeting with the King, but the couple are less keen these days to advertise their friendship with the Yorks. When Harper turned six, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson were said to have organised a birthday party for her at Buckingham Palace. When the Beckhams posted pictures of it, there was a furore. Victoria posted one of Harper standing with a balloon in the palace’s entrance quadrangle, while David posted another of her wearing a Disney princess dress with school friends and Princess Eugenie. He later denied that it was “the palace opening up the gates”, describing it as “a tea party where us and other guests were invited”.
“People have talked about ‘do we stay together because it’s a brand’,” David says. “Of course not. We stay together because we love each other, because we have four amazing children. Do you go through tough times? Of course. That’s part of relationships. It’s part of marriages. It’s part of having children and responsibilities.”
TAXING TIMES
They hit a rocky patch of a different kind over their financial affairs in 2013, when he was caught up in a tax avoidance scheme. Although he was later cleared of wrongdoing, it was said to have cost him the chance of the knighthood he is thought to covet.
In 2017 a leaked email from him described the honours committee as “unappreciative c..ts. I expected nothing less. It’s a disgrace, to be honest, and if I was American I would of got something like this ten years ago.” He later claimed that the emails had been doctored and were therefore fake.
More bad press surrounded him when he accepted a lucrative role to be an ambassador for Qatar before the World Cup in 2022, in spite of the country’s record on human rights and stance on gay rights. But the scandal, like all the others, soon faded, and David laughed all the way to the bank: he is said to have pocketed £10m to endorse the event as part of a ten-year deal worth £125m.
On their tenth wedding anniversary, he got a tattoo of ten roses round his arm, one for each year. On their 20th wedding anniversary, the couple celebrated at Versailles, with a private tour. It seems unlikely that on their 25th their focus will be on the general election. Have they lived happily ever after? Not always, but even Bower can’t deny that they’re still standing.
“We have a lot of fun together,” Victoria says. “If I really was as miserable as I look in some of those paparazzi pictures, my children wouldn’t be as happy as they are. And I certainly wouldn’t be married any more.”
Since that day in 1999, 25 years of rows, sulks, arguments and allegations have played out in public. They’ve learnt that weddings can have crowns and thrones but real life isn’t always a fairytale. According to Bower, David once reacted to the possibility of accepting a CBE with, “If it isn’t a knighthood, f..k off.”
Maybe one day the King will tap him on the shoulder with a sword. If and when he does, Sir David and Lady Beckham won’t just have their 25th wedding anniversary to celebrate.
The Times
