Review of “The House of Beckham” by Tom Bower – a sex-obsessed assassination work | Biographies

Nobody imagined that the Netflix series from last fall Beckham was a blunt confession. “There were some horrible stories that were difficult to deal with,” David said, coyly alluding to reports in 2004 that he had done dirty things with Rebecca Loos, who is not named in the film. “It was the first time Victoria and I had been under such pressure in our marriage. Ultimately, it’s our private life.”

This new book, by renowned investigative journalist Tom Bower, exists only to say, “No, it’s not.” Forget the summery scenes of amateur beekeeping and confession to OCD: Bower’s main point is that we should see David as a tax-dodging serial fucker who wasn’t even particularly good at football – and as for Victoria, she’s a talentless nonentity who would probably get divorced if she didn’t have to monetise her marriage and satisfy her addiction to the limelight.

This is the essence of this hilarious and bitter book, which is best understood as a silent howl of rage for the litigation-gagged dogs of Fleet Street. Bower might as well have scrawled “not fair” in crayon when he tells us that Beckham’s lawyers SunInterested in a snapshot of him with a telephoto lens on the Mediterranean with “a beautiful, nameless blonde” on his lap.

Since this is a story about money and sex, the emphasis is clearly on the latter. Bower tries valiantly to feel his way through the dead ends of Beckham’s accounts, scouring income and investments in Madrid, Miami and Dubai, but the best he knows about the tax stuff is merely the reuse of a seven-year-old scoop in The mirrorwhen hacked emails revealed the extent of Beckham’s anger after HMRC concerns denied him the knighthood he craved (“ungrateful cunts”).

The book’s main purpose is to latch onto the Netflix documentary and pepper it with the contents of every tabloid story that has ever printed Beckham’s name alongside that of another woman, be it decades-old gossip or tongue-in-cheek rumors about his partying with models Helena Christensen and Bella Hadid. “Whether true or not, the report was damaging” is the kind of wording Bower seems to prefer, which muddies the water somewhat. Kate Beckinsale was “suspected of getting too close to David, although no evidence ever surfaced.” Beckham and Charlize Theron “barely took their eyes off each other at the 2010 World Cup draw.” He even “went to parties where others were enjoying cocaine,” something no journalist would ever do.

Even if you think celebrities are fair game, The Beckham House fails on its own sordid terms because it’s all old news. I admit that when I first heard about this book, I wondered cynically which skeleton in the basement had Beckham queuing up for so long to see the Queen as pre-emptive atonement. But fresh dirt is conspicuous by its absence, even as Bower extols the “previously untold aspects of this extraordinary story” – and what are they exactly? Of more than 1,000 endnote references, all but four point to publicly available sources (mostly old tabloid stories), and of those four “confidential sources”, well… One of them is used to support a quote that Victoria’s early dressmaking relied on “fabrics, seamstresses and pattern makers” from the designer Roland Mouret – which is somewhat Fashion reported in 2008 after, er, her own PR team made it public. Another source informs Bower that Beckham was “quiet” when shooting his first commercial in 1997. There was nothing polished about him at all” (hold the front page). Another source confirms that Beckham once promoted fish fingers: hardly a clandestine activity by definition.

Those fish fingers really bother Bower. “As a child, advertisers say, Beckham ate fish fingers. This was controversial. Neither Beckham nor his mother ever mentioned that he had eaten this particular food.” That lying bastard! He once said he didn’t use a double in an H&M advert shot by Guy Ritchie – but he did! When he visited Victoria in hospital after the birth of his third son, he drank Coca-Cola “even though he was being paid to advertise Pepsi”! In the end, Bower has to tell us three times that by agreeing to be an ambassador for the World Cup in Qatar, Beckham “ignored its funding by Hamas”.

Beckham capitalised on his appeal to gay men who “spend a lot of money on underwear”, says Bower, and he was a man of the world. His fame apparently stems from our “nostalgia for a tattooed boy enjoying his manly bravado” – what? – but he and Victoria failed to understand that “the public’s fascination with two upwardly mobile people from Essex had its limits” – a tone-deaf confidence if ever there was one.

Bower is capable of finding a nicely cat-like phrase that captures the absurdity of his characters’ lives (“On a crucial match day, he was in London having dinner with Geri Halliwell after another miserably failed attempt to reboot Findus”), but for the most part his writing here is laughably bad: “Known to music fans as a June weekend of booze, dancing, affection and more, David Beckham enjoyed three days of frenzied partying at Glastonbury.” This chapter ends with the suggestion that the Beckhams were there in 2017 to cynically stage their relationship for the press – but when he says “reviving memories of the darkness of 2003 was forbidden,” he means Rebecca Loos, not Justin Hawkins, who opened the Pyramid stage.

It is a failure of research and craft, but also a failure of humanity. He constantly pokes fun at Victoria, who was “never the most beautiful”, for her acne and her “Cuprinol tan”, for being unbearable among the wives of other players, “many better looking than her”. “Few men would have resisted Rebecca Loos”, writes Bower. I shudder to think of the joy he took in solemnly reporting that Victoria was voted “the best-dressed woman in the world for the second year in a row” in 2003 – by the readers of Fine. It’s ugly stuff: The reunited Spice Girls could have been renamed the Geriatrics because they were “all about 30-year-old moms with breast augmentations.” No doubt Bower would say Victoria manipulates the press, but he never stops to consider that she operates in a world where a man approaching 80 can feel safe dropping innuendos about eating disorders.

Bower, whose previous subjects included Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and the fraudsters Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black, is absurdly unreflective here. He tells how Andy Coulson, then editor the news of the world“drawing on a variety of sources” (lol), was “pissed that the Beckhams are still selling the image of their happy marriage.” Coulson, another Essex lad who happened to be cheating on his own wife when he broke the Rebecca Loos story, was later jailed for conspiracy to tap phones; Neville Thurlbeck, the reporter who gave him the scoop, was also jailed; as was the story’s broker, Max Clifford, who was later jailed for sex offences. Bower tells us that Coulson’s team celebrated an early success with a party in Mayfair: “First editions of the paper were being sold long before King’s Cross station, as the partying journalists stumbled into the dawn.”

This kiosk doesn’t even sell newspapers anymore; Beckham’s dog now has a loyal following on Instagram. I could have instinctively regretted this somehow – but then I read the petty, nonsensical, sloppy crap Bower is serving up to us here. Then again, it’s probably only intended for the Beckhams themselves, as some kind of malicious re-edit of the Netflix film, gift-wrapped, hanging on the door of their $5 million Burj Khalifa apartment. When Bower devotes a paragraph to reproducing the testimony of a Bosnian woman who claims to have slept with Beckham five times in 2007 – “totally untrue,” Bower adds – it can only be to annoy her. It’s the trajectory every investigative scribe dreams of: start by writing about fugitive Nazis and end by pissing off Victoria Beckham.