Tom Bowers’ new book – “House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power” – is full of scandal. But will the unauthorized biography really “pierce the golden armor and smash the Beckham machine,” asked Katie Rosseinsky in the Independent. Given their “incredibly sophisticated” PR machine, that’s a tall order.
The book is based on the recent Netflix documentary “Beckham,” which offered a “staged look” into David and Victoria’s relationship and was full of “endearing snippets of their downtime,” Rosseinsky said. These included the iconic clip in which Victoria describes her “working class” background before David sticks his head around the door and reveals that she used to be driven to school in a Rolls-Royce.
Following his series of “sensational” books on the royals – the latest is titled Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors – Bower has set his sights on “Britain’s other royal family”. But while it “tries to be explosive”, it ends up falling short of expectations, “like diving into a Wikipedia summary that retreads old ground”.
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Boulevard fodder
Perhaps the biggest problem with Bowers’ book, says Zoe Williams in the Guardian, is that many of his juiciest “revelations” are already tabloid fodder. “ChatGPT could have done the whole thing quicker, using the keywords: David Beckham – erection – sun lounger.”
“Nothing here feels new,” said Hannah Betts in the Telegraph. Stories from the newspapers are “regurgitated”: David is “stingy” and has “a squeaky voice”; Victoria is a “melodic, angry gambler’s wife” whose fashion brand is a “much-vaunted vanity project”.
But there are always “magical moments.” Bower claims Victoria behaved so “capriciously” during her 2007 NBC documentary “Coming to America” that her disgruntled team chanted at her in unison, “So tell me what you want, what you really, really want.”
A “devil’s pact”
Bower portrays their relationship as a “pact with the devil,” says Betts, rather than the “image of a happy family” that her PR machine portrays – and yet “the narrative is strangely flat.”
His “overarching argument,” Rosseinsky wrote in the Independent, is that at times the marriage was “little more than a mutually beneficial business arrangement” – something that “hardly feels like a novel proposition.”
And yet, writes Hilary Rose in the Times, Bower can’t deny that after more than two decades of marriage, the Beckhams “are still standing together.” They may not have lived “happily ever after,” but on July 4, as they do every year, the couple will post “loving tributes” to each other to mark their 25th wedding anniversary.
Despite the alleged affairs and late-night arguments, Williams told the Guardian, “on some level they must really like each other.”
