Brooklyn and Nicola whizz through Beverly Hills on a red motorbike, a camera pointed up at their grinning bobbleheads as palm trees sail by. He lifts a tattooed paw up to caress her hand — and the tangerine-sized engagement ring it bears. They are the picture of marital bliss.
But offstage, all is not well. For this Beckham-Peltz alliance, between a footballer’s scion and a billionaire American heiress, has come at the cost of disharmony in the Beckham bloodline. The lore runs deep: what began with a spat between Queen Victoria and her future daughter-in-law over who would design her wedding dress (Nicola opted for custom Valentino over Posh’s own label) has deteriorated into a transatlantic battle of wills, with the eldest Beckham son shunning his father’s 50th birthday celebrations in London for the comforts of LA, a dynastic death blow which has kept the red tops going for weeks. And just before it was announced that David had at last snagged a knighthood, the final flourish in a decades-long hustle to accrue national-treasure status, it emerged that Brooklyn and Nicola had engaged the services of Jenny Afia to stop their PR going into tailspin. That’s Meghan and Harry’s lawyer, if you didn’t know. It seems errant celebrity sons and their Lady Macbeth wives are keeping the bright minds of Lincoln’s Inn in the finest horsehair.
What marks out nearly every player in this psychodrama is a distinctive deficit of flair; David’s brilliance at football is the only spark of talent in that entire extended family — the rest is luck and marketing. Victoria could not sing (roadies would turn her mic off during Spice Girls performances); Brooklyn cannot play football, model, photograph or cook. His younger brothers, Romeo and Cruz, dabble in fashion and music like all the other bottom-set nepo nippers. Nicola Peltz, the daughter of a billionaire, wrote and starred in a film about poverty last year. It was not well received. This clan’s rise to knightly success is purely the work of publicists — and it is this which makes the parable of the prodigal Beckham son in many ways the most telling story of our time.
For in the Beckhams, we see the revival of the celebrity dynasty, the family as a brand. Like the Medicis before them, they have risen to aristocratic respectability though cynical spin: weddings double as brand mergers (OK! splashed out a record-breaking £1 million to cover Posh and Becks’ wedding), and children are bequeathed dukedoms in the form of little brands and film cameos. Thus the Beckhams reveal the true cost of nepotism: the desecration of skill and value in public life, the disappearance of a celebrity meritocracy where you were expected to be able to sing, dance or otherwise earn your adoration. They are little better than A-list Machiavels like the Kardashians or Molly-Mae Hague, who are simply “famous for being famous”. In such a world, the eldest Beckham child is cursed with an empty empire; he has been given the stand — riches, attention, business backers — but he has absolutely nothing to say.
The new royal court in which Brooklyn wages war is as ritualistic and rotten as any before it: there is confession (Brooklyn is rumoured to be concocting a tell-all memoir of his eventless 26 years so far, in the style of Prince Harry’s Spare), portraiture (carefully choreographed dynastic lineups with out-of-favour members pointedly absent), assassination (deadly press briefings), succession (the careful delegation of nepo gigs), and exile (Brooklyn to Beverly Hills, away from his family’s newly settled kingdom — the Cotswolds).
“For in the Beckhams, we see the revival of the celebrity dynasty, the family as a brand.”
Brooklyn’s conduct towards his parents, much like Prince Harry’s, reveals a vacuum of character which exposes the unfairness of undeserved fame: all the set-dressing and charitable works in the world cannot distract from the fact that we have allowed the wrong people to become famous. The parallel with the prince doesn’t stop there: the Peltz-Beckhams and the Sussexes are said to have held an exiled-son summit in Montecito. What outrages us about these two hit dogs, Brooklyn and Harry, is that despite all the privilege imaginable they dared to complain, driven by horridly un-British concerns like “boundaries” and “their truth”. The last resort of the overtherapised offspring, going “no contact” with one’s family, has reportedly now been taken by Brooklyn — a telling echo of “Megxit” apparently steered by Nicola, another slightly older American bride viewed with suspicion by the British public.
Yet the British public isn’t exactly team Becks either: part of our contempt for Brooklyn derives from disdain for his parents, and their own meteoric rise. Many still see them as arriviste; it was not long ago that Victoria had a spiky bob and bulletproof breast implants, and David has at great pains shaken off his once-mocked Chingford accent. This couple has undeniably made it — David is guest-editing none other than Country Life in October, with flat caps, tweeds and spaniels guaranteed to erase any memory of his bleached Nineties curtains; they have also made it easy for their children to follow suit.
But Brooklyn has so far floundered, going through something of a career identity crisis in the process. The footballer-cum-model-cum-photographer-cum-chef’s latest venture, a hot-sauce brand called Cloud 23, has been beset by trademark disputes — but his bigger problem is the mishandling of his personal brand, the ultimate selling point for anyone in the food aisle frowning over a celebrity product. Whereas David somehow cobbled together an aura of sophistication convincing enough to flog Haig Club whisky, it would be difficult to swallow a glob of Cloud 23 without imagining Brooklyn smirking in an apron.
In the absence of talent or wit, Brooklyn must self-publicise relentlessly to retain his birthright. This is about vanity, yes — but also money. For the Beckham clan is also the Beckham conglomerate, in which children are spin-offs, subsidiaries, each expected to perform value for the business empire. In Brand Beckham, Victoria is the creative director; David is the legacy label. Brooklyn is the floundering prototype, launched too early. Romeo and Cruz are R&D projects, constantly retooled until the right note is hit. Harper, just 13, is a publicist’s dream: the only girl, she is primed for singing or modelling or, later down the line, a marriage alliance.
David and Victoria, for whom playing nice isn’t showing results, need only wait for their mutinous son’s bid for independence to fall on its face. Any attempt at freedom is cursed; this family has produced chicks with wings already clipped. Brand Beckham is too big to fail, and will crush any struggling subsidiaries.
Whether he realises it or not, Brooklyn is doomed to lose the Battle of the Beckhams. He is destined to be a leisure prince, but through some misguided sense of his own value has instead been larping purpose which, owing to his privilege, he has never needed and is now too old to acquire. But this troubled son must soon accept that his inheritance is simply equity in his parents’ brand: his fame is not a reward for excellence. Get off the motorbike, get on a plane, and tell your mum and dad you’re sorry, Brooklyn. After all, who on earth would you be without them?
