Is David Beckham "the most famous person in the world"? Perhaps the most ubiquitous, with his affairs in the papers, his official lookalike aiming for the charts and his sleeping body in an art installation. Barney Ronay tries to work out what it all means
A spell abroad at a glamorous foreign club, a Gucci-clad celebrity wife, Eastern-themed parties at their palatial home, a bogus kidnap scare, a series of hushed-up extra-marital dalliances – and finally a homosexual affair with Paul Scholes. Actually, this last detail appears to be the only major distinction between the lifestyles of Conrad Gates, blond-highlighted England skipper in the television series Footballer’s Wives, and our own David Beckham. While Conrad happily puts it about in the showers, Becks, we assume, has yet to swing that way. Although nothing, it seems, is to be taken for granted. Over the last month we have been confronted with a new version of David Beckham. Gone is the uxorious cultural icon who once inspired Julie Burchill to exclaim that in the face of his “breathtaking boldness and beauty… the clamour and loutishness of modern celebrity recede”. In his place we have a leering philanderer, a preening fraud and the possessor of a secret “mistress phone” on which he “lays bare his deepest cravings”.
