I first heard it in the spring of 1999 from a bloke who was sitting behind me at a West Ham game. It concerned David Beckham and Victoria Adams of the Spice Girls, who were then on their way to becoming the UK’s most prominent celebrity couple. They were set to marry that summer – and they particularly wanted to book an Essex country hotel for the event, he told me. But his friend of a friend had long since secured the booking on the day in question for his own wedding. On learning this, Beckham had been so keen on getting the coveted slot himself that he had offered to pay for the friend of a friend’s entire wedding if he moved it to a later date – and, as an extra sweetener, he would pay off his mortgage too.
An oral tradition akin to medieval folklore updated for the Hello! magazine age
Great story, I thought, and worth a few quid to a red top newspaper. So I explained this to the bloke behind me and asked him to put me in touch with his friend of a friend. Yet, despite pressuring him every time I saw him for weeks afterwards, no name or phone number ever materialised. And when I later mentioned all this to a red top showbiz writer in the run-up to the Beckham wedding, he just laughed. It turned out that the tabloids that summer were getting this call multiple times a day – and the story never checked out. It just wasn’t true.
The Beckhams duly married on 4 July 1999. And the wedding party wasn’t at an Essex hotel at all – but at Luttrellstown Castle in Ireland. That was the first time I encountered this story. But it still crops. Just the other day, a Twitter post went viral, racking up 100,000 views before it was finally deleted, read: ‘A friend of a friend is getting married at Gleneagles next year but David Beckham wants the date for his 50th, so to get the friend to move it so he can have the hotel, Gleneagles are paying for their wedding date, honeymoon AND paying off their mortgage… the power of Becks.’
The power of Becks indeed: a celeb of such stature that he’s capable of sustaining an urban myth for a quarter of a century. These are just a tiny fraction of the number of times this fake news has been shared over that time. During my long stint on the Sun newsdesk, in the mid-2000s, I would hear this story in various incarnations several hundred times. A former colleague tells me that they were still getting new versions of it earlier this year ahead of Victoria’s 50th birthday in April – actually at Oswald’s in London, rather than again Gleneagles in Scotland as the tip usually went.
The story seems to particularly flourish in Scotland: as well as repeatedly involving Gleneagles it has previously been based around a supposed Beckham party at the Cameron hotel in Loch Lomond. Both venues have issued denials over the years. In my primary school days, urban myths were more horror or sci-fi in theme: about vanishing hitchhikers, escaped lunatics with axes or albino alligators in sewers. Then came the era of the slebs.
This may have begun with the hippie music scene: there was Marianne Faithful’s Mars Bar, Led Zeppelin’s shark, Jimi Hendrix’s parakeets. By the 1980s, celebrity urban myths were proliferating. They often focused on the strange recreational practices of otherwise innocuous female celebs: there were tales about, of all people, Sue Lawley, Jan Leeming and Una Stubbs, which for both legal and taste, reasons I won’t share here.
There was also a stream of doubtless homophobic stories about gay or supposedly gay male celebs: Marc Almond and his stomach being pumped, Richard Gere and his gerbil, Keanu Reeves and his secret marriage. Then there were the Westminster variants – in the 1990s there was one about prominent Tories Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley; more recently there has been supposedly well-sourced gossip about Michael Gove and (separately) Liz Truss. But none of these can hold a candle to the hoary story about the Beckhams and the teller’s friend of a friend – both for the sheer number of repetitions and its astonishing duration.
It’s a story that has just kept going and going, a strange aspect of UK culture that’s everywhere but nowhere: there isn’t much mention of it online, but the rumour has been shared by tens of thousands of people through word of mouth, an oral tradition akin to medieval folklore updated for the Hello! magazine age. But is the Beckham story finally to be superseded? Last week, I’m told, the British tabloids started to get a flood of calls about a couple who have been offered £350,000 to give up their hotel booking by one Taylor Swift.
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