KEY POINTS:
He popped the question on a petrol station forecourt, proffering an engagement ring with a diamond "the size of a gobstopper".
Five years later, the private jets, the luxury yacht, the palatial Italian villa, the rare species of butterfly and the £200,000 ($513,000) wedding dress are ready. So,
too, is the £2.5 million glossy magazine deal. Welcome to the most expensive wedding in the celebrity universe.
Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin have arguably supplanted David and Victoria Beckham as football's first couple. Certainly the opulence of their marriage this weekend will leave the Beckhams' own nuptials of a few years ago looking like a drizzly afternoon at a small-town register office.
Pre-wedding hype has billed it as McLoughlin's bid to become "Queen Wag" (Wag = wives and girlfriends), outshining every other football bride. But she is determined that the lavish production on the Italian Riviera will be more Grace Kelly than vulgar celebrity trash.
The big day has been the subject of a vicious bidding war between OK! and Hello! magazines and will see an unprecedented military-style operation to keep the paparazzi at bay. There will be an average of two security guards for every guest, on alert for photographers in trees or waiters concealing miniature cameras. In all, hen parties, stag parties and the wedding itself are rumoured to be costing £5 million, and the couple have pledged a large chunk of their magazine fee to charity.
Rooney, who earns £115,000 a week, is not short of change, as he has just amply demonstrated when he bade farewell to bachelorhood in Ibiza. Yet if only his England team-mates had scored one more goal against Croatia at Wembley last November he would now be pulling on his shooting boots rather than his wedding togs. Austria's and Switzerland's loss after England failed to quality for the Euro 2008 finals is Italy's gain. Even Portofino, the "jewel of the Riviera", has never seen anything like the Wayne and Coleen travelling circus.
The formal marriage will take place at a secret civil ceremony in Cheshire, England, but that will not be allowed to spoil a good photo story. Five jets will fly 64 guests to Italy, where McLoughlin's local priest from Croxteth in Liverpool will conduct the public nuptials, possibly at the ornate marble-floored Villa Durazzo, part of the 16th-century Castello Brown. The wedding rings, worth £100,000, were designed by a New York jeweller to the couple's specifications. Guests will be given a ribbon-tied box containing a rare butterfly, which they will release simultaneously as the couple, both 22, are declared husband and wife.
It is her day and one she has been preparing for a long time.
Her dress, with an 8m train, is the result of six return trips to New York, costing £85,000, to consult the designer Georgina Chapman's Marchesa label. Chapman, 32, married to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, has previously designed gowns for Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger. McLoughlin has apparently asked female guests to wear black, ensuring that she will stand out. A mini-crisis was reported when she undertook a crash diet and went down a bust size, requiring last-minute adjustments. Her mother, Jeanette, has shed 45kg.
The reception will be held in La Cervara, a 700-year-old former abbey, where the singer Rod Stewart celebrated his wedding to Penny Lancaster.
McLoughlin's favourite band, Westlife, have been booked for a reported £400,000. The bride - after three hen parties in Miami, Manchester and the Canary Islands - will apparently impose an alcohol limit as she regards over-drinking as "vulgar".
It will not be a celebrity wedding in the name-dropping sense and not even all family members will be attending. McLoughlin has allegedly "banned" Rooney's extended family including his cousins Stephen, 23 - a cross-dresser who told a newspaper he would make a perfect bridesmaid - and Natalie, 18, who flashed her breasts at McLoughlin's 21st birthday party.
Her uncle, Sean McLoughlin, is believed to be Rooney's best man. The guest list is expected to include boxer Ricky Hatton, England player Steven Gerrard and wife Alex Curran, and a select band of Rooney's Manchester United teammates. The Beckhams are unlikely to attend. According to one unnamed source: "There is no love lost between the couples."
Most of the guests will stay at the luxurious Hotel Splendido. During the four-day extravaganza, there will be champagne breakfasts and a ball on the Alysia, the world's biggest charter yacht, which costs £42,000 a day.
Each guest has had to sign a confidentiality agreement with OK!. They will be required to surrender all digital cameras and mobile phones. In what has now become a lucrative business for a handful of firms, more than a hundred security guards will be hired to prevent newspapers pulling off a "spoiler". Last week waiters in Ibiza were being offered £1000 by British tabloids to take photos of Rooney and friends.
A snatched photo from the wedding could be worth a hundred times as much, according to Phil Hall, public relations consultant and former editor of the News of the World.
Security arrangements worthy of a state visit are now typical in the ever-escalating war between the glossies. Hello! enjoyed the most recent triumph last month when it paid a reported £500,000 for exclusive rights to the wedding of the Queen's grandson Peter Phillips to Canadian Autumn Kelly at Windsor Castle. But it missed out on the bigger prize of Wayne and Coleen.
A source close to the battle said that Hello! bid around £1.5m only to see OK! offer £2.5m. It is a record for a celebrity wedding, more than double the £1m agreed with the Beckhams in 1999.
Max Clifford, the veteran public relations adviser, said that Rooney and McLoughlin would find they are no longer in charge of their own wedding.
"It becomes a show produced by OK! and directed by the security people."
The couple are expected to honeymoon on Necker, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Islands hideaway, where they will doubtless be pursued by paparazzi again. They will then head home to Liverpool for a second reception, costing a relatively modest £250,000.
But despite all the stage management, spare a thought for the photographer charged with capturing Coleen's butterflies being liberated from their boxes. There will be no second take. With Desmond's cheque of £2.5m riding on it, this is one job that requires a steady hand.
- OBSERVER
CELEBRITY UNIONS
David Beckham & Victoria Adams
July 4, 1999 at Luttrellstown Castle, on the outskirts of Dublin.
Guests: The Manchester United team, Sir Bobby Charlton and the Spice Girls.
Magazine deal: £1m ($2.56m) with OK! The couple sat on red and gold thrones.
Catherine Zeta Jones & Michael Douglas
November 18, 2000 at the Plaza Hotel, New York.
Guests: Christopher Reeve, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Jack Nicholson.
Magazine deal: £1m with OK.
Hello! gatecrashed the wedding. The two magazines spent years in court.
Katie Price (Jordan) & Peter Andre
September 10, 2005 at Highclere Castle in Newbury, Berkshire.
Guests: Vanessa Feltz and Uri Geller. Former Atomic Kitten Kerry Katona and Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding were bridesmaids.
Magazine deal: £1.75m with OK!
Jordan made a "fairytale" entrance in a pumpkin carriage, pulled by six miniature white ponies.