It was, depending on your point of view, either the celebrity wedding of the century or the nadir of vacuous pop culture. When David Beckham and Victoria Adams got married in 1999, they sat on gold thrones, released a dove after exchanging their vows, cut the many-tiered cake with a sword and wore matching purple outfits for the reception. In a record-breaking £1 million deal, OK! Magazine covered the occasion and a national obsession with Golden Balls and Posh Spice's relationship was cemented.
Now another Beckham wedding extravaganza is imminent. Brooklyn Beckham, who also wore head-to-toe purple as a baby on his parents' big day, is marrying Nicola Peltz, an American trustafarian actress, and Vogue has secured exclusivity rights.
The main event is scheduled for Saturday, April 9 at the bride's family's oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. Known as Montsorrel, this is the £76 million (NZ$143.4m) estate where Nicola's father, a hedge fund titan named Nelson Peltz, hosted a £400,000-per-couple re-election fundraiser for Donald Trump in February 2020. Mar-a-Lago, Trump's country club, is just up the beach but the 45th president is unlikely to be on the guest list — Nelson Peltz publicly stopped supporting him after the Capitol riot in January 2021.
Montsorrel isn't as spacious as Peltz's property in rural New York, which is set over 130 acres with albino peacocks roaming the grounds, a helipad and a full-sized ice rink, but blue skies are more dependable in the Sunshine State. They will have to make do with a mere seven acres (and 185m of private beach).
It will be a Jewish ceremony with Brooklyn - model, photographer and latterly aspiring celebrity chef - wearing a yarmulke for the service. Sources have yet to confirm if it will be purple. The 23-year-old groom has banned square plates (too naff) and reportedly teed up his father to be master of ceremonies. His younger brothers, Romeo, 19, and Cruz, 17, will act as best men.
Crockery details aside, the marriage marks a transatlantic merging of two mega-dynasties. "This is the Hollywood version of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry," says R Couri Hay, a New York society publicist who has crossed paths with the Peltz family. "You've got the son of sports and fashion royalty marrying an American billionaire's daughter, who also happens to be a beautiful actress."
While the family fortunes differ in scale — David and Victoria's net worth is a mere £380m, as calculated by The Sunday Times Rich List, while Forbes puts Nelson Peltz's net worth at £1.3 billion — Brooklyn can relate to Nicola's silver-spoon upbringing of private jets, security guards and non-disclosure agreements. "I think Nelson is happy Nicola didn't marry a fortune hunter or a young playboy who counted on his parents to pay all his bills or who was some out-of-control nightclub kid," Hay says.
Brooklyn has enjoyed a few paydays to cover at least some of his own bills; in 2016 he landed a £100,000 advertising deal with Huawei to plug a smartphone and later modelled for the clothing company Pull&Bear, with the profoundly meaningless campaign slogan "Jump barriers and be in the right place". Last year he received £1m to be the face of the fashion brand Superdry.
After a first encounter at the Coachella music festival in California, Nicola and Brooklyn met again at a party in October 2019 and began dating. The following summer he got down on bended knee with a £350,000 diamond ring. It's not clear who stumped up for that one. Tactfully, Nicola, 27, wore a dress designed by Victoria Beckham for the engagement photos, although she is believed to have picked a Valentino gown for the wedding and has jetted to Rome for wardrobe fittings. Brooklyn has demonstrated his dedication by getting tattoos of — deep breath — Nicola's name, Nicola's granny's name (Gina), Nicola's eyes, Nicola's mum's rosary beads (she's Catholic), a replicated love letter from Nicola (signed "your future wifey") and so on. She has a small, cursive "Brooklyn" inked on her back.
The bride-to-be grew up in Westchester County, an affluent area outside New York City, with her thrice-married father, her mother — a former model called Claudia Heffner Peltz — and seven siblings (there are also two half-siblings from Nelson's first marriage). Plus the peacocks.
Nicola, the youngest daughter, is close to her Jewish Brooklyn-born father, who was a self-described "ski bum" and university dropout before he turned his family's frozen food distribution business into a US$150m public company in the 1970s. Today, the 79-year-old mogul still runs his investment fund, Trian Partners. He has worked with America's best-known companies — Procter & Gamble, Tiffany & Co, Starbucks, Heinz — and recently bought up a chunk of Unilever, the struggling British consumer goods giant. Described by his future son-in-law as "the most loveliest man", Peltz is as powerful as he is private. "He has always been a behind the privet hedge sort of man, who wants to keep his money private, his family private," Hay says.
On the other side of the aisle, the Beckhams have taken a different approach — they haven't been out of the papers for a quarter of a century; Brooklyn's birth was front-page news. When Posh and Becks, then 25 and 24 respectively, wed at Luttrellstown Castle, near Dublin, they were already world famous as a pouting pop star in the Spice Girls and an England footballer with a golden right foot. On the eve of his own nuptials, Brooklyn's career is less established.
"Financially, I suspect he will always be all right," says the celebrity PR consultant Mark Borkowski, acknowledging Brooklyn's 13 million Instagram followers and the lucrative influencer world of so-called brand ambassadors. "But fulfilment and actually having something that he owns, that he's brilliant at, there's no evidence he can achieve that."
His childhood was spent variously living in Britain, Spain and Los Angeles, while his dad played for Manchester United, Real Madrid and LA Galaxy, but Brooklyn ditched his own footballing dream after Arsenal's youth academy released him aged 16. In a 2015 interview with ABC News, David reflected on how difficult his son found following in his footsteps: "He said, 'Every time I step on to the field, I know people are saying, 'This is David Beckham's son,' and if I am not as good as you, then it is not good enough.' "
Carving a different path has proved a struggle too. As a budding photographer he was hired by Burberry in 2016 to shoot a campaign, drawing criticism from professionals in the industry. A year later his £16.99 photography book, What I See, was roundly panned. One image of an elephant entirely in the shade was captioned: "So hard to photograph but incredible to see". Next to a blurry restaurant scene he wrote: "I like this picture — it's out of focus but you can tell there's a lot going on."
He enrolled in a photography course at New York's Parsons School of Design but dropped out a year later, allegedly due to homesickness. The celebrity photographer Rankin then gave him an internship but colleagues remarked that he was "lacking basic skills".
Today Brooklyn lives in a £7.5 million mansion in Beverly Hills with Nicola and has a new goal — to become a celebrity chef. Encouraged by his (lactose intolerant) fiancée, he recently launched a show, Cookin' with Brooklyn, which streams on Facebook and Instagram. The culinary pretensions kicked in during lockdowns but unfortunately he appears a few sandwiches short of a picnic on the cooking front. "I love cheese," he says during a pasta-making tutorial. "It's like butter."
Victoria Beckham, who runs a fashion and beauty empire with a financial track record to horrify Nelson Peltz (her business has made losses upwards of £50m and not recorded a profit since 2016), has probably not enjoyed much of Brooklyn's food as she has eaten the same meal for 25 years. "Since I met her she only eats grilled fish, steamed vegetables — she will very rarely deviate from that," David Beckham revealed on the River Café's Table 4 podcast last month.
Cue derision when it was reported that one eight-minute episode of Cookin' with Brooklyn cost US$100,000 to make and involved a 62-person team. As he oversees a chef making a fish sandwich on the show, Brooklyn proffers his own technique ("I eat half the fish and then I, like, mess it all up and put it in two loaves of bread with the fish, vinegar, salt, mushy peas"). "[Brooklyn] is to cooking what Posh was to singing," a source close to the production told the New York Post, adding that he needed an illustrated "cheat sheet" for basic terminology such as "whisk" and "parboil".
"The question is whether the Beckham name is ultimately going to be a curse," Borkowski says. "You're never allowed the freedom to fail because as soon as you fail, you're clickbait. Most people need failure, you learn more lessons from failure than you ever do from success. For Brooklyn, that's a poisoned chalice."
Thayer Willis, a US-based wealth therapist who helps the super-rich find fulfilment, agrees that the fear of failure can be crippling. "Sometimes young family members feel very defensive about being recognised as their parents' child, more so than anything else," she says. "They see the differential treatment they get because of their parents and that's kind of demeaning."
Escaping the long shadow of successful, famous parents to find identity, self-worth and purpose in early adulthood is a fraught business, while sympathy is understandably limited. On TikTok, skewering the lifestyles of so-called "#nepobabies" (nepotism babies) — high-profile celebrity kids such as the model Iris Law, the daughter of Jude Law and Sadie Frost, and the model and actress Lily-Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis — is a flourishing trend.
Willis argues that it's crucial for colossally rich parents not to give their children too much too soon: "It helps these young family members take charge of their lives and realise, 'Oh, it's on my shoulders. If I want to have all the things I like in life, then I need to generate income.' "
As the heirs to Britain's biggest celebrity brand, the trio of Beckham boys — all impeccably polite, I've heard — have the industry connections and social media pulling power to earn enviable incomes. (Their younger sister, Harper, is 10, at a private day school in London and not yet on social media.)
Having left Millfield School, the Somerset public school where boarding fees are £13,785 a term, Romeo recently made his playing debut for Fort Lauderdale CF, the reserve team of Inter Miami, the Florida club that his father co-owns. (Phil Neville, Beckham's old Manchester United team-mate, is the manager and his 19-year-old son, Harvey, is also on the squad.) While Kieran Gibbs, the former Arsenal defender who now plays alongside Romeo in Florida, describes him as "a great, humble kid", it is also assumed that the teenager wouldn't have made it in the Premier League and made the right decision to leave Arsenal's academy in 2015.
Realistically, Romeo is more likely to find success as a model and influencer. At the age of 12 he began to appear in high-profile Burberry campaigns. Last year he modelled for Yves Saint Laurent and recently accompanied his mum to Paris Fashion Week. He and his girlfriend Mia Regan, a model from Chippenham, are Generation Z idols and he regularly posts loved-up selfies on Instagram for his three million followers. Earlier this month the couple were revealed as the new faces of Ami, a trendy French fashion company, for its gender-neutral collaboration with Puma.
Then there is Cruz, son number three, who is attempting to break into the music industry and has worked with Poo Bear, the songwriter and mastermind behind Justin Bieber. Unsurprisingly, his image has toughened up since he released a Christmas charity single aged 11; a recent cover shoot for i-D magazine saw him topless, with jeans round his ankles, a pink buzz cut and metal grills on his teeth. "I don't think you ever stop learning, but I'm taking my time seeing what happens," he said, as critics griped that the edgy photoshoot was overly sexualised.
Meanwhile, Nelson Peltz's 10 children have pursued careers in finance, figure skating, ice hockey and acting. Nicola's latest projects include writing and co-directing an upcoming film, Lola James, in which she stars alongside her brother Will. She has also been cast for an American TV series as Dorothy Stratten, the real-life Playboy model who was murdered by her estranged husband, who will be played by the Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens.
With limitless opportunities and limitless funds, Nicola and Brooklyn will surely have a prenuptial agreement. "In cases like this it's interesting how involved the family, particularly the parents, get in negotiating the prenuptial agreement," says Laura Wasser, a Hollywood divorce lawyer who has worked with Kim Kardashian, Johnny Depp and Britney Spears. "How in bed are the family going to be, so to speak, with these parties as they negotiate what should be a pretty important part of what they're going into in terms of their marriage?"
Wasser, who charges clients US$950 (NZ$1368) an hour plus a retainer, advises to have the prenup ironed out well before the wedding itself. "Then it's done and any kind of conflicted or hurt feelings go away and you put on your beautiful dress, your tuxedo and you've got the bouquet, cake, music and a magical day." In Hollywood, romance isn't dead. It's just reading the contracts.
In a YouTube video in which Brooklyn makes his fiancée a heart-shaped pizza and chocolate lava cake for Valentine's Day, Nicola confesses that they are fretting about something less thorny than ring-fencing trust funds: the separate girls' and boys' "slumber parties" the night before the wedding. "We've been panicking about it, this one night apart," says the bride-to-be. Then she tries a tiny spoonful of dessert and says: "Oh my God, that is amazing."
'Money can't buy you happiness'
What happens to a child if they are born into immense wealth? Going by bank balance alone, they have won the genetic lottery. They will be physically and materially looked after, with access to the finest education and the best healthcare. Psychologically, it's not so simple. Not all of them will be able to cope with the particular set of complications that come with being obscenely loaded. Further down the line, it can lead to destructive behaviour.
"I got so much, so fast that nothing really excited me any more," said Nicole Richie in a 2007 interview. Daughter of the singer Lionel Richie, the socialite and reality TV star lived a youth of hard partying and by her early twenties was addicted to heroin, cocaine and alcohol. There was also an arrest after a fight outside a New York nightclub and a four-day jail sentence for driving her Mercedes-Benz SUV under the influence of cannabis and the prescription painkiller Vicodin (for which she served 82 minutes in jail).
"I think I was just bored. I had seen everything. Especially when you're young, you just want more," she said. After rehab for addiction, the 40-year-old mother of two is now clean.
Robert Batt, 55, is all too familiar with the downside of unfettered wealth. He is a recovered addict, inherited lord of the manor, psychologist and founder of the Recovery Centre (TRC), a day rehabilitation service. Children of the 0.1 per cent fly in from all over the world to TRC clinics in London, Edinburgh and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Batt thinks of his team as the ultimate specialists in "wealth-related therapy". His job is to mend the super-rich.
"If you take a 'normal' family," Batt says, "with the jealousy, conflict, sibling rivalry and pressures, and you give them a billion dollars, that family is likely to get more complicated. Sure, their quality of life goes up, but all those issues from before tend to be amplified. That is often misunderstood." For many people the encumbrance of extreme wealth is outweighed by the many lifestyle benefits that come with it.
"So when our patients say, 'How can I possibly complain?' there will be a lot of the population who say, 'Yeah, you really don't have the right to complain.' But the people we see — they're trying to kill themselves, they're drinking themselves to death, they're starving themselves, taking prescription meds, self-harming. Wealth certainly doesn't immunise against mental health problems. In fact, it does the opposite."
TRC does not have brochures or treatment menus. A patient meets with Batt and his team, explains their issues (addiction, depression, lack of motivation, dissatisfaction and so on) and is given a personalised programme. "There is a group of very wealthy families that know about us, rely on us and trust us," Batt says. He won't disclose exact costs — he says the price is different for each patient — but suggests it is about £250 an hour.
Part of Batt's appeal to the super-rich is that he is one of them. At five years old he inherited an 18-village estate in Norfolk when his father died in a plane crash. It has been in his family since 1620. He opened his first fête at eight and was sent to boarding school (Harrow) in his teens. By 14 he was drinking litres of whisky during lessons and spending days unconscious in his room. He left school the following year with two O-levels.
The next chunk of his youth was spent living alone in Chelsea with no parental control, developing an "epic" cocaine habit and working in property. One Christmas in his twenties he went home to Norfolk with 15 grams of cocaine and "spent three days in bed telling everyone that I had flu when I was really just doing coke around the clock". Aged 25 he gravitated from drugs to booze, drinking bottles of single malt whisky, and after that he developed an addiction to shopping.
"Shopping addiction is a compulsive activity designed to fix difficult feelings," he says. "But it's actually a really poor way of doing that. The thrill lies with the expectation. Then it arrives, that's really exciting, yet it very quickly leads to feelings of guilt and shame, which then need to be fixed with more shopping."
In his early thirties he sought help. Years of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and therapy followed, which eventually led to his own training as an addictions counsellor. "My past enables me to have sympathy for the young people who come to us from similar situations," he says. "I've been a lost child, a lost young man."
In the office of his Norfolk home, Batt outlines the troubled relationship between wealth and happiness. "If we look at what makes someone flourish, what makes someone truly happy, it's not money."
Mark is a former TRC patient. Aged 45, he is the second generation of a super-rich family. "I was in my teens when I was first overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness," he says. "I tried to discuss this with a friend but I later overheard a group of friends talking about me. They were saying, 'People like them have no feelings,' after a newspaper article about my family's business dealings.
"I always felt totally self-centred and shameful about my depression, when others have to cope with very difficult financial circumstances. It seemed to me that no matter what I did, I would never be able to be seen for myself, separate from my family. I began to feel there was no escape and everything I did was pointless."
After one of his first girlfriends talked to a newspaper about their break-up, Mark "withdrew" further into himself. "I find it very difficult to trust because when people find out who I am, something changes in the relationship," he continues. "My life was very active socially — it was a constant round of parties with friends in London, Switzerland and the Caribbean, but none of them knew anything about me. I was there to entertain and host everyone but I could never tell anyone how I was really feeling." This continued for about 10 years. "I drank and took drugs to numb the voices in my head telling me that I had no right to be unhappy." He attempted suicide three times.
Deep down, Batt says, the offspring of the super-rich know they are being treated differently by their peers. Doubt creeps into their relationships. "Children of the very wealthy or the very famous often worry why they're liked," he says. "Am I liked because my father is very wealthy, am I liked because my mother is X, Y, Z?"
These feelings of suspicion are often exacerbated by the family's need for privacy: the well known and well heeled require security staff, closely guarded properties and house staff who sign non-disclosure agreements. From a young age, children are taught that they are targets, so they pull up the drawbridge.
"If you doubt the veracity of your friendship group, then that's only going to lead to anxiety," Batt continues. "It creates loneliness — true loneliness."
So then come the binges and splurges — the pursuit of empty pleasures. The people surrounding the super-rich are the perfect enablers. They are paid to do what the young person wants and stay quiet about it. "These are the people who get called up at 2am to go to Gerrards Cross police station to spring someone out of prison," Batt says.
"When someone says to me, 'why won't my daughter stop drinking', it's probably because there's some pay-off for doing that." Their lifestyle enables them to continue. "The only thing I know that effectively shifts someone into the first stage of recovery, into action, is consequences. And with a super-wealthy, global family, there are very few, so they stay in their illness.
"There's a huge misconception about the mental health of wealthy families. It is very unfair that everyone assumes that money can buy you happiness." It can, at least, buy you good therapy. - Megan Agnew
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London