Beckham revealed: part 2

Even though it's a calm summer afternoon, in the usually relaxed air-conditioned offices of David Beckham's sporting agents, SFX, in Mayfair there is thunder in the air.

From the speaker phone on the desk of one of the senior staff, the familiar shrill, sharp voice of Mrs Victoria Beckham is haranguing the team with expletives that might make a building site worker blush.

'It's absolutely outrageous, they can't get away with it,' she screams from Los Angeles. 'I don't care if it is The Times.'

Even though SFX are not her agents, the 29-year-old is incandescent with rage that the newspaper has described her appearance at theMTV awards as 'sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins while looking like The Artist Formerly Known As Prince in drag'.

News of this description has reached her and her husband at the £12,000-a-week Beverly Hills mansion they have rented - close to the designer shopping mecca of Rodeo Drive - and Posh is holding SFX responsible for this slur.

'You're a major agency, you should be able to stop this sort of thing!' she fumes. It's a performance that might make even her old enemy, Beckham's former manager Sir Alex Ferguson, tremble. 'I don't care what you say,' she yells. 'They can't say that about me. It's an absolute insult. I'm going to bloody well sue.'

Slowly, the wise heads of the American-owned agency - which numbers Gary Lineker and Andre Agassi among its millionaire clients - prevail and the transatlantic telephone tirade comes to an end. But not before every person in the room 'feels as though we've been attacked with a blowtorch', as one confessed to a friend later.

'She's just as ferocious when it comes to David. If you think she doesn't care about what people say about them both and the business decisions they take, you're dead wrong,' a former colleague said this week. 'She's ultra-sensitive - and ultra-controlling. Nothing happens without her approval, nothing.'

This episode, along with many others just like it, gives the lie to the suggestions that Mrs Beckham is a brainless airhead with hair extensions and over-long nails.

In the years since her magnificently tacky wedding - complete with thrones - to the England captain in 1999, she has cultivated her desire for perfection to such an extent that she wants to control everything about 'brand Beckham'.

Though many an agent may claim a role, the true architect of 'Planet Beckham' is Victoria, for it is she who pulls the strings that control her gifted footballer husband; she who influences all his decisions off the pitch; and she who manages his every commercial move.

And the 28-year-old footballer is more than content for her to do so. It is one reason why the couple were in Los Angeles - he agreed to her plan to establish their reputation as 'the hottest couple in the western hemisphere' with a string of appearances and interviews.

But there was a more personal reason - to rekindle Victoria's sagging music career. She has not released a single for almost 18 months and his fame now eclipses hers.

To do so she has done a volte face and put her career back in the hands of the man whom she and her four fellow Spices sacked as their manager, 42-year-old Simon Fuller, the group's creator and Svengali.

Now based in Los Angeles, where TV's American Idol has made him an estimated £30 million, Fuller says unashamedly: 'My business is creating fame and celebrity, and I'm one of the best in the world.'

Victoria knows it, and wants it. In her earlier incarnation as a Spice Girl, she once told Fuller: 'I want to be as famous as Daz Automatic.'

She still does, and that is why she and her husband agreed a deal with Fuller's 19 management company on their U.S. trip. 'Posh is quite happy to use David's fame as a lever to re-launch her career,' says a music industry insider. 'Whether it will work is quite another matter.'

The deal with Fuller, who is said to be worth £100 million, was first discussed at Sir Elton John's luxurious hilltop mansion in the south of France earlier this summer, and marks the culmination of a plan that she has been hatching for almost a year.

It's not Mrs Beckham's only move, however. She has also joined the respected theatrical agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop - who look after Kate Winslet among many others - to push the acting side of her career.

'Posh has now got every single one of her ducks in a row to launch the assault,' says a former aide. 'And David is a superb ambassador for her ambition.'

Aware that her husband sometimes has difficulty in choosing the right words for the occasion, Victoria - backed by his agents at SFX - allows him to speak only in strictly controlled situations using prepared answers written for him by an expert. Otherwise, she must know and trust the interviewer and have approval over both the words and pictures published.

It was Posh, assisted by the Beckhams' aggressive PR Caroline McAteer, who chose the former East-Enders actor Tom Watt to ghostwrite her husband's autobiography, because she knew she could trust his discretion. And he was not a journalist or someone who might gossip about their relationship.

Not that she wanted Watt too close. Though he was on the fringes of their trips to the Far East this summer, while the glittering couple flew firstclass on the flight home to London from Bangkok, Watt was in economy.

It was Posh who orchestrated her husband's magazine interview with Sir Elton John's friend and partner David Furnish in which he confessed that he was 'crazy about fashion', although he admitted that his wife has 'a lot to do with the way I dress'.

'If I hadn't met Victoria and married some other girl, I probably wouldn't dress the way I dress,' he admitted. Even his hairstyle has fallen under his wife's spell. It is her hairstylist Adee who creates each and every one of the ever-changing Beckham haircuts.

'Adee is just the latest example of how David has put himself entirely in the hands of the Posh team,' says a former aide. The reality is that Team Beckham is Team Posh. There's no room in it any more for his kitchenfitter father Ted, his hairdresser mother Sandra or his sisters Joanne and Lynne.

In fact, only Victoria's parents, Jackie and Tony Adams, her sister Louise, make-up artist Maria-Louise - whom she's known since the age of five - hairdresser Adee and publicist McAteer could truly be called members of the inner circle.

There were a few footballer friends, such as David's best pal Gary Neville, but with his move to Madrid those friendships will fall away, leaving the player with his wife and his minders from SFX. The reality is that Beckham is in his wife's thrall in every part of his life except the football field.

As he puts it: 'I can be bossy on the pitch, where you have to take charge and be assertive, but off the pitch I'm not because I've got someone around me who already does that.'

Off the field, the football-mad lad from Chingford who always longed to play for Manchester United is, in the words of one cynical observer, 'little more than a glove puppet that she operates with her fingers'.

But the Beckhams are bound together by a strange and remarkable bond which stretches back into their childhoods.

Both loners from an early age - he obsessed with football, she with wanting to be famous - neither had close friends, depending on their families for support. Since their relationship began six years ago, they have clung together, creating a bubble around them that few other people are allowed to penetrate.

This is why Beckham is content to fit in with whatever scheme Victoria has in mind - not least the one to make him what she calls 'a perfect husband'. He has only ever known and trusted a handful of people in his life, first his family and then Sir Alex Ferguson. Now he has transferred that trust entirely to his wife.

Victoria, on the other hand, finds it very hard to trust anyone, especially after Mark Niblett, the bodyguard she hired to protect their son Brooklyn in the wake of a series of kidnap threats in 2000, taped hours of conversations with her and threatened to write a book.

'It makes you very cynical,' she said recently. 'I've known so many people who have sold stories to newspapers and it's sad when you realise that most people have a price.'

The former Posh Spice has a paranoid streak - one she has even been known to turn on her husband, with extraordinary physical violence.

When she was pregnant with Brooklyn, for example, one tabloid newspaper ran a story about a girl claiming she had a relationship with Beckham before he met the Spice Girl.

Posh went berserk, screaming, shouting and swearing.

'You don't realise what you've done,' she yelled into her mobile phone when he called her at 10pm from the team hotel where Manchester United were staying before a match at Southampton.

'I can hardly remember the girl,' he told her. 'Please, Victoria, you must believe me.'

She didn't reply, but just punched the off button on her mobile phone and threw herself weeping on to her bed at her parents' house in Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire.

At 2.30am, Beckham arrived at the house, desperate to see her. 'I'm not
going anywhere, Victoria,' he said quietly. 'We have to talk about this.'

And they did, through the night, until the driver who'd brought him insisted the footballer leave so that he could get back to the team hotel before Ferguson found out that he'd disappeared for the night.

That morning, a different tabloid carried a story that Beckham had kissed another girl while Posh was on the SpiceWorld tour of the U.S. - and that the girl had squeezed his bottom. If the future Mrs Beckham was angry before, now she was furious. She rang David on his mobile phone and they talked before the match, at half-time and afterwards.

Throughout, Beckham insisted that they would talk about it when he got back to Goffs Oak that night.

By that time, however, Victoria wasn't in the mood for talking. The moment her future husband walked into the Adams' home, she punched him in the face three times - so hard that she cut the inside of his mouth. With blood dripping down his chin, he all but burst into tears.

Again they talked for most of the night, as Beckham once again tried to reassure his wife that there was no truth in the story, while she wept.

Nevertheless, the next morning, with the paparazzi at the door, the ever resilient, not to say clearsighted, Posh emerged smiling, hand in hand with her future husband - and as he got into the car she gave his bottom a squeeze.

'No chance this lot will get the irony, but it's doing me good,' she thought to herself. In the days that followed, she asked him over and over when they were alone: 'Swear on my life it's not true.'

They even took a brief trip to Lake Como in Italy to try to heal the rift. But her paranoia was working overtime. 'It got so bad that one night David said he felt like killing himself,' she said.

Finally, common sense and her husband's innate honesty prevailed and the pregnant Victoria admitted that her 'hormones were all over the place'. But the episode reveals the particular intensity of their relationship, one that was bred in a pressure cooker of publicity.

Indeed, the very strength of Beckham's devotion to his formidable wife dates back to their clandestine meetings that were to set the tone for this most introverted of relationships. At the time of their first meeting, Posh had a serious boyfriend, florist's son Stuart Bilton. But when he went on a skiing holiday with her father, she accepted an invitation to see Manchester United at Old Trafford.

It was then that she met David in the Players' Lounge. He was talking to his father, but as soon as he saw her, he stood up.

'I liked the fact he was so oldfashioned,' she said afterwards, and gave him her phone number.

The next day, Beckham phoned and asked to meet her for a drink. But the omnipresent Fuller had got wind of the possibility and warned: 'Don't be photographed - you've got to keep it quiet.' Victoria couldn't believe it. 'For once in my life I'd met a bloke I really fancied and I just wanted to be with him.'

In the end, the couple met outside the Castle pub in Woodford. He got out of his open-top BMW and climbed into her MGF and they drove off 'without knowing where we were going'. Afraid to be seen together, they ended up at fellow Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm's East London flat at 11.30pm, where all three stayed talking until 2am.

Victoria then drove Beckham back to his car, where he kissed her on the cheek. She was due to fly to the U.S. the next day, and he asked her to call him when she got back. But the future Mrs Beckham didn't wait that long. 'By the time I was back home a week later, David and I had talked for hours on the phone,' she says. 'I don't think there's been a day in my life since then when we haven't spoken.'

The only slight hiccup was that Stuart Bilton had returned from his skiing holiday with a broken arm and was staying in her bedroom at her parents' house. The ever resolute Victoria didn't hesitate: she threw her former boyfriend out of her bed, and out of her parents' house, ending the relationship.

The next morning she received the first of what were to become a deluge of expensive presents from Beckham - a black Prada handbag. Stuart had given her nothing to compare.

That evening, the new couple arranged to meet in a car park about 20 minutes from her home. Once again, he got into her car and they sat in the dark, talking. The smitten Victoria talked about dumping her boyfriend while he explained that he'd strained his arm in training.

'He took hold of my head and kissed me,' she remembered later. 'Didn't say a word, just kissed me. And again.'

But still Simon Fuller was adamant that his Spice Girl should not be seen in public with a footballer.

He told her: 'You should go away for a few days. There's this great hotel I know in Italy.' Then he offered to make all the arrangements. But Victoria had no intention of following his advice. 'He was basically arranging the first place we should have sex,' she recalled. 'But that was something I didn't want scheduled.'

Typically, she made that arrangement herself. On May 13, 1997, when the Spice Girls were to play a charity concert in Manchester, Posh invited Beckham to the Midland hotel. But at the last moment he wasn't able to make the after-show party, and she went back to her room to sleep. Beckham was not to be deterred. At 2am, he knocked on her door.

'Oh my God,' she remembers. 'No make-up, no hair-do, nothing.' But she let him in anyway. That was just 11 days after Beckham's 22nd birthday, but from that moment on he called her 'perfect for me', even though in the past he'd always said he preferred natural blondes who were quiet rather than noisy.

'Victoria's quite the opposite,' he admits. 'Dark and loud.' Less than three months after that first night, Beckham went down on one knee and proposed at the Rookery Hall hotel, not far from his flat in Alderley Edge, Cheshire. Posh accepted - but she was afraid of what Simon Fuller would say and didn't tell anyone.

Fuller had insisted from the start of the Spice Girls that a man would split up the group. It was January 1998 before the world discovered their engagement. Their son Brooklyn was born 14 months later, three months before their marriage. Fuller was right: the Beckhams' romance presaged the end of the Spice Girls.

Since then, Victoria's career has nosedived. Her first solo single, Out Of Your Mind, with Dane Bowers in August 2000 made it to No 2, but she was kept from the top spot by Sophie Ellis Bextor. It was in the run-up to that release that it became clear how much she needed her husband to guarantee her celebrity.

After the couple turned up together at a record signing at Woolworths in Oldham, one newspaper branded her 'desperate'. She and her publicist McAteer refused to speak to that paper for weeks afterwards. In September 2001, Posh released a second solo single, this time sporting hair extensions and the well-tried leather catsuit, but again there was a chart battle - against Kylie Minogue - and she lost even more decisively. Not Such An Innocent Girl made it only to No 6.

But she was desperate to put Posh Spice behind her. With her first solo album she went to elaborate lengths to remind the world that she was Victoria Beckham, as the album was pointedly titled: the first true sign of 'brand Beckham'.

It didn't work. The third and final single, A Mind Of Its Own, released in February last year, also made it to No 6. Two weeks later, her record company dumped her. Victoria was more pop has-been than pop icon: 'probably the least successful of the five former Spices', says one record industry expert.

When she signed with the lesser known Telstar label, who boast Vinnie Jones and Craig David among their list of artists, industry insiders insisted 'nobody else would take her'.

So far there is little concrete sign of her first Telstar album, though there have been repeated statements that she is 'working on tracks'.

Why doesn't she call it a day, you may ask, and bask in the couple's estimated £50 million fortune?

The answer is the final telling insight into the life of both Beckhams - she started out a bigger star than he is and doesn't intend to end her days as little more than an appendage.

'She thinks she has talent and is determined to prove it,' says a former aide. 'In her mind she's a singer, just as David is a footballer. Her ambition isn't just to get a British No 1, but to make it in America.'

And that's why Mrs Beckham is so determined to control every aspect of her husband's image. She has a great deal at stake, and a lot of pride to lose, if she fails to use his fame to re-kindle her own.

The intriguing question - as we shall discover tomorrow - is whether the tensions between her ambitions for herself and the demands of her husband's new life in Spain may put an intolerable strain on their apparently golden partnership. In short, are both Beckhams in danger of being too big for their own boots?