Beckham revealed: part 3

The scene is a celebrity-studded party just before the MTV Music Video awards in New York last Thursday. Paparazzi are everywhere, snapping tennis star Serena Williams at one moment, watching Madonna kiss Christina Aguilera on stage the next.

But just to one side stands the familiar skeletal figure of Mrs Victoria Beckham wearing her distinctive pout and a diaphanous black top that certainly reveals a great deal more than it conceals. But, for once, Posh is looking just a trifle on edge.

Could the reason for her unease be the man who is by her side? For the girl from Goff 's Oak in Hertfordshire is accompanied to the party by her new ' friend', Harlem- born, fashion empire owner and record producer Damon Dash, co-founder of the £200million Roca-Wear fashion and Roc-A-Fella record empire that sells everything from exceedingly tight satin trousers to 'gangsta rap' : a man with a distinctly dubious reputation.

The shrewd Dash seized on Posh's desire to make her, and her husband's, reputation in America, and recently signed her to become the 'face' of his fashion label, which will see her features and form spread across hundreds of giant billboards, including one in New York's Times Square, wearing little more than a tight vest, shorts and stilettos.

In time Dash intends to spread the advertising campaign to Europe. But his influence does not stop there.

The 29-year-old former Spice Girl also wanted Dash's music industry expertise to help her to re-launch her stumbling career as a solo performer. In recent weeks she has recorded seven tracks for her much delayed new album with him, the first of which recently debuted on Radio One to a considerable fanfare.

The only trouble, according to a poll, was that the listeners hated it. The mixture of Posh and a Dash of Rap does not seem to be a cocktail the audience is yet ready for.

Indeed, putting herself in Dash's hands could just turn out to be a desperate mistake for the girl nicknamed ' Goody Two Shoes' at school. Dash's cannabis habit was exposed when his 11-year-old son took his stash to school, and he was later embroiled in an acrimonious custody battle with the boy's mother - who accused him of violence. One of Dash's executives, Kareem 'Biggs' Burke was arrested last month accused of growing cannabis in his Manhattan penthouse.

Biggs is not the only one of Dash's associates to have a dubious reputation. Posh also finds herself working alongside some less than entirely savoury performers at the New York-based producer's Roc-AFella label. One Ol' Dirty Bastard recently served time for drug offences, and has just completed a documentary for music channel VH1 called 'Inside Out: ODB on Parole', which features footage of him visiting his parole officer. Another, Cam-ron, (nicknamed Killer Cam), was once a cocaine dealer whose song I Love You pays tribute to September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.

So while husband David was facing what he himself described as 'one of the greatest challenges of my career' - making his debut at Real Madrid's legendary Bernabeu stadium in the Spanish Super Cup - his wife was more than 3,000 miles away desperately trying to turn up the heat on her career in the company of a man whose reputation is hardly without blemish.

Beckham remained unfazed, however, basking in the glory of scoring a headed goal on his debut in Madrid - a feat he was to repeat on his league debut - and insisting at a Press conference: 'If you play with great players you can only learn. It's important for me to see that and gain from it, because I will be with them for a long time.'

The couple's two sons, Brooklyn and Romeo, meanwhile, were being looked after by Posh's parents, Tony and Jackie Adams, who have travelled to Madrid to help the Beckhams settle into their new £32,000-a-month rented villa in the Spanish capital.

'David calls Victoria all the time on his mobile,' says one friend of the family, 'but he does miss her when she's away. Remember those 30 calls a day when they were separated in the Far East during the summer?'

The woman he always calls 'Babes' is never far from the 28-year-old midfielder's mind, even if she is on the other side of the world. But like Posh, who loathes her notorious nickname, Beckham is well aware that their commercial interests, and their sponsors, are now among the most important things in the world to them and together they will do everything they can to increase their celebrity, and what they see as Brand Beckham.

Why else would David dress up as a Gladiator for the latest Pepsi commercial; be photographed wearing the very latest boots for adidas in Tokyo; make sure to be caught by the cameras on the Real team coach in Bangkok using his new photo mobile from Vodafone; or be driven round a football stadium in a convertible car without another player on the pitch to wave at thousands of fans on behalf of the oil manufacturer, Castrol?

Brand Beckham is now big business, very big business indeed - and likely to get even bigger. Only six months ago marketing experts estimated it might be worth £200million. Now some are saying: 'Make it five times that, say £1bn.' In the last four months alone, the couple have flown a staggering 73,380 miles - enough to go round the world three times - in support of these commercial ambitions.

They know the profits the Beckham name can bring. Vodafone sold 50,000 of their new Live! Mobile phones in the first three weeks after the England captain agreed to sponsor it; the sales of Brylcreem increased by 50 per cent in the wake of an advertising campaign featuring him; the sales of Police sunglasses increased by 67 per cent in Britain and Japan when he became the face of the brand; and the sales of Castrol's motorcycle oil 'rocketed', according to the company, after his visit to Vietnam in June - where 10million mopeds outnumber the cars by 40 to one.

' Right now, Beckham is the hottest possible endorsement you can get anywhere in Europe and the Far East,' says one marketing expert. 'But he and Posh clearly intend to make it the same in the United States.'

Beckham's new autobiography, My Side, for example, is not only being published in Britain, but it is also appearing in the United States. His publishers, the Rupert Murdoch- owned Harper Collins, even brought an American editor to Britain five weeks ago to ' Americanise' the book to make it more

acceptable to that market. Outsiders may see the 6ft tall, Chingford-born lad as nothing more than an immensely gifted footballer, but that would be to ignore the transformation in his character that has taken place over the past three years.

With his wife's encouragement, and the tutelage of their diminutive publicity guru Caroline McAteer, Beckham has become very savvy indeed when it comes to marketing. He is more than happy, for example, to take the smart advice of his sports agents, SFX, who treat his and his wife's affairs with stringent professional discretion and loyalty - even though that advice can lead him in unexpected directions.

Take the matter of his signature. Not, you might have thought, something all that susceptible to adaptation for what are now called image rights. You could not be more mistaken. On his transfer to Real Madrid he could not take over the familiar No.7 shirt that he wore at Manchester United because it belonged to club hero Raul.

Instead, after consultation with SFX, Beckham chose No.23 - a number that had worked spectacularly well for another of the agency's clients, basketball star Michael Jordan.

Part of Beckham's contract with his new club is that he gets a share of every shirt sold around the world with his name and number on - a deal that some experts believe could make the footballer £100m over the next five years. One of his sponsors, adidas, who make the shirt, say it will become 'the biggest selling football shirt in history'.

Beckham is well aware of it, so much so that he has now amended his own signature to include 23. It is a clear sign of the lengths to which he will go to support what I once dubbed Planet Beckham.

The sums of money at stake are truly breathtaking. Beckham's £100,000-a-week pay packet at Real Madrid pales into insignificance when compared to his sponsorship revenue. Though he is no longer with Brylcreem, his other British sponsorships bring him at least another £ 200,000- a- week or £10.2m a year, while his Far East contracts are worth a £100,000 each week, some £5.5m-a-year.

The Beckhams are already estimated to be worth £53m - far more than his former manager at Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson, whose fortune is estimated at £30m - and there is every sign that their worth will increase again considerably this year. In the past four years Beckham's personal fortune has more than trebled - from £10m to £35m - while Posh's has risen by £8m from £20m to £28m, mainly as a result of royalties associated with Spice Girls songs and merchandise.

It is a very long way indeed from the days, barely a dozen years ago, when she was earning £35-a-day as a perfume girl in a department store, and he was getting a mere £3 each night for collecting glasses and washing up at Walthamstow Greyhound Stadium in east London. Even when Beckham joined Manchester United's first team squad at 18 he was still only earning the relatively small amount of £2,500-a-week and a red Ford Escort passed down from Ryan Giggs.

Since then, the Beckhams have come to symbolise for millions the so- called 'bling bling' culture of excess, a flashy glee at over-the-top spending on expensive gifts for one another and their children.

The truth is a little more complicated. In fact, it is David who is the spendthrift. She, on the other hand, is distinctly more careful; happy to spend money on concrete objects, like their £2.5m Beckingham Palace, but keen to get her clothes from designers who will give her substantial discounts, if they ask her to pay at all. She also pays an old school friend just £20 to cut her hair, when someone else isn't paying.

Indeed, it is entrepreneur's daughter Victoria Beckham who is the driving force behind Brand Beckham. That explains her efforts to extend her and her husband's appeal beyond football. For she knows that an injury could end her husband's career in an instant - just as the break-up of the Spice Girls all but ended her pop career.

'Fame can be taken away from you as easily as it can be given to you,' she once remarked, 'and a lot of celebrities forget that.'

But as the Brand Beckham bandwagon gathers pace in the months to come, the pressures on this introverted couple, who famously insist they have few friends, will increase ever more rapidly, and the consequences could be truly terrifying. It would be a tragedy to see the genius of this sublime footballer crushed in a ruthless attempt to exploit his celebrity for unbridled financial gain.

The trouble is that now the commercial genie of Planet Beckham is out of the bottle, putting it back in, and controlling it, will be quite another matter.