Beckham - the football, the lifestyle, the wife

If David Beckham thinks he got a bad press after his red card in the 1998 World Cup finals — the Daily Mirror printed a cut-out dartboard with his face as the bull’s-eye — he should try being Los Angeles for a day.

No other city in the United States is so frequently and enthusiastically abused for being itself. When you land at New York’s JFK airport, you can buy a T-shirt that reads: “Los Angeles: 500 hundred miles wide and an inch deep.” You can also pickup a book of witty travel quotations, such as this from Neil Simon, the Broadway playwright: “When it’s 100 degrees in New York, it’s 72 in Los Angeles. When it’s 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it’s still 72. However, there are six million interesting people in New York and 72 in Los Angeles.”

Even the city’s unofficial nickname — La-La Land — is unashamedly hostile. It is certainly nowhere near as cool as “The Big Apple”.

There is a sense, of course, that Beckham, with his “Hollywood passes” and his postmatch sarongs, is ideally suited for a town where Jean-Paul Sartre is assumed to be a fragrance and where Venice is a board-walk. In reality, though, Los Angeles is a hugely complex place.

It is not even a city, really — it is a county that includes 89 separately incorporated cities, including Beckham’s new home of Beverly Hills, where 20 per cent of the population are not white rich kids but Iranian Jews (who fled when the Shah was deposed in the late 1970s). Next to Beverly Hills is the rainbow-coloured City of West Hollywood — with its strip of gay nightclubs known as “Boyz Town” — where Beckham will no doubt be popular.

As for the rest of Los Angeles, it is made up of almost 200 unincorporated areas, of which Hollywood (as unlovely as some of the unloveliest parts of North London) is perhaps the most famous. Indeed, the most frequent complaint from tourists in LA is that they cannot find it — as though it is not a proper city without public squares.

All of which goes to show that it takes a certain amount of intelligence and an open-mindedness to fall in love with the place. New York is obvious and easy to enjoy: a prawn cocktail to LA’s lobster.

But Beckham presumably knows this: he has, after all, agreed to join a football club unknown to most of the city’s residents, located in a suburb (Carson) also unknown to most of the city’s residents. He is going to spend most of his days on the 405 freeway — one of the most congested in the country — going back and forth from the club’s grounds to his home in the Santa Monica Mountains.

He will also spend a good deal of his time with LA’s underclass: the Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, who work for less than minimium wage with no health insurance and who form the support base of American “ futbol”. Beckham will be an unusual package — a white Latino working man’s hero, a foreigner and an A-list celebrity. But there is a danger of overanalysis. Perhaps Beckham, the ultimate media creation, is simply paying his respects to the ultimate media city.

As Andy Warhol once said of LA: “Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

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