Call the Midlife (18 page)

Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t want to be either of them for a second, but no one can deny that they have totally rewritten the book of how to milk the holy cow of good fortune.

So, how much luck is involved?

Well, maybe some, but not that much. At least, nowhere near as much as most people think.

Their success is down to meticulous and brilliant planning. In fact, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say they may well be the best-managed double act OF ALL TIME.

Take Angelina and Brad, for example. Here we have the number one megastar couple in the world, but look where they began by comparison. They were both A-list movie stars when they met, both with a history of massively high-profile relationships. So much heat behind them when they hooked up, there was almost a second Big Bang.

Enter the super-brand we have come to know as BrAngelina.

And what a brand.

BrAngelina isn’t even a real word, but type B-R-A-N into a Google search and up it pops.

Boom.

Yet here are our very own Posh and Becks, breathing down their necks. That’s nothing short of astounding.

Simon Fuller, their manager, is like a wizard with Posh and Becks the perfect apprentices. When Lewis Hamilton joined 19 (Fuller’s
management company) things didn’t work out so well. Hamilton had his own ideas about how he wanted to be perceived and what direction he wanted his life and career to go in. In the end he parted company with Fuller and has since begun to manage himself. With Posh & Becks, however, there has never been any underlying conflict to unsteady the ship.

But there’s something else going on here. All the clever PR spin in the world will only bear fruit if everyone involved is prepared to WORK THEIR ARSES OFF.

How about this example of Becks’s unfailing commitment to Posh & Becks Inc.

When the Olympic flame arrived at RNLS
Culdrose
back in 2012, I co-hosted
The One Show
live from the event. It was a fantastically exciting moment to be part of. As the gold-painted BA (type) code-named ‘Firefly’ made its final approach, one could sense the nationwide party that was about to begin.

Chaperoning the flame to Britain were Princess Anne, the Princess Royal; Lord Coe, Chairman of LOCOG; Boris ‘Blustering’ Johnson, Mayor of London; and Golden Balls himself, Becks – all-round hero and
bona fide
founding member of the UK’s original Olympic bid team.

Our Olympic Torch
One Show
Special came and went, the Olympic Flame was lit and the countdown to London 2012 had begun.

But here’s the thing:

After we came off air, I had to leave the celebrations straight away to get back home and somehow, someone had wangled me a lift back to London on the golden plane. Not only that, but in the seat where the Olympic flame had been sitting on its inbound flight from Athens. Honestly, it had its own seat next to the Princess Royal. Although when I say
it
, I mean it and five other flames. All flickering away as back-ups should the original flame go out for some reason.

But that’s not the story.

The story is, for the duration of the flight as I (seat 1C) was sitting next to the BBC’s Sophie Raworth (seat 1D), in front of Boris Johnson
(seat 2C) and Lord Coe (seat 2D), Becks was miles back down the aisle in a row on his own.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to guess what he was doing while we were all rabbiting over each other and diving into the complimentary champagne. What do you reckon?

Let me tell you.

He was READING A BOOK.

Don’t ask me which one, because I can’t remember. Actually the truth is, I forgot to look, for which I will always be annoyed with myself. I was so gobsmacked with what I was seeing, it didn’t occur to me to check out exactly what book it might be. Purely the fact that it was a book at all threw me right off balance.

Why would Becks be reading a book?

He has never once mentioned books in any of his interviews that I’ve seen or read. Not once, and yet here he was, nose-deep in print while the rest of us were having a high old time. Or did he simply want a bit of privacy and was pretending to read? Surely not. Had he wanted privacy it would have been much easier for him to close his eyes and pretend to be asleep.

But Becks reading in the middle of a raucous plane full of post-Olympic flame jubilation? I’m just not buying that.

Becks knows that more than anything else, he looks the part. So that’s what he was doing. He was looking the part all the way home. Like the members of a boy band whose guitars and microphones aren’t plugged in. No one cares as long as we’re all playing the right roles.

And WORKING.

Working is actually what Posh & Becks do best. They work really hard, all the time. And that’s why they will always have my ultimate respect.

Good luck to them.

Work

Ten Things I Need:

My All-Time Favourite Restaurant and How I Liked It So Much I (Nearly) Bought It

I do think it’s important to underwrite one’s future relevance if at all possible. Feeling relevant is a huge factor in how well one ages. Still being part of whichever scene you choose to hang out in has to be a good thing. That’s why for years I have hankered after my own proper big-boy restaurant. Having been fortunate enough to eat in many of the very best over the years, I am always amazed, excited and inspired at the tsunami of life that crashes through the door, come lunch or dinner. Players, movers, shakers, chancers, beauties, beasts, the powerful, the peaceful and the downright dreadful. Who doesn’t want a bit of that every day?

And the best restaurateurs never want for anything. They get invited everywhere by everyone all the time – hunting, skiing, racing, you name it. They also enjoy the vicarious role of being among life’s
great connectors, hooking one person up with another for a bit of business here and there or a bit of hanky-panky who knows where. Not that I have any spare time to commit myself to such a venture at the moment, but if it all went tits-up tomorrow, I could think of a lot of worse things I might end up doing.

With this in mind, even though the timing may have been somewhat premature, I decided to investigate an opportunity that came my way, with a view to securing my non-irrelevant future. My favourite restaurant of all time had very quietly been put up for sale. I sensed there might be a deal to be done, and she’s a belter, the best of the best, top of the hill, number one.

When I bought Virgin Radio the first thing I did was boldly announce my intentions live on air. It worked then, so I thought I might try a similar tactic this time, only instead of announcing it on the radio I wrote about it in my newspaper column in the
Mail on Sunday
. The world-famous Langan’s restaurant, once the shining beacon of the London glitterati, was in need of a new team, a new owner, a new direction and generally being dragged into the twenty-first century.

Now it just so happened that Brian Clivaz, the managing director, and I had exchanged correspondence a week earlier after a chance meeting. Well, I say chance meeting, but ironically it was at the auctioning off of Peter Langan’s art collection. The famous collection that had adorned the walls of his eponymous eatery for the last thirty years had become the subject of a much-anticipated sale drummed up to liquidate the beginning of the end. Which it did. And very handsomely, to the tune of almost two million pounds.

Langan was:

Over the years, he had clearly spent every spare penny he had on rare and iconic pieces. Although, having said that, few were as rare
and iconic as the prices they realized on the day. Most works went for, get this, five to ten times their estimate. Now either the valuers at Christie’s had got their estimates catastrophically wrong, there was something very strange going on, or even more unlikely but increasingly looking like it might be the case, a heady cocktail of the two had taken place.

The legendary Langan’s magic had shown itself one final time, his unfathomable alchemy back for a curtain call. The prices went ballistic, proving that some people have more charisma dead than many of those still alive. When Langan set up his restaurant with Michael Caine in 1976, Caine was one of the hottest movie stars in the world; Langan was an outrageous and notorious bon viveur and Richard Shepherd, their chef, was one of only a handful of UK chefs to hold a coveted Michelin star. A triumvirate that turned out to be a lethal combination.

Langan’s did lunch and dinner like it had never been done before. Hundreds of covers every day. And the crème de la crème of the world’s rich and famous would drop in, to then fall out several hours later – Nicholson, O’Toole, Burton, Taylor, Sinatra, Princess Margaret. Triple AAA* all the way.

Alas, all this was way before my time. But even in the twenty-odd years I’ve been a regular, the great and good have still been seen there from time to time. It’s just that the great and good nowadays are not as the great and good once were. Never mind, we are who we are and we can’t be anyone else.

All through
The Big Breakfast
,
Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush
and the
TFI
days, I was almost a permanent fixture at Langan’s lunchtime.

It was also the place where I made the momentous decision to sell Virgin Radio. My media business was at an impasse at the time, as my backers had just refused me permission to buy the
Daily Star
and
Daily Express
newspaper businesses. Apparently we had done too well, too quickly and no longer needed to ‘bet the ranch’ – a phrase I’ll never forget – on any new ventures. By the way, Richard Desmond went on to buy both and turned them into a hundred -
million-pound-plus business in no time at all – hardly betting the bloomin’ ranch!

Anyway, my team were down in the dumps in the full knowledge the controls of the train set had been irredeemably taken from us. Blow them, I said, I know what we’ll do, we’ll sell up and move on. Six months and a £135 million profit later, that’s precisely what we did.

I’m sure I am not the only guy or gal who has benefited from the special blend of ‘space and time’ that Langan’s can lend to an otherwise befuddled and claustrophobic state of mind. It’s a big place with high ceilings, a lot of square footage and a huge amount of positive energy, like Grand Central Station without the trains. Sometimes the noise in there at lunchtime is deafening, the backdrop to much scheming and plotting over the years. In fact Langan’s might have the most glamorous and starry story to tell of the last four decades, if only she could speak.

Ah, there we are, out of nowhere I seem to have decided her gender. All things great that are not human in my mind are girls: majestic warships, resilient and proud little boats, legendary aircraft and of course beautiful and magnificent old cars.

I think it’s the restaurant’s magic that drove those prices so high at the Christie’s auction. So many people wanted a piece of Langan’s, a piece of art that they could hang at home over a table of their own. What then of the ultimate auction lot – the restaurant herself?

‘Nostalgia can demand the highest of prices,’ whispered a very wise man to me while the sale was taking place. Hmm, words of the magi indeed. Excellent news for the seller but not so great for the buyers if they ever need to sell it on.

There is a similar argument when it comes to Beatles’ memorabilia, the most valuable showbiz memorabilia of all. The theory is that its time may peak, like a good wine. Probably somewhere around ten years after the death of whichever Beatle croaks last, as after that the next generation of well-heeled collectors will hold far less affection for the Fab Four than we do now. It’s the same
with single-seater pre- and post-race cars as opposed to technically much less important Sixties’ sports cars. You can pick up an example of the former for a fraction of the far less rare but far more recognizable and usable latter.

How then to go about valuing Langan’s? What with all my own emotion tied up in her, I didn’t want to become the patsy with so much passion burning in his heart it would lead to a whole load of nonsense burning a hole in his pocket. By the current management’s own admission, she needed a complete ground-up and sympathetic restoration, both physically and spiritually. And preferably some time last week or at least as soon as possible. This once-gleaming vessel was halfway to becoming a tatty and lacklustre has-been with wires hanging out of sockets and once-proud staff who looked like they might burst into tears at any moment. The whole thing was in danger of foundering on the rocks. In many ways, damaged goods.

‘OK, Brian, I give up. Tell me the price?’ I asked.

‘The current owner will take £6 million for her.’

Wow. For damaged goods, that’s a whole chunk of change.

Yes, £6,000,000 is definitely an awful lot of anyone’s money and especially for a restaurant. Even an established one.

But nevertheless my heart immediately pulled out a sledgehammer and started to rain blows down upon my brain. This wasn’t just any established restaurant, for heaven’s sake. This was the original London grand eatery. The establishment that paved the way for those other Scarlet Pimpernel impersonators that began popping up all over the place in the mid-Eighties and crazy Nineties. Besides, she’s my favourite restaurant of all time. Owning and running her wouldn’t be the worst default I could choose in order to avoid the showbiz scrapheap. My own lunchtime and dinnertime show, live! Every day.