Cheryl Cole’s request for the media to respect her privacy ‘during this difficult time’ is in sharp contrast with the stage-managed soap opera of her celebrity career, which is about to go into overdrive
IT HAS BEEN a fantastic week for Cheryl Cole. Her career is about to go into overdrive and she is now primed to break into the lucrative American market. She has already been lined up to be one of the judges on the first series of the US version of the X Factor(says Max Clifford); she will experience a huge surge in album and merchandising sales over the next few weeks and months and her next album will be this year's Christmas Number One (says Gennarao Castaldo, head of PR at HMV); she has been booked for a high-profile appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Rosson March 12th (says the BBC press office) – it will be a "tell-all interview on her divorce from Ashley" (adds the Sun); she has been invited on to the bill of the major UK rock festival "T In The Park" in June where she is sure to "take the festival by storm" (says Scotland's Daily Record newspaper); she has just overtaken the previous incumbent, Victoria Beckham, to become the "Number One Celebrity Wag" (says the News Of The Worldwebsite) and earlier this week she spent the night with dancer Derek Hough, who was seen leaving her hotel room suitably "bleary eyed" the next morning (say all the tabloids – and even some broadsheets).
Now would be a good time for Cheryl to make a new L’Oreal haircare product advertisement, for which she is paid a reputed £500,000 a year. The end line just could be: “Divorce – because it’s worth it”.
Not such a good week for “love rat” Ashley Cole. The media’s treatment of him has been “somewhere between a paedophile and an MP at the moment”, say the celebrity gossip websites. Profiles, panels, side bars and highlighted text are gleefully reminding us that since he married Cheryl in 2006, he has had a “sex romp” with Aimee Walton, a 22-year-old hairdresser (revealed in 2008). Walton reported that he had to “interrupt the sex session” to throw up because he was so drunk. We read again about when his then club Arsenal offered him a new contract worth only £55,000 a week (plus bonuses and image rights revenue) he was so traumatised that he almost crashed his £115,000 Bentley. A glamour model, Sonia Wild, told us that semi-naked pictures of the footballer were sent to her mobile phone (“an accident” says Ashley) and it was revealed that he had “repeatedly bedded” political aide Ann Corbitt on Chelsea’s pre-season tour of the US last year.
It is alleged that Ashley got Chelsea’s director of communications to advise Corbitt on how to respond to press enquiries about the affair. Cole now faces a record £400,000 fine from Chelsea for, among other reasons, using club officials to deal with his personal life. Oh, and another affair has been reported – this time with Liverpool club secretary Vicki Gough.
And now, and this is really bad, he’s blaming Cheryl’s mother for his marriage break-up, saying ever since the mother-in-law came to live with them two years ago “the marriage never stood a chance”.
Poor Ashley, he has a broken ankle, which could keep him out of the England squad for this year’s World Cup, and a broken reputation in the press. He now makes Tiger Woods and John Terry look exceptionally uxorious. But just as Cheryl’s “people” have been spinning the marriage break-up into “new career openings blossom for nation’s sweetheart Cheryl” so Ashley’s “people” are already on the counter-spin. First you must decipher the code: “a source close to” when used in celebrity reportage usually means the person themselves giving the quote directly to a “trusted” reporter but wanting to distance themselves from its origin; while “a close friend of” usually means their manager or PR agent. Thus, we have already learnt from sources close to and close friends of Ashley’s that he’s been crying on the phone to Cheryl (repentance – step one), he’s been begging for her forgiveness (acceptance that it’s all his fault – step two) and he’s promised to seek treatment in a sex clinic (he probably got that from Tiger Woods’s press release) to cure him of all his ills (determination to repair his marriage and the damage he has done to it – step three).
Sources close to and close friends of Cheryl meanwhile have her eying up a “$2.1 million Hollywood villa as a base for her new American TV career and so she can be closer to her hunky new boyfriend, the dancer Derek Hough”.
This is a soap opera that just keeps on giving. And you could shove the whole thing on to an advanced media studies course to illustrate just how warped the status of celebrity culture and its attendant reportage has become. But it’s not reportage even in the most elastic meaning of the word: it’s massaging, aggrandising and promoting. Which is why inconvenient truths such as Cheryl once being found guilty of assault – in 2003 she punched a nightclub toilet attendant and was sentenced to 120 hours of community service – haven’t been given much of an airing this week; neither has the inescapable fact that Ashley’s Cole fame and wealth are predicated on the fact that he is one of the best left-backs in the world.
And on it goes: “Brave Cheryl fights back the tears”, “Coward Love Cheat Ashley Flees The Country”. And both Ashley and Cheryl Cole have been complicit in this media manipulation/intrusion from the moment they handed over their wedding vows to OK! magazine for £1 million.
Just to be quite clear what these sort of deals entail – according to the people who have brokered them – you allow the magazine to invite people you have never met before (say, cast members from Hollyoaksand EastEndersto up the "glamour celeb" count), you allow your own family to be frisked on their way into the church (in case of hidden cameras), you consent to the fact that your frumpy old aunt with the bad hair-do and the moustache is not allowed sit with the family but is put well down the back of the church behind a pillar so she won't show in the photos.
But why worry about all that when your “people” have told you that it is a fantastic “branding exercise” which will only enhance your future career prospects.
There is a sharp contrast between Cheryl and Ashley flogging “the happiest day of their life” for cash and the announcement from Cheryl this week that “she asks the media to respect her privacy during this difficult time”.
Celebrity isn’t a tap you can turn on and off. If you sell the details of your private life to the highest bidder when it suits you, you can hardly plead for privacy when it doesn’t.
A certain very well-known ex-singer, also married to a very high-profile footballer, is notorious around tabloid newsrooms for ringing up the picture desk and telling them what time she will be arriving at and leaving a certain restaurant. When the pictures appear the next day, she then gets more column inches for complaining about “press intrusion into her private life”. Weirdly, these interventions always seem to happen when this person has something to sell or needs a profile “top-up”.
The apotheosis of celebrity status and commercial earning convergence is Katie Price (Jordan) who has seemingly artfully engineered a dramatic, and quick turn-around love life which allows her to pick up big cheques for blabbing about every stage of her relationship with the various men in her life until the “I’m so in love/We’re getting engaged!/Here are the pictures of our wedding!/My marriage is on the rocks/He’s a bastard/I’m so over him and looking for love again ” cycle is exhausted.
But then this is a cultural marketplace where a C-list actress/singer/whatever can pick up a cheque for “opening up” about her miscarriage.
With Cheryl and Ashley you have the discernibly sad reality of two young people (both in their 20s) going through one of the most serious episodes that can happen in life – separation.
And it is well known that, whatever about Ashley, Cheryl is, for the most part, a genuinely kind and good person. Her hunger for fame, though, isn’t matched by any real level of appreciable musical talent which is why, like Victoria Beckham, she has gone the “brand” route. Once you enter into that distorted celebrity cough-up and cash-in commercial imbroglio, all bets are off on your private life and most particularly your romantic private life.
By dint of her own actions, Cheryl Cole now belongs in a world where sales of L’Oreal Elvive Full Restore 5 were, according to a Nielsen market scan report, at about 10,000 a month just before she started to advertise it. Now, sales are at 250,000 a month.
Cheryl Cole is a product that sells. And sadly, so is her divorce.
