Yuku free message boards

By Franois-Marie Banier

Sonja Moussa (b. 1986), Aljosha and Kenia (b. 1993).

Gap ad

Mummy, can I have a Ferrari for Christmas?
August 2, 2003


Children of celebrities have lifestyles of unimaginable luxury - but it comes at a price, writes Joanna Briscoe.

Kids these days, they're spoilt rotten - whereas we, of course, grubbed around with second-hand peg dolls and mud pies, and our parents played with stones. But today's standard bratlings are mere waifs and strays compared with the new crew of It Kids. As our celebrity culture becomes ever more entrenched, the lifestyle of the celebrity kid can provide a highly enjoyable gawp-and-snort. The rich, it seems, are different.

Celebrity kids used to be kept out of the limelight, occasionally airbrushed on to Christmas cards and subjected to interesting kidnap threats. Now they're muffled in blankets to protect their Hello! deals, herded into Harry Potter premieres and given shoulder rides in their designer smocks to a twitching of telephotos in the foliage.

Prince of the emerging generation of undersized tabloid favourites is Brooklyn Beckham, son of footballer David and footballer's wife Posh. Instead of bunging a packet of luminous stars above the lad's bed, the Poshes added a $A50,000 fibre-optic ceiling to a bedroom already painted with 8000 cartoon characters. As the stars merrily twinkle, projectors built into the wall change the sky's hues from dusk to dawn while the lad snoozes. It was also reported that Brooklyn (who frequently sports Wale Adeyemi and Junior Dolce & Gabbana) and brother Romeo are about to be treated to a tree house, the $20,000 HideAway Hollow, no less, hand-carved from a Scandinavian redwood and available from Harrods.

Well, golly to that. In all his check-suited, logoed-up naffness, however, Brooklyn is no match for the real thing: Lourdes Leon. From the outset, Madonna's first-born has been presented with miniature versions of her mother's clothes from designers such as Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Gaultier. Madonna had spent an estimated $100,000 topping up the freebies in Lourdes' wardrobe by the time she was four, including a cashmere coat with fur collar, a sari and cowboy clothes. "She's got a really exclusive wardrobe for a four-year-old, but she likes clothes and make-up and getting ready to go out," said Madonna. Amazing how far a little parental reinforcement can go.Liz Hurley's son Damian, age one, has six celebrity godfathers, including Elton John and Hugh Grant. He visits Brooklyn Beckham for tea, sports a $700 pale blue leather jacket andwatches a Baby Mozart video to stimulate his brain cells.

"She knows what she wants," says Lourdes' personal stylist, Deborah Bunn. "If I send her a design she doesn't like, she'll tell me."

Mother and daughter have been spotted together at top beauty spas. Lourdes has enjoyed manicures, and wears Juicy Couture tracksuits, just like mama. When the Italian designer Patty Shelabarger created a line of limited-edition velvet and applique chairs, Madonna bought miniature replicas for Lourdes, for $3500 to $4000 apiece. The realities of such a life are almost impossible to understand. There is a photograph of Lourdes sitting alone in the back of a car, wide-eyed and eerily reminiscent of her mother, every inch of window space crammed with camera lenses. With fame thrust upon them in an era of hysterical celebrity, children such as Lourdes and her brother, Rocco, inhabit a closed world of bodyguards, gagged nannies and fawning flunkies, and will automatically consort with the few others whose freakish fortune imposes equivalent restraints. Thus the offspring of Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Kate Moss and Meg Mathews are thrown together in a smug North London circlet, all Stella McCartney baby showers, angel wings, ecstasy pills on club floors, names like Rafferty and Lila, visits to Thailand, dinky little mini-mum wardrobes, and mothers clutching yoga mats. Shopping addict Mathews reportedly asked for a package nearing $15 million for herself and daughter Anais after the divorce from Noel Gallagher, while Kate Moss installed a $80,000 nursery for her daughter, Lila.

It is a world of every-wish-answered excess, and yet a paradoxically restrictive and artificial one. Liz Hurley's son Damian, age one, has six celebrity godfathers, including Elton John and Hugh Grant. He visits Brooklyn Beckham for tea, sports a $700 pale blue leather jacket and watches a Baby Mozart video to stimulate his brain cells. On the other hand, he is almost entirely confined to Hurley's back garden.

"It's disgraceful that I am surrounded by 10 grown men shoving their cameras in my baby's face every time I attempt to take him for a walk or to a friend's house," says the woman who posed in a barely there dress with her naked baby for a magazine cover soon after the birth. "I do worry horribly about how it affects Damian, as I find their behaviour so unnerving that I rarely take him out. It upsets him so much."

Fifteen years ago, we had no idea what the young Rolling Stones daughters, Elizabeth Jagger and Leah Wood, looked like, whereas now they make a tidy living on the catwalks, and Mick Jagger's seventh child, Lucas, aged three, is a tabloid star in his own right. The Poppy Honeys, Phoenix Chis and Lennons of this world, their toddler features already recognisable to sizeable swathes of the public, will never be able to escape their fame-by-association, their silly names, or the effects of affluence. Their financial - and in many cases psychological - future is pretty much assured. We can guarantee that they will be hitting the catwalks, however pig-ugly, having dramatic drug problems, or suffering an uneasy relationship with fame. They will earn resentment for being loaded. Someone, somewhere will recognise Brooklyn Beckham when he's 50 - even if he changes his name to Jack Brown and lives on a Hebridean island.

"The children of celebrities are often under tremendous pressure to be as successful as their parents," says clinical child psychologist Linda Blair. "In most cases, it is a completely unrealistic and damaging goal."

However lavish, the fortunes of Gene, Romeo, Daisy Boo and peers are small compared with those of their American counterparts. MGM billionaire Kirk Kerkorian's ex-wife claimed that their three-year-old daughter, Kira, needed $550,000 a month, to include a monthly $22,000 for parties and play dates, $800 for pet care, $11,000 for eating out and $12,000 for charity.

Similarly, Revlon magnate Ronald Perelman was asked for $180,000 each month on the basis that his five-year-old daughter, Caleigh, might grow up feeling deprived if she didn't receive it.

As for the rest of us, we might feel a little deprived if we read any more of this. Yet our kids are probably the lucky ones. As celebrity editor Frances Sheen says of celebrity children: "Their world is such a bizarre one, and I think life is going to be much more difficult for them than people would imagine. Look at Brooklyn and Romeo Beckham. Yes, they will have fantastic lives - but at what price?"

...

Apple has a very weird face (eyes especially), like a ghost.

She may grow up looking gorgeous like her mom but right now she freaks me out!