Jade Goody once said that she dreamt of “a timeless wedding that I can look
back on in 80 years' time”.
When the reality TV star gets married tomorrow the ceremony will certainly be
preserved for all time. Deals worth £1 million have been struck for the
magazine and TV rights as international interest in the story grows. But she
will not have the luxury of looking back on any of it in years to come.
With terminal cervical cancer and as little as eight weeks to live, it is
uncertain whether Goody, 27, will even have the strength to walk down the
aisle. Plans are said to be in place to bring the wedding forward to today
if her health deteriorates. It is understood that Jonathan Blake, an
archbishop in the Open Episcopal Church, will participate in the ceremony.
Although she has managed to stand unaided since leaving the Royal Marsden
Hospital in West London to return to her home in Essex, Goody is so frail
that the evening celebrations may be postponed. A special pouch has been
sewn into her Manuel Mota wedding dress, a gift from the Harrods owner
Mohamed Al Fayed, in which to keep her painkillers.
The Ministry of Justice proffered its own wedding gift yesterday. Her fiancé
Jack Tweed's curfew conditions, imposed after he was released early from a
prison sentence for assault, were changed to allow him to spend the wedding
night and the next morning with his new bride. Jack Straw, the Justice
Secretary, said: “It is crucial that offenders are treated equally within
the rules regardless of the publicity surrounding their case, but I was
satisfied that it was reasonable to allow this.”
The event is being labelled as among the most poignant celebrity wedding in
history. It is certainly one of the most hotly debated. Some believe that
the media are exploiting Goody by buying up images showing her bald, ailing
and at times distressed. But Goody says that she wants to make as much money
as quickly as possible for the education of her two young sons, Bobby and
Freddy. It has been speculated that Goody's death itself might be filmed,
though this is flatly denied by Max Clifford, her publicist. Tweed said:
“People ask why she's doing this in the public eye, but that's Jade. She has
done this all her life. It helps take her mind off it and she never feels
alone.”
Mr Clifford told The Times: “Although it might be hard for some people
to understand, for her what she is doing is totally consistent. It might be
unnatural for them, but it's totally natural for her. The media have
exploited her and she has exploited them, and it seems to have worked very
well for both of them. The past seven years have been the happiest of her
life.”
Most agree that Goody's career trajectory has been a one-off that will never
be replicated in reality TV.
Goody, who became a household name (a poll found her to be more recognisable
than the Prime Minister) after appearing in the 2002 series of Big Brother,
has exposed her entire adult life to the camera. One of her bridesmaids will
be Kate Jackson, producer of various documentary series about Goody. Many of
her closest friends hail from the media bubble in which she lives. “People
might think they are just professional friendships but they're genuine,”
said another source who has worked with Goody. “Jade is insecure. She works
hard to be liked and that is very endearing.”
Goody's frequent malapropisms and lack of education — she once said: “Do they
speak Portuganese in Portugal? I thought Portugal was in Spain” — contribute
to a gullible charm that made her a hugely marketable brand. Her combination
of damaged vulnerability and brassy confidence won over the public and
launched her as a moneymaking machine, not just for herself but for agents,
publishers, editors, producers and publicists.
Her first autobiography sold 113,000 copies, she has starred in many reality
TV series such as What Jade Did Next, Jade's Salon and Jade's
PA, and her perfume, Shh, became the third most popular in Britain after
Kylie Minogue's and Victoria Beckham's.
“I think maybe it's because they can relate to me,” she once said of her
public appeal. “I'm like the girl next door, and they think that if I can do
it, then anyone else can.”
The media's relationship with Goody has long been double-edged, alternatively
describing her as heroine and sinner. It turned on her when she appeared in Celebrity
Big Brother and made a racially offensive remark to the Bollywood
actress Shilpa Shetty that caused an international outcry. At the time her
career was thought by some to be beyond rescue. But she apologised and
bounced back.
John Noel, her agent until 2007, said: “I think we are moving towards an
iconic status with Jade. She is a one-off. Of all the talent I've worked
with, she is one of the special ones. Most reality TV people don't last
beyond six months but she went on to develop a huge income for herself.
She's a natural comedienne who appeals to people on the street.”
Mr Noel said that the media found her an easy target to attack, yet always
carried on writing about her. “She's helped to sell an awful lot of
newspapers and magazines.”
Those who talk of exploitation are often the same people who look down on her,
he added. “One of the things about Jade is that she's very tough and
resilient. She is a very streetwise young woman.”
Some journalists have expressed guilt over the way that Goody was projected.
Jane Ennis, a former editor of the celebrity gossip magazine Now,
admitted in a newspaper article: “I paid Jade lots of money to talk about
her weight fluctuations, her terrible family history, her rocky romances,
her children, her cosmetic surgery and to pose for makeover pictures ... I
sold magazines and Jade got rich. It all seemed like innocent fun at the
time, but today I am not so sure.
“The whole of Jade's celebrity status was built on feet of clay. Unlike the
other showbusiness people featured in Now, she had no discernible
talent and she came from a background of ignorance and poverty that made her
vulnerable to the idea of easy money.”
On the other hand, Kevin O'Sullivan, the Sunday Mirror TV columnist and Big
Brother commentator, said: “The completely wrong thing to say about Jade
Goody is that she is thick. She isn't thick, she is just uneducated. In many
ways she is as sharp as a pin.”
She was born into a dysfunctional household in Bermondsey, South London. Her
father was a drug addict (he later died from an overdose in the toilet of a
Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet) who stored guns under her cot and her mother,
Jackiey, a clipper — a woman who pretends to procure prostitutes for clients
then runs off with the money. A photograph exists of Goody, aged 5, with a
spliff in her mouth, and one of her earliest memories is of watching her
father taking drugs.
Friends say that to this day she cannot bear the smell of matches or the sight
of tinfoil because it triggers memories of her parents' drug abuse. She
admits that in the past she has abused slimming pills and laxatives as a way
of losing weight, which has left her with chronic stomach problems.
Rob Yeung first encountered Goody when he appeared as a guest psychologist on Big
Brother 3. “I remember doing a live phone-in, and a viewer called in,
asking whether she was really plain stupid, or does she have some clever
game plan.” Dr Yeung told the viewer he was in no doubt that it was the
former.
Five years later, when he became a panellist on Jade's PA, a spin-off
series in which she auditioned for a personal assistant, he revised his
opinion. “I had expected she might be a diva or be difficult, but actually
she was one of the most professional celebrities I've worked with.
“She is very self-aware. She knows that her strengths are just being herself.
She never tries to put a front on. There are no barriers or guardedness. I
think that is a huge part of her success. She is quite happy to tell you
exactly how she is feeling, whether it is enthusiastic or elated, or whether
she is angry. That is one of the reasons people are interested in her.”
Craig Purves, one of the stylists drafted in to complete Jade's first
magazine-shifting makeover in 2003, remembers that a machine was growing
around her right from the start. “When she came in that day, there was a
huge entourage of around 20 people, including some very fierce chaperones,”
he said. “These people were aware that she could make them all an extremely
large amount of money. It was mercenary. It was very much a case of, 'Jade
you're going to go brunette, you're going to wear this'.
“The atmosphere was clearly very controlled. Lots of people whispering, and
shifting about, monitoring what was being said. We weren't allowed to take
any Polaroids, or chat in the make-up room. Then, Jade would say something
inappropriate, and I would always have to take her to one side and say,
'Jade, you can't say that, there are journalists about', and she would say,
'why not?'.”
Mr Purves, owner of the Number One salon in Soho, London, said he had rarely
seen such heavy-handed management of a celebrity. In contrast other,
“ghastly” Big Brother contestants and aspiring
celebrities he had styled had been “calculated”. But Jade was there for a
giggle. “I don't think she ever [set out to] work the system, she just got
on with it.”
This, in fact, is the reason why media experts believe there will never be
another Jade Goody. Reality TV contestants today are too shrewd, too well
versed in the system to have the innocent gullibility that made the formula
work.
O'Sullivan of the Mirror said: “All reality TV stars want to be her but
they can't be her. They are too knowing now. Jade was gullible and innocent
and that's why it worked. But that's gone. There will be attempts to do
similar TV shows with different reality stars and they will all fail. You
could not have made up the script of this woman's life. It's almost
operatic.”
Mr Noel believes that Goody's media career would have lasted much longer and
that she will continue to be written about. “This won't be the end. I can
see her becoming the subject of a movie: considering what she went through
as a little girl and what she has achieved, it is like an opera.”
As far as the filming of Goody is concerned, it is likely to end after
tomorrow's wedding, which will be combined with the christening of her
children. There may be an interview with Piers Morgan for ITV but then, says
Mr Clifford, it will be “the end of that road”. It will certainly mark the
end of an era. When Jade Goody finally does succumb to cancer, part of the
huge reality TV phenomenon that she helped to create will die with her.
