scriptgirl
Active Member
- Joined
- May 1, 2006
- Messages
- 12,232
- Reaction score
- 5
I thought this was funny. It's about a Footballer's wife wanting a Grace type wedding.
The Guardian
Why Coleen wants her big day to be more Grace Kelly than Jade Goody
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Despite the private jets, £200,000 dress and £2.5m magazine deal, Wayne Rooney's bride is determined next weekend's celebrity-studded wedding should be a classy affair, writes David Smith[/FONT]
He popped the question on a petrol station forecourt, proffering an engagement ring with a diamond 'the size of a gobstopper'. Five years later, the private jets, the luxury yacht, the palatial Italian villa, the rare species of butterfly and the £200,000 wedding dress are ready. So, too, is the £2.5m glossy magazine deal. Welcome to the most expensive wedding in the celebrity universe.
Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin have arguably supplanted David and Victoria Beckham as football's first couple. Certainly the opulence of their marriage on Saturday will leave the Beckhams' own nuptials of a few years ago looking like a drizzly afternoon at Darlington register office. Pre-wedding hype has billed it as McLoughlin's bid to become 'Queen Wag', outshining every other football bride. But she is determined that the lavish production on the Italian Riviera will be more Grace Kelly than Jade Goody.
The big day has been the subject of a vicious bidding war between OK! and Hello! magazines and will see an unprecedented military-style operation to keep the paparazzi at bay. There will be an average of two security guards for every guest, on alert for photographers in trees or waiters concealing miniature cameras. In all, hen parties, stag parties and the wedding itself are rumoured to be costing £5m, and the couple have pledged a large chunk of their magazine fee to charity.
Rooney, who earns £115,000 a week, is not short of change, as he has just amply demonstrated when he bade farewell to bachelorhood in Ibiza. Yet if only his England team-mates had scored one more goal against Croatia at Wembley last November he would now be pulling on his shooting boots rather than his wedding togs. Austria's and Switzerland's loss after England failed to quality for the Euro 2008 finals is Italy's gain. Portofino, the 'jewel of the Riviera', has seduced Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne, but it has never seen anything like the Wayne and Coleen travelling circus.
The formal marriage will take place at a secret civil ceremony in Cheshire, but that will not be allowed to spoil a good photo story. Five jets will fly 64 guests to Italy, where McLoughlin's local priest from Croxteth in Liverpool will conduct the public nuptials, possibly at the ornate marble-floored Villa Durazzo, part of the 16th-century Castello Brown. The wedding rings, worth £100,000, were designed by a New York jeweller to the couple's specifications. Guests will be given a ribbon-tied box containing a rare butterfly, which they will release simultaneously as the couple, both 22, are declared husband and wife. The gesture was chosen by McLoughlin to symbolise her love for Rooney and their years growing up together.
It is her day and one she has been preparing for a very long time. A source was quoted by the News of the World as saying: 'She knows people will be expecting the wedding to be chavvy, so she's doing everything possible to look as classy as she can. She's toned down the fake tan because she doesn't want to be orange on the day.'
Her dress, with a 25ft train, is the result of six return trips to New York, costing £85,000, to consult the designer Georgina Chapman's Marchesa label. Chapman, 32, married to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, has previously designed gowns for Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger. McLoughlin has apparently asked female guests to wear black, ensuring that she will stand out. A mini-crisis was reported when she undertook a crash diet and went down a bust size, requiring last-minute adjustments. Her mother, Jeanette, has gone further and shed seven stones.
The reception will be held in La Cervara, a 700-year-old former abbey, where the singer Rod Stewart celebrated his wedding to Penny Lancaster. McLoughlin's favourite band, Westlife, have been booked for a reported £400,000, with a similar fee going to a rapper whose identity remains under wraps. The bride - after three hen parties in Miami, Manchester and the Canary Islands - will apparently impose an alcohol limit as she regards over-drinking as 'vulgar'.
It will not be a celebrity wedding in the name-dropping sense and not even all family members will be attending. McLoughlin has allegedly 'banned' Rooney's extended family including his cousins Stephen, 23 - a cross-dresser who told a newspaper he would make a perfect bridesmaid - and Natalie, 18, who flashed her breasts at McLoughlin's 21st birthday party. Her uncle, Sean McLoughlin, is believed to be Rooney's best man. The guest list is expected to include boxer Ricky Hatton, England player Steven Gerrard and wife Alex Curran, and a select band of Rooney's Manchester United team-mates. The Beckhams are unlikely to attend. According to one unnamed source: 'There is no love lost between the couples.'
Most of the guests will stay at the luxurious Hotel Splendido, once a monastery that was attacked by Saracen pirates. Most of its 64 rooms look out across the bay amid Cyprus trees and wisteria. The hotel sits below Rex Harrison's former villa, while Domenico Dolce's and Stefano Gabbana's summer residence is on the headland opposite. During the four-day extravaganza, there will be champagne breakfasts and a masked ball on the Alysia, the world's biggest charter yacht, which costs £42,000 a day.
Each guest has been obliged to sign a confidentiality agreement with OK!. They will be required to surrender all digital cameras and mobile phones on their way in. In what has now become a lucrative business for a handful of specialist firms, more than a hundred security guards will be hired to prevent Sunday newspapers pulling off a 'spoiler'. Last week waiters in Ibiza were being offered £1,000 by British tabloids to take photos of Rooney and friends.
A snatched photo from the wedding could be worth a hundred times as much, according to Phil Hall, public relations consultant and former editor of the News of the World. 'All the guests will be guarded like never before,' he said yesterday. 'OK! will probably spend a quarter of a million pounds on security that day to make sure there are no Happy Snaps. Guests are told to hand over cameras and now mobile phones as well; I remember being involved in one wedding where all the cameras were confiscated but as soon as the bride walked down the aisle 20 mobile phones came out taking pictures. I had to put one of our pictures out to all the papers straight away.'
Security arrangements worthy of a state visit are now typical in the ever-escalating war between the glossies. Hello! enjoyed the most recent triumph last month when it paid a reported half a million pounds for exclusive rights to the wedding of the Queen's grandson Peter Phillips to Canadian Autumn Kelly at Windsor Castle. But it missed out on the bigger prize of Wayne and Coleen.
A source close to the battle told The Observer that Hello! bid around £1.5m only to see OK! owner Richard Desmond offer £2.5m, 'the biggest cheque he's ever written out'. It is a record for a celebrity wedding, more than double the £1m agreed with the Beckhams in 1999. The deal was rubber-stamped in March and also included McLoughlin's 21st birthday celebrations that month.
Max Clifford, the veteran public relations adviser, said that Rooney and McLoughlin would find they are no longer in charge of their own wedding. 'It becomes a show produced by OK! and directed by the security people. With anybody I have ever represented, I've always explained that if you want to do this, they control the whole thing. At the last one I went to there was a lot of stopping and starting - even the ceremony was stopped and started for pictures. After the vows there was an hour and a half of posing for pictures. It's a totally unnatural phenomenon, all about money and control, like being married in a photographer's studio. If that's the kind of wedding you want, good luck to you.'
Not that the wedding day will be the end of the story. The couple are expected to honeymoon on Necker, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Islands hideaway, where they will doubtless be pursued by paparazzi again. They will then head home to Liverpool for a second reception, costing a relatively modest £250,000, which members of Rooney's extended family will be able to attend.
But despite all the stage management, spare a thought for the wedding photographer charged with capturing Coleen's butterflies being liberated from their boxes. There will be no second take. With Desmond's cheque of £2.5m riding on it, this is one job that requires a steady hand.
The Guardian
Why Coleen wants her big day to be more Grace Kelly than Jade Goody
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Despite the private jets, £200,000 dress and £2.5m magazine deal, Wayne Rooney's bride is determined next weekend's celebrity-studded wedding should be a classy affair, writes David Smith[/FONT]
He popped the question on a petrol station forecourt, proffering an engagement ring with a diamond 'the size of a gobstopper'. Five years later, the private jets, the luxury yacht, the palatial Italian villa, the rare species of butterfly and the £200,000 wedding dress are ready. So, too, is the £2.5m glossy magazine deal. Welcome to the most expensive wedding in the celebrity universe.
Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin have arguably supplanted David and Victoria Beckham as football's first couple. Certainly the opulence of their marriage on Saturday will leave the Beckhams' own nuptials of a few years ago looking like a drizzly afternoon at Darlington register office. Pre-wedding hype has billed it as McLoughlin's bid to become 'Queen Wag', outshining every other football bride. But she is determined that the lavish production on the Italian Riviera will be more Grace Kelly than Jade Goody.
The big day has been the subject of a vicious bidding war between OK! and Hello! magazines and will see an unprecedented military-style operation to keep the paparazzi at bay. There will be an average of two security guards for every guest, on alert for photographers in trees or waiters concealing miniature cameras. In all, hen parties, stag parties and the wedding itself are rumoured to be costing £5m, and the couple have pledged a large chunk of their magazine fee to charity.
Rooney, who earns £115,000 a week, is not short of change, as he has just amply demonstrated when he bade farewell to bachelorhood in Ibiza. Yet if only his England team-mates had scored one more goal against Croatia at Wembley last November he would now be pulling on his shooting boots rather than his wedding togs. Austria's and Switzerland's loss after England failed to quality for the Euro 2008 finals is Italy's gain. Portofino, the 'jewel of the Riviera', has seduced Ingrid Bergman, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne, but it has never seen anything like the Wayne and Coleen travelling circus.
The formal marriage will take place at a secret civil ceremony in Cheshire, but that will not be allowed to spoil a good photo story. Five jets will fly 64 guests to Italy, where McLoughlin's local priest from Croxteth in Liverpool will conduct the public nuptials, possibly at the ornate marble-floored Villa Durazzo, part of the 16th-century Castello Brown. The wedding rings, worth £100,000, were designed by a New York jeweller to the couple's specifications. Guests will be given a ribbon-tied box containing a rare butterfly, which they will release simultaneously as the couple, both 22, are declared husband and wife. The gesture was chosen by McLoughlin to symbolise her love for Rooney and their years growing up together.
It is her day and one she has been preparing for a very long time. A source was quoted by the News of the World as saying: 'She knows people will be expecting the wedding to be chavvy, so she's doing everything possible to look as classy as she can. She's toned down the fake tan because she doesn't want to be orange on the day.'
Her dress, with a 25ft train, is the result of six return trips to New York, costing £85,000, to consult the designer Georgina Chapman's Marchesa label. Chapman, 32, married to Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, has previously designed gowns for Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger. McLoughlin has apparently asked female guests to wear black, ensuring that she will stand out. A mini-crisis was reported when she undertook a crash diet and went down a bust size, requiring last-minute adjustments. Her mother, Jeanette, has gone further and shed seven stones.
The reception will be held in La Cervara, a 700-year-old former abbey, where the singer Rod Stewart celebrated his wedding to Penny Lancaster. McLoughlin's favourite band, Westlife, have been booked for a reported £400,000, with a similar fee going to a rapper whose identity remains under wraps. The bride - after three hen parties in Miami, Manchester and the Canary Islands - will apparently impose an alcohol limit as she regards over-drinking as 'vulgar'.
It will not be a celebrity wedding in the name-dropping sense and not even all family members will be attending. McLoughlin has allegedly 'banned' Rooney's extended family including his cousins Stephen, 23 - a cross-dresser who told a newspaper he would make a perfect bridesmaid - and Natalie, 18, who flashed her breasts at McLoughlin's 21st birthday party. Her uncle, Sean McLoughlin, is believed to be Rooney's best man. The guest list is expected to include boxer Ricky Hatton, England player Steven Gerrard and wife Alex Curran, and a select band of Rooney's Manchester United team-mates. The Beckhams are unlikely to attend. According to one unnamed source: 'There is no love lost between the couples.'
Most of the guests will stay at the luxurious Hotel Splendido, once a monastery that was attacked by Saracen pirates. Most of its 64 rooms look out across the bay amid Cyprus trees and wisteria. The hotel sits below Rex Harrison's former villa, while Domenico Dolce's and Stefano Gabbana's summer residence is on the headland opposite. During the four-day extravaganza, there will be champagne breakfasts and a masked ball on the Alysia, the world's biggest charter yacht, which costs £42,000 a day.
Each guest has been obliged to sign a confidentiality agreement with OK!. They will be required to surrender all digital cameras and mobile phones on their way in. In what has now become a lucrative business for a handful of specialist firms, more than a hundred security guards will be hired to prevent Sunday newspapers pulling off a 'spoiler'. Last week waiters in Ibiza were being offered £1,000 by British tabloids to take photos of Rooney and friends.
A snatched photo from the wedding could be worth a hundred times as much, according to Phil Hall, public relations consultant and former editor of the News of the World. 'All the guests will be guarded like never before,' he said yesterday. 'OK! will probably spend a quarter of a million pounds on security that day to make sure there are no Happy Snaps. Guests are told to hand over cameras and now mobile phones as well; I remember being involved in one wedding where all the cameras were confiscated but as soon as the bride walked down the aisle 20 mobile phones came out taking pictures. I had to put one of our pictures out to all the papers straight away.'
Security arrangements worthy of a state visit are now typical in the ever-escalating war between the glossies. Hello! enjoyed the most recent triumph last month when it paid a reported half a million pounds for exclusive rights to the wedding of the Queen's grandson Peter Phillips to Canadian Autumn Kelly at Windsor Castle. But it missed out on the bigger prize of Wayne and Coleen.
A source close to the battle told The Observer that Hello! bid around £1.5m only to see OK! owner Richard Desmond offer £2.5m, 'the biggest cheque he's ever written out'. It is a record for a celebrity wedding, more than double the £1m agreed with the Beckhams in 1999. The deal was rubber-stamped in March and also included McLoughlin's 21st birthday celebrations that month.
Max Clifford, the veteran public relations adviser, said that Rooney and McLoughlin would find they are no longer in charge of their own wedding. 'It becomes a show produced by OK! and directed by the security people. With anybody I have ever represented, I've always explained that if you want to do this, they control the whole thing. At the last one I went to there was a lot of stopping and starting - even the ceremony was stopped and started for pictures. After the vows there was an hour and a half of posing for pictures. It's a totally unnatural phenomenon, all about money and control, like being married in a photographer's studio. If that's the kind of wedding you want, good luck to you.'
Not that the wedding day will be the end of the story. The couple are expected to honeymoon on Necker, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Islands hideaway, where they will doubtless be pursued by paparazzi again. They will then head home to Liverpool for a second reception, costing a relatively modest £250,000, which members of Rooney's extended family will be able to attend.
But despite all the stage management, spare a thought for the wedding photographer charged with capturing Coleen's butterflies being liberated from their boxes. There will be no second take. With Desmond's cheque of £2.5m riding on it, this is one job that requires a steady hand.
