Fun and kisses for cameras take their toll before Jade's big day

Published on Saturday 21 February 2009 18:40

AT HIGH noon today in Down Hall, an ancient country pile on the Hertfordshire-Essex border, a dying young woman will marry a younger man.

Theirs has been a complex romance, interrupted while the groom served a jail sentence for attacking a teenager with a golf club, but not half as complex as the woman's relationship with a British public which, since her 2002 appearance on Big Brother, has regarded her variously as a buffoon, bigot and "brave" bride-to-be. They are Jade Goody and Jack Tweed, and theirs could be described as a fairytale wedding only if it had been scripted by the Brothers Grimm.

Goody, a 27-year-old mother of two, has terminal cancer. On Valentine's Day she learned she had only weeks to live. Tweed, 21, proposed, and Goody at once got to work arranging the wedding from her bed at London's Royal Marsden Hospital.

When I interviewed her in 2006, near her home in Essex, we talked about her bulimia. She forced herself to vomit as a way of combating anxiety "because the only way I can feel better is if I'm in control of something". Planning the wedding, no doubt, is a way of feeling in control of her life even as it slips away.

On Wednesday, Goody left hospital in a wheelchair and returned to the village of Upshire.

By Saturday morning, a large crowd of journalists was standing on the single-track road outside her three-storey property which is partly hidden behind a fence and security gate. Flowers were delivered: a hot pink bouquet from Paul O'Grady. Goody came out, resplendent in a white tracksuit, accompanied by four bridesmaids who all wore skull-caps in solidarity with her bald head. She had spent her hen night drinking Lucozade. They piled into a large black car and left for London so she could get her teeth done. Later, she planned to fly to the wedding venue by helicopter and spend the night.

In the village, locals spoke warmly about Goody. Eric Wilding, a near neighbour, said that when she moved to Upshire he couldn't fathom what she had achieved that would allow her to buy such an expensive property. "But your feelings change when someone is about to die. It's very sad. She's come from nothing, and she's trying to do the best for her boys. Good luck to her."

Hannah Jones, Bethany Spence, and Rosha Kelly, aged between 14 and 16, are performing dance moves near the Post Office. "We've always liked her," said Jones, "even when she was in the Big Brother house, because she's, like, herself and she ain't fake at all. Other people, if they had what she's got, would be hiding it. But she wants to expose it to the world to show what can happen, which is a really good thing."

Hossein Banharally, 42, manages the local Co-op, its shelves groaning under the weight of tabloids bearing Goody's image. "Sometimes I think Jade's like an innocent girl who doesn't understand the outside world," he said. "She's in my prayers."

A few miles away at Down Hall, another marriage was taking place, but that was not what drew the men with the long-lenses, the TV crews whup-whupping overhead, or the security turning gawpers away. The management of Down Hall pride themselves on the privacy they offer celebrities, but today's wedding will be – eventually – a public occasion. It is already a commercial event. Max Clifford has brokered a reported 750,000 deal with OK! magazine, and the wedding will also be filmed by Living TV as the final part of their fly-on-the-wall series about Goody's illness.

The service will be conducted by Bishop Jonathan Blake of the Open Episcopal Church, and the couple will exchange Tiffany rings. It will not be the only jewellery worn by the groom; he has an electronic ankle bracelet as part of his bail conditions. On Friday, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw intervened to allow Tweed to spend his wedding night at Down Hall, though he must return to his mother's house by 3pm on Monday.

Goody will arrive at her wedding in a Bentley. The 150 guests are thought to include Davina McCall and Elton John. Girls Aloud have been asked to perform. The groom will wear a navy Armani suit. The bride's dress is a white silk gown worth 3,500, donated by Mohammed Al Fayed, another of Max Clifford's clients. Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, a former Clifford client, last week urged the public to pray for Goody.

This story has at its heart a very sad and basic fact, but it has been spun at dizzying velocity, its centrifugal force capable of pulling in even Gordon Brown, who last week expressed his sympathy.

Clifford agreed to represent Goody following her disastrous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother which saw her branded a racist for her bullying treatment of fellow housemate Shetty. The campaign to rebuild her brand began in August with her journey to India to appear on that country's version of Big Brother. However, only two days into the show, she was told on camera that she had cancer. That was the moment when media opinion began to swing back in Goody's favour. The adjectives changed. She was no longer "bigoted", "vile" and "thick". She was "sad", "frail" and most of all "brave".

She has been criticised, though, for her decision to live and die so publicly. But Goody and her people insist that the reason for granting interviews to the leading tabloids and selling access to her wedding is to raise as much money as possible in order to pay for the future education of her sons, Bobby, five, and Freddy, four. Having grown up in poverty, her drug-addict father absent, her mother feckless and criminal, Goody had little formal education, and this, rather than any innate stupidity, is responsible for her much-derided inarticulacy. She values education, however, and told me that after Big Brother she took lessons in reading, writing and arithmetic. I asked whether she read to her children, and she replied, touchingly, that Bobby read to her so they could be certain of pronouncing the words correctly.

It was desperation that drove Goody to audition for Big Brother. Not a desire to be famous, but a need to find refuge from an abusive boyfriend. Fame suited her, though. It provided her with the kind of support structure – in the form of agent, publicist and others working on her behalf – which she had never experienced in family life. Then there was the media coverage. Goody found this affirming and mentioned with real pride that, whenever she was on the front of a magazine, she sold more copies of that title than Victoria Beckham.

But can she really still be enjoying the lucrative public gaze?

"Yes," said Clifford. "Jade is doing what comes naturally, and giving the odd interview, when she's well enough, gives her something to focus on and look forward to. She said she's been famous for seven years and she's absolutely loved it. It's been the happiest time of her life."

Goody's life will be cut tragically short, but her longevity as a celebrity is remarkable. She has been notorious for most of her adult life, a completely public individual with no apparent understanding of, or desire for, private space, and so it is natural that there has been wide speculation that she will die on camera too. Clifford considers this offensive and denies making any such deal.

But Goody has lived life in the lens and has become emblematic of a symbiotic society of exhibitionists and voyeurs. Isn't it logical that the ultimate reality TV star should see out her days on TV?

"But in the week or two before you die, that's not the real person," said Clifford, whose own wife died of cancer. "That's just a sad and pain-wracked version of the real person. I know from that, that's not how she would want to be remembered."

In 2009, it's unlikely that any other wedding or passing will attract as much attention or debate as Goody's. That may seem unfair, grotesque even. What, we may ask, makes her so special? The answer, of course, is that nothing does. She's a vacuum but none the less, a phenomenon and grateful for it. She once told me she planned to decorate a room with framed covers of all the magazines on which she had appeared. It seems sad, especially today, that she won't be around to admire her final, fatal headlines.