It’s like a Mario Puzo novel: the Beckhams are brawling. If you are to take the Daily Mail at their word, David and Victoria “have become estranged” from the eldest son Brooklyn, who is supposedly trapped in a prenup arrangement with notorious actress-heiress Nicola Peltz Beckham. To add insult to injury, online onlookers have started to make fun of Cruz Beckham, 20, for playing guitar in an indie rock band. “Are you going to stick with this job or going to become a race car driver next or something?” asked one TikTok commenter under some clips of him mid-shred.
“Wrong brother mate,” he replied.
Perhaps Cruz is right to distance himself from his sibling, who has accidentally become a boogeyman for his downwardly-mobile contemporaries. In 2025, many are struggling just to get a job interview – but Brooklyn has been a model, a hapless online chef, a hot-sauce entrepreneur and a not-very-good published photographer. (“Elephants in Kenya,” goes a caption from his photography book, next to an image of an elephant-shaped shadow. “So hard to photograph but incredible to see.”)
Brooklyn is the archetypal “nepo baby,” allowed to fail upwards because of celebrity parents.
“The entertainment industry has never been a meritocracy,” began the New York Magazine cover story that helped popularise the term three years ago. But the article went on to claim we were living in a “nepo-baby boom,” surrounded by an unusual number of actors and singers leeching off their famous relatives. When you look at the rest of human history it seems likely that we’ve just stepped slightly out of a 200-year lacuna. Our modern conception of the celebrity – a unique talent nurtured by press – is relatively new. It most likely began on the Victorian stage with the astronomical success of non-nepo Sarah Bernhardt; Clara Bow, the first woman famed for her non-inherited but natural “It” factor, came out of nowhere a century ago. Millennia have been spent going the other way.
All the major ancient pantheons had twisty family trees; biblical figures in the Old Testament constantly begat other figures. And most world civilisations on record have been ruled by nepo babies, or at least by those who have plotted to depose them. We have had no time to rejig our expectations. It’s no longer in vogue to say that our remaining monarchs have a direct stamp of approval from God – but there are few other conclusions to make about our new celebrity class. Minor sightings result in hysteria; red carpets command press cavalcades; props, costumes and personal belongings make big money at auction. Why wouldn’t these supernatural qualities pass from generation to generation? The religious have collected sacred relics for centuries; surely the most exciting relic to see, the one bearing the largest volume of original biological detritus, is a living child.
Like every great historical dynasty, the Beckhams are doing a public service by moving fact to the more interesting realm of fiction. Ask any casting agent from the world of reality TV: those with enough talent to rise up through meritocracy are too busy grinding on the job to produce any good interpersonal drama. But intergenerational sagas are everywhere in literature because the plots never get old; as Tolstoy said, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Brooklyn’s troubles in the kitchen and on safari have a Waughesque air about them; the battle between the Peltzes and the Beckhams seems to have been lifted word-for-word from the soap opera Dynasty. And we cannot help but root for Cruz, who would probably be the earnest, field-tilling character in a long Russian novel collaged together from the Sidebar of Shame. He will never manage to dissociate himself from the rest. But he shouldn’t have to.
I am not a nepo baby; before becoming a journalist I knew nobody in the industry, although I did once try to stake a Tess of the d’Urbervilles-style claim to literary status after hearing that one of my ancestors supposedly fled Nazi Germany with Thomas Mann. Those of us who jeer at the nepo babies have no idea how romantic and fun it feels to almost be one. We should make fewer complaints and start falsifying our family trees; it’s time to operate by the real rules of Qing China or Plantagenet England. All of history is ours to play with.
[See more: Stop taking Glastonbury so seriously]
Content from our partners
Related
