“If I’d known David Attenborough 40 years ago,” Cameron Diaz rather startlingly confessed to me last year, “he might have been the one man to tame me.” As it turned out, it was Benji Madden — a diminutive, tattooed, shaven-headed rocker with more paunch than one of Attenborough’s quirkiest marsupials — who was finally able to make that claim. After an eight-month romance, the unlikely pair wed last week under a Chinese lantern-lit marquee in Diaz’s Beverly Hills back garden. When news of the wedding broke the following day, fans and idle priers were astonished not so much by the union as the fact that the Good Charlotte frontman and the most eligible bachelorette in Hollywood had managed to keep it semi-secret. Semi, because although the paparazzi were successfully thwarted and even Diaz’s neighbours were under the illusion that the 42-year-old star of Something About Mary and The Other Woman was throwing a party in advance of the Golden Globe awards, tantalising details of the ceremony (right down to the Stephanotis adorning the marquee) flooded the internet within hours.
The ring bearers, we discovered quickly, were Madden’s brother Joel and Nicole Richie’s five-year-old son, Sparrow; the bridesmaids Richie, Drew Barrymore, Cameron’s sister Chimene, and her assistant Jesse Lutz. “I waited because I didn’t want to settle,” Diaz’s wedding speech reportedly began. “Now I got the best man ever. My special man. He’s mine.”
Whether by accident or design, Diaz’s semi-secret wedding provoked more enthusiasm than an eight-page spread in Hello! magazine. “When Drew, Reese, Nicole and Gwyneth all tip up at your home at the same time one morning, swiftly followed by the wedding planner to the stars and her giant white marquee,” says Jade Beer, editor of Brides magazine, “I’m afraid your secret is out, Cameron. But in keeping her wedding under wraps for this long, Diaz has managed to get the world even more interested in it. We still don’t know what she wore, what flowers she carried, what guests ate, who partied hardest and longest. There has been just a mere trickle of tiny detail. Cue an enormous magazine deal to quell that growing global interest? Or a refreshingly civilised celebrity approach to what is still a pretty personal moment between a couple and their closest family and friends?”
While I can’t help but hope that Diaz ditches the magazine deal and goes for the “civilised celebrity” option, stars like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — who married in secret at their chateau in France before sharing edited tit-bits with the world in People magazine and Hello! — have set a trend we’re likely to see a lot more of in 2015.
Quiet ceremony
In the past fortnight alone, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan semi-secretly married former BBC weather girl Reham Khan in Pakistan (sharing the pictures and details, including the bride’s £850 [Dh4,728] dowry, days later); Take That singer Howard Donald semi-secretly married illustrator Katie Halil in the Cotswolds (we now know that the groom wore purple and the guests — including Gary Barlow — ate pizza), and Stephen Fry let “a certain cat out of a certain bag” to his 8.3 million Twitter followers on Tuesday when he confirmed his wedding to his 27-year-old stand-up comedian boyfriend, Elliott Spencer — but insisted he wanted the date and details to be kept private. Good luck with that, Fry.
Maintaining secrecy on the day is the reason LA-based celebrity wedding planners such as David Tutera — who has worked with the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Barbara Walters and Matthew McConaughey — commands fees upwards of £30,000. “Major stars live the majority of their life in the public eye and a wedding is a special time that many are starting to keep private,” Tutera tells me. “In order to achieve secrecy, you have to keep the planning process and execution short. Vendors are the first to leak. A shorter time frame of planning helps minimise that.” Tutera’s UK counterpart, Sarah Haywood — aka “Britain’s most sought-after wedding planner” — agrees. “We did a wedding for an international royal in October which we had to put together in 19 days,” she admits. “But if you’ve got that kind of money you can just get someone like me in and make it happen.”
All in the contract
Naturally, ironclad confidentiality contracts are signed by everyone involved. “Anyone who talks — and it has never happened to me — we would simply never work with again,” Haywood explains. “This week, for example, we’re spending a couple of million quid on a secret wedding taking place at the weekend. For one secret wedding we had a £30,000 cake made and for another eight different cakes, so people would be really foolish to let it slip. Oh and also, we would sue them.” Although ‘’ordinary people’’ are keener than ever to capitalise on their A-list moment, Haywood tells me — with most weddings now featuring Instagram boards encouraging guests to hashtag their way through the big day — in her professional, high-profile world, the trend is undoubtedly in the opposite direction. “Unless, of course, you’re George Clooney, who realised that he was just never going to pull off a secret, or even semi-secret wedding,” she says. “So what he did was rather clever: Venice is a difficult place to get around and although we felt we were allowed in, he was in fact able to keep a good deal of it private.” Which, after all, is what you want if you’re not just playing at being a star for a day, but like Clooney or Diaz really are one 365 days a year. “One thing I’ve learnt,” insists Haywood, “is that if people really want to keep their wedding quiet, they do.” Quiet, perhaps — but not unnoticed.
