A difficult week in Posh Angeles: A former Spice Girl takes on LA

Being invited to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game is one of those American rituals that usually brings more emotional wallop to the participant than real public attention. Sure, it means you are someone - a police chief, perhaps, or a prominent local musician, or a visiting national politician - but it's also over in seconds. While most television viewers are still hauling the six-pack out of the fridge in anticipation of the opening inning, and most of the stadium spectators are still parking their cars and buying hot dogs, the honoree steps on to the field with an entourage of no more than three or four, strides up to the pitcher's mound and hurls the ball as elegantly as he or she can manage into the outstretched glove of a home-team factotum.

A few people like to practise ahead of time so that they don't make too big a twit of themselves. But nobody exactly works at it. Nobody, that is, except the redoubtable Victoria Beckham, who took centre stage for a few brief moments at Los Angeles's Dodger Stadium earlier this week and milked the occasion for all it was worth.

This was hardly Posh's first visit to the City of Angels, nor even the first time she has attracted the attention of the local media. But it did seem like some kind of symbolic marker - a way for the world's most famous footballer's wife to make her formal announcement to southern California that Beckham-mania is on its way.

And announce it she did. She showed up at the stadium a couple of hours ahead of time, accompanied by the production team for a TV reality show chronicling her move from Madrid to LA. She dressed for the occasion - looking natty in a pair of high-heeled trainers, a white T-shirt and shorts, a Dodgers windbreaker and her ubiquitous goggle sunglasses. And she took instruction only from the best - detaining Dodgers pitcher Derek Lowe (who was not working that night) long enough for him to teach her how to throw, and making small-talk with the team's most beloved hitter, Nomar Garciaparra, about the surprisingly elaborate art of batting. Everything had the air of being carefully scripted. Derek Lowe is well known for being a bit of a flirt - he left his wife last year for a television sports reporter - and he lit up, right on cue, when Mrs Beckham asked him to take her through the motions of pitching mechanics. The choice of Garciaparra was no accident either - he is married to Mia Hamm, the former US women's soccer champ. And she also took care to sweet-talk the team's elder statesman, Tommy Lasorda, the octogenarian former manager who is the closest thing baseball has to a godfather. Posh, in other words, was not just introducing herself. She was networking.

Not everything, though, had quite the effect the Beckham entourage might have hoped. The clothes, for a start, attracted less than favourable attention. Nobody wears shorts on a baseball field - as generations of boys told off by their Little League coaches can tell you. And it's almost impossible to throw a pitch in heels. (Victoria's duly missed its target.) As for the banter generated for the reality show, one has to hope it rose above the level of Victoria's opening comment to Garciaparra when he offered one of his wooden bats to her. "So," she said, "how do you hold this thing?"

The reviews the next day were less than scintillating. Most media outlets offered Beckham the ultimate insult and paid her no attention whatsoever. Those that did mention her were not necessarily all that complimentary. "Just a hunch, but David Beckham might never be anywhere near as big in Los Angeles as he is overseas," the LA Times wrote. This hunch might prove misplaced - Beckham was named No 15 in the Forbes Celebrity 100 on Thursday. None the less, it suggests a lack of enthusiasm for the Beckhams' arrival that Victoria must find disconcerting.

So far, her extended LA coming-out party has involved several such false notes. A week before the Dodger Stadium appearance, she showed up at the MTV Movie Awards and was, for the most part, plumb ignored because the gossip was focused almost exclusively on Paris Hilton, who made the mistake of showing up, and Sarah Silverman, the comedienne-host, who ripped the hotel heiress to shreds on the eve of her admission to the Los Angeles County jail system. Then came the news that NBC, the television network, was less than impressed with the footage from her reality show and was scaling back its plans to show six half-hour episodes, ordering just one hour-long special instead. It will air on 16 July, at about the time David is expected to land in California and join his new team, the LA Galaxy.

It's hard to escape the impression that a lot of Americans are itching for Victoria Beckham to fail. Not David Beckham - he remains one of those overlords of global sport whose fame inspires awe even in those who do not know the game he plays and never intend to watch it. Posh, though, is a whole different matter. The US gossip columns appear to have taken their cue from the British gossip columns, and take delight in depicting LA's new first lady of football as a pushy, humourless, unsophisticated wannabe.

One columnist, Sarah Aarthun, took one look at her outfit at the MTV Movie Awards - an ultra-short, skin-tight zebra-print dress -- and asked the question: "Did someone tell Victoria Beckham the latest trend on the Sunset Strip is prostitute-chic? ... Posh, we know you have a hot body, even after three kids, and that's great, but it seems as though you're taking the less is more theory too literally."

Even the people who stand to gain most directly from her arrival in the United States - the paparazzi who obsessively chronicle her every move - don't necessarily think a whole lot of her.

"She's trying to make herself pretty large, isn't she?" said Frank Griffin of the Bauer-Griffin photo agency. "LA's seen it all, so nobody's surprised by what she's doing. They know what she's up to ... You've got to wonder, though, what she's planning to be, other than a beautiful corpse on the periphery. She can't act. She can't sing. She can't dance. What can she do, except be Posh? The one thing you can say for her is that there's no one else out there who could be a better Posh than she is."

For now, the photographers are snapping away largely for a non-American audience. The papers back home want to know everything about her American adventure, and the Australians have also taken a keen interest. Whether the US media market will go the same way remains an open question at this point, though the pack mentality might very well prevail. "Everyone is afraid that if they don't do something on her they're going to miss out," Griffin said. "She does provide that foil against all the tragedies in the world."

Beckham, herself, though, is giving the media every encouragement. The snappers say they get text message tip-offs from someone in the Beckham entourage to announce where she is going to be at any given moment. And she performs for the cameras, without fail.

Earlier this week, the Bauer-Griffin agency spotted her leaving LA for New York at the American Airlines terminal - something the Beckham team had not volunteered themselves - and managed to get a rare candid shot of Victoria sans sunglasses and removing her shoes for the metal detectors.

That was a big selling point - because, as Frank Griffin, explained it, her forehead is considered to be a bit big and bumpy (hence the sunglasses). Celebrities looking as crappy as the rest of us are evidently big on the photo market.

Wishing for Victoria Beckham's failure is a whole different thing from seeing it come to pass, of course. And there are plentiful reasons for thinking she won't fail at all. The Beckhams, first of all, have some powerful allies. The man behind Victoria's reality series is Simon Fuller, something of a marketing genius who turned Pop Idol - now rebranded as American Idol - into a worldwide sensation and has been the guiding hand behind the Beckham brand for several years.

They also have instant celebrity cred, redoubled by the fact that they are a glamour couple, like their friends Brad and Angelina and Tom and Katie. That Forbes listing can't have done any harm, either.

The couple have certainly set themselves up appropriately, in a one-storey, 13,000sq ft house with ocean views up in the ritzy part of Beverly Hills. (Not far, it seems from Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' pad.) And Victoria, in particular, has cultivated a distinctly visible circle of friends - just the other day, she was having dinner on the Sunset Strip with Mel B, from her Spice Girl days, and Jennifer Aniston's new boyfriend, Paul Sculfor.

Victoria's immediate passion is likely to be her clothing line - which she also found time to launch this week, with some razzmatazz, in New York - and here she has made some key allies among LA's fashion retailers, especially in the higher-end reaches of West Hollywood - much more the shopping mecca these days than Rodeo Drive, which is mostly for the tourists. The Marc Jacobs emporium appears to have become a second home for Beckham and her shopping pals, as has a smaller shop called Kitson, which stocks Victoria's own DVB line. "I always tell celebrities who launch their own lines that their fans are their customers and they have to keep them happy," Kitson's owner, Fraser Ross, said. "She seems to understand that more than most. She's very down to earth."

Beckham was in Kitson a couple of weeks ago filming a segment of her reality show, in which she, the expatriate Brit, gives her American assistant a lesson in how to dress more appropriately for Los Angeles. Ross was not entirely complimentary about Posh - he, like many others, wondered whether she really knew how to dress for LA herself. Her couture-heavy wardrobe is at least a little out of place in this notably casual town - Ross predicted she might quickly change into sweats, like everyone else, when ferrying her kids to school. "She might want to ditch those high heels and start wearing flip-flops," he remarked.

But Ross also listed all the things she has done right. When she launched a new denim section of her fashion line last week, he saw 20 pairs of jeans disappear in the first couple of hours - even though Beckham herself was in New York, not LA. He has bought $100,000 worth of inventory - largely on the strength of her name alone - and does not expect to be disappointed.

He also pointed out that she is playing the gossip circuit very cleverly. A few weeks ago she arranged a meeting with Perez Hilton, a blogger notorious for his outspoken, and outrageous, cattiness against celebrities he either does not like or suspects of being closet gays. If she can neutralise him, or better still get him on her side, half of her publicity battle will be won already.

Perhaps most importantly, the Victoria Beckham look is already catching on. Katie Holmes has already unveiled (earlier this week) a hairstyle remarkably similar to Posh's. The skinny legs and big boob combo is already popular in the City of Angels, so she won't do herself any harm by propagating that. The one thing Angelenos have little feel for is her personality, and that's perhaps the biggest unknown of all. But perhaps that, too, could be fixed.

"She's already rich and she wants to be famous. That's certainly doable," Frank Griffin said, with his trademark irreverence. "Look at Paris Hilton. Perhaps that's what Posh needs - she needs to go to jail for a few days, doesn't she? Then she'll be really famous."

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