Dave Heron's Moustache wrote:She has left her children with the worst possible legacy. Imagine as they grow up, and how they will learn about their mother. No amount of money will compensate for that - I hope they manage to grow up without being totally fecked up by all this, but I doubt it. If Jade was really, really thinking about her kids then the best thing to do would have been to show some dignity and leave them with something they could be proud of.
Shame on Max Clifford also. I've never held the popular opinion of him (that he was a total *******). But he has given poor advice here.
I do feel for the children, but Jade's self obsession and need to be in the media has hurt them and will continue to hurt them for the rest of their lives.
Having a glimpse of what goes on in the world of "celebrity" via a family member then I can only pass on the information that you shouldn't believe all that you read in the newspapers.
To take Jade Goody as an example of a "celebrity" who is a celebrity for the sheer hell of being a celebrity as opposed to (but not all that disimilar from) a celebrity who is a celbrity because they had five minutes of fame as a popular singing artist (Kerry Katona and her like), you have to understand that their only purpose in getting out of bed in a morning is to make sure that something is released via your agent that day.
Max Clifford is the best in the world at doing that and the challenge that he thought he was facing when he took on Jade Goody after her infamous racist Big Brother episode must have changed to "Its all my christmas's come at once" when she discovered that she had a terminal illness, even I could have sold her story after that.
Back to the "celebrity" lifestyle ... the opportunities to earn a lot of money are not as frequent as you'd believe and without a good agent then you simply won't get them, you'll also discover that if your real talent is very shallow then all you'll have to sell is a lifestyle story in which you go for shock or sympathy, Kerry Katona has tried both and boxed herself into a corner as an object of ridicule, where Jade Goody found a niche with her illness Katona is a bankrupt who tried to present herself in a wealthy "WAG" format while all the time spending more than she was earning - a years worth of Iceland earnings went to pay a tax bill that should have been paid the year before - where do you go from there when MTV want to film inside your executive pad that is one week away from being repossesed and at what point do you confess to that and let them in when the bailiffs arrive - all she had to sell then was the story of her seperation from the scuffer that was hanging on to her purse.
Story's of millions earned by having your face in OK and Hello! are bollax perpetuated by the "celebrities" who want to be known as the one who is worth the most and not denied by the magazines themselves as its hardly bad publicity to be known as the top payer in the business, even when £500 is their starting point for most negotiations, £30k being the average for a really juicy story or even a wedding if your name isn't Beckham.
So was Jade Goody wrong for dying on camera ?
Its the only skill she had, her earnings before her diagnosis would have been down to zero, possibly with legal threats from her franchised products suppliers (how much does it cost to pull "Jade" perfume off the shelves) and with an expensive lifestyle to pay for and two children to provide a future for then who can blame her - I don't.
The fekkwits who buy the magazines are another story, and I include my own family in that...
