As he held his newborn son in his arms, Liam Payne knew he was truly in love, perhaps for the first time in his life.
One hand supporting little Bear’s neck and the other on his bottom, the singer clasped him like he was the most precious thing in the world, just minutes after his birth at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on March 22, 2017.
He later posted the photograph on Instagram, alongside the words: ‘My close friends and family know there are very few times when I’m left speechless… wow!’
It was a moment that Bear’s mother, the singer and former X Factor judge Cheryl Tweedy, who is believed to have taken the photograph, will hold in her heart for ever, now that their little boy will never see his father again. Liam, the former One Direction star, died on Wednesday evening, after falling from a third-floor balcony at the CasaSur hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He was only 31. He did everything so early in life: fame at 16, fatherhood at 23, and now a terrible, senseless death before he really got to know his son properly.
Liam Payne with Cheryl Tweedy at the BRITs in 2018 before they announced their split
For Cheryl, 41, losing Liam is the latest sadness in what has been a tormenting few years for her. She had struggled to maintain the relationship between her much younger ex and their son, as Liam’s behaviour became increasingly erratic.
For Liam was far from a traditional dad, and he acknowledged himself that he was more ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. While he would regularly call Bear, he was rarely physically present in his life – although he didn’t shirk parental responsibility.
For, as I can reveal today, there were some areas in life in which Liam showed almost prescient maturity, and he provided well for Bear.
The seven-year-old stands to inherit the £30 million fortune that Liam made during his boyband years and which, despite his drug and alcohol addictions, he managed to cling on to.
He was also careful to invest in property, having bought a mansion in Buckinghamshire.
Friends say that some years ago Liam made arrangements for his money to go to his only child in the event of his death, despite the fact that there would often be thousands of miles between them, as the singer spent a lot of time in America. Most of their interaction occurred via video calls on FaceTime.
‘Liam had some very sensible people around him for a time and he adored Bear so much,’ said a source close to the late star. ‘He always wanted to do the right thing by him financially.
‘It is a small consolation that Bear will never want for anything, that he will at least benefit from that.’
But it will be Cheryl, supported by her loyal mother Joan, who will be left to deal with the emotional fallout from Liam’s death.
Despite the sudden ending to their relationship in 2018, friends say Cheryl will be devastated. Although she’s had ‘a few dates’, Cheryl is not publicly known to have had any serious boyfriends since Liam.
While Cheryl has fiercely guarded Bear’s privacy and never shown his face to the world, those who know him say he is an ‘absolutely beautiful’ little boy.
One adds: ‘Well, he would be with his genes though, wouldn’t he?’
Only this summer Liam described Bear as his ‘mini me’, before adding wryly: ‘As if we needed any more me in the world’.
‘It’s tragic that they never had a proper father and son bond,’ said a friend of Liam’s,
‘Liam was there, a lost soul, on his own, thousands of miles away from home – it is awful. He would always call Bear; they would speak to each other a lot and Liam would see him as much as he could.
‘Despite his difficulties, which we now know the full extent of, Liam loved Bear so, so much.’
Liam holds his then-newborn son Bear in his arms in March 2017 like he was the most precious thing in the world
Like his fans, Cheryl was able to see the social media videos charting Liam’s increasingly worrying behaviour, and she would surely have been aware of his drug-taking.
Vehemently anti-drugs after losing a childhood friend, budding footballer John Courtney, to a heroin overdose in 2005 when he was just 21, Cheryl supported Liam in his battle with addiction.
In the book Cheryl Cole: Her Story – The Unauthorised Biography, John’s mother Angie revealed that Cheryl had written her son a letter begging him not to destroy his life.
‘It put me off drugs for life,’ Cheryl later said. ‘That nightmare devastated all John’s family and friends.’
I’m told: ‘Cheryl did her best to look after Liam even though they weren’t together. She wanted Bear to have a daddy, even if he wasn’t there as much as perhaps she would have liked him to be.’
When, in July last year, Liam revealed he had completed 100 days in a Louisiana rehab after hitting ‘rock bottom’, he thanked Cheryl for her support.
‘More than anything, I want to say thank you to [Bear] and his mum for giving me a little bit of freedom to go and get well in that moment because I had to,’ he said in a YouTube video.
Cheryl and Liam’s relationship was complicated, and short-lived. They were revealed to be dating in 2016 following Cheryl’s split from French playboy husband Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini.
The end of her second marriage – she had previously been married to footballer Ashley Cole from 2006 to 2010 – had left her bruised.
Liam had first met Cheryl in 2008 when making a bid for stardom aged 14 on The X Factor, auditioning with a version of Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me To The Moon.
Liam with Bear where only this summer the pop star described Bear as his ‘mini me’
Pop veteran Cheryl, then 25, had been catapulted to fame six years earlier in ITV talent show Popstars: The Rivals, when Girls Aloud was formed. She was already a bona fide star – although Payne was clearly not too overawed by her celebrity, as he pointedly gave her a cheeky wink during his performance.
Two years later, when Liam returned to The X Factor and was put in a band that became One Direction, he was still only 16 and Cheryl was 27.
While Simon Cowell was assigned as the band’s mentor, she was still critiquing him live on television every Saturday night.
Their relationship started in 2016, when he was 22 and she was 32.
Although the ten-year age gap raised eyebrows, friends of Liam said that he couldn’t believe his luck. ‘He fell head over heels in lust for her,’ said one.
They attended several showbiz events together, and Cheryl was a regular visitor to Liam’s £5 million bachelor pad in Woking, Surrey.
However, Cheryl’s real yearning was to be a mum. I’d had many conversations with Cheryl over the years about her desire to be a mother, and by her early 30s she was keen to find her dream man.
As friends of Liam have pointed out to me, he was the ‘perfect baby daddy’. After all, in addition to being extremely handsome, Liam was also very rich and very kind.
As for Liam, he was not expecting to become a father so soon. Aged 23, he was a young man on the verge of signing a multi-million-pound deal to become a solo artist, and was aware that he desperately needed his female fan base. He knew that being a father with an older girlfriend might make him less appealing.
Nevertheless, they gave their romance a shot and Cheryl moved into Liam’s Surrey home, where they enjoyed preparing for their baby.
But after Cheryl gave birth, the pressure of being a young dad was too much for Liam and there were some ‘spectacular rows,’ I’m told.
By the beginning of 2018, with Bear yet to reach his first birthday, the couple’s relationship was all but over.
There was a forced joint appearance at the BRIT Awards. Cheryl and Liam, keen to keep their split private, dressed up and posed on the red carpet.
By July, though, the game was up, and they announced on social media that their romance had reached the end of the road.
Despite their split, both worked hard to keep their son out of the spotlight, only allowing occasional glimpses of him in social media posts.
In a rare insight into their parenting dynamic, Cheryl described herself in a 2019 interview as ‘the strict one’, adding: ‘[Liam] is much softer than me’.
Then, around that time, Liam helped to pay for a £4 million home for Cheryl and Bear in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Peter. Liam later bought himself a home nearby.
One friend said: ‘Bear is the only beautiful thing to have come from that rocky relationship.’
Bear remains Cheryl’s focus, and she is determined that he will not suffer the same pitfalls of fame as his father. Or indeed the ones she has suffered.
Apart from a brief foray into the limelight earlier this year with the Girls Aloud reunion tour, Cheryl took herself out of public view at around the time she had Bear. Friends say that in the end she just couldn’t cope with fame and wanted to retreat.
‘By the end, Cheryl hated being talked about all the time,’ a friend said. ‘She actually didn’t like being famous at all and it made her very unhappy.
‘The same, we now know, was the case for Liam. If anyone knows the pitfalls of celebrity it is Cheryl, and she will do everything she can to protect Bear from it all.’
But the real sadness for Bear is that Daddy died just as he was getting to know him.
