Fall

by John Preston

Before the 1968 accounts could be sent to Steinberg, they had to be approved by Pergamon’s board. At two o’clock on 2 April 1969 a board meeting was held in Pergamon’s headquarters in Fitzroy Square. Maxwell had barely entered the room when he announced he couldn’t hang around as he had an important appointment – he had to take the President of Nigeria round the House of Commons.

  The accounts were quickly signed off. Although ILSC was listed as having behaved ‘disappointingly’, the £2,000,000 target for the entire Pergamon group had been met. The following morning the Stock Exchange announced that Pergamon had made ‘record profits’ in the last tax year.

  With everything apparently sorted out, Maxwell invited Saul Steinberg to Headington Hill Hall so they could get to know one another better. There, he introduced him to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his near-neighbour, the Duke of Bedford. As Maxwell anticipated, Steinberg was bowled over. ‘His scope of relations was amazing to me,’ he would say later. Steinberg was also introduced to Maxwell’s children. ‘He had an incredibly limp handshake,’ Isabel recalls.

  Betty Maxwell was equally unimpressed. ‘Saul accompanied by his wife came for lunch: she had nothing to say and spent her time before and after lunch working furiously on a small tapestry which in the circumstances was extremely impolite. Saul, on the other hand, kept on admiring the house, saying how nice it would be to live there, which made me uneasy to say the least.’

  But while Steinberg was eyeing up the Headington Hill Hall curtains, another storm was brewing. Having tussled with him over the running of the House of Commons Catering Committee, the Editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, had been left with a lingering suspicion there was something dodgy about Maxwell. He decided that the paper should investigate further. As he looked through Pergamon’s interim accounts, Evans had a peculiar sense of déjà vu. ‘I’m not an accountant, but even I could tell that something was odd. I remember saying, “Where are the profit figures?” There just didn’t seem to be any. Even so, I didn’t have that much confidence in my own judgement and I thought there was a risk I might have got it wrong.’

  In the interests of fairness, Evans invited Maxwell to come to the Sunday Times so he could put his side of the story. The meeting soon descended into a shouting match. Maxwell was already convinced that their investigation was part of a Rupert Murdoch-led attempt to smear him. ‘First of all, he told me he’d been to see the proprietor of the Sunday Times, Lord Thomson. The message was quite clear. I remember thinking, “Harry, watch out for yourself.”’

  Things went from bad to worse when Evans told him that, as far as he could see, Maxwell had been falsely inflating his profits. ‘He kept thumping the table and saying I didn’t understand what I was talking about. He may even have stormed out. I know I didn’t enjoy it much. But then two or three days later I’d see him at some party and he’d be all cheerful and jolly, just as he’d been when I came out of the House of Commons Committee of Privileges. Again, I found it very strange.’

  On 17 June 1969, Steinberg gave Maxwell a personal guarantee that the deal was on; it was just a matter of drawing up a formal offer document. News of the proposed takeover made the front pages of all the broadsheet newspapers: Maxwell, Britain’s most flamboyant publisher, was about to join forces with America’s youngest self-made multimillionaire.

  But by now Jack Anderson, Leasco’s Chief Accountant, was starting to have his doubts. Like Harold Evans, he felt there was something dodgy about Maxwell, even if he couldn’t put his finger on quite what it was. Anderson threatened to pull out of the deal unless he was given access to Pergamon’s files in Headington Hill Hall.

  Again Maxwell reluctantly complied.

  When Anderson looked through Pergamon’s invoices, one of them stood out. It was for 100 complete editions of the Journal of Inorganic Nuclear Chemistry. This came in twenty-nine volumes and sold in America for $133,000 – almost a million dollars today. Anderson may not have known much about inorganic chemistry, but he knew a rat when he smelled one. Could there really be a hundred academic institutions in America prepared to stump up $133,000 for a full set of an extremely obscure journal?

  The next day – 11 August – Anderson went to see the Pergamon warehouse in Olney. He was not reassured. All of their old journals were jumbled together with no indication of which of Maxwell’s various companies owned which. It didn’t help that the warehouseman, a Pole named Tadeusz Kamienski, could barely speak English.

  Five days later, Saul Steinberg was lying by the pool of his twenty-nine-room house in Long Island. He’d just celebrated his thirtieth birthday and was on the verge of pulling off a deal that would make him a major international player. All in all, things could hardly have been any better.

  ‘I had the feeling that everything was right with the world,’ Steinberg recalled. ‘I was rich and my family was wonderful when Robert, my valet, came with a vodka martini and said George Bello, my Finance Director, was on the phone from London.’

  Robert brought the phone. Steinberg put it to his ear.

  ‘Saul,’ Bello told him. ‘We’ve discovered a major problem.’

  Instantly, Steinberg’s good humour vanished.

  ‘I shouted for another vodka martini, drank it in one and screamed, “Whaaat?”’

  On 21 August, Maxwell was summoned to appear before the Takeover Panel to explain the discrepancies in his figures. That afternoon Steinberg pulled out of the deal. The news stunned the City. Dealing in Pergamon shares was immediately suspended on the Stock Exchange. However much Maxwell blustered and frothed, he was powerless to do anything. Then, from the other side of the Atlantic, came what looked at first like a lifeline, but which soon turned into a noose. Steinberg announced that he was prepared to go through with the deal under one condition – Maxwell’s influence had to be severely curtailed.

  To make matters worse, the Sunday Times finally published their profile of Maxwell. After all the months of investigation, the profile turned out to be pretty thin stuff. The worst they could come up with was that he was popularly known as ‘The Bouncing Czech’. Even so, that didn’t stop Maxwell from denouncing the journalists who had written it as ‘the forces of evil’.

  Nor did it do anything to set Pergamon shareholders’ minds at rest. On 10 October 1969, five days after the Sunday Times piece was published, Maxwell was removed from Pergamon’s board at an Extraordinary General Meeting of shareholders, along with eight other directors. In their place, seven Leasco nominees, including Saul Steinberg, were appointed. Although Maxwell kept the proceeds from the sale of his shares – over £1,000,000 – the company he had founded almost twenty years earlier no longer belonged to him.

  As a final twist, the meeting took place at the Connaught Rooms in Covent Garden, where nine months earlier Maxwell had been humiliated in his bid to buy the News of the World. After the meeting was over, he was asked how he felt. For once, all Maxwell’s brashness, all his booming self-assurance, had disappeared.

  ‘You can’t expect me to be anything other than very, very sad.’

  Three weeks later Betty Maxwell was awakened by the sound of banging. Looking out of her bedroom window, she saw a wooden fence topped by rolls of barbed wire being erected between Headington Hill Hall and the headquarters of Pergamon – housed in what had once been the Victorian servants’ quarters next door.

  The same day a firm of locksmiths arrived. On the orders of Pergamon’s new directors, the locks were changed on their offices to prevent Maxwell or any members of his family from coming in. The two buildings were so close to one another that a single basement ran beneath both properties. At the same time as the locks were changed, an iron gate was erected in the basement of Headington Hill Hall to make sure no one could gain access to the Pergamon end of the cellars.

  Nothing could illustrate quite so starkly how far and how quickly Maxwell had fallen. Not only had he lost control of his company; he had also been physically barred from setting foot insi
de it.

  10.

  The Lights Go Out

  Throughout all this Maxwell had continued being a Member of Parliament. But his career had proved to be rather less dazzling than he had anticipated. Although he had transformed the fortunes of the catering department and played a key role in piloting through the Clean Air Act of 1968 – intended to tighten controls on pollution – that was about it. Despite all his speeches, all his interventions, his hopes of climbing any further up the ladder, far less of becoming Prime Minister, had come to nothing.

  In June 1969, Maxwell was interviewed on the television show Today. Clearly in a peppery mood, he was asked by the interviewer, Sandra Harris: ‘Mr Maxwell, while you’re surrounded by tremendous wealth, do you still think about poverty?’

  Maxwell: ‘I can never be separated from my origins. I came from a working class and I’m part of them and will continue to support them.’

  Harris: ‘Did you ever consider being a member of any other party?’

  Maxwell: ‘That is a scurrilous suggestion and quite untrue. Just because I’ve made a couple of shillings, I’m not about to change sides.’

  Harris: ‘Does property mean a lot to you?’

  Maxwell: ‘Quite unimportant. I merely have property as a means of getting things done that need to be done. I’m completely unattached.’

  Harris: ‘You’ve also been described as a tremendously ruthless man. A man who is very, very difficult to cross. Does what other people say about you bother you at all?’

  Maxwell: ‘No.’

  In May 1970, confidently expecting victory, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, announced that a General Election would be held on 18 June. Maxwell’s campaign slogan – ‘Harold and Bob Will Finish the Job’ – gave an indication of the company he felt he belonged in. This time round he was driven around his constituency in another Land Rover – painted bright red. A hole had been cut in the roof through which Maxwell’s head would appear from time to time topped by a cloth cap, further underlining his socialist credentials.

  As before, his family, principally Betty, were on hand to lend support. So too was a woman called Eleanor Berry, the youngest daughter of Lord Hartwell, the former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph. Berry had had a troubled history, having been diagnosed with a number of mental conditions – including schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and manic depression. At the time she was at university and in the middle of writing her thesis – on the Marquis de Sade.

  Berry and Maxwell had first met when her brother, Nicholas Berry, the financial correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, had taken her to one of the Maxwells’ parties in the late 1960s: ‘Nicky introduced me to RM who was standing in a marquee wearing a towelling dressing-gown . . . He was very nice and friendly and it suddenly dawned on me that he generated a livid, brutal, astonishing and overwhelming sexuality.’

  As far as Berry was concerned, it would be the start of a life-long obsession: in her eyes Maxwell would be a father figure and fantasy lover all rolled into one. Both flattered and amused by Berry’s eccentricities, Maxwell quickly developed a soft spot for her. A few months later, Berry was sectioned after attacking a man in a jeweller’s shop in Paddington Station – he had misspelled the word ‘steppe’ on a gold pillbox she had asked him to engrave. Confined to a mental hospital in north London, she was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs and a course of electro-shock treatment.

  On the day the treatment was due to start, Berry had been wheeled into the operating theatre and was about to be given an anaesthetic. But before the anaesthetic could be administered, the door burst open. With the electrodes already attached to her head, Berry looked up to see Maxwell standing in the doorway, dressed in a white flannel suit.

  If anything, the doctors were even more astonished than she was.

  ‘Who are you?’ one them asked.

  ‘I am Robert Maxwell,’ Maxwell announced. ‘Member of Parliament for Buckingham.’

  ‘How dare you come in here when you’re not scrubbed up!’

  Maxwell took no notice.

  ‘I order you to turn that fucking machine off.’

  Removing the electrodes from Berry’s head, Maxwell then carried her outside to where his Rolls-Royce was waiting. Behind the wheel was another of his chauffeurs – a man called Hoppit.

  ‘Floor it, Hoppit!’ Maxwell told him. ‘Head for Oxford.’

  Not surprisingly, the incident made Berry even more slavish in her adoration. During the election campaign, she helped hand out leaflets and distribute Maxwell’s daily bulletins, known as ‘Maxwellgrams’. When they were out canvassing together, Betty and Berry would sometimes discuss their shared interest in de Sade. Betty, it seems, was fascinated by de Sade’s belief that every pleasure contained an element of pain. ‘I wondered if she had been referring to the sex act,’ Berry recalled, ‘but I thought it would have been more than inappropriate to ask her.’

  The polls continued to put Labour well in front – by as much as 12 per cent. Victory seemed assured. Then on the evening before the election came an incident which Berry was tempted to regard as an omen. She’d previously noticed that whenever Maxwell gave a speech at the local Labour headquarters an elderly man would be sitting in the back row with his eyes closed. No one else liked to go near him because they complained that he smelled. However, Maxwell would always ruffle the old man’s hair as he went past and ask, ‘How you doing, Grandpa?’ Shortly before he was about to give his Eve of Polls speech, all efforts to rouse the old man in the back row failed. It turned out he had died some time earlier.

  Nor was this the only unusual event to have taken place. On election day, Berry helped drive Labour supporters to the polling stations. Still feeling apprehensive about the result, she took 60 mg of Diazepam before getting into her car. ‘Doctors say that 60 mg is a colossal dose, but I have always been able to tolerate it.’

  After polling had closed and the votes were being counted, it became increasingly clear that the result was going to be much closer than anyone had anticipated. Early the next morning, the Maxwell family and Berry went to Buckingham Town Hall to hear the result. Outside was a crowd of Labour supporters, angry and dejected at the way the pendulum appeared to be swinging against them. One man was brandishing a red flag with a hammer and sickle sewn on to it.

  Somehow he persuaded Eleanor Berry to climb on to the roof of the Town Hall, take down the Union Jack and replace it with the Red Flag. She managed to find a fire escape which led up to the roof. There, she lowered the Union Jack and – amid cheers from below – hurled it to the ground, where it was promptly doused in lighter fuel and set alight. But raising the Red Flag defeated her. Instead she waved it above her head – to more cheers from below.

  At this point the police intervened, telling her through a loud-hailer that she had to come down immediately. Suffering from a sudden attack of vertigo, Berry found her legs had turned to jelly. When the police finally managed to coax her down, they asked her why she had done it.

  ‘Because I wanted to please Mr Maxwell,’ she told them. ‘I am in love with him and I’d be prepared to die for him if necessary!’

  It soon became clear that the voters of Buckingham did not share her devotion. In keeping with a nationwide swing to the Tories, the Conservative candidate won the seat by a majority of more than 2500 votes.

  Maxwell’s parliamentary dream was over.

  After the result had been declared, he drove Eleanor Berry back to Headington Hill Hall in his campaign Land Rover. On the way they discussed a novel she had recently read, The Man Who was Afraid, by Maxim Gorky. The novel’s main character is a man called Foma Gordyev who starts off by being fixated on becoming rich: ‘He could never have enough of the jingle and sound of money’. Increasingly, though, he feels hamstrung by society’s conventions. Despising his fellow merchants, he tells them they deserve to be ‘scorched in sizzling dung for centuries on end’. In the end, bankrupt, friendless and ridiculed, Gordyev becomes a down-and-out on th
e streets of his hometown.

  When Berry had finished describing the plot, Maxwell remained silent for a while. Then he said quietly, ‘I know what loneliness is like.’

  On 13 July 1971, the Department of Trade and Industry published its report into the sale of Pergamon to Leasco. Maxwell had done everything he could to delay publication, but when the blow finally came it was as devastating as he had feared.

  The report concluded: ‘He [Maxwell] is a man of great energy, drive and imagination, but an apparent fixation as to his own abilities causes him to ignore the views of others if these are not compatible . . . Notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.’

  Within the space of three and a half years, Maxwell had lost his eldest son, his company, his parliamentary seat and now his reputation. At a press conference, he denounced the report as a ‘witch-hunt’ and claimed to have been victimized by the ‘so-called City Establishment’. But the damage had been done. As Betty recalled, it was as if the family had suddenly become pariahs: ‘Almost overnight, the invitations vanished from our mantelpiece.’

  From Courchevel in France, where she had gone skiing with her sister, she wrote her husband a letter: ‘I have thought quite a lot, going up the sunny or snowy or blizzard slopes about what I could say to you to give you some courage, as you sounded so sad on the phone the other night. The essence of what I wish to tell you is that I love you, irrespective of your worth in terms of cash or otherwise . . . I love you for the exceptional life you have already given me and the privilege I have had to share your life for twenty-five years and be loved by you for all that length of time . . .

  ‘If you feel that we must give up Headington Hill Hall and live elsewhere or emigrate to China or live underground or in a treetop, I am game. No waves are static and I would much rather swim and have swum with you than vegetated with small, unintelligent and uninteresting beings.’