Fall

by John Preston

  Meanwhile Maxwell and Leasco continued to exist awkwardly side by side. The arrangement was further complicated by the fact that the basement of Pergamon contained the generators and boilers for both properties. Every so often Maxwell would be spotted after dark in the Pergamon offices, stalking the corridors. Although the locks had been changed and guards employed to patrol the building, none of them had the nerve to tell him to leave.

  After one of Maxwell’s nocturnal visits, during a particularly cold snap, it transpired that the boiler had been mysteriously extinguished. As a result, Pergamon’s central heating no longer worked. Leasco retaliated by turning off Headington Hill Hall’s power supplies, leaving the building without light, heat or a telephone line.

  Cut off from the outside world, alone in the darkness, Maxwell brooded on his misfortune and plotted his revenge.

  11.

  The Grasshopper Returns

  On the morning of 12 February 1974, an announcement came over the PA system at Pergamon Press. All employees were immediately to stop what they were doing and go straight to the canteen, where they would receive some important news. Around 100 people gathered, chattering apprehensively to one another, wondering what was going on. After they’d been waiting for several minutes, Robert Maxwell walked in. The room fell silent. People stood aside to let him go by.

  Climbing on to a chair, Maxwell looked down at the upturned faces.

  ‘I’m back,’ he said.

  Then he got down and walked out.

  Four and a half years earlier, when Saul Steinberg had ousted Maxwell from the Pergamon board, he’d assumed that in doing so he had taken full control of the company and its subsidiaries. But it wasn’t long before Steinberg realized he had made a terrible mistake – a mistake so basic that it’s remarkable no one spotted it before. What he and his directors had failed to notice was that Maxwell still controlled 70 per cent of an American company called Pergamon Press Inc. (PPI).

  On the face of it, PPI might have seemed pretty unimportant, just another of Maxwell’s bewildering network of subsidiaries. In fact, it was the engine room of the entire business: the company had exclusive rights to sell Pergamon’s journals in America. Effectively, Leasco had paid £25,000,000 for an empty shell.

  Bob Miranda was one of PPI’s key directors in America. ‘I think Leasco were too dumb to realize what had happened. They had bought a company which was essentially devoid of cash flow. All the profit was coming to us. Even though they were producing the material, we kept the money.’

  The moment Steinberg discovered what had happened, he launched a flurry of lawsuits trying to wrest back Pergamon Press Inc. from Maxwell’s control. No stranger to issuing writs himself, Maxwell ignored them. ‘I remember our lawyers thought we didn’t have a leg to stand on,’ recounted Miranda, ‘but Maxwell said, “Do exactly what I tell you and everything will be OK.”’

  His plan could hardly have been more simple. In the past, PPI had handed the money that had been earned in the US back to Pergamon in Britain. But not any more. ‘We basically sat on the money and refused to give it back. At the same time we weren’t paying any of our bills. In effect, we were starving out the parent company.’

  It didn’t take long for this to drive the normally urbane Steinberg to the point of apoplexy. The angrier he became, the more delight Maxwell took in goading him. ‘It was like a game with him,’ Miranda recalls, ‘but it was a game he was determined to win.’

  Steinberg demanded Maxwell’s immediate resignation from PPI. Maxwell refused. Claiming – quite rightly – that PPI were refusing to pay their rent, Steinberg tried to force them out of their offices in Elmsford, New York. Maxwell promptly counter-sued, alleging harassment. In the end the police intervened; every morning Miranda had to go and pick up his office key from the local sheriff.

  And so it went on, back and forth. All the time Pergamon, increasingly starved of funds, was sinking fast. In Chicago, a group of its American editors and authors confronted the new Chairman, Sir Walter Coutts, threatening to withdraw their services unless Maxwell was reinstated. ‘They absolutely hammered me,’ Coutts complained later. His wife was even more incensed. Lady Coutts told a friend that she had ‘never imagined a crowd of men could be so unpleasant’.

  The next morning, Sir Walter called Maxwell and told him, ‘I have enough contacts in the City of London to sink you as far as you’ll ever go, and you’ll never come up again.’ By way of a peace offering, Maxwell sent the couple an enormous bouquet of flowers. Sir Walter was briefly placated – until he discovered that the flowers had been bought on Pergamon’s account.

  Meanwhile, behind the barbed-wire fence at Headington Hill Hall, life had undergone another upheaval. ‘As children, the biggest difference for us was that we couldn’t go and play in the Pergamon offices any more,’ Ian Maxwell recalls. ‘It was as if there was a kind of apartheid going on between us and them.’ But there were other, less tangible differences. ‘Generally, they were dark times. There seemed to be a fear in the air; a fear that we would be ostracized, or that something else terrible would happen.’

  There were material changes too; for the first time in years, the Maxwells were having to be careful with money. The previous summer they had spent their holiday cruising around the Mediterranean on a 210-foot-long motor yacht called the Shemara – the yacht was so big that it had been requisitioned by the Royal Navy during the Second World War for use as a training vessel. In the summer of 1969, Betty took the children camping in Wales.

  Maxwell didn’t come with them; he was far too busy to take a holiday. ‘Basically, my father was hardly ever at home, and when he was he always seemed to be in a hurry. A lot of people abandoned him when he lost Pergamon, people he’d been able to rely on in the past. I think he felt very lonely and under attack, and it left him with a renewed sense that he had to do everything on his own.’

  Much of Maxwell’s time was spent in America, trying to accumulate enough money to buy back Pergamon. Together, he and Bob Miranda would drive across the country, visiting potential clients. ‘He was a nightmare to travel with,’ Miranda remembers. ‘When he had finished reading a newspaper, he would just throw it out of the car window. It used to drive me crazy.’

  The two of them stayed in cheap motels beside the freeway. ‘We used to share a bedroom to save money. I spent a lot of sleepless nights with him – he could never sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. Then he would wake me up in the middle of the night for someone to talk to.’ But in all the time they spent together, Miranda noticed that Maxwell never spoke about anything personal. ‘He was very secretive about that sort of stuff. Instead, he was like an actor; he could be one person one minute, and then another person entirely fifteen minutes later. I guess that was why I could never really consider him as a friend.’

  As Pergamon’s fortunes continued to plummet – by now they had debts of nearly £5,000,000 – the City started to lose faith in Steinberg and to look more favourably on Maxwell. Even Sir Walter Coutts began to think the unthinkable. Through gritted teeth, he conceded there were things Maxwell could do that no one else could: ‘He has a computer brain in that he can read things, particularly in the scientific magazines, which he will store away. At the right moment of time it will come out of the computer and he will be able to talk to those people in the same language that they talk among themselves.’

  By early 1973, Coutts admitted privately that Pergamon was close to bankruptcy. On 20 November, Maxwell offered him a deal – he would give Pergamon back some of the money from PPI, but only if he was allowed on to the board.

  The offer was eagerly accepted.

  Two months later, on 20 January 1974, Saul Steinberg agreed to sell Maxwell his personal 38 per cent holding in Pergamon for just 12 pence a share. In all, this brought him around £600,000. Barely four years earlier, he’d paid £9,000,000 for the same shares. Then they had been valued at 185 pence each.

  At the beginning of February, Sir Walter Coutt
s was chairing a board meeting at Pergamon’s headquarters next to Headington Hill Hall when the door burst open.

  ‘Right,’ said Maxwell. ‘We’re taking over now. You can all go.’

  That afternoon the barbed-wire fence was taken down and the iron gate in the basement removed. Shortly afterwards, Coutts resigned as Chairman. Later on, he reflected on the whole affair, and on Maxwell’s character in particular: ‘He has an ability to sublimate anything that stops him getting what he wants. He’s so flexible he is like a grasshopper. There’s no question of any morality or conscience. Maxwell is Number One and what Maxwell wants is the most important thing and to hell with anything else.’

  In an attempt to show there were no hard feelings, Maxwell held a dinner at Headington Hill Hall for members of the Pergamon board, including Sir Walter and his wife. At the end of the evening, he stood in the porch making a great show of wishing each guest goodbye in a different language.

  To his surprise, Lady Coutts replied in a language that Maxwell didn’t recognize: ‘Kwaheri ashante sana sitaki kukuona tena.’

  In Swahili, this means: ‘Goodbye. Thank you very much. I don’t wish to see you again.’

  12.

  Strife

  Maxwell may have triumphed, but it had come at a cost – a much greater cost than anyone realized at the time. Betty, though, had long had intimations of what was to come. Fifteen years earlier, shortly after they had moved into Headington Hill Hall, she had written Maxwell a letter – one that was in stark contrast to the letters she had written him in the past:

  ‘I find it a sorry state of affairs that on one of the finest Sundays of the year you decided to show a detestable facet of your character; you behaved in a completely callous and self-centred way and were totally oblivious of other people around you. I have also had a tough two years in which – just to remind you – I have given birth to a baby, lost my mother, and had a consequently difficult summer sorting out our family affairs in Paris. I had two miscarriages, no doubt brought on by rushing about and my complete exhaustion. I am at the end of my tether and so are you.’

  By December 1965, things were even worse: ‘I am so intensely miserable that I have decided to confide my thoughts to paper in order to concentrate and force myself to think what I can do to remedy the situation, and also to draw your attention, if you will bear with me, to your attitude toward your family and me . . . We are both mentally and physically exhausted. We have not been able to unwind for years . . . It affects us in different ways: you have become exceedingly short-tempered, snappy, nagging, despotic. Your weight has gone up, you sleep badly. Your use of uncouth language does you no credit, nor does your complete lack of respect for what I represent, notwithstanding all my failings.

  ‘You must curb your intemperate, short-lived but wounding judgements of my every move and utterance, control your excessive swollen-headedness and show some appreciation for my great devotion to you alone, throughout our lives. I note that you are unstinting in your compliments when you need me and yet so stingy with your rewards when the battle is won.

  ‘I am prepared to do without friends, entertainment, joy of any kind in my own pursuits. The only thing I am not prepared to give up in life is you. I love you. You wanted me for what I am, you have got me for keeps.’

  But by October 1969 – soon after Maxwell had lost Pergamon – Betty’s attitude had changed. Now, her exasperation had gone; instead she wearily acknowledged what she believed had become an inescapable fact: ‘For some years now I have realized, at first with bellicose sadness, then with hurt pride and at last with victorious serenity, that my usefulness to you has come to an end. I am now certain that I am in your way. You are still a very young man, you are really incredibly healthy. Because of the unfair treatment you have received at the hands of the most hypocritical of societies, you have been denied the laurels you so richly deserved. You are now poised at the peak of your intelligence, made wiser by your experience of men and matters, with the whole wild and mad world around you tearing at your soul . . .

  ‘I have searched night and day in my head and heart and now understand that the only present that can prove my love to you after twenty-five years is, paradoxically, that I should give you your freedom. I have not reached this decision lightly. More than half of me has fought it tooth and nail, but believe me when I say that I offer it with serenity, with no strings attached whatsoever.’

  Although Maxwell showed no desire to take his freedom, he did continue to have affairs. One was with a woman called Wendy Leigh, the author of a number of sex manuals, including What Makes a Woman Good in Bed, as well as a novel, Unraveled by Him, a lightly fictionalized account of her affair with Maxwell.

  He appears as a character called Robert Hartwell – ‘the number one publisher in the world’. As well as being the owner of Hartwell Castle and a 480-foot luxury yacht, the Lady Georgiana, Hartwell has a well-nigh unquenchable appetite for flagellation – something that rouses the narrator, Miranda, to hitherto undreamed-of heights of passion: ‘For what seems forever, he spanks and spanks, then spanks more . . .’

  Afterwards a surprised Hartwell asks why she’s not crying. ‘Because I can’t, Master,’ Miranda tells him. ‘And no one has ever been able to make me.’

  ‘Give me time,’ says Hartwell, ‘with a twinkle that undercuts the menace.’

  It’s possible that Leigh was letting her imagination run away with her. She told her friend Roy Greenslade, later Editor of the Daily Mirror, that Maxwell was a very considerate lover:

  ‘Wendy said that he was always gentle, courteous, and despite the fact that he lacked any manual dexterity, very dainty in his habits.’ What’s more, he could be unexpectedly old-fashioned, even prudish. ‘Apparently he was very shocked once when she started talking dirty to him, and asked her never to do it again.’

  Under no illusions about Maxwell’s fidelity, Betty herself had never been tempted to stray. But that too was about to change. Cooped up in Headington Hill Hall, she yearned for something to give her back a sense of purpose. After taking an A level in English at the Oxford College of Further Education, she was accepted into St Hugh’s College as a mature student studying Modern Languages.

  While Betty, now aged fifty-three, was revising for her finals in the summer of 1974, she met a friend of her daughter Isabel’s – an American man called Greg. ‘He was thirty, dashingly good-looking, sensitive and cultured. I had invited him home to meet Bob one weekend and he had unfortunately witnessed one of Bob’s disgraceful outbursts, accompanied by the usual humiliating comments about my character and intelligence.’

  Soon Greg became Betty’s constant companion, helping her with her revision, taking her to her finals and doing wonders for her confidence. Before each exam he would stand her in front of a full-length mirror, point at her reflection and say, ‘Just look at yourself! You look like any other kid taking her exams, except that you’re beautiful, knowledgeable and wise.’

  As well as being twenty-three years younger than her, Betty realized that Greg was the same age that her son Michael would have been. Although she kept telling herself the whole thing was absurd, she did nothing to discourage him. One evening Greg took her out to a pub by the river and told her that he loved her. He went on to say that he loved her just as she was: ‘I don’t want you to be different. All I want is to see things as you see them.’

  For a moment Betty said nothing; she just sat silently repeating to herself what he had just told her – ‘I had to admit that it was sweet music.’ Then, gently but firmly, she told him they could never have a future together. That as far as she was concerned, marriage was for ever, no matter how difficult and unrewarding it was. But the flirtation, however innocent, was to have a lasting effect on her. In future, Betty resolved to stand up to her husband – not to let herself be cowed or denigrated.

  Any illusions she had once had about Maxwell were now gone. In their place was an almost academic curiosity about what had happened to him to m
ake him the way he was. Why, she wondered, couldn’t he tolerate any kind of competition? Part of the answer, she felt, was because he had never learned humility. Doted on by his mother and then forced, prematurely, to become an adult, he had always remained emotionally immature, apt to fly off the handle if he didn’t get his own way.

  Plainly there was more to it than that. A lot of people never grow up emotionally, but Maxwell seemed to be growing ever more childish and unreasonable the older he became. Betty suspected that he had a Jekyll and Hyde personality – something that made him reserve the worst aspects of himself for those he claimed to care most about. That was why he turned on her and their children with such ferocity, never praising, only ever condemning. Constantly pushing them towards some image of perfection, then rounding on them when they – inevitably – fell short. She was particularly disturbed by how badly he treated his sons, Kevin and Ian, both of whom were now working for him – ‘Bob was especially hard on the two younger boys and drove them mercilessly.’

  Yet even this didn’t explain the relish he took in humiliating people, publicly grinding them into the dust. Like the Hydra of Greek myth, it was as if he needed to devour his victims on a regular basis in order to replenish himself. The more they winced and squirmed, the better he felt about himself. Like a perpetually squalling child, Maxwell had also become addicted to drama – a drama in which he naturally played the lead role, wildly overacting, impossibly histrionic and always displaying a compulsive need to be centre stage.

  However isolated Betty was feeling, she tried to keep her unhappiness from the children, to pretend they were still one big happy family. At Christmas time, she always took great pains to ensure the atmosphere was as festive as possible. Every year an enormous tree – around forty feet high – would be put up in the galleried hall at Headington Hill Hall. The tree was so tall that it took eight men all day to erect it.