by John Preston
When he came in, Maxwell immediately got to the point. Was he staying or going?
‘I said, “That depends on whether you accept my conditions or not.”’
Haines proceeded to lay out his terms: he would only stay if the Mirror remained committed to the Labour Party; if Maxwell never told him what to write, or tried to interfere with anything he had written.
As soon as he’d finished, Maxwell said, ‘I agree to all your terms.’
Too late, Haines realized he had been outmanoeuvred. Maxwell, as he’d so often proved in the past, was a master at the art of giving people everything they wanted. Or at least appearing to – what they actually received tended to be another matter.
‘It was my own fault,’ Haines admitted later. ‘I had walked into a trap of my own making.’
One of Haines’s first pieces under Maxwell’s ownership was a characteristically fierce condemnation of corrupt union practices, and the expenses-fuelled lifestyles of many of the paper’s senior journalists.
‘The gravy-train,’ he wrote, ‘has hit the buffers.’
Later on, Rupert Murdoch would get the credit for revolutionizing Fleet Street, but it was Maxwell who set the process in motion. Over the next two years, he forced the print unions to accept widespread redundancies, repeatedly threatening to shut down his papers unless they agreed to his terms. However, Murdoch did – inadvertently – do Maxwell a favour. In the course of a single night in January 1986, he transferred production of his papers to a fortified stockade in Wapping where no printers, only electricians, were required to print them. Facing the prospect of imminent extinction, the unions at the Mirror swiftly caved in.
But while Maxwell happily whacked his adversaries with any stick that came to hand, he also knew how to wield the carrot to maximum effect. Among the cost-cutting measures introduced by Clive Thornton had been one of the Mirror’s most sacred traditions: the distribution of free alcohol to journalists during working hours. As well as costing hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, this arrangement was held to be largely responsible for the fact that the Mirror had the highest level of alcoholism in Fleet Street.
Not only did Maxwell restore the practice – he added a little twist of his own. Every Thursday afternoon an elderly man wearing a once-white linen jacket would push a trolley around the editorial floor handing out the weekly alcohol ration. How much each journalist received depended on their level of seniority. Peter Miller, Deputy News Editor of the Sunday Mirror, was given a weekly allocation of six bottles of red wine and six bottles of white wine – ‘and it was good stuff too.’ He was also provided with a fridge to keep it in. As far as anybody knew, there was no maximum allowance. Or, if there was, no one ever managed to exceed it.
In the hallway outside Maxwell’s office, people waited for hours – sometimes, it was reputed, for days – in the hope of being granted an audience. The atmosphere was like that of a medieval court, with a constant stream of supplicants seeking the monarch’s bounty. Some sat clutching papers they wanted him to sign – Maxwell insisted on making all decisions himself, however minor. The more experienced brought books to read. At times there were so many people waiting that there weren’t enough chairs for them to sit on. Instead, they shuffled about disconsolately, hoping against hope to hear their name announced.
But still they came, from dawn until long after dusk: personnel managers with hit lists of people to be fired, journalists wanting an interview, down-on-their-luck peers looking for a job . . . Periodically, trays of snacks would be handed round to those who had been waiting the longest. One man who had been summoned for a job interview finally got to see Maxwell twenty-six hours after he had arrived.
Meanwhile, Maxwell rushed about in an ecstasy of excitement, keen to show off his new purchase to as many people as possible. Among the early visitors was Margaret Thatcher, who was invited to lunch in the newspaper’s executive dining room. Mike Molloy was also there. ‘The lunch was a lively occasion as both had a lot to say,’ he recalled. ‘The trouble was they both said it at the same time, so it was impossible to hear the points each of them was making.’
As Molloy soon discovered, there was a further hazard to dining with Maxwell. ‘I was the first to be served by the butler. It was leg of lamb, and I helped myself to the meat cut from around the knuckle. I began talking to the person on my left and when I turned back I found Bob finishing the last of the choice morsels of meat from my plate. He obviously liked the same cut as well and couldn’t wait until the butler got around to him.’
The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Roy Hattersley, was another early visitor, along with his political adviser, Dave Hill. When they were shown into the dining room, Hattersley found Maxwell sitting at the head of ‘a huge dining table drinking from a silver goblet. He did not get up.’
Shortly after the meal started, Maxwell told the butler to leave and close the door behind him. Once the butler had gone, Maxwell explained what he had done. ‘“I feared that you were going to discuss intelligence reports. And that man” – he pointed at the door – “is a spy planted by Rupert Murdoch.”’
When Dave Hill, not unreasonably, asked why Maxwell continued to employ him, ‘the response was a mixture of contempt and incredulity. “That just goes to show how little you know about business,” Maxwell said. “I don’t waste my time worrying about who is appointed as my butler.”’
By this point Who Dares Wins had been running for several weeks and no one had won the million-pound prize. Now that the novelty had worn off, the Mirror’s circulation had started to slide back to what it had been before the prize had been announced. But once again this wasn’t the whole story. In fact, there had been several winners. Maxwell, however, didn’t consider any of them to be worthy recipients of his money. Either they were too middle class, or too undeserving, or just not appealing enough.
Having rejected all the winners so far, Maxwell finally found one who ticked all the right boxes. Maudie Barrett was an elderly widow from Harwich in Essex who had spent her entire working life as a cleaning lady. As well as heroically providing for a large family, Mrs Barrett also had a dog – a spaniel – called Thumper. The dog, Maxwell felt, would go down especially well with readers.
Mrs Barrett and Thumper were driven up to Blackpool, where Maxwell, accompanied by his editors and senior members of staff, would present her prize at the Town Hall. It just so happened that the Labour Party Conference was going on at the same time – an event Maxwell had calculated would ensure him even more publicity. But not everything went according to plan. First of all, Mrs Barrett, unused to long car journeys, was sick by the roadside on the way to Blackpool. Then the Mirror’s gossip columnist stood on Thumper’s paw, putting an already nervous Mrs Barrett even more on edge.
Installed in a suite at the Imperial Hotel, she sat on a bed chain-smoking.
When Maxwell finally appeared, he made a great fuss of the now-limping Thumper, before plonking himself down beside Mrs Barrett – causing, as Mike Molloy recalled, ‘the bed to rear like a boat in a heavy sea’. Having congratulated her on her win, Maxwell proceeded to lecture Mrs Barrett on what to do with the money; essentially, this involved her giving it straight back to him. ‘Do you realize this is a tax-free sum and if you let me invest it for you it will bring you an income of a thousand pounds a week without any reduction in the capital sum?’
Afterwards Mrs Barrett was driven in an open-topped tram along the seafront to the Town Hall. Before the cheque could be presented, there was another hitch: the paper’s veteran agony aunt, Marje Proops, sat on the luckless Thumper. Richard Stott looked on in disbelief. ‘Marje sat down, not knowing that Thumper’s rear end was already occupying part of the seat. As she did so, she pinioned him, but as neither could move, the squeals of Thumper and the protestations of Marje held up the ceremony for several minutes.’
Within a few days of promising Joe Haines that he would never interfere with anything he had written, Maxwell went back on his
word. Once again Haines threatened to resign. Although Maxwell backed down, Richard Stott saw that he had already homed in on Haines’s own Achilles heel: ‘Joe always loved power; it was an aphrodisiac and the powerful men who exercised it fascinated and mesmerized him.’
Maxwell not only rewrote articles: he chose photographs – frequently of himself – and commissioned pieces extolling the virtues of places where he had, or hoped to have, business interests. Puzzled Mirror readers now found themselves confronted by headlines such as: ‘Burma, A Country We Have Ignored For Far Too Long.’
At the same time, Maxwell clearly believed that owning a newspaper gave him a licence to act as a kind of international superhero, jetting round the world dispensing money and advice as he saw fit. The 1984/5 famine in Ethiopia claimed the lives of more than a million people and left more than twice that number homeless.
Infuriated by what he regarded as a tardy and ineffectual response to the crisis, Maxwell ran an appeal in the Mirror which raised £2,000,000 from readers and well-heeled friends. Still reeling from his introduction to the Queen, Ryōichi Sasakawa stumped up £100,000. Maxwell also persuaded the country’s military government to allow an RAF transport plane loaded with food and medical supplies to land in Addis Ababa. He insisted on travelling in the plane and took along a number of journalists to record what was dubbed ‘The Mirror’s Mercy Mission’.
Among the journalists on the plane was the paper’s Political Editor, Alastair Campbell. ‘If I read back my stuff today, I have to say I’m ashamed. It really was “Starving children were saved yesterday thanks to the intervention of Mirror publisher, Robert Maxwell.”’ One evening, Campbell returned to his hotel to find Maxwell had left a note for him. ‘My work here is done,’ he had written. ‘I have returned home to resolve the miners’ strike.’
The next year Maxwell stepped in to – as he put it – save the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. Dogged by financial mismanagement and facing a political boycott, the games were on the verge of collapse. Maxwell promised £2,000,000 of his own money. Once again, he turned to Ryōichi Sasakawa to help him out. At a joint press conference, Sasakawa caused considerable surprise by claiming to be twenty-seven years old and predicting that he would live until he was 200. In fact, he had recently celebrated his eighty-seventh birthday.
When the Queen arrived to open the games, Maxwell gave her a set of commemorative coins, saying, ‘Permit me to present you with a token of this great event which I have orchestrated.’ But once the games were over and the dust had settled, the organizers complained that, of the £2,000,000 Maxwell had promised, only £250,000 ever materialized.
If the public Maxwell radiated brightness and beneficence, the private Maxwell was much darker, especially where his children were concerned. Joe Haines once went into Maxwell’s office to see his son Kevin standing in front of his father’s desk. ‘As I walked in, he said to Kevin, “Get out. I want to talk to Joe.” What struck me most of all was how he treated the boy. Not “Excuse me, son”, or anything like that, just “Get out.” It was incredible.’
But, as Haines came to see, alongside Maxwell’s ballooning messianic complex ran an almost equally large sentimental streak. In Berlin, Maxwell had doted on Barry, his German shepherd; in Blackpool he’d made a great fuss of Mrs Barratt’s Thumper, and when he learned that Haines and his wife had just bought a new puppy, he reacted in a way that neither of them could have predicted. The next day Maxwell gave him a present he had bought for the puppy: a fluffy toy. That evening, Haines took the toy home and gave it to the puppy – who promptly tore it to pieces.
The following morning Maxwell asked how the puppy had liked it. Diplomatically, Haines said that it had been a great success. Maxwell was delighted. Perhaps Haines wouldn’t mind doing him a favour? Would he take a photograph of the puppy with the fluffy toy?
Rushing home, Haines and his wife fished out the remains of the toy from their rubbish bin. After sticking it back together as best they could, they took a Polaroid which Haines duly gave to Maxwell. This too was to have unexpected consequences. Normally, Maxwell had just one framed photograph on his desk – of his daughter Ghislaine. But the next time Haines went into Maxwell’s office, he saw that it had been replaced by the photograph of his dog. ‘He kept it there for months. The whole thing just seemed very odd to me, especially when he treated his own children so badly.’
Yet, however appealing Mrs Barrett and Thumper may have been, however enormous the Mirror’s cash prizes, however many photos of Maxwell they ran, or starving children they saved, these failed to have the desired effect on the paper’s sales. Within a year of his taking over, the Mirror’s circulation was down to 3,102,427, a loss of almost 450,000 copies a day. Even though all Fleet Street papers were going through a rough patch at the time, nearly one million readers had deserted Maxwell’s three national papers – the fastest fall in their history.
Soon after returning from Blackpool, Mike Molloy met a friend of his – a psychiatrist called Tom Pitt-Atkins – who asked how he was getting on with Maxwell.
‘He’s pretty eccentric,’ Molloy told him.
‘He’s not eccentric – he’s mad,’ said Pitt-Atkins bluntly. ‘I’ve got people inside who are less crazy than him.’
‘You actually think he’s clinically mad?’ said Molloy.
Pitt-Atkins nodded.
‘Does he have a group of executives who are bitter rivals and only answer to him directly?’ he asked.
Molloy said that he did.
‘Does he micro-manage trivial matters, but leave important decisions deliberately vague and then blame others when things go wrong?’
Again Molloy admitted that he did.
‘Does he make grandiose claims for all his business motives?’
‘He says he went into scientific publishing when he saw the first atomic explosion, and he knew that science was the only hope for mankind to avert nuclear Armageddon,’ Molloy said.
‘That’ll do. How does he treat his family?’
‘Like slaves.’
‘The man’s off his head,’ said Pitt-Atkins. ‘He’ll end up bringing his whole empire down around him.’
As for Maxwell himself, Pitt-Atkins felt the future was equally bleak. ‘He’ll probably die unexpectedly, perhaps in some sort of explosion.’
When Molloy pointed out that Maxwell had claimed that he wanted to leave a great heritage for his children, Pitt-Atkins offered a prediction of his own:
‘He’ll leave nothing to them,’ he said. ‘Just ashes.’
15.
In the Lair of the Black Bear
Two years after buying the Daily Mirror, Maxwell bought the building next door, Strand House, previously the headquarters of the Goldman Sachs bank. He promptly rechristened it Maxwell House – just as he’d done with his office on the Marylebone Road thirty-five years before. The top floor was converted into a luxury apartment where in future Maxwell would spend most of his time.
Now that he had a grand apartment, he wanted a suitably grand entrance to go with it. Two nine-foot-high doors of darkly polished wood, more suited to a doge’s palace than a newspaper proprietor, were installed. Once the work was finished, Maxwell asked Eleanor Berry to come and have a look. She was enormously impressed: ‘The lift ascended to the top floor. When it opened, I saw an entirely new world. I am not an authority on interior decoration, but the room I had been left in looked majestic and was adorned with seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings. The furniture might have belonged to kings and the carpets were embroidered with the letter M.’
Maxwell also wondered if Berry would like to watch the paper being printed. With its clanging hot-metal presses and streams of newspapers flying by on overhead conveyor belts, this too was an entirely new world – although possibly no one had ever seen it in quite such apocalyptic terms: ‘I saw before me a river of volcanic lava sent by the gods in colours of red and white, purifying the earth and the fleece of freshly-shorn lambs and newly-fallen
snow. Beside me stood the black bear, taking me by the hand.’
Maxwell had a lot to feel proud of. By pruning the workforce and driving costs down, he had turned Mirror Group Newspapers into a colossal cash cow. While circulation may have continued to fall, profits were soaring: up from £5,000,000 a year to £70,000,000 within eighteen months of his arrival.
Having recently bought the British Airways helicopter division for £12,500,000, he now owned more helicopters than anyone else in Europe. As Maxwell House had at one time been an HM Customs & Revenue building, the new owner still had the right to use the flat roof as a helipad – one of only three places in London where private helicopters could land and take off. Maxwell’s personal helicopter was a twin-engined Eurocopter Squirrel. Before getting on board, he had a little ritual he would perform: he would stand on the roof of Maxwell House, unzip his fly and urinate over the side of the building. Subsequently, people would claim that he liked to do so directly on to the heads of the people below, an impression Maxwell did nothing to dispel; in fact, there was an internal gutter that ran around the roof of the building.
The child in Maxwell – bubbling ever closer to the surface, as Betty had realized – exulted in having another new toy. He took particular pleasure in the call sign given to the new helicopter: VR-BOB – he liked to say it stood for ‘Very Rich Bob’ – and would eagerly invite guests to join him on a spin over the rooftops of London. Sometimes when he went further afield he liked to drop in on people unexpectedly, descending from the skies and landing in their back gardens.
Maxwell could be an exacting guest. Arriving at a party that a Mirror employee and his wife were having, he held court in their living room. A small girl was brought forward to be introduced to the famous publisher. After chatting to her for a few minutes, Maxwell stared more closely at the girl’s mouth.
‘Why don’t your parents do something about your teeth?’ he asked.