Fall

by John Preston

  Apologetically, the girl’s mother admitted they had been meaning to take her to a dentist.

  Later, Maxwell quietly paid her dental bills. Rather more often, people would come to see him. On one occasion, Mother Teresa arrived unexpectedly in Maxwell’s apartment accompanied by an interpreter and, according to Mike Molloy, ‘clothed in garments that appeared to have been made out of old tea towels’. She had come specially to bring him a message from God, she said.

  If this struck Maxwell as unusual, he gave no sign of it. Mother Teresa then launched into a lengthy speech in her native Albanian, sounding ‘like someone cracking nuts with their teeth’. When she had finished, the interpreter declared, ‘God wants you to give Mother Teresa a million pounds to start a hospice in England!’ In the silence that followed, observers noticed that the grin on Maxwell’s face appeared to be rather more fixed than it had been before. Glancing at his watch, he announced that he had urgent business to attend to. A few minutes later, the clatter of rotor blades was heard overhead.

  Over the next year, two men started working for Robert Maxwell – men from very different backgrounds and possessed of very different skills. Each of them would bring out very different sides of Maxwell’s character.

  Peter Jay was one of the golden boys of his generation. The son of two prominent Labour politicians, he went to Winchester College – where he was Head Boy – then Christ Church College, Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree in PPE. He was also President of the Oxford Union. Jay went on to become the Economics Editor of The Times and to marry Margaret Callaghan, daughter of the Labour politician Jim Callaghan.

  In every magazine profile, he would be referred to, without fail, as ‘the cleverest man in Britain’. As if this wasn’t enough, in 1974 Jay was tipped by Time magazine as a future world leader. Three years later his father-in-law, Jim Callaghan, succeeded Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. Then, just when Jay’s path to the top seemed assured, everything began to fall apart. Despite having no experience as a diplomat, he was appointed British ambassador in Washington.

  With accusations of nepotism ringing in his ears, Jay headed across the Atlantic to take up his new job. Once in Washington, his wife, Margaret, started an affair with the journalist Carl Bernstein, co-author of All the President’s Men. Meanwhile Jay had an affair of his own – with their children’s nanny. To complicate things further, Bernstein was also married, to the writer Nora Ephron, who wrote a comic novel, Heartburn, based on the whole tangled business. The book was turned into a hit film with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

  All this was related with enormous glee in the British tabloid press – Rupert Murdoch’s Sun ran the story under the headline ‘How the Know-All Came a Cropper’. When Jay came back to London after two years, he found he was no longer the golden boy; instead, he had become a pariah.

  At this point Maxwell swooped. He’d always had a peculiar knack for homing in on once grand people who had fallen on hard times, and Jay, however tarnished he may have become, was still grander than most. Maxwell offered him a job as his ‘Chief-of-Staff’ – a job title normally reserved for the armed forces, or the White House. While no one, least of all Jay himself, was sure what this involved, it sounded prestigious and carried a hefty salary. Eagerly, he accepted.

  But before Jay started, there was something he needed to find out. Like practically everyone else, he’d heard rumours that Maxwell was working for the KGB. Clearly, it would be awkward for a former British ambassador to work for anybody in the pay of a foreign government. Jay therefore took soundings from his contacts in the Foreign Office, and was reassured that, while Maxwell plainly loved passing snippets of information back and forth between world leaders, there was no evidence to suggest he was a spy.

  Back in 1977, Jay had written an essay for a book entitled The Future That Doesn’t Work: Social Democracy’s Failures in Britain. His essay was called ‘Englanditis’ and began: ‘We in Britain are a confused and unhappy people.’ The two years Peter Jay spent working for Maxwell were to bring him more confusion and unhappiness than he would have imagined possible.

  Simon Grigg was born into a working-class family who lived on a council estate in Reading. Leaving school at fifteen, he went to work for his father, a builder, but never much cared for it. One day he was reading a newspaper and saw an advertisement for Ivor Spencer’s International School for Butlers – Spencer was a former Toastmaster to the Queen. Grigg spent the next year saving up the course fees, and by the time he left, nine months later, he’d acquired a whole range of new skills – including ‘dealing with greedy guests’, ‘answering the door to tradesmen’ and ‘polishing very high-end shoes’.

  After a spell working for the son of the richest man in Austria, Grigg, then aged twenty-one, came back to Britain with the growing suspicion that he’d made a big mistake. But Ivor Spencer arranged for him to go for an interview as assistant to Robert Maxwell’s butler, and, much to Griggs’s surprise, he got the job.

  ‘I wasn’t really prepared for it at all. I’d just done this course, but I was very young, incredibly shy and had no real experience of the world. I was winging it really – completely winging it.’

  Dressed in his uniform – a morning suit and a grey tie – Grigg did his best to keep as busy as possible. Naturally discreet and light on his feet, he also had a knack for making himself inconspicuous. At first, Grigg hardly ever saw Maxwell; occasionally a large, black-haired figure would sweep by on his way to yet another meeting. Then, after a few months, Maxwell’s butler was moved to another job; his replacement turned out to have a criminal record and all at once Grigg was bumped up the line to become his valet.

  ‘Even though I was shy, I wasn’t nervous in his presence; for some reason he didn’t frighten me. I think he liked the fact that I wasn’t pretending to be anything I wasn’t. He needed people who he could trust, whose loyalty wasn’t in any doubt. Clearly, I wasn’t any threat to him. He also liked having young people around him; they energized him. And while I may have been inexperienced, I was very keen and determined to do well.’

  Grigg’s duties included everything from serving Maxwell breakfast – orange juice, Corn Flakes and strong coffee, served in an enormous cup with ‘Very Important Person’ printed on the side – to dabbing his face with a powder puff so that he never looked sweaty in photographs.

  As he settled into his job, Grigg began to pay more attention to Maxwell’s foibles – partly so he could anticipate his demands, and partly because he had never met anyone remotely like him before. Like Betty, he noticed how childlike Maxwell could be. ‘If you showed weakness, you’d had it. But if you stood up to him, he tended to crumble. I remember once he was firing off all these different orders. I think I must have been really tired at the time because after a while I just said, “Right, what the fuck do you want me to do first?” He just looked at me for a bit, then he started to laugh. The strange thing was that at times like that there was this incredible innocence to him; he became just like a little boy.’

  It wasn’t just Maxwell’s behaviour that was childlike; so were his tastes. Wherever they were in the world, he would send Grigg out to buy boxed sets of his favourite films. ‘He used to like watching James Bond movies more than anything else. Even though he must have seen the same films time and time again, he never seemed to tire of them.’

  In the four years Grigg spent working for Maxwell, he accompanied him to sixty-four countries, sometimes travelling on his private jet, sometimes on Concorde and sometimes – though much less often – on regular commercial flights. As they sped through one border control after another, Grigg noticed something else about Maxwell: how carefully he guarded his passport. ‘He was very protective about it in a way he wasn’t protective about anything else. Although he’d lived in this country for most of his adult life, I think somewhere inside him he felt that, as an immigrant, it could be taken away from him at any moment.’

  In his own way, Peter Jay was also winging it. Hi
s job, as he saw it, was to make sure that Maxwell’s life ran as smoothly as possible. Seeing the teetering piles of unopened envelopes on Maxwell’s desk, he instigated a filing system whereby all the post would be put into different boxes depending on importance. But it soon became clear that this was the last thing Maxwell wanted; instead, he was determined to remain in charge of everything himself. That way, he, and he alone, knew what was happening.

  While Maxwell would frequently reduce people to quivering wrecks, Grigg saw that he took particular pleasure in humiliating Peter Jay. The combination of Jay’s reputation for cleverness, his Establishment background and his air of fleshy self-assurance brought all Maxwell’s resentment – and insecurities – surging to the fore.

  At the fortnightly lunches Maxwell held in the Mirror dining room, he would sneeringly refer to Jay as ‘Mister Ambassador’ – insisting that he take down verbatim notes of what was being said, or sending him off on mundane errands. Visitors winced with embarrassment. Peter Mandelson, the Labour Party’s Director of Communications and the man widely credited with reviving the party’s fortunes, remembers Maxwell treating Jay appallingly – ‘just like the office boy’. Maxwell also took to phoning Jay up in the middle of the night with absurdly trivial questions. He once called him at four o’clock on a Saturday morning to ask him what the time was.

  On another occasion he told Grigg that he needed to speak to Jay immediately. At the time, senior staff at the Mirror had just been issued with early mobile phones. When Grigg finally tracked him down, Jay turned out to be in the middle of an important family occasion: ‘I remember Peter saying, “Look, Simon, it’s my daughter’s wedding and I’m just about to walk her down the aisle. Does he really want to talk to me?” I said, ‘I’m afraid he does.”’ Faced with a choice between discharging his paternal duties and answering his master’s call, the ever-obliging Jay decided that his daughter would have to wait.

  Jay himself claimed to be more bemused than upset by Maxwell’s behaviour. ‘From the moment I took the job, I very consciously decided to surround myself with an impermeable glass bubble so that nothing he did ever got to me. That said, I often found myself laughing hysterically at the bizarre nature of what we were all doing.’ But when he wasn’t laughing hysterically, Jay, like Simon Grigg, was observing Maxwell and coming to his own conclusions: ‘It seemed to me that there was something not so much amoral about him, as pre-moral. It was as if he was literally uncivilized, like some great woolly mammoth stalking through a primeval forest wholly unaware of things like good and evil.’

  At night, as he replayed the events of the day in his mind, Jay would sometimes wonder how Maxwell spent his own spare time up in his apartment at the top of Maxwell House. ‘I came to see that he was terrified of boredom. He had no hobbies, no private activities and no friends. I think what drove him more than anything wasn’t greed, or money, or even notoriety, but the desire to generate activity – no matter how pointless it was. Above all, he dreaded being on his own with nothing to do. That’s why he would do things like call me up at four o’clock on a Saturday morning. The weekend was always an agony. Every Friday night it must have stretched before him like a vast desert of boredom.’

  Although Eleanor Berry was very taken by Maxwell’s new apartment at the top of Maxwell House, not everyone was so impressed. As Mike Molloy looked at the mahogany furniture, the pink marble fireplace that had been specially imported from Siena, the silk curtains, gilt mirrors and marble urns, he thought it tried – none too convincingly – to evoke the home of a country squire.

  Molloy was intrigued by the Doric columns that had been erected in the entrance hall. Something about them didn’t seem right, he felt, although he couldn’t say what exactly. One day when nobody was looking, he tapped one.

  It was hollow.

  16.

  An Enormous Spread

  Whenever a new chef started work for Robert Maxwell, they would be handed a six-page list by his fiercely protective PA, Jean Baddeley. The list was headlined ‘Robert Maxwell’s likes’ and contained very specific instructions about the food that Maxwell was to be served. It began with the most important instruction of all – so important that it was printed across the top of the paper in capital letters:

  ‘IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD GARLIC OR ONIONS BE USED.’

  While garlic and onions topped his list of dislikes, they were by no means the only ones. Mr Maxwell did not care for ‘small apples or oranges’ – or indeed for small anything. ‘In most instances, the largest sized fruit available should be sent of the best quality.’ Sliced brown bread ‘should never be buttered’. Similarly, no butter should ever be used in cooking – ‘peanut oil may be used as an alternative’. On no account was deep-fried fish ever to be served. Caviar should always be Beluga and served with half-slices of brown bread or toast – again with the key proviso: ‘NO BUTTER’. Mediterranean king prawns were to be accompanied by ‘a plain yoghurt dip’.

  Beef was to be cooked medium – ‘trim off fat where possible’. Steak should be ‘grilled only. Medium, sirloin fillet only. Brush with oil, trim fat.’ When it came to lamb, Maxwell liked the ‘knuckle end of a roast leg of lamb’ and ‘the end next to the tail’ of a saddle. He was also fond of offal – in particular grilled calves’ kidneys and veal kidneys in cream sauce. Other ‘likes’ included Chinese takeaway meals.

  Coffee was to be poured into ‘RM’S VIP cup which should be warmed first’. Sugar should not be served ‘unless asked for’. As for alcohol, he preferred vodka: ‘RM only drinks Stolichnaya which should be kept very cold and served on its own.’ Whisky should be Chivas Regal, brandy Exshaw’s Vintage, champagne Mumm Cordon Rouge – ‘served in tumblers’ – and beer Löwenbräu. Mixers were ‘all to be slimline’.

  With the possible exception of Chinese takeaways and veal kidneys in cream sauce, all this amounted to a pretty healthy diet. Yet, by the mid-1980s, even the most casual of observers could hardly fail to notice that Maxwell, always a large man, was getting considerably larger.

  Maxwell’s weight was a constant source of mystery to his chefs. However dutifully they followed Jean Baddeley’s instructions, he continued to pile on the pounds. What was going on? It seemed that whenever Baddeley wasn’t around with her reproving finger and list of instructions, Maxwell’s self-control went out of the window.

  Even as a youngish man, he had always been a big, as well as an unorthodox, feeder. Gyles Brandreth remembers seeing Maxwell at a buffet lunch in the late 1960s to launch the Buy British campaign. ‘He was going down the table eating everything with his hands, piling it into his mouth. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It was as if he was hungry for life, as if he just couldn’t get enough of it.’

  Fifteen years later, Eleanor Berry was a frequent guest at mealtimes in Headington Hill Hall. On one occasion she noticed that there was a padlock on the larder door. When Berry asked Betty why the larder was locked, she told her that it was to keep Maxwell out. ‘Otherwise he breaks in and eats everything there is,’ said Betty. ‘He broke in the other day I’m sorry to say. He ate a pound of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, two jars of caviar, a loaf of bread and a whole chicken in one go.’ She went on to say they had had to change the padlock a few weeks earlier as Maxwell had broken the last one. ‘He’s so strong he can break any door down . . . he’s so naughty sometimes.’

  When they sat down to lunch, Jean Baddeley was on hand to ensure that any outbursts of gluttony were kept in check. After the joint had been carved, a maid went round the table with a dish of potatoes. Berry helped herself before the dish was passed to Maxwell, ‘who took even more potatoes than I had’.

  Furiously, Baddeley rounded on the maid.

  ‘I thought I told you that Mr Maxwell was not to be offered potatoes!’ she told her.

  She then spooned the potatoes off Maxwell’s plate and back into the serving dish. To Berry’s surprise, Maxwell did nothing; he just sat there meekly. At the end of the meal, his daughter Isab
el took her to one side. ‘My father has an eating disorder,’ she explained. ‘And we all have to struggle to prevent him from harming himself. Once he starts to eat carbohydrates, he can’t stop.’

  On another occasion, the journalist and editor Nicholas Coleridge was a guest at Sunday lunch, where roast chicken was served. Coleridge was particularly keen on breast meat and eagerly looking forward to a decent helping. But so too, it turned out, was his host. Glumly, Coleridge watched as Maxwell carved several chickens, putting every piece of breast on to his own plate in an enormous pile which he then topped off with a gherkin on a cocktail stick.

  Betty believed that the roots of Maxwell’s food consumption went back to his childhood – to when there was never enough to eat and he was always hungry: to when, as he told one of his secretaries, he had once been reduced to eating a dog. Ever since food had always represented security, a clear dividing line between his past life and his present.

  As Maxwell grew older, his eating habits became even more unconstrained. Now it was if nothing ever satisfied him, nothing ever made him feel full. The Mirror’s Foreign Editor, Nick Davies, was with Maxwell on a trip abroad when he walked into Maxwell’s suite one morning and saw him stuffing himself with sandwiches: ‘It was like watching a starving man, driven mad by hunger, unable to control himself as he forced handfuls of food into his mouth. He must have sensed me there, because he turned and saw me standing in the doorway. For a split second, he was like a cornered animal, as though I had caught him thieving.’

  Every year the disparity between pigginess and pickiness grew more pronounced. And, every year, Maxwell’s waistband continued to expand. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Betty would send him to specialist slimming clinics – in one clinic in Switzerland, he was put on a sleep regime for several days, presumably on the grounds that this would be the only time when he was unable to eat. Nothing, though, seemed to have any effect.