Fall

by John Preston

  To make the moment sweeter still, the deal was negotiated, in part, by Rothschild’s. Back in 1969, Rothschild’s had conspicuously frozen out Maxwell after the Pergamon takeover. This made Betty Maxwell so mad that for fifteen years afterwards she turned her back on Jacob Rothschild, Chairman of the English branch, whenever she saw him.

  Now all that had been forgotten. Maxwell was ecstatic. At last he had joined the Big Ten League, an unofficial club of the world’s top media moguls. Admittedly, the entry fee was much higher than he had anticipated, but Maxwell was convinced he could pay off his loans within a few years.

  On the surface everything looked rosy. Beneath it, though, lay a very different story. A story of falling profits, soaring interest rates and looming recession. In trying to emulate Rupert Murdoch – to prove he could be an equally heavy hitter – Maxwell had set in train a course of events that would lead to his physical and mental disintegration, his downfall and, ultimately, his death.

  19.

  Homecomings

  When Gerald Ronson first met Robert Maxwell in the late 1970s, he had not been impressed. Always nattily dressed in tailor-made suits, Ronson took great pride both in his wardrobe and in the opulence of his lifestyle. Maxwell on the other hand arrived for their first meeting wearing a suit that was shiny with wear and driving a clapped-out Rolls-Royce. Ronson felt he was letting the side down.

  ‘I told him, “You can’t go around like that.”’

  In a bid to smarten him up, Ronson first introduced him to his tailor, then sent him over to the luxury car dealers H. R. Owen in Berkeley Square so that Maxwell could buy himself a new Rolls-Royce. He even tried to interest Maxwell in some ‘very expensive art’, but quickly realized this was going too far. ‘Bob said, “I’m not spending a million quid on pictures when I can get some that look real for a few hundred.”’

  However, Ronson had better luck when it came to a much more expensive purchase. At the time, he was in the process of building himself a yacht, My Gail III – named after his wife. Ronson happened to hear that the brother of the Saudi financier/arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi had also been building a yacht, but had abandoned the project halfway through. Perhaps Maxwell might be interested in taking it on, he suggested.

  ‘I helped Bob buy that boat. I think he paid eleven to twelve million dollars for it. He wasn’t at all bothered about how it was finished inside and said to me, “You deal with it”, so I did. I didn’t make money out of it; I did it as a friend.’

  For the next few years, whenever Ronson and his family went on a summer holiday on the My Gail III, Maxwell would follow close behind in the Lady Ghislaine, as he had named his new boat. He could, of course, have named the boat after Betty, or any one of his three older daughters, Isabel, Christine or Anne, but instead he plumped for his favourite child. ‘He loved that boat. His private plane was a tool, but his boat was his escape.’

  At sea, Maxwell behaved very differently to the way he did on dry land. According to the Mirror’s Foreign Editor, Nick Davies, he would often revert to a child-like state when on board the Lady Ghislaine, sometimes slipping into baby language. ‘He would refer to a swim in the sea as a “twim in the tea”; he would say “trightened” for “frightened”, “minkey” for “monkey”, “deaded” for “tired”, and call his pockets “sky-rockets”.’

  But, even here, Maxwell was seldom off the phone, Ronson noticed. ‘He could never relax. And he didn’t have a lot of personal friends. There were plenty of people he could use and abuse, but there weren’t a lot of people he could sit down and have a genuine talk with.’

  Ronson knew that Maxwell, like him, was a Jew. But he also knew that Maxwell had denied it in the past, or else claimed to have abandoned Judaism long ago. ‘He usually told people he wasn’t Jewish, but he told me he was and had given it up.’

  Again, Ronson was not impressed. ‘I said to him, “What’s all this crap? How come all of a sudden you’re not Jewish any more?”’

  Shortly after Maxwell had bought the Mirror in 1984, Ronson was due to go to Israel to see the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Why didn’t Maxwell and Betty come along? Despite being ‘nonplussed’ by the idea, Maxwell agreed. They flew out on Ronson’s private plane. As they neared Tel Aviv, Ronson glanced over at Maxwell and saw he was crying. ‘There were tears coming down his face. He kept saying, “I should have come here years ago.” It surprised me because he was not the sort of man you expected to see showing such emotion.’

  Ronson was even more surprised when he and Maxwell went to see Yitzhak Shamir the next morning. At one point in the meeting Maxwell suddenly announced that he wanted to invest in Israel.

  Shamir wondered how much he had in mind.

  ‘At least a quarter of a billion dollars,’ Maxwell told him.

  Both Shamir and Ronson were astounded. ‘That was a huge amount of money.’ Whether Maxwell actually had it was another matter. ‘He certainly wasn’t shy when it came to telling people stories that weren’t true.’ But on this occasion, Maxwell proved to be as good as his word. Over the next four years he became the largest single investor in the Israeli economy, so much so that people began driving around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with bumper stickers reading, ‘Please Mr Maxwell, Buy Me!’

  Using Mirror Group funds, Maxwell bought several newspapers, made substantial investments in Israeli high-tech and pharmaceutical companies, and tried to buy a football team. Not only that, he would also pass on any useful information that came his way to Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Now that Maxwell had rediscovered his Judaism, Ronson set about ‘guiding him into the Community’, encouraging his involvement in various charities he supported.

  In December 1984, there was a production of The Nutcracker at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to mark the centenary year of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, one of the many charities to which Maxwell gave large sums of money. All the senior members of the Royal Family were present: the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew.

  Maxwell and Betty were in the Royal Box; he was placed next to the Queen Mother. Although he would sometimes profess a keen interest in the ballet when asked about his cultural pursuits, to Betty’s alarm Maxwell fell asleep as soon as the lights went down and continued nodding off throughout the performance: ‘I was constantly poking him in the ribs to wake him up.’

  Ronson was under no illusions about Maxwell’s motives – or his own for that matter. ‘Maybe he was using me for a certain amount of respectability. And maybe I was using him for the money he could contribute to worthy causes. But still we became good friends . . . I think I was one of the few people he trusted enough to spend personal time with. He knew that I’d give him a straight opinion on things and would also tell him if he was talking bollocks. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t always listen to my advice.’

  The trip to Israel not only changed Maxwell’s life; it changed Betty’s too. On her return, she immersed herself in studying the Nazi genocide. She started a journal called Holocaust and Genocide Studies – published by Pergamon – and in 1988 organized a conference in Oxford called ‘Remembering for the Future’, the largest collection of Holocaust scholars ever assembled.

  Having researched her own family tree for her thesis, Betty decided to do the same for Maxwell’s – partly for their children’s sake, and partly to show him how much, despite everything, she still cared for him. She spent most of 1985 travelling the world in search of Maxwell’s roots, tracking down his distant cousins in America, Argentina, Switzerland, Belgium and Israel.

  When Betty came to compile Maxwell’s family tree, she put a little yellow Star of David in front of all the people who had been murdered in the camps. It wasn’t until she finished that she realized just how many there were. ‘When I unfolded it, it was like a shower of yellow stars.’ But her hopes that this might bring the two of them closer together came to nothing. At a meeting of the ed
itorial board of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Jerusalem, Maxwell shocked everyone by ridiculing her for her lack of experience in publishing, and belittling her whenever she opened her mouth.

  Nobody could understand what was going on – nobody except Betty herself. ‘That episode could not have demonstrated more clearly that Bob had not managed to reconcile himself with his grief, or overcome his guilt complex at having married a Christian. Confronted by Israeli Jews, most of them survivors, and dealing with the subject of the Holocaust, he took his distress out on me.’

  In September 1978, Maxwell finally went back to his home town of Solotvino. Hoping to butter him up for a publishing deal, the Soviet Minister of Culture extended an invitation to him and Betty. When he had left almost forty years earlier, Maxwell had been sixteen years old and trying to make a living selling bead necklaces. Now dancers lined the streets to greet his arrival. The couple were showered with gifts and at the town hall the Mayor launched into what proved to be an epically long speech of welcome.

  Despite all the celebrations, it was a profoundly depressing experience for Maxwell. The house where he had been born was still standing, but even tinier and shabbier than he remembered. There was no one left whom he’d known as a child – all of them had either fled or been killed. That night, he and Betty slept in a local inn. It was bitterly cold. To try to keep Maxwell warm, she wrapped him in a sheep’s wool blanket they had been presented with earlier.

  He left vowing never to return.

  Previously part of Czechoslovakia, Solotvino had been incorporated into Ukraine at the end of the War. While Maxwell may have gone back to his home town, he hadn’t visited the land of his birth since his mysterious trips there in the 1950s.

  Another eight years would pass until he went to Czechoslovakia on what was described as a ‘state visit’. In September 1986, Maxwell flew to Prague accompanied by the Mirror’s Political Editor, Julia Langdon. During the flight, he speculated about who would be there to greet him when his plane landed. Given the significance of the event, he expected a suitably grand turn-out – the Czech Foreign Minister at the very least.

  But when they arrived at one o’clock in the morning, there was no sign of the Foreign Minister, or anyone else. Instead, their plane was guided to a distant corner of the airport where both of them had their passports confiscated. They were then locked into a large glass box. For the next hour they waited while Maxwell grew more and more angry. ‘The problem was the airport officials could only speak Czech and Maxwell’s Czech was quite rusty because he hadn’t spoken it for so long,’ Langdon recalls.

  All at once she became aware of a commotion in the distance. ‘I could see these people rushing towards us, clearly in a flustered state. There was an entire band, some other people carrying a red carpet and a man who turned out to be the Deputy Foreign Minister.’ The carpet was unrolled, the band struck up and profuse apologies were offered; apparently a terrible mistake had been made and their plane had been directed to the wrong part of the airport.

  The next morning, Maxwell and Langdon were driven to Prague Castle to see the Czech President, Gustáv Husák. After Husák had been presented with a hefty vellum-bound edition of his speeches, the two men made what struck Langdon as extremely stilted conversation, with each sentence being translated from Czech to English, then back again.

  At one point Husák started banging on about great Czech folk traditions. Much to Langdon’s surprise, Maxwell suddenly expressed an interested in hunting. It was obvious to her that he’d only done so because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Husák, however, didn’t see it that way.

  ‘Oh, you like hunting, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, you must go hunting this afternoon.’

  Frantic phone calls were made to Maxwell’s office in London asking for his measurements. That afternoon he and Langdon were driven to the President’s summer palace. There, Maxwell was taken off to change into his hunting uniform – a green hunting jacket and matching hat with a feather in the brim. Unfortunately, his waist measurement was so large that they’d been unable to find him any trousers that fitted, so he had to wear his suit trousers instead.

  Normally, the hunters all rode horses, but as Maxwell couldn’t ride it was decided they should go in the back of a lorry. Before they left a procession of women wearing white dresses came out with trays of vodka so that everyone could wish them good fortune. Bugles were played and toasts drunk. Then, amid more fanfares, the hunting party disappeared off into the forest.

  They were gone a long time, but when at last the party returned they did so in triumph, with a deer which Maxwell had shot. The deer was ceremonially laid on a bed of branches, the women in white dresses reappeared and yet more toasts were drunk – this time to Maxwell the mighty hunter.

  When he and Langdon were driven back to Prague that evening, they saw the castle had been specially lit up – something the Czechs only did for their most esteemed guests.

  ‘I remember we got out of the car to look at the view and Maxwell said, “Why do you think they are doing this for me?”

  ‘I said, “I suppose it must be a token of their admiration for you, Bob.” I was being ironic, but of course he didn’t see it that way; he took it quite literally.’

  After dinner with the President, Langdon and Maxwell had a whisky before bed. They were talking about the events of the day when Maxwell made a sudden announcement.

  ‘I didn’t shoot that deer, you know,’ he told her.

  ‘I said, “What do you mean?”

  ‘“I didn’t shoot the deer,” he repeated. “I tried to, but I kept on missing. That was why we took so long. In the end, someone else had to shoot it for me.”’

  This admission made an enormous impression on Langdon. ‘He spoke quite casually, but also as though he was getting something off his chest. It felt extraordinarily self-revelatory. What struck me most of all was the honesty, the openness. It was as if for once in his life he didn’t have to pretend.’

  20.

  The Party of the Decade

  The dinner-dances hosted by Robert and Betty Maxwell at Headington Hill Hall were considered, even by hardened partygoers, to be in a class of their own. The house itself was an ideal venue for a party. It had been built in the early nineteenth century by a culture-loving family of brewers, the Morrells. They too had been keen party-givers. In 1878, Oscar Wilde was among the 300 guests at one of their fancy-dress balls. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he chose to come dressed as Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

  Ever since the Maxwells had moved into Headington Hill Hall, they had continued the tradition of throwing grand parties. But, as guests soon discovered, Maxwell had his own distinctive way of doing things. The writer and future Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth was a guest at one of their parties in the 1970s. At first nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. ‘It was only when I went up to Maxwell that I realized he had this apparatus on. There was an old-fashioned microphone attached to the lapel of his jacket with a wind-shield on it. And on his belt was this large box, the size of a hard-back book with a dial in the middle. This was somehow connected to speakers in each of the rooms.’

  Maxwell, Brandreth realized, was wearing his own personal PA system, enabling him to address people no matter how far away they were. ‘He’d turn the dial down when he was talking to you. Then, as soon as he saw someone he wanted to talk to on the other side of the room he’d turn it up again and this disembodied voice would come booming out of the speakers.’

  For all the splendour of his parties, Maxwell himself remained an oddly elusive figure. ‘It was as if there was a kind of invisible moat around Maxwell,’ Brandreth recalls. ‘He was definitely a presence, but whenever he came into a room, instead of the room being more crowded, it always seemed slightly emptier than before.’

  As Maxwell’s fortune grew, the larger and grander their parties became. Cabinet ministers would rub shoulders with captains of industry, leading scientists
with newspaper editors. But the joint party to celebrate Maxwell’s sixty-fifth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of his company, Pergamon Press, in June 1988, was confidently predicted to outdo them all, in terms of both opulence and pomp.

  No one, not even his many critics, could deny that Maxwell was on a colossal roll: from Oxford to Osaka, his empire was booming. As he had boasted just a few weeks earlier, ‘The banks owe us money; we have so much on deposit.’ At the same time, academic institutions were queuing up to bestow honours upon him: Maxwell had just been given a doctorate of law by Aberdeen University as well as honorary life membership of the University of London’s Institute of Philosophy.

  So many guests had been invited – around 3000 – that it had been decided to hold the party over three consecutive nights. Friday night would be white tie and ‘decorations’, and Saturday night black tie, while the Sunday night party would be a more informal affair for members of staff. In between, there was a lunch party on the Saturday where there would be a hot and cold buffet, Pimm’s and wine to drink, as well as a coconut shy, hoopla and skittles.

  In the days leading up to the first party, vast marquees were erected around the house. Two floor-to-ceiling windows were removed to improve access to the main marquee. Legions of florists came down from London to create elaborate displays in the house, the marquees and even the swimming pool – this involved them transporting the flowers out to the middle of the pool in little dinghies.

  A stage had been built at one end of the main marquee and a dance floor laid so that guests could dance to the sound of the Joe Loss Orchestra and, later on, a disco. At the end of the meal, the cast of the West End musical Me and My Girl would perform highlights from the show. To ensure that everyone enjoyed unimpeded views of the entertainment, the dining area had been constructed on two levels. A mobile darkroom had also been set up in the grounds. Guests who had their pictures taken during the evening by a team of six dinner-jacketed photographers would be able to collect them as they left.