Fall

by John Preston

  To mark the fortieth anniversary of Pergamon, a special book of tributes had been compiled. Pergamon had grown into the world’s largest scientific publishers, and the editors of Maxwell’s scientific journals – more than 300 in all – along with various Nobel laureates extolled his virtues in extravagant terms.

  The Editor of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy noted that ‘Everything Bob Maxwell touches turns to gold’, while the director of one of his Japanese companies wrote, ‘Each time I have the pleasure of meeting him, I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words that a millionaire is no ordinary man.’ Arthur Barrett, Editor of the journal Vacuum, recalled how his initial doubts about Maxwell had soon disappeared: ‘I have to confess that, quickly realizing his predatory and entrepreneurial ambitions, I none the less took a great liking to him.’

  There were also some unexpected contributions. The Editor of Planetary and Space Science recalled how as a favour Maxwell had once agreed to publish a book by his sister Margaret called Talking About Cakes. Apparently this had done so well that it had spawned a successor, Talking About Puddings.

  Among the congratulatory telegrams was one from the US President, Ronald Reagan: ‘As the Happy Birthdays ring out, Nancy and I are delighted to join in the chorus of appreciation.’ The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, offered a – somewhat solipsistic – contribution of her own: ‘Robert Maxwell has never made any secret of the fact that officially he is politically opposed to me. But to tell the truth, I think he rather liked my approach to politics and government – a sense of direction and decision. These are the very qualities that have taken him far.’ As far as the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, was concerned, ‘If Bob Maxwell didn’t exist, no one could invent him.’ Kinnock went on to pay tribute to Maxwell’s ‘basic convictions of liberty and fairness’.

  On the night of the first party, the guests passed down a receiving line where they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty and all seven of their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents. The broadcaster David Frost turned up with a £500 bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost, Maxwell’s chef later tipped it into a beef stew.

  As they sipped their drinks, the band of the Coldstream Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started, Robert and Betty Maxwell made their formal entrance into the marquee to an announcement from the Master of Ceremonies – ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and Elisabeth Maxwell’ – and a fanfare of herald trumpeters.

  Everyone stood up to applaud. Along with a row of medals pinned to his black tail coat, Maxwell was wearing a large white enamel cross on a chain around his neck. This was the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a decoration normally only given to foreign heads of state in recognition of ‘outstanding civilian or military conduct’. Betty Maxwell wore a dress made of gold-embroidered tulle over yellow taffeta silk.

  At one of their earlier parties – in 1986 – the speech had been given by a former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. Suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Wilson had begun his speech brightly enough, but then clearly forgot who he was supposed to be talking about. This time nothing had been left to chance. The main speech was given by Maxwell’s banker, Sir Michael Richardson, Managing Director of Rothschild’s bank and an economic adviser to Mrs Thatcher.

  ‘Betty and Bob, this must be the Party of the Decade!’ Richardson declared to shouts of ‘Hear Hear!’ and another round of applause. ‘All of us are delighted to be here because we believe you have made a major contribution to all our lives.’

  But, as she sat beaming away by Maxwell’s side, Betty found herself wondering if the party might not be too puffed up with self-importance. If something vital might not have been lost along the way. In particular, she had major doubts about the herald trumpeters. ‘I thought it was really over the top, but I managed to play my part . . . For all its success, for me, it had lost the intimate quality that our previous parties had had. It was just too vast.’

  While the Friday night party passed off without incident, at the Saturday lunch party an uninvited guest appeared: Eleanor Berry. Although Berry hadn’t been invited to the party – possibly Maxwell thought she might make a scene – she decided to turn up anyway. Unsure of the appropriate dress code, she plumped for ‘white, tight-fitting, leather trousers, a white V-necked sweater and RM’s [Robert Maxwell’s] favourite red snake-skin, stiletto-heeled boots’. To steady her nerves beforehand, she fortified herself with some amphetamines.

  Claiming to have mislaid her invitation card, Berry managed to persuade the security guards she was an old friend of the family’s. Inside the marquee Berry saw that a film was being shown about Maxwell’s many achievements, but there was no sign of Maxwell himself.

  Eventually she found him in the house.

  ‘RM was standing in an inner chamber. I didn’t know which room it was because its ceiling and walls were draped with white cloth like an Arab’s tent.

  ‘“Hello Bob. Happy birthday,” I said and kissed him. As always, he was pleased to see me.’

  Maxwell introduced her to the people he was with. ‘“This is Eleanor Berry and I’m one of her greatest admirers . . . she’s got spunk.”’

  But when Berry asked for another drink, he refused. ‘“No, I can’t give it to you as it will make you ill. You’ve already had several glasses of wine. Last time you got drunk here, you started talking to me about necrophilia.”’

  Shortly after they had sat down for lunch, Maxwell was called to the phone – ‘Apparently Gorbachev was wishing him a happy birthday.’ By this stage the amphetamines Berry had taken earlier were starting to wear off. ‘I threw my napkin under the table to give the impression I had dropped it, and took more Speed.’

  Although this pepped her up, it also left her itching for a fight. Berry took particular exception to a Polish woman who she thought had been trying to monopolize Maxwell’s attention: ‘She was slim, her long curly hair was dishevelled and she wore a see-through white garment descending into her cleavage. Her shirt was strategically raised and her sun-tanned legs were crossed.’

  The moment Maxwell left the marquee, Berry swung into action. ‘I caught her eye and said, “For Christ’s sake put your legs under the table and cover them with your skirt. This is a respectable residence, not a disorderly house.”’

  As she drifted around the marquee after lunch, Berry noticed something about the other guests – something that seemed to confirm Betty Maxwell’s suspicions that the larger their parties had grown, the less intimate they’d become. Approaching one of them, Berry asked her how she knew Maxwell.

  ‘I don’t,’ the woman told her. ‘I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing here then?’

  The woman admitted she had no idea. ‘My name was taken from the telephone directory, I suppose.’

  That evening, Peter Jay found himself sharing Betty Maxwell’s misgivings. ‘It was as if people came because they wanted to see Maxwell; it was a spectacle. And although they sucked up to him and enjoyed his hospitality, you could see them raising their eyebrows at the same time.’

  Maxwell’s Chief Leader Writer, Joe Haines, had been hoping for a relatively quiet evening. Instead, he found himself in charge of one of the tables. His wife, Irene, was even more unlucky: she sat between ‘the East German ambassador and his dour wife. You could have scoured the country to find anyone less appealing to Irene and not succeeded.’

  After dinner was over and the cast of Me and My Girl had finished performing, guests were asked to go back outside into the garden. There they were treated to a firework display, the culmination of which – just like Maxwell’s Christmas card – was a huge flaming sign spelling out the words ‘Happy Birthday Bob!’ across the Oxford skyline.

  But not all the guests stayed to watch. Keen to avail themselves of an unrivalled opportunity, some of them succumbed to curiosity and went snooping. Mike Molloy, by now the Editor-in-
Chief of the Mirror, was particularly struck by the décor of Headington Hill Hall: ‘All the furniture looked as if it had been bought from the sale of a second-rate country house in the 1920s. There was something oddly shabby about it. And the paintings were terrible, absolutely terrible. I’ve never seen a worse collection.’

  Having inspected the art, Molloy peered into Maxwell’s drawing room. ‘There were all these bookshelves with books on them. Except when I looked more closely, I saw that they weren’t real books: they were made out of cardboard. I couldn’t get over it. Here was this man who had made his fortune out of publishing and yet there weren’t even real books on his shelves.’ In fact, not all the books were false; only those concealing Maxwell’s stereo system.

  Julia Langdon was equally surprised by what she saw of Headington Hill Hall. ‘I went looking for a loo at one point, and on my way back I did something I don’t normally do in other people’s houses – I had a nose around. I opened one cupboard and found it was completely full of Heinz Salad Cream. There were bottles and bottles of it, stacked from floor to ceiling.’

  Among the other guests that night were Neil Kinnock and his wife, Glenys. ‘I did go on that occasion, but frankly most of the time I found good reason not to go,’ Kinnock recalls. As always, whenever he had any dealings with Maxwell, he found himself in a tricky position. ‘I was in this constant dilemma of not wanting to defer to him, and not wanting to lose his support either. How do you deal with this extremely capricious man with an overwhelming sense of his own power? It was very difficult.’

  After the fireworks were over, the Kinnocks took to the dance floor. When Neil Kinnock decided he’d done enough dancing, another guest stepped up to partner his wife: Peter Mandelson. Although it would be another few years before Mandelson was dubbed ‘The Prince of Darkness’, mention of his name already prompted mingled awe and dread in Labour circles.

  ‘Glenys, Neil, Julie Hall his press secretary and I danced for about an hour and a half,’ Mandelson remembers. ‘We got all hot and sweaty and it was great fun. But I never spoke to Maxwell. It was very strange because you’d simultaneously want to be at his parties and at the same time shrink away from him. Because he was such a bully and so unpredictable. To be honest, I was frightened of his company. He had that ability to make you feel completely small and inadequate, and that just scrambled my head.’

  While the dancing was going on, Maxwell asked another of the guests, Gerald Ronson, if he would like to come into the house for a quiet drink. ‘He waved his fat finger at me and said, “Let’s go into the library because I don’t want to talk to these people.”’

  They were, Maxwell told him, ‘a bunch of arseholes’ who would go anywhere if they were invited by someone important. It wasn’t just that, though: Maxwell had something he wanted to show him.

  ‘Bob said, “You always thought I was joking when I told you that I had won the Military Cross.”’

  He then opened a large photo album and proudly pointed to one of the photographs. Taken more than forty years earlier, it showed Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery pinning the medal on to the uniform of a much younger, slimmer Maxwell.

  Ronson laughed and held up his hands.

  ‘I said, “I take it all back, Bob. I’m sorry if I didn’t believe you, but you do tell so many stories . . . ”’

  21.

  Listening In

  At a dinner for senior police officers in early 1988, John Pole, a Detective Chief Superintendent at the Metropolitan Police, was approached by a colleague who wondered if he might be interested in a new job. With retirement fast approaching, this was exactly what Pole was looking for.

  He asked what sort of job it was.

  Head of Security at Maxwell Communications, he was told. The man wrote down a phone number and suggested he make an appointment. A few days later, Pole went to see MCC’s Managing Director and was promptly hired: as far as he could tell, there didn’t appear to be any other applicants. At first, the work was straightforward enough. ‘My job was to go into various buildings that Maxwell owned and decide whether the security there was adequate.’

  But it wasn’t long before everything changed. ‘Maxwell had another police officer working for him called Les Williams. Les came to me and said, “Mr Maxwell wants to know if people are loyal to him. Is there a way of finding out what they are saying on the telephone without breaking the law?”’

  If Pole thought this was unusual, he had no intention of jeopardizing his new job by saying so. He did, however, seek advice and was assured that bugging phones was perfectly legal at the time. ‘The actual bugging was fairly simple. Although you had to do each phone individually, it was really just a matter of changing the wiring around – taking a plug from one socket and putting it in another one.’

  As well as bugging the heads of department at the Mirror, Maxwell asked Pole to bug his own office. Pole installed two concealed microphones, both of them activated by a switch concealed beneath Maxwell’s desk. ‘There was a microphone at each end of his office because we quickly realized that when someone was moving about, they would go out of range. So we put in a system where it was possible to follow someone around the room. Whenever they went out of range of one microphone, the other one would automatically pick them up.’

  Maxwell also asked Pole to put bugs in all the meeting rooms. These soon had a dramatic effect on his negotiating techniques. ‘When Maxwell held a meeting, after a while he’d say to the people there, “We’ll take a little break now. Why don’t you retire to this particular room and we’ll meet up again in half an hour?”’

  Everybody would go into one of the meeting rooms and discuss how things were going. Meanwhile Maxwell would sit in his office listening to what they were talking about. Although he’d long had a reputation as a formidable deal-maker, now it was as if Maxwell had developed psychic powers. Uncannily, he always seemed to be one step ahead of the game.

  And there was something else Maxwell wanted Pole to do. ‘He said to me one day, “I want you to install a system which is obedient to my voice, and my voice only.”’ Like Ali Baba, Maxwell wanted to be able to say, ‘Open!’, and a door would open. Everything – and everyone – would jump to his command. ‘I said, “Mr Maxwell, I don’t think that technology is available.”’

  The bugged conversations were all recorded on ninety-minute cassettes – the tape recorder was hidden in a cupboard behind his desk. Maxwell would usually listen to them at night when he was alone in his penthouse apartment. Sometimes, though, he would do so in the middle of the day. ‘He listened to them obsessively whenever the mood took him. They were supposed to be recordings of confidential conversations, but he used to play them at full volume.

  ‘A couple of times I walked into his private office and he would be sitting there listening to the tapes. I would say to him, “Mr Maxwell, people can hear the conversation all over the building.” He’d just lost it completely.’

  It seemed to Pole that Maxwell had become increasingly suspicious in the time he had been working for him. ‘He really didn’t trust anybody any more. He would say things like, “They’re not telling me the truth”, or “They’re not onside.” But there was never any indication of who “they” were. Gradually, bit by bit, I got the impression he was more and more paranoid.’

  Although Maxwell didn’t mention it to Pole at the time, there was one conversation in particular that he wanted to eavesdrop on. A conversation that would make him suffer what Eleanor Berry called ‘the torments of the damned’ when he eventually heard it. But that wouldn’t be until more than a year later, and by then everything he had tried so hard to control would be slipping helplessly from his grasp.

  22.

  A Glorious New Dawn

  A dark blue sky appears on screen. Stars fly by. A triumphal blast of trumpets sounds. This is followed by a bewildering jumble of images: Robert Maxwell getting into his helicopter; Robert Maxwell shaking hands with assorted world leaders; Robert Maxwell striding off
to yet another important meeting . . .

  An enormous letter ‘M’ swims closer, with the Earth wedged between its legs. Then comes Maxwell again, staring into the camera, his pitch-black hair slicked back, his eyebrows on full alert: ‘I’m very proud to say that today our group is internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading ten global publishers and professional information providers.’

  Just in case anyone should doubt this, a disembodied voice announces: ‘The past year has seen a remarkable transition in the affairs and standing of Maxwell Communications. Information is the gold-dust of the twentieth century. Prosperity in the next century will be governed by information flow. Those who provide that flow will be at the centre of the world stage. And who will the leading players be? Maxwell Communications will be one of them.’

  The trumpets fade away, replaced by a chorus of heavenly voices. A man called Kevin Gruneich, ‘Publishing Analyst, First Boston’, appears on screen along with a caption hanging over his head reading ‘Independent Opinion’ in large letters. According to Gruneich, ‘The consolidation of Maxwell’s businesses in the United States and in the UK has been completed with unprecedented success.’ And, what’s more, the vast majority of these businesses are ‘largely recession-proof’.

  Music swells to underline the point; the heavenly voices soar. Kevin Gruneich gives way to another ‘Independent Opinion’, this one belonging to a Publishing Analyst called Kendrick Noble. ‘I expect Maxwell Communications to be an excellent investment,’ says Noble. Then, giving a little smirk, he adds, ‘So much so that I intend to buy some shares for myself.’

  A long list of Maxwell’s ventures follows: academic journals, newspapers, new and exciting technological ventures such as CD-ROM, along with more traditional forms of publishing: ‘The adult books have an interesting backlist which includes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.’ But the emphasis is firmly on the future – on businesses like the Berlitz language school. ‘We’ve seen a lot of occurrences over the past year such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of freedom in Eastern Europe that are going to cause a need for Berlitz’s services.’