by John Preston
The conference was a great success for Maxwell too – though not necessarily for the same reasons. As the Lady Ghislaine was being chartered out in the Caribbean, he hired another, equally large, yacht to take him to Rhodes. All the senior editorial staff on the Mirror were instructed to accompany him. So too was Andrea. Throughout their stay, Maxwell insisted she remained by his side. According to Mike Molloy, ‘It was obvious that he wouldn’t let her out of his sight.’
Every evening, after the conference had finished for the day, the journalists adjourned to a local restaurant, where they drank lavish quantities of wine, smashed plates and generally engaged in traditional forms of Greek revelry. ‘I remember Andrea asking me what we got up to in the evenings. Normally, she was very cool and collected, but on this occasion she was practically whispering. I explained about the restaurant we all went to, and she said she would like to come along. But she never did. She had to dine on the yacht with Maxwell – he wouldn’t allow her to go anywhere else.’
One of the Mirror journalists found a shop on the island selling cut-price leather jackets – whereupon everyone went along looking for a bargain. Once again Andrea wanted to go, but again Maxwell forbade it. Instead, he called up the shop owner and told him to bring a large selection of his stock out to the yacht. ‘The entire deck of the yacht was covered in leather jackets so she could make her choice.’
As well as being more than forty years younger than Maxwell, Andrea was a fraction of his size. On their last day in Rhodes, he called a breakfast press conference. Molloy could see that Maxwell was in a particularly foul mood: ‘He sat at the head of the table seeking victims to bully while he crammed astonishingly large amounts of food into himself.’
This was to have unexpected consequences. ‘The table at which we ate was equipped with wrought-iron chairs and, as he raved, his vast weight began to buckle his chair legs. Gradually, he sank lower and lower, until his chin was almost level with the table. He tried to get up, but it proved impossible to manage, so he ordered us all on deck. We never did find out how he extricated himself.’
Despite his ballooning size, Maxwell’s obsession with Andrea made him even fussier than usual about his appearance. For some years now, the chief barber at the Savoy Hotel, George Wheeler, had been coming to Maxwell House every week to dye Maxwell’s hair and eyebrows with L’Oréal CreScendo – ‘imparts thickness, body, shine and long-lasting colour to even resistant grey’.
Maxwell’s corporate lawyer, Deborah Maxwell – no relation – became used to walking into Maxwell’s apartment and finding him sitting in the kitchen with a towel round his shoulders and a freshly blackened head. ‘I would have to walk by and pretend that nothing unusual was going on.’ Maxwell’s increasing pickiness took even George Wheeler aback. ‘Even if he saw a grey eyebrow, he would go berserk.’
Any qualms Andrea may have had about being on the receiving end of Maxwell’s attentions seemed to have disappeared – for the time being at least. When the two of them travelled together on his new Gulfstream G4 private jet, she would sit opposite him with her feet tucked beneath his thighs. On transatlantic flights, they would even lie down together on the plane’s divan bed. As far as Simon Grigg was concerned, ‘it was clear that he was in love with her, and she was in love with him. Although Andrea had this cool exterior, there was an insecurity to her; she was a very private girl. I think perhaps Maxwell saw this and related to it.’
There were those who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – believe that their relationship was ever consummated. Others, however, were less sure. Deborah Maxwell was with them both on a trip to Lisbon when she walked into what turned out to be Maxwell’s hotel suite. ‘I thought I was going into the lounge part of his suite, but by mistake I went into the bedroom. There were two double beds in there and I could see they had both been used. Andrea was in the room in her dressing gown. I remember thinking, “Oh my God”, and quickly withdrawing. However young she may have been, I think she was a woman for whom the power was clearly intoxicating.’
On one of her periodic visits to Maxwell House, Eleanor Berry also suspected that something was going on – this despite swallowing ‘two or three happy pills’ beforehand. While she waited for Maxwell, Berry went to have a cigarette in his private lavatory. When she came out, she found Andrea waiting.
‘You had a cigarette in Mr Maxwell’s lavatory,’ Andrea said accusingly.
Berry too was not impressed – either by Andrea’s attitude or by her appearance. ‘I couldn’t understand what Bob saw in her. She was wearing awfully naff green eye shadow and a ridiculously short mini-skirt which left nothing to the imagination. In fact, it was so bloody short that it was just about possible to see her cervix.’
Berry was in no mood to be conciliatory. ‘You are a shorthand typist,’ she told her, ‘and I am a distinguished woman of letters. When I die, my profile will be engraved on the coins. When your time comes up, no one will know or care that you’d ever existed.’
There was a long pause.
‘Do you have psychiatric problems, Miss Berry?’ Andrea asked.
There was another pause.
‘Oh piss off, you silly little nit,’ said Berry.
Seeing how besotted Maxwell had become with Andrea, Peter Jay felt that he should do whatever he could to steer her away from danger. ‘It was all rather like King Lear, in terms of an old man becoming extremely foolish and making himself look ridiculous. It was obviously a very sensitive situation, but I considered that I had some responsibility for this junior member of staff. I did try to talk to her, to give her an opportunity to say, “Please help,” but she never took me up on it. Through thick and thin, she stoutly maintained that nothing was going on.’
24.
Obsessed
As he watched Andrea’s growing closeness to Maxwell, Nick Davies found his own feelings becoming more and more torn. Like many others, Richard Stott felt that Davies’s nickname of ‘Sneaky’ had been aptly chosen: ‘He had this habit of talking behind his hand’ – something Stott put down to the fact Davies was also running his underwater television business from his office phone.
Every so often Stott liked to have black-tie dinners for the senior staff. At one of them, Davies astonished everyone by launching into a lengthy speech in which he denounced Maxwell as a hopelessly incompetent proprietor. A watching Joe Haines couldn’t understand what was happening. ‘He went on and on. People were getting embarrassed. When he eventually finished, I said, “That’s the longest suicide speech I have ever heard.”’
What Haines didn’t know was that Nick Davies had also fallen for Andrea Martin. Nor at this stage did Maxwell have any idea about Davies’s feelings for Andrea – or her growing feelings for him. But all that was about to change. In early 1990, Maxwell and Davies flew to Bulgaria, where they had a number of meetings with the new Prime Minister, Andrei Lukanov. Maxwell got off to a flying start by announcing at their first meeting that he was prepared to take on responsibility for Bulgaria’s entire foreign debt – then running at around 11 billion dollars.
‘You have my word that you can trust me,’ he told Lukanov. ‘Remember, I have been a friend to your country for many years now and we can trust each other.’
Typically, this was only half the story. The former President Todor Zhivkov was one of the Soviet bloc leaders whom Maxwell had buttered up by featuring in a series of biographies he published in the 1970s and 1980s entitled Leaders of the World. In his 1977 book on the Soviet Premier, Leonid Brezhnev, he had piled on the flattery with possibly the world’s largest shovel, referring to him as ‘This outstanding personality in the international communist and working class movement whose versatile, tireless and productive work is an inspiring example of utter devotion to the socialist homeland.’
In his meeting with Zhivkov, Maxwell sought to go one better, offering operatically protracted condolences on the recent death of the President’s daughter: ‘Hundreds of state and government leaders, leaders of Communist
and workers’ parties, politicians and cultural figures the world over expressed their condolences to the Bulgarian people, to the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and personally to you for this great loss . . . I would like to ask you in connection with this how does the project of Mrs Zhivkova on aesthetic education, defined as realization of the vital necessity to live according to the supreme laws of truth and beauty, fit into, if I may express myself so, the more orthodox targets of the Communist education?’
But even the supreme laws of truth and beauty weren’t enough to save Zhivkov’s skin. After he was toppled in November 1989, Maxwell quickly set about ingratiating himself with his successor. He told Lukanov that he liked Bulgaria so much he was thinking of settling there. ‘I would like to buy a country estate and have it as my summer residence,’ he said. ‘Somewhere I could station my helicopter and work from.’
‘Why don’t you view one of the former President’s palaces?’ Lukanov suggested. ‘They are all available for rent to people such as yourself.’
Maxwell agreed this was a splendid idea. Zhivkov, it turned out, had had a grand total of thirty-two separate lodges and palaces, dotted all over the country. Maxwell expressed an interest in six of them. He was particularly taken with Zhivkov’s former summer palace on the shores of the Black Sea. After he and Nick Davies had inspected it, and Maxwell had bounced up and down on Zhivkov’s old double bed, they sat out on the balcony gazing at the view.
‘Are you going to take it?’ Davies asked.
Maxwell did not reply – not directly. Instead he said, ‘Do you think Andrea would like it here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Davies replied cautiously. ‘It’s a little remote for her, I would imagine.’
‘It would be very peaceful for her,’ Maxwell insisted. ‘I could see her working out here on the balcony in the sunshine.’
Nothing more was said, but back in London Davies noticed that Maxwell’s attitude towards him had gone through a dramatic change. The easy conviviality of before had disappeared; now there were surliness and suspicion. Clearly something had happened, but what? Davies thought he knew the answer. Like others at the Mirror, he had heard rumours that the phones were bugged. He told Andrea to check her office phone for anything unusual, and, sure enough, ‘She found what looked like a microphone attached to a tiny camera, hidden in the high ceiling above her desk.’
There was worse to come. One of the Mirror’s security officers tipped Davies off that he was now a ‘marked man’. Apparently Maxwell had ordered that he should be followed around the clock by a team of private detectives. Another team had been instructed to follow Andrea. ‘Every detail of our movements and any possible meetings had to be reported back to Maxwell within twenty-four hours.’ Maxwell had also asked the same man to see if he could buy the flat next door to Andrea Martin’s in Docklands. ‘If that was possible, the security staff were ordered to purchase it immediately, drill holes in the wall and install cameras to spy on her.’
Ever since Maxwell had asked John Pole to bug the office phones, he would sit in his apartment when he was unable to sleep, listening to the tapes. Pole too had seen how obsessed he had become with Andrea. ‘Occasionally, I would ask myself, how are you going to get out of this one, Andrea? I remember one day she went out to lunch with Nick Davies and Maxwell kept asking me, “Where did she go? Who was she with?”’
Shortly afterwards, Andrea went away for a fortnight’s holiday. When she returned, Maxwell was beside himself. All he could do was go round saying, ‘Andrea’s back! Andrea’s back!’
Pole soon had the evidence to prove that she and Nick Davies were very much in touch with one another. Like many others, he had assumed that Maxwell’s relationship with Andrea was simply a fling. It was only now that he realized his mistake. ‘It wasn’t a game; it was extremely serious.’
In one taped conversation, Andrea and Nick Davies could be heard discussing her underwear. As he watched Maxwell listening to the tape, Pole could see how badly affected he was. ‘I got the impression he was a broken man.’ Soon afterwards, Pole went to see him and was told he was up on the roof of Maxwell House. ‘I stepped out of the lift and Maxwell was sitting in a chair on his own. Here was one of the richest men in the world, and yet he seemed completely isolated, completely alone. I thought as one human being to another that I would say to him, “Do you want me to sit with you?” I didn’t though; I told myself it was nothing to do with me. Besides, I suspect he would have thrown me off the roof if I had. Instead I just went back in the lift and came down again, but the memory has stayed with me ever since.’
In January 1990, Maxwell and Andrea travelled to Moscow on a business trip. As Nick Davies recalled, twenty-fours later, he received a phone call. ‘He knows,’ a panic-stricken Andrea told him. ‘He knows everything about us.’
From the moment they had left Heathrow, Maxwell had repeatedly bombarded her with the same question. ‘Have you anything to tell me?’ To begin with, Andrea didn’t know what he was talking about. Then Maxwell blurted out that he knew she was having an affair with Davies.
As Davies later described, ‘He began a long, obviously well-rehearsed speech, which basically amounted to a tirade against me; informing her that he was only bringing up the matter for her own good because I was no good for her: a twice-married man with teenage children who was old enough to be her father.’
While there may have been something in this, what Maxwell omitted to mention was that while Davies was old enough to be Andrea’s father, he was old enough to be her grandfather. Apparently Maxwell had then quietened down, but not for long. Forty-eight hours later, Davies received another call – from Jerusalem this time. ‘She was in tears, obviously distraught and sounded frightened.’ Maxwell, Andrea said, had walked unannounced into her bedroom that morning and forced himself on her, ‘trying to kiss her as she fought him off, shouting at him to stop, hitting out at him as she struggled to escape his bear-like arms’.
In the end, she had persuaded him to leave, locked the door and phoned Davies. Subsequently Maxwell had apologized and reiterated that he was merely concerned for her welfare. That she was in danger of throwing her life away on a wastrel. The rest of the trip passed without incident, but back in London Maxwell soon started up again. Unable to bring himself to say Davies’s name, he referred to him simply as ‘that dreadful man’. One evening he asked Andrea to marry him.
‘Andrea was dumbstruck, just shaking her head and saying, “No.”’
As both Davies and Andrea were worried about losing their jobs if this carried on, they decided to separate for a while – ‘to take the heat out of the situation’. But for Maxwell the damage had already been done. Like John Pole, Simon Grigg could see how crestfallen, how broken-hearted, he was.
‘The wind had been completely knocked out of his sails.’
25.
Three Departures
At the end of 1989, Maxwell walked into Peter Jay’s office and suddenly announced that he wanted him to leave – he had decided that he no longer needed a Chief-of-Staff.
Having spent the last three years being belittled, ridiculed and telephoned in the middle of the night, Jay was not unduly downhearted. Apart from anything else, he’d just been sounded out by the BBC, who wondered if he would be interested in becoming their Economics Editor – an offer he later accepted. He had also realized long ago that it was impossible to bring order to anyone’s life when they were hell-bent on creating as much chaos as possible.
The two of them agreed that Jay would carry on working at the Mirror for the next three months. In those three months, Maxwell’s behaviour changed markedly. ‘He became much nicer to me,’ Jay recalls. ‘Almost fatherly. I don’t think he exactly wanted me as his friend because he didn’t have any capacity for friendship. To be friends with someone you need to have a mutual regard which he wasn’t capable of. But I do think he wanted someone to be close to.’
And there was something else that Jay noticed.
‘Once or twice I had the sense Maxwell was deliberately excluding me from things. Things I would have expected to have been involved with. Subsequently, I found myself wondering if there was a kind of affection at work in Maxwell’s mind. Somehow he seemed to be shielding me from those parts of his activities which might have been damaging to my reputation. As if in some strange way he was trying to protect me from what was to come.’
After four years working as Maxwell’s valet, Simon Grigg was exhausted. ‘I had been very happy there, but I felt I had gone as far as I could go. I’d basically lived and breathed the guy; it had been my entire life. I had even got to the stage where I could second-guess him. If Maxwell wanted a cup of coffee, he didn’t have to say anything. I could practically feel it.’
Grigg decided to hand in his notice. However, this proved easier said than done. It wasn’t until he was staying with Maxwell in the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York in November 1990 that the opportunity finally arose. ‘Maxwell came back one night at around midnight and I had my resignation letter ready. I remember I was feeling quite nervous.
‘I walked into his bedroom and he was lying on the bed leafing through a newspaper.’ Having handed Maxwell his letter, Grigg stood at the foot of the bed, waiting. ‘When he’d read it, he put it down and said, “What’s the problem, Simon?” I could see how upset he was; there was a tear in his eye. But then I was welling up myself.’
Grigg explained there wasn’t a problem – he just felt like a change. ‘Maxwell seemed quite taken aback by that, but it was true. In all the time I’d spent there, I’d never had a problem with him.’ After four years, Grigg reckoned that nothing Maxwell did could surprise him any more. But here he turned out to be mistaken. Early the next morning, he was lying in bed when he heard a knock on his door.