Fall

by John Preston

  By then there had been relief, of sorts, for Maxwell pensioners. In the end most of them received around half of what they were owed – thanks to a combination of a government bailout, and money paid back by sheepish investment bankers who had formerly advised Maxwell and were looking to salvage their reputations.

  As well as being an ogre of our time, Maxwell had turned into something even more humiliating: a figure of fun. Along with a Robert Maxwell joke book entitled A Drop in the Ocean – ‘published on 100% recycled libel writs’ – there had been a Robert Maxwell board game: ‘The Game for the Nineties – be the First Player to the Pension Fund!’

  In 1996, almost a decade after his single share in Today newspaper had netted him £250,000, Jeffrey Archer published a novel, The Fourth Estate, based on the rivalry between Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. Maxwell appears as ‘Lubji Hoch’, who changes his name to ‘Richard Armstrong’, becomes a British media mogul, loots $50,000,000 from his pension funds and eventually commits suicide by jumping off his luxury yacht.

  This was mild stuff compared to a novel called Max by the Israeli writer and former Mossad member Juval Aviv. Here Maxwell is lightly disguised as ‘Max Robertson’, a billionaire media tycoon, who manages to steal the entire gold reserves of the Soviet Union and squirrel them away in a nuclear bunker inside Mount Haifa.

  But in terms of unfettered imagination, nothing could match Never Alone with Rex Malone. Written by Eleanor Beckman and published in 1986, five years before Maxwell’s death, the novel is set in a post-apocalyptic Britain where almost every building has been destroyed apart from the mausoleum of the former Prime Minister – and ‘demi-god’ – Rex Malone. An East European immigrant who rose from nothing to become a newspaper proprietor, ‘RM’ appears in a flashback, in which he has a tempestuous affair with a masochistic funeral director called Natalie. Later, it turned out that Eleanor Beckman was a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Eleanor Berry.

  There was one fictional reincarnation that would almost certainly have delighted Maxwell. Having whiled away so many hours watching old James Bond movies, he became the model for the villain in the eighteenth Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. Released in 1997, the film starred Pierce Brosnan as Bond and Jonathan Pryce as ‘Elliot Carver’, the megalomaniac founder of the Carver Media Group.

  Initially it was assumed that Rupert Murdoch had been the inspiration for Elliot Carver before the scriptwriter, Bruce Feirstein, admitted it was actually Maxwell. At the film’s climax, shortly before being disembowelled by a razor-tipped torpedo, Carver gives one last manic burst of laughter and cries, ‘Great men have always manipulated the media to save the world!’

  40.

  The March of Time

  After Betty Maxwell left Headington Hill Hall at the end of 1992, Oxford City Council, owners of the building, leased it to Oxford Brookes University, where it now houses the university’s law faculty. The swimming pool in which florists once created elaborate displays to delight the Maxwells’ guests has been filled in. The rolls of barbed wire that topped the perimeter fence have been removed, along with the video cameras that were mounted in the trees.

  Inside the house, the chandeliers, gilt furniture and bottles of salad cream are long gone; in their place are pin boards, conference tables and piles of plastic chairs. Maxwell’s old study is now a seminar room, his drawing room a lecture theatre.

  Yet not everything has changed. Halfway up the main staircase is a stained-glass window which Maxwell commissioned to replace one that had been damaged in the War. It depicts Samson at the Gates of Gaza. Although this is a fairly obscure scene in the Old Testament, it’s not hard to see why it appealed to him. In Samson’s time, Gaza was a walled city with only one entrance, consisting of two enormous wooden gates. One night, Samson decided to leave the city, but rather than waiting around for the gatekeeper to let him out, he simply tore the gates off their hinges and carried them on his back – ‘bar and all’ – to Hebron, almost forty miles away.

  Nowadays the name of Robert Maxwell evokes little or no reaction among the students walking through the grounds. But here too traces remain, however faint. At first, the young woman working in the Tyrolean-themed snack bar outside Pergamon Press’s former headquarters looks blank when asked if she has ever heard of him. Then her expression changes. ‘Actually, that does ring a bell . . .’ she says. ‘Didn’t they used to have big parties here, a long time ago?’

  Although almost thirty years have passed since Robert Maxwell’s death, speculation about how he died shows no sign of waning. A number of journalists have insisted, often without a tremor of doubt, that he was murdered. When it comes to contenders, the Israelis are the clear front-runners. Maddened by Maxwell’s attempt to blackmail the Israeli government over top-secret computer software he had allegedly been marketing on their behalf, Mossad sent a crack team of assassins to shadow the Lady Ghislaine. At dead of night they boarded the yacht, where they injected Maxwell with a lethal poison before tipping him into the water.

  Or so the theory goes. Anyone pointing out that it seems odd that the Israelis should have bumped Maxwell off, then given him what amounted to a state funeral within the space of five days, invariably meets with the exasperated response: ‘But that’s exactly the sort of thing they would do!’

  It is in the nature of conspiracy theories that they are hard to disprove. They are, of course, much harder to prove. Advocates of the Mossad-backed murder plot, or any murder plot, tend to fall at the same hurdle. Why would anybody go to the trouble of sending a boat out into the middle of the ocean to kill Maxwell when it would have been far easier – and cheaper – to do so on dry land? After all, it’s not as if he was difficult to track down; if anything he was so addicted to self-publicity that he practically walked around with a target pinned to his forehead.

  In the absence of any convincing evidence that Maxwell was murdered, that leaves two possibilities: either his death was an accident, or else he committed suicide. The people interviewed for this book tend to divide down the middle. Among those convinced that Maxwell killed himself is his old rival Rupert Murdoch. ‘I remember I got a call one morning when I was in Los Angeles saying that he had disappeared off his boat. I said straightaway, “Ah, he jumped.” He knew the banks were closing in, he knew what he’d done and he jumped. I can’t give any other explanation.’

  Supporters of the suicide theory also believe – along with Rupert Murdoch – that Maxwell must have known the game was up. If he went back to London, he was facing imminent ruin, public disgrace and the strong likelihood of prison. However thick-skinned he may have seemed to be, Maxwell cared deeply about his reputation. The prospect of losing everything he had spent his life creating may well have been too much to bear.

  Although he had fought his way back from ignominy once, that had been twenty years earlier, and Maxwell was no longer the man he’d been then, either physically or mentally. Betty Maxwell always insisted that her husband would never have committed suicide, although privately she admitted to having her doubts: ‘With hindsight you go from one end of the spectrum of speculation to the other.’

  Her children also believed that their father’s death was an accident, with the exception of Ghislaine Maxwell, who has always believed that he was murdered. The other Maxwells maintain that it just wasn’t in his nature to kill himself. He had bounced back from adversity before and was convinced he could do so again – however colossal the odds.

  Contrary to some reports, it was surprisingly easy to fall off the Lady Ghislaine. At the point where he is thought to have gone overboard, there was only a thin metal cable at below hip height. As well as being an extremely large man, Maxwell was increasingly top-heavy. Seeing him in his swimming trunks once, Gerald Ronson thought he looked like ‘a hippopotamus on two legs.’

  Suffering from chronic insomnia, Maxwell often liked to urinate over the back of the boat at night. Although the yacht had stabilizers, they wouldn’t have prevented it from rocking from si
de to side. Yet none of this explains why, for the first and only time, Maxwell chose to go on the Lady Ghislaine on his own, apart from the crew. Nor does it explain why Maxwell locked both his cabin door – from the inside – as well as the main door that led out on to the deck. This door could be locked from either the inside or the outside. It seemed he had gone out on deck sometime after 4.45 a.m, then locked the door behind him and removed the key – it was never found.

  For Captain Rankin, the locked door on to the rear deck was the clincher: ‘There was a presence of mind. Closing the door, locking it, taking the key out and having that presence of mind at that point to do that. There’d be no reason to lock the door from the outside if he were planning to go back in. And why take the key? Was this done to maybe keep us crew members to think [sic] that he was still inside. I think so.’

  While there may not have been any proof one way or the other, there were plenty of crumbs for amateur sleuths to sift through. After helping conduct the second autopsy, the pathologist Iain West concluded that although Maxwell was suffering from heart and lung disease, they were unlikely to have proved fatal. Attempts to ascertain whether he had drowned were similarly inconclusive. While there was a certain amount of liquid in Maxwell’s lungs, this wasn’t necessarily seawater – it might have been produced by his own body.

  A sample of Maxwell’s bone marrow was brought back to London to test for diatoms. The presence of diatoms – tiny organisms that live in seawater – is generally considered proof of drowning. Three litres of seawater were also taken from the spot where Maxwell’s body was found and analysed. But this too was inconclusive: there were no diatoms in either the bone marrow or the seawater.

  Could anything be deduced from the fact that Maxwell had been discovered floating face-up, when most people who drown are found face-down? Dr West thought not. ‘He was such a large, obese man that he had enormous natural buoyancy. I would not regard him as being a typical example of how a body is going to behave after death from drowning.’

  Much of the uncertainty over the cause of Maxwell’s death is due to the botched first autopsy, which made it all but impossible for the second to come to any clear conclusion. However, that didn’t stop West from going in for some energetic theorizing. ‘Did he have to be alive when he went into the water? The answer is no.’ Yet that didn’t mean Maxwell was dead by the time he hit the water: he could have survived for some time afterwards. ‘Could he have been killed and then thrown into the water? The answer is yes, but I think it very unlikely.’

  What about suicide? ‘When an individual is in serious trouble you obviously have a situation where suicide could happen,’ West observed. ‘He [Maxwell] was not the sort of man who would be likely to carry out such an act with a lot of premeditation. If he killed himself, it would be an impulsive act.’

  Most people who drown themselves, don’t do so naked – either they go into the water fully clothed, or else they leave a neat pile of clothes behind. But, as West pointed out, this situation was different: Maxwell often slept naked, so he was hardly going to have got dressed just in order to drown himself.

  Then there were Maxwell’s torn shoulder muscles. Surely they indicate that he accidentally fell and then grabbed at something to try to save himself? Not necessarily – West had often dealt with cases where someone toyed with the idea of killing themselves before actually doing so. ‘In other scenarios I have seen, the victim has climbed out of a window and taken a few steps along a ledge, or has hung on to a windowsill for a time. They either have no real intention of killing themselves or they are carrying out the act in stages – building up to it . . .

  ‘A younger fitter individual [than Maxwell] might stand at the top of the rail and just launch himself. But at his age he might have stepped up and over the handrail to stand on the top of the curved teak rail which is smooth and varnished. He might have slipped while trying to lower his grip to the rail below the handrail. He might even have changed his mind having got over the rail, and slipped while trying to get back.’

  So which way was West inclined to go? ‘There is no evidence for homicide, but it remains a possibility because I am in no position to exclude it. I don’t think he died of a heart attack. Without the background of a man who was in financial trouble, I would probably say accident. As it is, there are only a few percentage points between the two options, but I favour suicide.’

  West, however, wasn’t quite as impartial as he liked to appear: in fact he had been employed by Maxwell’s insurers. Conveniently, his suspicion that Maxwell had committed suicide was enough to convince them they didn’t need to pay out £20,000,000 on his life insurance policy.

  Believers in the theory of Occam’s Razor tended to reach a different conclusion. Attributed to the fourteenth-century Surrey friar William of Ockham, Occam’s Razor holds that the simplest explanation for anything is invariably the most plausible. In Maxwell’s case, the simplest explanation is that a vastly overweight man lost his balance, possibly as a result of a sudden swell, and fell overboard.

  And yet . . . Looking at the escalating mayhem of the last two years of Maxwell’s life; at the way in which everything was falling apart; at his increasingly self-destructive lifestyle, and his general state of mind, there is a sense that Maxwell was killing himself whether or not he was aware of it. That he was hurtling downhill at such speed that it was only ever going to end one way.

  Easy to say in retrospect, of course. But if Maxwell’s death was an accident, it was an astonishingly fortuitous one, given what awaited him back in London. Had the gods, who Betty Maxwell believed controlled Maxwell’s fate, really snatched him away just as he was about to get his comeuppance? Or could it be that the line between suicide and accident is even more indistinct than Iain West allowed?

  Perhaps Maxwell, the inveterate risk-taker, was somehow dicing with death. Half willing something to happen, while loath to take the final step himself. Perhaps he was being deliberately careless with his safety because he didn’t care any more. Perhaps he lent too far out and by the time he tried to save himself it was too late. Perhaps he stepped over the rail intending to throw himself off, then changed his mind and slipped while trying to get back.

  Perhaps . . .

  41.

  Curtain Call

  Betty Maxwell died on 7 August 2013, aged ninety-two. She’s buried in the Meynard family plot in a small village near Avignon. Since Maxwell’s death, she had lived first at her house in France, then – when she couldn’t afford to keep it any longer – in a small rented flat in Pimlico. Much of the last twenty-five years of her life was spent pursuing her interest in Holocaust Studies, a subject in which she became a respected scholar.

  Three years after Maxwell died, Betty wrote her memoir, pointedly titled A Mind of My Own, in which she described her marriage – and her late husband – with remarkable candour: ‘He seemed cast right from the beginning in the role of the Greek tragic hero, who is inevitably defeated in the end, since in Greek mythology, man cannot avoid the gods’ anger or vengeance if he rebels against them in an attempt to alter his destiny.’ In the final reckoning, Betty believed, Maxwell’s ‘worship of power had resurrected the demon of power’. Among the acknowledgements at the start of A Mind of My Own was one that stood out: ‘It also gives me great pleasure to thank Rupert Murdoch, who “turned the tide” for me by reading the proposal himself and recommending the book to HarperCollins.’

  At Betty’s memorial service in the University church of St Mary in Oxford, the eulogy was given by Sir Colin Lucas, former Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Departing from convention, Lucas speculated on what had made Maxwell turn against her so pointedly. Why had he disparaged her efforts to resume her education, and generally sought to humiliate her?

  ‘Betty needed to understand why Bob so peremptorily dismissed her efforts, let alone her virtues in terms that implied failure on her part,’ Lucas said. ‘She came (rightly or wrongly, I do not know) to explain this in terms of hi
s Jewishness. She felt that he was full of guilt for marrying a Christian woman, and that he had not therefore created a Jewish family such as the one he had grown up in and which had been so cruelly decimated during the War. She saw him as not reconciled to grief about his family and she saw herself as irredeemably an outsider in his terms.’

  Was she right? In terms of timing, Maxwell’s re-embracing of his Judaism certainly coincided with a sharp rise in his antagonism towards Betty. She herself came to believe it was the visit they both made to his home village of Solotvino that altered his feelings for ever. That was when she realized just how great a burden of guilt Maxwell carried within him. ‘He was convinced that had he stayed at home, he could have saved the lives of his parents and younger siblings. Nothing he achieved in life would ever compensate for what he had not been able to accomplish – the rescue of his family.’

  Years earlier, in a rare unguarded moment, Maxwell had told his son Philip, ‘Unlike you, I keep the door to my haunted inner chamber firmly closed’ – except that the door was a lot less tightly sealed than he liked to imagine. The older Maxwell grew, the more his ghosts started to escape. But while he clearly blamed Betty for something, there is another possibility: that increasingly haunted by the death of his family, above all by the death of the one person who had ever loved him unconditionally, what Maxwell really blamed her for was not being more like his mother.

  Richard Stott died in 2007, aged sixty-three, having edited five Fleet Street papers over the course of his career – two of them twice. As the Editor of the Mirror at the time of Maxwell’s death, he was described in his Times obituary as ‘the last man to wear that crown of thorns under Robert Maxwell’s criminal activities’.