by John Preston
In his memoir, Dogs and Lampposts, published in 2002, Stott offered his own analysis of Maxwell’s character: ‘He was generous but never kind; far-sighted but, on occasions, blind, stupid, cunningly subtle yet numbingly unpleasant. Unhappy, lonely, terrified of boredom, constantly wining and dining the great and good of the world but never truly liking or trusting anyone. Nervous, uncertain and insecure, which he dealt with by being decisive to the extent of lunatic folly, secure in the belief of his own infallibility even when presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, and charging through people and events like a demented rhino.’
One morning in May 1992, Lawrence Guest was looking through the Financial Times when he saw to his surprise that he had been replaced without warning as MGN’s Finance Director. Afterwards he and his wife, Beverley, moved from Surrey to the South Coast. They went there partly because Guest was a keen sailor, but also because they wanted to get away from London – and his former life. A Mirror pensioner himself, he only received two thirds of the money he was due. When Guest died in 2016, aged eighty, he was described in his Mirror obituary as ‘a gentleman amongst sharks’. A former colleague said of him, ‘He was a popular man, well-liked. I suppose you could say that the only enemy he had was Robert Maxwell.’
Nick Davies died in 2016 aged seventy-six. After being sacked from the Mirror, he married Andrea Martin; together they settled in Surrey and had a son. As Davies once said of himself, his motto in life had always been ‘Go for It’. This was advice he followed with particular gusto in the fourth and last of the books he wrote about Princess Diana, The Killing of Princess Diana.
The book’s most eye-catching claim was that Diana had been murdered on the orders of MI5 with the assistance of the French secret service. Apparently Diana’s unidentified assassins had first sabotaged the seatbelts of her car, then employed ‘high-intensity strobe lights used by NATO forces’ to blind her chauffeur. According to his publisher, Davies, ‘who has close contacts within royal circles, doesn’t write to be sensationalist, but pulls no punches’.
In July 2007, Conrad Black, once head of the third-largest English-language newspaper empire in the world, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison after being found guilty of fraud and obstruction of justice by a court in Chicago. Having served thirty-seven months of his sentence, he was released in July 2010. In 2018, Black published a biography of President Trump entitled Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. A year later, Trump granted him a full pardon.
For the last thirty years, Kevin Maxwell has worked on a number of business as well as philanthropic ventures with his brother Ian. Isabel Maxwell, a former dotcom entrepreneur and co-founder – with her twin sister, Christine – of the Internet reference guide Magellan, now works as a consultant for start-up companies and venture capitalists. Christine is a PhD Candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, and the author of several books, including The Dictionary of Perfect Spelling. Anne Maxwell worked as an actress before becoming a cognitive behavioural therapist. Philip, a private tutor, lives quietly in north London.
Of all the Maxwell children, the one hit hardest by his death was his favourite – his youngest daughter, Ghislaine. Shortly before Christmas 1991, the journalist Edward Klein visited her in her New York apartment. He found her dressed in a pair of jeans and a loose shirt, and not wearing any make-up.
‘The floor was strewn with newspaper clippings about her father. Hundreds of letters of condolence lay on her desk, along with boxes of cards of acknowledgement waiting to be sent in reply. I did not recognize in Ghislaine Maxwell the young woman [she was about to turn thirty] her friends had described to me – the racy, glamorous, social flibbertigibbet.’
‘He wasn’t a crook,’ Ghislaine told Klein. ‘A thief to me is somebody who steals money. Do I think my father did that? No. I don’t know what he did. Obviously something happened. Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run off with the money? No. And that’s my definition of a crook.’
As for what the future might hold, Ghislaine struck a defiant note: ‘I can’t just die quietly in a corner. I have to believe that something good will come out of this mess. It’s sad for my mother. It’s sad to have lost my dad. It’s sad for my brothers. But I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.’
Just as she predicted, the world had not heard the last of Ghislaine Maxwell. Following her father’s death, she began dating the millionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein. In 2008, after their affair had ended, Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution and sentenced to eighteen months in prison – he served just thirteen. In July 2019, he was rearrested, this time for the sex trafficking of minors. A month later he was found hanging in his prison cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Twenty-three years earlier, there had been a notable absentee at the trial of Kevin and Ian Maxwell: their father. Now, once again, the main player had died in mysterious circumstances. With Epstein beyond the reach of the law, attention shifted to Ghislaine. It’s alleged that she was involved in procuring underage girls for her former lover – allegations she has strongly denied. She also introduced Epstein to a number of her friends, including the Duke of York. Interviewed by the BBC Newsnight programme in November 2019, the Duke recalled how he had met him through his girlfriend (Ghislaine) back in 1999 – ‘I’d known her since she was at university’.
In 2000 Epstein and Ghislaine had been guests at Windsor Castle and at the Queen’s Norfolk retreat, Sandringham, for what the Duke memorably described as ‘a straightforward shooting weekend’. He admitted visiting Ghislaine’s house in Belgravia – a house where, in March 2001, Epstein’s’s principal accuser, Virginia Roberts, claimed she was pressurized into having sex with him when she was only seventeen. Ghislaine has categorically denied Robert’s accusations, while the Duke has insisted that he has no recollection of ever having met Roberts. Widely reckoned to have been a PR disaster, the Newsnight interview led to the Duke retiring from public life.
On 2 July 2020, Ghislaine was arrested at a remote house in Bradford, New Hampshire and charged with the enticement of minors, sex trafficking and perjury. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges. At the time of writing, she is being held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Her trial is due to start in July 2021.
42.
A True Scotsman
Five years before his death, Maxwell had dinner in Edinburgh with the Editor of The European, Ian Watson. As they were eating their meal, the sun went down and the floodlights came on, silhouetting Edinburgh Castle against the night sky. Pointing at the view, Maxwell said, ‘Look, Watty, there’s a sight to warm the hearts of true Scotsmen like you and me!’
At first, Watson assumed he was joking. ‘It took a few moments for me to realize Maxwell was being completely serious. I think that says a lot about him; it was as if he was a Scotsman in Scotland, an Englishman in England and a Czech in Czechoslovakia. But what did he actually think he was? Perhaps none of these things.’
Throughout his life, Maxwell took things from people that didn’t belong to him: their accents, their behaviour, their manners, their lifestyle . . . anything he thought worth copying. Having learned English by imitating Winston Churchill’s speeches – even though he couldn’t understand a word Churchill was saying – Maxwell continued helping himself to whatever he needed at the time. He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers – a roaring lion – from the Hollywood studio MGM; the name of his headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket Club – one of the bastions of the Establishment he claimed to loathe so much.
In filching bits and pieces from other people’s lives, it’s as if Maxwell created a self that he could never quite believe in. Maybe his mania for having his photograph taken – and for putting those photographs in his own newspapers – was due simply to his colossal vanity. But maybe it was a wa
y of reinforcing his identity, of proving, both to himself and the outside world, that he was who he appeared to be.
Once, Maxwell walked into Peter Jay’s office while Jay was chatting with the Editor of the Mirror, at the time Mike Molloy. Maxwell wanted to know what they were talking about. Molloy told him they had been discussing President Reagan.
‘Oh, I know Reagan,’ Maxwell told them. ‘We were in hospital together during the War.’
Later that day, an intrigued Molloy did some sleuthing of his own. ‘I was puzzled by Maxwell saying he’d been in hospital with President Reagan, so I went to the library, where I confirmed my belief that Reagan had never left America during his war service. Still thinking about Maxwell’s claim, I walked to my own office. Then I remembered a film I had seen in my childhood. It was called The Hasty Heart, and was set in a military hospital during World War Two. It starred Ronald Reagan and Richard Todd.’
In The Hasty Heart Reagan plays a wounded American soldier recuperating in a Burmese field hospital. One day there is a new arrival: an aloof, bad-tempered Scotsman called Lachie MacLachlan (Todd), who turns out to be dying of kidney failure. At first, MacLachlan alienates all the other patients with his standoffish manner, but towards the end he confesses that he has been so deeply scarred by his childhood that he’s never been able to get close to anyone.
Maxwell too was deeply scarred by his upbringing, and it was the one part of himself he couldn’t change. Few people in the twentieth century travelled as far from their origins as he did, yet the older he grew, the more the past seemed to drag at his heels, almost mocking him for what he had achieved. ‘However hard you’ve tried to become someone else,’ it seemed to say, ‘you can never escape what you were.’ Like the hollow pillars in his office and the pretend books on his shelves, everything else was a sham.
As to who Maxwell really was, perhaps he never fully knew. Mike Molloy was also present one day when Maxwell’s sister Sylvia came to visit him in the Daily Mirror offices. After trying to make her way as an actress, Sylvia worked for the Schools Council, which coordinated secondary school exams in England and Wales.
At the time Molloy was captioning some old wartime photographs, one of which showed Maxwell during the War as a soldier in the Czech army. When Sylvia arrived, Molloy was writing Maxwell’s original name on the back of the photograph – Jan Ludvik Hoch. Seeing what he was doing, she said to her brother, ‘Why do you always say your name was Jan Ludvik Hoch?’
‘Because it is,’ Maxwell replied.
‘No, it’s not,’ said Sylvia. ‘Your name is Ludvik. You were named after Uncle Ludvik, not Jan.’
Maxwell looked at her in astonishment.
‘Was I?’ he said.
According to some estimates, Maxwell spent as long as six hours in the water before he died. If this was the case, what did he do? Never a strong swimmer, did he strike out for the shore knowing there was no chance of his ever making it? Did he cry for help knowing that no one would hear him? Or did he just lie there, naked and alone in the middle of the ocean, with all hope gone and the lights of the Lady Ghislaine disappearing into the darkness?
In 2017, Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Anna decided that she wanted to buy a yacht. Their son James, a keen sailor, offered to help. A few weeks later, he found just what she was looking for – a boat called the Lady Mona K, on the market for $14,500,000. His mother went to have a look and liked what she saw. It was only after buying the Lady Mona K that Anna learned the yacht’s name had been changed several years earlier. It had previously been called the Lady Ghislaine.
Acknowledgements
I’m extremely grateful to Ian Maxwell for taking a great deal of time to talk to me – even though what I’ve written does not in any way reflect his own views or sentiments, nor those of his sisters Christine and Isabel, to whom I’m also very grateful. Rupert Murdoch was kind enough to see me in New York City, Julia Samuel was characteristically perceptive about Maxwell’s psychology, while I have benefited enormously from Joe Haines’s recollections.
In addition, I’d like to thank the following people for their help: Jeffrey Archer, John Ashfield, Colin Barr, Brian Basham, Richard Belfield, Eleanor Berry, Conrad Black, John Blake, Tim Bouquet, John Brown, Gyles Brandreth, David Burnside, Alastair Campbell, Peter Capaldi, Dominic Carman, Deborah Chande, Richard Charkin, Martin Cheeseman, Anthony Cheetham, Caroline Coleman, Nicholas Coleridge, Elaine Collins, Neil Collins, Karen Colognese, Brian Cox, Peter Croxford, Harry Dalmeny, Jonathan Davie, Bernard Donoughue, Daisy Dunlop, Charles Elton, Harry Evans, Janet Fielding, Andrew Golden, Michael Gove, Anthony Grabiner, Roy Greenslade, Simon Grigg, Miriam Gross, Beverley Guest, Kate Hadley, Bill Hagerty, Max Hastings, Carolyn Hinsey, James Hoge, John Jackson, Tony Jackson, Gerald Jacobs, Peter Jay, David Jordan, Neil Kinnock, Julia Langdon, Ken Lennox, Magnus Linklater, Mike Maloney, Peter Mandelson, Flora McEvedy, Andy McSmith, Neil Mendoza, Peter Miller, Bob Miranda, Mike Molloy, Anna Moon, Brian Moss, Matthew Norman, Geoffrey Owen, John Penrose, Roland Phillips, John Pole, Eve Pollard, Anne Robinson, Gerald Ronson, Bill Snyder, Taki Theodoracopulos, Stuart Urban, Maggie Urry, Sarah Vine, Rabbi Feivish Vogel, Simon Walters, Ian Watson, Francis Wheen, Jim Willse, Charlie Wilson and Yvonne Young.
As always, my agent, Natasha Fairweather at Rogers, Coleridge and White, has provided support and wise counsel. At Penguin, I want to thank my editor, Venetia Butterfield, along with Isabel Wall and Amelia Fairney, and everyone else who worked on the book. My wife, Susanna, has listened to my woes, boosted my morale and given unfailingly good editorial advice. Over the three years I’ve spent researching and writing Fall, I’m grimly aware that I have been in even more of a preoccupied haze than usual. As a result, our two children, Milly and Joseph, probably know more about Robert Maxwell than any other twelve- or fourteen-year-olds on the planet.
A Note on Sources
General
Eleanor Berry, Cap’n Bob and Me, The Book Guild, 2003
——, My Unique Relationship with Robert Maxwell: The Truth at Last!, The Book Guild, 2019
Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Final Verdict, HarperCollins, 1995
——, Maxwell: The Outsider, Aurum Press, 1988
Nick Davies, Death of a Tycoon, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992
Russell Davies, Foreign Body: The Secret Life of Robert Maxwell, Bloomsbury, 1995
Roy Greenslade, Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire, Simon & Schuster, 1992
Joe Haines, Maxwell, Macdonald, 1988
Mike Maloney, Flash! Splash! Crash! All at Sea with Cap’n Bob, Mainstream, 1996
Elisabeth Maxwell, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994
Mike Molloy, The Happy Hack: A Memoir of Fleet Street in Its Heyday, John Blake, 2016
Richard Stott, Dogs and Lampposts, Metro, 2002
Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano, Maxwell: A Portrait of Power, Bantam, 1988
Preface: The King of New York
Books
Kenneth M. Jennings, Labor Relations at the New York Daily News: Peripheral Bargaining and the 1990 Strike, Praeger, 1993
Press
New York Daily News: various articles
New York Magazine: John Taylor, ‘Mad Max’, February 1992
Playboy: interview with ‘British Press Lord Robert Maxwell’, October 1991
Vanity Fair: Peter J. Boyer, ‘Mighty Max, Robert Maxwell Storms Manhattan’, June 1991
Vanity Fair: Edward Klein, ‘The Fall of the House of Maxwell’, March 1992
Interviews
Simon Grigg
Jim Hoge
Rupert Murdoch
Jim Willse
Charlie Wilson
1. The Salt Mine
Books
History of the Queen’s Royal Regiment
Press
Playboy interview, October 1991
Radio
Desert Island Discs, 1987
2. Out of the Darkness
Books
Interviews
Joe Haines
Ian Maxwell
Mike Molloy
3. An Adventurer of Great Style
Books
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Battleground Berlin: Diaries 1945–1948, Paragon House, 1990
George Clare, Berlin Days, Macmillan, 1989
John Loftus and Mark Aarong, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, St Martin’s Griffin, 1994
Betty Maxwell: A Tribute from Your Family and Friends on the Occasion of This Special Birthday, privately printed, 1991
Victor Sebestyen, 1946: The Making of the Modern World, Macmillan, 2014
Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2010
Interviews
Peter Croxford
Television
Inside Story. Maxwell: The Downfall, BBC2, 1996
Archives
Czech Secret Service Archive – Státní bezpečnost (StB), Prague
4. Difficulties With Pork
Books
Richard Abel and Gordon Graham (eds.), Immigrant Publishers: The Impact of Expatriate Publishers in Britain and America in the 20th Century, Transaction, 2009