Maxwell: The Final Verdict

That morning, at Shamir’s request, Maxwell had telephoned Gorbachev’s direct number in the Kremlin from the prime minister’s office. Speaking in halting Russian, he had passed on Shamir’s greetings and his request that the Soviet leader should remove an obstacle in Soviet – Israeli relations. The warmth of the conversation reconvinced Shamir of Maxwell’s importance. Emerging into the sunlight, the Publisher returned to a hectic schedule of meetings with his employees and advisers, interrupted only by lunch with David Levy, the junior foreign minister, and dinner with Yitzhak Modai, the finance minister. That night, as he lay in his room reflecting upon his importance, his financial troubles in London appeared thankfully remote. In one of those characteristic moments of rashness, he pondered first whether to buy El Al, Israel’s beleaguered national airline, or the Israeli Discount Bank, and even about bidding $11 billion for Paramount film studios.

After a short nap, at 4 a.m. on 9 November Maxwell flew to Frankfurt. There he lunched with George Shultz, the former US secretary of state whose memoirs Macmillan had published at enormous financial loss and whose company Maxwell often sought. He also met Ulrike Pöhl, the wife of the German central banker, a woman upon whom Maxwell was able to unburden his emotions and whose company he eagerly sought.

By nightfall, Maxwell had returned to London for dinner with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister. The two men, with a common ancestry in Eastern Europe, had deepened their bond when, with Peres’s approval, Alisa Eshed, his vivacious personal assistant for twenty-two years, had been appointed Maxwell’s coordinator and representative in Israel. These were the close relationships to which Maxwell had long aspired in Britain. But other than the occasional meeting with Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, an occasional lunch with Norman Lamont, or conversations with other government ministers at charity parties, Maxwell could satisfy his frustrated political ambitions only by meeting leaders of the Labour Party.

Overcoming their antipathy, both Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, Labour’s leader and deputy leader, accepted Maxwell’s invitations to meetings and meals in order to secure the continuing support for their beleaguered party of the Mirror Group’s newspapers – the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People. In Maxwell’s dining room, the entertainment manager, Douglas Harrod, would overhear both of them seriously seeking his advice and on one occasion listening to his request for a peerage. ‘It’s normal for a newspaper owner,’ Maxwell urged, expecting a positive response. Both visitors had smiled benignly, without committing themselves.

The delivery of the proofs of that night’s Daily Mirror interrupted the dinner with Peres. It was a familiar ritual, enjoyed by Maxwell as a means of demonstrating his influence. To emphasize to any doubters his unquestioned authority, he would push a button on the telephone to hear the editor’s attentive voice on the intercom. After he had barked an order and pushed the button again to cut off any possible response, his eyes would shine. His irrepressible pride was expressed in this telephone terrorism, harassing employees regardless of the time by insisting on their constant availability to his summons. To Peres, like so many others who saw the ritual with the proofs, his host seemed truly potent. But Maxwell’s life in his glossy apartment had in fact become a torment.

His forty-six-year marriage to Betty had effectively terminated long before. Ever since their first wedding anniversary after a whirlwind romance in wartime Paris, he had sporadically tired of the older French woman, but her devotion and his loneliness had always compelled his return. Her patience during his long absences and the regular arrival of new children had compensated for his irritation with her cold, unhumorous, unJewish demeanour. While most voiced warm respect for Betty, chiming that she was the sane, modest, reasonable and honest side of the unlikely duo, marvelling at her forbearance as her husband changed from being a muscular, brave, handsome charmer into an obese tyrant, he believed that their wartime romance should have been brought to an end after their first passion. Their markedly disparate backgrounds were not suited for an enduring relationship. Unlike Robert Maxwell, with his impoverished Jewish childhood, Betty Maxwell had been born into the tranquil, even dull, Protestant comfort of a large house in the French countryside, supported by the wealth of a silk manufacturer.

Not surprisingly, the small, plain woman with the rasping French accent had enjoyed the partying and jet-setting around the world’s most exclusive hotels and beaches, paid for by her husband. She had even tolerated appalling rows caused by his inexplicable emotional outbursts whenever his financial pressures seemed overwhelming. For years she had concealed her repeated humiliation in private by uttering public declarations of passion and loyalty. ‘Our love for each other’, she had told She magazine in 1987, ‘is not in doubt, it is the rock and rudder of my life.’ Few doubted her. Yet seven years later, in her autobiography, she would accuse her late husband of taking ‘sadistic pleasure’ in behaving during their long marriage in a ‘harsh, cruel, uncompromising, dictatorial, exceedingly selfish and inconsiderate fashion’. During his life her concealment of this truth had been near perfect. Annually, she had chosen and collected within a new leather-bound scrapbook all the newspaper cuttings and letters reporting her husband’s activities, presenting the volume to him on his birthday.

So by 1987 a woman described by an Oxford don as ‘sharp as a knife. All brain,’ could be in no doubt about the myriad accusations of fraud, deceit and dishonesty which he had attracted. Yet, rejecting the accumulated evidence and as an additional gift that year, she presented her husband as testimony to his ‘boundless energy and originality’ with a green volume listing the 2,418 bundles of documents used by one of Britain’s most litigious individuals in his lawsuits between 1945 and 1983. Prefaced by a quotation from Abraham Lincoln, Maxwell’s self-styled ‘personal archivist’ recalled how his ‘opponents dragged out every skeleton they could find from every cupboard imaginable … The British press and the British establishment have a nasty habit of never letting sleeping dogs lie and their attacks have to be nailed every time.’ In particular, she recalled the ‘seemingly unending bleak, sombre days’ of the ‘infamous DTI inspectors’ disgraceful attacks on your reputation’ and how their lives were ruined by ‘iniquitous’ High Court judges and ‘Trotskyites’ in the Labour Party’s ‘grotesque kangaroo court’. There were years, Betty recalled, when the number of loyal friends ‘could be counted on the fingers of one hand’ and when ‘Every morning, the slim thread holding the Damocles sword seemed to have frayed a little more.’ That loyalty had been rewarded by her appointment as a director of Headington Hill Investments, a controlling company linking the London & Bishopsgate companies (among other constellations) to Maxwell’s worldwide empire and to the Liechtenstein trusts. But Headington was separate and deliberately unconnected to the Robert Maxwell Group and its subsidiaries. (See company plan after notes.) Blessed, according to Betty’s own account, with high intelligence, some would think that she could not be ignorant of the developing financial crisis. Yet, for Maxwell, whether she was aware or not was irrelevant.

For twenty-five years, he had proposed separation from Betty. During the early 1950s he had fallen in love with Anne Dove, his secretary. Her lightheartedness, efficiency and typically English attractiveness, in contrast to Betty’s plodding worthiness, had resulted in a long, passionate affair. The relationship’s termination when Dove exiled herself to the Indian Himalayas had led to an uneasy reconciliation with Betty, which, after his fraud as a book wholesaler had been exposed in 1954, was interrupted by ferocious rows, complete with renewed demands for separation.

In the 1960s, he had enjoyed the company of Jean Baddeley, another devoted secretary. Pleasant looking and efficient, Baddeley had dotingly remained with Maxwell throughout the dark years after the DTI inspectors’ 1971 condemnation and had organized his office after his resurrection in the 1980s. ‘My love for him’, she would explain, ‘was based on huge respect and deep affection for someone who was very important to me.’ But when her looks declined and her imperious, jealous manner earned her the nickname ‘Queen Bitch’, Maxwell shuffled her to a side office.

By 1990, the pressure of his continuing deceit had made the demands of marriage intolerable. Effectively, he had separated from Betty. On her visits to London, she would sleep either in a hotel or with friends. Other than his occasional return on a Friday night to Headington Hill Hall, the Oxford mansion he had leased in 1959 from the council for a fixed £2,000 per annum and used as an office and family home, he barely lived under the same roof as his wife. Typically, on Saturday, 10 November, after sleeping one night in his own bedroom in Oxford, he summoned Captain Cowley to fly him back to Holborn.

For the following day, Maxwell had invited Professor Fedor Burlatsky, a well-connected Russian historian, and his wife Kira Vladina, a journalist, to lunch. To impress the couple, he sent his maroon Rolls-Royce to collect them from the Waldorf. The gesture was more rewarding than he could have anticipated.

As usual, he kept his guests waiting. His eventual appearance was dramatic: ‘If only I’d known it was you waiting for me, I wouldn’t have taken such a long time getting here.’ Maxwell was staring at Kira Vladina, a shapely forty-seven-year-old blonde. For her part, already awed by the display of wealth, Vladina was struck by the giant figure which was apparently filling an enormous living room.

Over lunch, Maxwell could hardly take his eyes off the woman. At the end of the meal, they agreed to continue their conversation, because she wished to interview him for a Moscow newspaper. Professor Burlatsky departed, Maxwell cancelled his other appointments and Vladina, accustomed to her small, sparsely furnished apartment in Moscow, relaxed in the company of the noticeably admiring billionaire. Their conversation soon switched from Maxwell’s customary bombast and inventions about his wartime heroism – ‘I escaped from Czechoslovakia on a raft at dawn with German bullets flying over me,’ he claimed, forgetting that he had simply boarded a train in peacetime – to an intimate outpouring of his misery, his loneliness and his forlorn search for affection. ‘I love the dawn,’ he murmured in Russian, correctly guessing that his listener would be impressed by sensitivity.

‘You have everything in life,’ said Kira.

‘Not love,’ replied Maxwell.

‘But everyone loves you.’

There was a long pause. ‘I don’t believe that. It’s my money they love.’ Maxwell paused again and moved closer to the Slav, so different from the women he usually met. ‘I absolutely adored my mother. With all my heart. And that’s why I always dreamt of loving and being loved in return.’

‘Are you happily married?’

‘Well, she’s French. You know how the French are. What they love more than anything is money. I never sensed any of the warmth or affection I got from my mother in my own family and which I gave to the world around me.’

Kira moved closer, responding to and even sharing Maxwell’s emotion. The man was ‘sad and lonely’, she realized, ‘even within his family’. Yet she was unable to change anything.

Maxwell continued talking about Betty: ‘She’s so calculating. A calculating Frenchwoman, putting up a good front, but she gives me no love. Not the love I got from my mother.’

Naturally, Kira knew nothing of the tempestuous rows which took place between Maxwell and Betty. Instead she noticed only the Publisher’s vulnerability: ‘His big, piercing, fatal wound’. It was already nightfall. Kira felt an intimacy towards a man who was ‘overweight, old and plain’. He spoke of his love for Russia and the culture which was his own. ‘I sympathize,’ she whispered. ‘I understand.’ Letting his imagination run wild, Maxwell had become infatuated with the woman.

Some time later that evening, he spoke of his children. ‘They’re very good at spending the money I earn. They’re not like me. They don’t work hard and take risks.’ Maxwell was clearly bothered by his seven surviving children. His favourite, Michael, he confessed, had died in 1968 after being kept alive for seven years on a support system following a motor accident. His new favourite was his son Ian, conceived in 1955 when Maxwell had been mistakenly told by a doctor that he was dying of cancer. ‘I adore him. He’s a bit like me.’ Pause. ‘But not in work. And I love my youngest daughter, Ghislaine. The rest are a cold lot. Like their mother; and they want to live off what others earn.’

Kira returned late to her hotel and her husband. Maxwell’s last words had been memorable: ‘Kira, I would so like to be in your suit of clothes or, even better, your skin.’ He had been, she thought, so tender, so trusting. The whole intimate experience had been ‘a fantasy which took hold of our hearts’.

Alone once again in his penthouse, Maxwell might have reconsidered his description of his children. He unashamedly doted upon Ghislaine, his youngest daughter, naming his luxury yacht after her and financing her unprofitable corporate-gifts business, though he would not tolerate the presence of her boyfriends, whom he suspected were hoping to benefit from a piece of the action. His relationship with Ghislaine was becoming increasingly intense, some would say indulgent. He no longer had much interest in his twin daughters, Isabel and Christine, born in 1950. Of Anne, his daughter born in 1948, he had quipped to colleagues, ‘What have Anne and Pope John Paul in common? Both are ugly and both are failed actors!’ His eldest son Philip, born in 1947, a donnish, decent man, disliked his father, and the sentiment was reciprocated. When he married in South America, his father refused to attend the ceremony. Some suspected that Maxwell had always resented the death of his elder son Michael and the survival of Philip.

Maxwell often spoke to Ian, a joint managing director of MCC and a director of over eighty private companies, but he permitted him few responsibilities, despite his annual income of £262,000 plus practically unlimited expenses. Ian, it was agreed by most, was a charming, easygoing playboy, sought by many young, attractive women, whom he tended to address as ‘princess’. But there was also an arrogance. On one occasion, Ian had told Bob Cole, Maxwell’s spokesman, to collect a suit from his London flat. Cole arrived to find the chaotic evidence of the previous night’s revelry. Scattered on the bedroom floor lay several used condoms. Ian clearly expected his Filipina maid to clear everything. A similarly casual attitude affected Ian’s responsibilities to work. Educated at Marlborough College and at Balliol College, Oxford, he understood the legal requirements expected of directors of companies but adopted his father’s cavalier attitude towards those laws, smoothing things over with a modicum of charm.

Robert Maxwell, however, noting that Ian lacked an astute appreciation of finance, engaged in the real conversations with Kevin. As the empire’s finances became perilous, it was Kevin whom he increasingly trusted. But there was little intimacy, and frequently, as in the past, he ignored his son’s advice, not least when Kevin urged that they renegotiate all their loans with the banks. ‘They’ll eat us alive,’ snapped Maxwell each time he raised the issue. All those bankers, lawyers and other professionals visiting the Publisher were appalled by the father’s treatment of his son. ‘Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Maxwell would yell. The eyewitnesses to those humiliating outbursts, admirers of Kevin’s talent, would gaze stupefied as his father ‘treated him like dirt’. None was more surprised than Bill Harry, Macmillan’s tax adviser. At a celebratory party on board the Lady Ghislaine in July 1989, Harry was explaining the tax implications of the company’s recent merger with McGraw-Hill when Kevin asked a question. His father exploded: ‘Don’t ever interrupt a tax expert!’ A chastened Kevin fell silent, while the others present stared at their shoes.

Yet at 7 a.m. most days during 1990, Robert Maxwell was ensconced alone in his office with Kevin, taking the place of his son’s early-morning German lessons. Dignified with the label ‘prayer meetings’, their encounters allowed them to plot and plan their agenda.

So much in Kevin’s life had changed in the last months. In 1988, his father had dispatched him to New York to manage Macmillan and their new American empire. There, to Robert Maxwell’s irritation, he had been joined by Pandora Warnford-Davis, his tall, thin, toothy, aggressive, thirty-year-old wife, whom he had met at Oxford and whose assertions of independence both before and since their wedding in 1984 had not endeared her to Robert. ‘What shall I call you?’ she had coldly asked Dick Cowley, the helicopter pilot, on first meeting. ‘You can call me Captain,’ he replied. Robert Maxwell was never able to establish that advantage over a woman he regarded as spoilt and foolish. For his staff, the defining moment of Pandora’s attitude towards her father-in-law had occurred one day when the Gulfstream was parked on the tarmac at Le Bourget airport outside Paris. Maxwell was fuming because Kevin and his wife were late for take-off. ‘Fuck them! Let’s go!’ he shouted eventually, sending Terry Gilmour, the chief steward, to deposit their passports at immigration. At that moment the couple arrived, only to be tongue-lashed by a furious Maxwell. To his astonishment, Pandora then turned on him and snarled, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ Silenced, Maxwell stared out of the window until touch-down in London. The relationship worsened as the financial crisis grew, with the helicopter being frequently dispatched to collect Kevin from Hailey, his Oxfordshire country home near Wallingford. Unintimidated, Pandora once mockingly threatened to ‘use a gun [on her father-in-law] if you disturb our life again’. Her outbursts won only temporary respite. Like most bullies, Maxwell retreated when challenged but soon resumed his egotistical behaviour, demanding total obedience to his needs.

By the autumn of 1990, Kevin had abandoned his New York residence and was commuting from London on the 9.30 a.m. Concorde to New York, cramming up to twenty-one meetings into one day before sleeping on the overnight British Airways 747 flight home, with a helicopter hop to Maxwell House at 6.30 in the morning. During that year, his use of conventional airlines within Europe had declined. Under increasing pressure, he flew on chartered jets, accompanied by Carolyn Barwell, his lively assistant – to Zurich for lunch, to Hamburg for dinner, or on one occasion overnight to see his father in Istanbul, returning the following day to London. He had also more or less abandoned watching his own Oxford United football club on Saturdays or playing with his children, Tilly, Teddy and Chloe. His regular cultural outings organized by Pandora – to the theatre, Covent Garden or the Festival Hall, followed by dinner in London’s fashionable restaurants – also tended increasingly to be cancelled, prompting frequent absences from their chaotic home in Jubilee Place, Chelsea. Despite Pandora’s shrill complaints about the working hours her father-in-law required from Kevin, she enjoyed the perks of Maxwell’s fortune. Even her family shared the benefits. John Warnford-Davis, her father employed by Maxwell, used the helicopter to avoid the traffic to Newmarket, while her brother Darryll, employed at brokers Astaire and Partners, regularly approached Kevin with ‘business propositions’ in return for monitoring and buying MCC shares.

Initially, Kevin had not complained about the pressure. No other man of his age in London could helicopter from the city centre to land alongside Concorde, receiving special dispensation from customs and passport control. Like his father, he revelled in the exercise of power, seeking acceptance from the establishment as befitted an old boy of Marlborough College and a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. He even used a barber at the Savoy, a custom Robert Maxwell had adopted more than forty years earlier. He had not complained when his summer holidays in 1990 had been forsaken. While his friends were relaxing in expensive resorts, his August days had been filled by endless meetings with bankers, lawyers, accountants, analysts and staff. His most frequent visitors were Colin Emson, the managing director of Robert Fraser, a merchant bank chaired by Lord Rippon, an independent director of MCC; Neil Taberner, a senior partner of Coopers, the empire’s accountants; Scott Marden and Andrew Capitman of Bankers Trust; Michael von Clemm of Merrill Lynch, a friend anxious to win some of the business; Sir Michael Richardson of Smith New Court, MCC’s stockbrokers, and reputedly close to the prime minister; and Thomas Christofferson of Morgan Stanley. These men were unified by more than their financial profession and their proximity to the Maxwells. Individually, each was contributing to the Maxwells’ appearance of probity and financial security.

Another group of visitors, his employees, members of the inner sanctum, the heart of the operation, were probably more important. By the end of September 1990, to help him to cope with the financial crisis, they were being summoned by Kevin to daily meetings. All were men and women of unquestioning obedience and unremarkable technical competence, closely associated with the empire’s finances. The overriding criteria for their employment were their loyalty and their readiness to become beholden to their employer in return for their over-generous salaries. Among them were Deborah Maxwell, a thirty-three-year-old dark-haired lawyer who was not related to her employer, although outsiders sometimes mistakenly believed there was a connection; Mark Tanzer, a ‘poor man’s Peter Jay’; Robert Bunn, forty-two years old, an accountant and RMG’s finance director, of whom Maxwell irreverently joked, ‘I could order him to rob the Midland Bank!’; Basil Brookes, the acting finance director recruited from Coopers; and Albert Fuller, the head of the treasury.

As the crisis deepened, Kevin included in those meetings Michael Stoney, an ambitious accountant, and Jean-Pierre Anselmini, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman and former director of Crédit Lyonnais, who in 1988 had helped to organize the $3 billion Jumbo Loan to the Maxwells and had been flattered by the subsequent invitation to join MCC as deputy chairman. Although blessed in Maxwell’s propaganda as ‘brilliant’, Anselmini was the fullest embodiment of his state-owned bank’s naivety. ‘The bank which could never say “no”’ had lent Maxwell $1.3 billion, its accumulated bad debts now totalling over £20 billion. For the Frenchman, wilfully ignorant of Maxwell’s past, his new employer was ‘a fairy tale everyone needed to believe in’, especially because he proclaimed himself a socialist while offering an entrée into the giddy world of the media. ‘I wanted to believe in Maxwell’s success,’ Anselmini later confessed. He was hypnotized by Maxwell’s ‘star quality, and I loved the Maxwell family’. That same warmth was reflected by Sam Pisar, Maxwell’s French lawyer and business representative engaged in deals in Russia and Israel and had become a close confidante: ‘We needed myths and heroes in those dark times.’

One of the recent casualties of that trusted group was Ron Woods, a director of MCC whom Maxwell had inherited as a tax consultant (just as he had inherited the deputy managing director Richard Baker) on his spectacular relaunch into business in 1980 when he bought the British Printing Corporation. The forty-seven-year-old from the Rhondda Valley fell under Maxwell’s spell and came to regard him with a mixture of awe and fear as a ‘hero and father-figure’. To his delight, Woods had discovered that his new employer was hyper-sensitive about taxation and wished him to deploy his skill to minimize the tax liabilities on the empire’s purchases, take-overs and disposals. Little pleased Woods more than to work on his computer to produce an innovative tax scheme. The empire, he knew, was ‘tax-driven’ and he more than anyone understood its complexity. According to a senior company auditor, ‘Only Woods could explain why it was so complex.’ The challenge, Woods would attest, was ‘very exciting’. It was also legal and ethical. There was no need to resort to the criminal evasion of taxes. Maxwell’s empire was ultimately owned in Liechtenstein, so few taxes were unavoidable and they could be neutralized if, by careful anticipation, MCC and the 400 private companies accumulated the appropriate debts and losses. When he bought Macmillan, $1.8 billion of the $2.6 billion purchase price was charged to Macmillan itself so that the interest charges could be offset against the profits, thereby avoiding all taxation. Indeed, Maxwell’s only serious liability was advance corporation tax (ACT) on dividends. ‘I don’t want to pay taxes,’ he had told Bill Harry, his American tax adviser, ‘but I don’t want to go to prison either.’ This was a reference to the fate of Leona Helmsley, recently jailed in New York for tax evasion, a poignant moment for Maxwell, who regularly occupied the presidential suite in her Manhattan hotel.