Observer book of the weekBiography booksReviewThe author of A Very English Scandal details the media tycoon’s bullying, lies and looting of pension funds in an absorbing profile of the war hero turned rogue
The yacht that features on the front cover of Fall, John Preston’s very entertaining account of the extraordinary life and death of Robert Maxwell, is called the Lady Ghislaine. In February 1991 it docked in New York as a four-storey, floating symbol of its owner: outlandish, brash and attention-seeking. It would shortly host a party to celebrate Maxwell’s purchase of the New York Daily News, and guests would be given blue bootees to wear so as not to soil the cream, deep-pile carpets. Within a year Maxwell would be dead, and three decades later his daughter, after whom the yacht was named, would herself be in a very different kind of dock in the same city.
There have been more than a dozen books about Maxwell, mainly published in the 90s, including a rather touching memoir, A Mind of My Own, by his long-suffering widow, Betty, who died in 2013. Preston comes to his subject with the advantage both of hindsight and his great skill at exposing hypocrisy and subterfuge, as he demonstrated with A Very English Scandal, about another high-profile chancer, Jeremy Thorpe.
There are two particularly striking photos in this book. One shows Maxwell receiving the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery in 1945 for his part in a heroic rescue of fellow soldiers in the final stages of the war. “The day before, he had learned that his mother and one of his sisters had been murdered by the Nazis”, reads the brief caption. The other shows Maxwell and Betty shortly after their wedding, in which the elegant, bow-tied, moustachioed figure with a cigarette – probably a Du Maurier, as “Ivan du Maurier” was, like Robert Maxwell, one of his many invented personas – could easily be mistaken for Errol Flynn. By the time of his death, this debonair war hero had turned into a bloated, cigar-chomping, 22-stone fraudster. How come?
There are many ways to fall, and Preston deals mainly with two: the fall from grace as a billionaire transatlantic publisher, former Labour MP and friend – perhaps “associate” is more accurate – of some of the world’s most powerful people; and the fall from the stern of the Lady Ghislaine, which left him floating naked and dead off the Canary Islands.
The book’s subtitle is The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, and there are mysteries aplenty. Born in 1923 as Jan – or was it Ludvik? – Hoch into a large Jewish family in the village of Solotvino, in what was then Czechoslovakia, he left home at 16 to join the resistance to the Nazis. He walked 275 miles to Budapest, was captured, imprisoned as a spy, faced a possible death penalty but escaped after attacking his guard. But how much of that was true? A cousin remembered travelling with him to Budapest by train, and Maxwell told various versions of his escape, including having his handcuffs removed by a “Gypsy lady” while he hid under a bridge. Had she, wonders Preston, “crept onstage… from some colourful corner of his imagination?”
The hair and eyebrows were dyed weekly, with L’Oreal Crescendo, by the Savoy’s chief barberPreston has an eye for the telling detail and an ear for the revealing quote. Maxwell’s greatest rival was the far more savvy Rupert Murdoch, with whom he competed for the purchases of many of Britain’s newspapers before he eventually captured the Daily Mirror. “Maxwell thought he’d entered the ring with another boxer,” was how the late Harry Evans saw it. “In fact, he’d entered the ring with a ju-jitsu artist who also happened to be carrying a stiletto.” Mike Molloy, the Mirror editor, reckoned that “his ink-black hair and enormous eyebrows gave him the look of of a music hall comedian; but his smile was like that of Richard III”. The hair and eyebrows were dyed weekly, with L’Oreal Crescendo, by the Savoy ’s chief barber.
There were nine Maxwell children, two of whom, Michael and Karine, died young in tragic circumstances. His treatment of the rest of the family was shocking. Betty would be told to “fuck off” in front of guests. His son Ian recounts that when he was sacked by his father in 1980, his reaction was “Thank Christ, I’m finally out of this madhouse.” Alas, for him, he wasn’t. Staff were treated equally badly. Peter Jay, the former British ambassador to the US, was hired as Maxwell’s chief of staff but frequently humiliated, sent off on mundane errands and mocked in meetings. Maxwell was also an early abuser of the libel laws, which he resorted to “almost weekly”, with George Carman QC as his brief.
There were affairs. In the wake of Maxwell’s death, two former lovers told their contrasting stories to the News of the World and Sunday Mirror. Preston also recounts Maxwell’s “obsession”, towards the end of his life, with his young PA, Andrea Martin, with whom he became, in the words of his wife, “besotted”. Apparently he confided in Martin, who later married the Daily Mirror’s foreign editor, the late Nick Davies (not the Guardian journalist of the same name), that he considered “doing a Stonehouse” – faking his disappearance to escape from his troubles.
Which brings us to the greatest mystery: Maxwell’s death. Accident, suicide or murder? Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon came to one conclusion in their 2002 book The Assassination of Robert Maxwell. Preston leans towards accident, or, possibly, Maxwell killed himself. Did he fall or did he jump? He must have known that financial ruin and disgrace were around the corner: “perhaps he was being deliberately careless with his safety because he didn’t care any more”.
Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush were swift to offer condolences. President Gorbachev was “deeply grieved”; the former Israeli president Shimon Peres declared him “not a man but an empire in his power, thought and deeds”. Having earlier denied his Judaism, Maxwell had become a major investor in Israeli companies and had chosen to be buried on the Mount of Olives.
Within months of his death it became clear that pension funds had been looted, banks defrauded and £763m was missing. His sons Kevin and Ian were charged with conspiracy to defraud, but acquitted after an Old Bailey trial in 1996. Ghislaine will stand trial in July accused of involvement in “enticement of minors” on behalf of her former boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein – charges she fiercely denies.
It’s not a long book, around 350 pages, and there is only a brief reference to Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who took his story of Israel’s secret nuclear programme to the Sunday Mirror prior to its appearance in the Sunday Times. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and others have suggested that Davies at the Daily Mirror, acting on Maxwell’s orders, betrayed Vanunu to Mossad. “After an anonymous tipoff, he’d been snatched off a street in Rome by Mossad agents, injected with a paralysing drug, smuggled on board a ship and taken back to an Israeli prison,” writes Preston. In fact, Vanunu was lured to Rome by a female Mossad agent and would spend 18 years behind bars.
There is no shortage of evidence of Maxwell’s duplicity elsewhere: he bugged the offices at the Mirror so he could eavesdrop on his staff, and ensured that the paper’s spot the ball competition was rigged to cut out big winners. And there is no mention of the one daily newspaper he actually launched, the London Daily News, conceived as a rival to the Evening Standard’s monopoly and then changed by Maxwell – crazily – into a 24-hour operation: “For the city that never sleeps, the paper that never stops.” It sank with all hands (including this one) just a few months after its 1987 launch.
And that yacht? In 2017 it was sold for $15m to Anna, the former wife of one Rupert Murdoch…
Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian for more than 20 years, as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent. He is the author of two novels and five nonfiction books
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston is published by Viking (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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