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
