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
