Maxwell’s schedule the following day confirmed his importance in the country. After breakfast with Ehoud Olmert, the health minister and a friend with whom he shared a passion for football, he spent half an hour with Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister. Their regular meetings were welcomed by the diminutive former terrorist. Maxwell had not only committed himself to substantial investments in Israeli industry, newspapers and football, but he had established a direct link between Shamir and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. The benefit to Israel had been considerable. Through Maxwell’s efforts, 300,000 Soviet Jews had been allowed to emigrate to Israel. He had also flown dozens of Soviet children afflicted by Chernobyl’s 1986 radioactive blast to Israel for treatment. In 1990, he had stood among the guests of honour at a solemn reunion of 1,000 Czech Jews, blessed by the presence of Václav Havel, the Czech president, and senior Israeli politicians.
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