Fall Read online

  Dedication

  To Cat Ledger

  1958–2020

  Epigraph

  ‘Such a man rises above honesty,’ said Mrs Hurtle.

  Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

  He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Plates

  Preface: The King of New York

  1.The Salt Mine

  2.Out of the Darkness

  3.An Adventurer of Great Style

  4.Difficulties With Pork

  5.Mortality

  6.Down on the Bottom

  7.The Man Who Gets Things Done

  8.Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding

  9.Robert Maxwell’s Code of Conduct

  10.The Lights Go Out

  11.The Grasshopper Returns

  12.Strife

  13.Written in the Stars

  14.Madness

  15.In the Lair of the Black Bear

  16.An Enormous Spread

  17.A Very Happy Person

  18.Battle Rejoined

  19.Homecomings

  20.The Party of the Decade

  21.Listening In

  22.A Glorious New Dawn

  23.Crossing the Line

  24.Obsessed

  25.Three Departures

  26.What Have I Done to Deserve That?

  27.Intangible Assets

  28.Légumes du Maurier

  29.Selling the Crown Jewels

  30.Don’t You Worry About a Thing

  31.Hurricane Bob

  32.A Long Way Down

  33.Lost

  34.Found

  35.The First Autopsy

  36.A Hero of Our Time

  37.The Second Autopsy

  38.The Four Horsemen

  39.Everything Must Go

  40.The March of Time

  41.Curtain Call

  42.A True Scotsman

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  List of Plates

  here

  Maxwell being presented with the Military Cross by Field-Marshal Montgomery in March 1945. (Maxwell family archives, first published in Joe Haines, Maxwell, Orion, 1988.)

  here

  Maxwell and Betty shortly after their marriage. (Maxwell family archives, first published in Joe Haines, Maxwell, Orion, 1988.)

  Maxwell with Barry in post-war Berlin. (Maxwell family archives, first published in Joe Haines, Maxwell, Orion, 1988.)

  here

  Clash of the titans: a rare photograph of Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch in the same room. (Mirrorpix.)

  here

  A genius for hobnobbing: Maxwell with Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela. (Mirrorpix.)

  here

  ‘That odious man’: Maxwell with Princess Diana. (Mirrorpix.)

  here

  When the going was good: Maxwell with Andrea Martin and Peter Jay. (Mirrorpix.)

  here

  Up above the clouds: Maxwell stretched out on his private jet. (Mirrorpix.)

  Headington Hill Hall: ‘the best council house in the country’. (Mirrorpix.)

  here

  The Mirror pulls out all the stops to report Maxwell’s death. (Mirrorpix.)

  Preface

  The King of New York

  Just as its owner had intended, the yacht that made its way slowly up Manhattan’s East River and docked at the Water Club at East 30th Street in early March 1991 caused a considerable stir. For a start, it was far bigger than any of its neighbours – so big that it took up eight berths instead of the customary one. Four storeys high, gleaming white and topped with a mast bristling with satellite equipment, the yacht could clearly be seen from several blocks away.

  The man’s identity and the reason for his visit soon became the subject of much excited speculation. In several newspapers it even displaced reports of the end of the first Gulf War from the front pages. Who was this ‘portly press baron with the bushy eyebrows, the square jaw and the sly smile,’ people wondered.

  What little was known about him piqued their curiosity even more. Born to a peasant family in Czechoslovakia, he had apparently fought for the British Army during the War and been awarded one of the country’s highest medals for gallantry. Now he was understood to be the possessor of a vast mansion as well as a ‘40-button portable telephone’. He was also described as ‘a symbol of an Age of Flash. Of big-time dreams and big-time deals.’

  It seemed that his private life had been scarred by terrible tragedy and his business career by controversy. As for his personal fortune, this was estimated at between a billion and two billion dollars – a figure that was confidently predicted to increase by as much as $500,000 by the end of the year. Among the many publications he owned was the Daily Mirror, the biggest selling left-wing tabloid newspaper in the UK. This alone gave him enormous political influence. According to Bob Bagdikian, dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, ‘Neither Caesar nor Franklin Roosevelt nor any Pope has commanded as much power to shape the information on which so many people depend.’

  New Yorkers would have to wait several more days before they caught their first sight of the yacht’s owner. But once seen, he was not easily forgotten. At nine in the morning on 13 March, a convoy of stretch limousines drew up beside a news-stand on 42nd Street. Out of the first limousine stepped an extremely large man dressed in a camel hair coat and a red bow-tie, with a green-and-white-striped cap perched on top of his head.

  Showing unexpected nimbleness for someone of his size, he sprang up on to the sidewalk. A crowd of around 300 had gathered to witness his arrival, along with several TV crews. ‘Good on you!’ one of the onlookers shouted. Another one called for three cheers. As the hurrahs rang out, the man grinned in delight and took off his cap to reveal a head full of startlingly black hair. He twirled the cap in the air, before holding up his other hand for silence.

  The cheers died away.

  ‘This is a great day,’ he announced in his booming treacly voice. ‘A great day for me, but above all for New York. It’s the first good thing that New Yorkers have seen happen in a long while. The city has lost confidence in itself. People are departing. I say enough! New York still has something to say. The fact that I have chosen New York is a vote of tremendous confidence in this city.’

  Then, holding both arms above his head now, his fists clenched in triumph, he went even further.

  ‘It is a miracle!’ he said, ‘A Miracle on 42nd Street!’

  At this point he was approached by two policemen, who asked if he would mind moving on. The problem, they explained with uncharacteristic deference, was that so many people had come to see him they were spilling out into the road; as a result, lengthy tailbacks were stretching in both directions. Of course, said the man; the last thing he wanted was to cause any inconvenience. Rather than get back into his limousine, he strode away up 42nd Street, his camel hair coat trailing out behind. Far from dispersing, the crowd and the TV crews set off in pursuit, loath to let him out of their sight.

  The man’s name was Robert Maxwell, and this was the day that all his dreams had finally come true.

  As he often liked to say later, Maxwell had come to New York in answer to a plea. A saviour was needed in the city’s hour of need and Bob the Max, as he’d taken to
styling himself, was not about to shirk his duty. This was not strictly true – indeed, it wasn’t really true at all – but amid the excitement no one was in any mood to get too hung up on detail.

  Eighteen months earlier, in the autumn of 1989, journalists on newspapers in Orlando, Newport, Rhode Island, and Fort Lauderdale were surprised to receive letters asking if they would like to come and work in New York for a while. Anyone who expressed interest was then sent – in strict confidence – a list of instructions on what not to do if they decided to take up the offer:

  •Don’t stop to talk to anyone who approaches you.

  •Don’t frequent restaurants in close proximity to the office.

  •Don’t make eye-contact with passers-by.

  At the same time, Jim Hoge, publisher of the New York Daily News, launched the first salvo in what he strongly suspected would be a fight to the death. The New York Daily News was the oldest and most iconic tabloid newspaper in America. In its heyday, it had sold 2.4 million copies a day – more than a quarter of the city’s population.

  Brash, blue-collar and fiercely proud of the breadth and depth of its prejudices, the paper liked to style itself ‘The Honest Voice of New York’, a claim rather belied by the fact that it also ran a regular ‘Gang Land’ column – a kind of low-life social diary chronicling the ups and downs of the city’s best known organized crime figures, such as Vincent ‘Chin’ Gigante and Anthony ‘Gaspipe’ Casso.

  But the News’s heyday had long gone. For years, it had been hobbled by astounding levels of over-manning, widespread corruption, an exorbitant wage bill and machinery so antiquated that printers were reputed to have to blow black ink out of their nostrils for several hours after their shifts had ended. By 1989, it was losing $2,000,000 a month.

  In a bid to break the unions’ power, Hoge decided to take them on. He planned his campaign with meticulous precision. If they went on strike, as he was convinced they would, he intended to keep the News running with non-union labour – hence his appeal to out-of-town journalists to come to New York. In a former Sears warehouse in New Jersey, he even built a full-scale replica of the paper’s newsroom so that people could be properly trained beforehand. The warehouse was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and patrolled round the clock by security guards with German shepherd dogs.

  The choice was stark, Hoge told the unions. Either they had to accept new machinery and a dramatically reduced workforce, or else the paper was doomed. To no one’s surprise, negotiations swiftly broke down. On 20 October 1990, the News management dismissed most of its 2,400 unionized employees.

  War had effectively been declared.

  What followed was described as nothing less than a battle for the beating heart of New York. As well as using non-union journalists, Hoge also employed non-union delivery drivers. Their vans were regularly firebombed by enraged strikers and the drivers beaten up. Journalists who defied the strike were spat at as they passed through the picket line outside the newspaper’s offices. Protest rallies were broken up by police in riot gear. Both the Mayor, David Dinkins, and the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O’Connor, appealed for calm.

  No one took any notice.

  Then came Hoge’s most inflammatory move. Intimidated by the strikers, many of the city’s news vendors had vanished from the streets. In place of the vanished vendors, Hoge recruited homeless people to sell the paper. Predictably enough, this sent the temperature soaring still higher. ‘Hoge is using the most desperate group of people in our city to do his dirty work for him,’ said George McDonald, leader of the biggest union, the Allied Printing Trades Council. ‘The next thing you know he’ll be using poor children to peddle his scab rag.’

  Advertisers too had melted away. By 11 November 1990 the paper had shrunk to a third of its normal size and had just four full-page advertisements. By 12 December, less than two months into the strike, there had already been 888 ‘serious incidents’, 144 arrests, 66 injuries, 11 people hospitalized and 147 trucks either destroyed or damaged.

  Despite his efforts, Hoge had begun to suspect that this was a battle that no one could win. The paper’s owners, the Chicago Tribune, indicated that they’d had enough, and wanted to put the News up for sale. Just about the only thing that Hoge and McDonald had in common was the hope that someone might appear out of the blue to buy the paper – someone with apparently bottomless pockets and a keen appetite for wielding influence and shaping opinions. As McDonald put it, ‘Owning the Daily News is like a visiting card for sheikhs, kings and queens. It opens the door to people.’

  By February 1991, the paper was down to just twenty pages and circulation had fallen to less than 300,000. Gloom was so deeply entrenched that scarcely anyone paid the least attention when Robert Maxwell announced that he was interested in buying a US paper valued in ‘the mid-hundreds of millions of dollars’.

  And then came another blow. The city’s florists decided en masse not to use the paper to advertise their services in the week leading up to Valentine’s Day – traditionally its most profitable week of the year. On 4 March Hoge issued a statement. ‘The New York Daily News will cease publication on March 15th 1991 unless a binding agreement to sell the paper is reached by that date.’

  Unbeknownst to all but a few, Maxwell had already sent a representative to New York to sniff the air and make discreet overtures to both Hoge and the unions. Ian Watson was a wiry Scot who edited one of Maxwell’s papers, The European. He had his first taste of what might be involved when he took two union representatives out for dinner.

  What no one had thought to tell Watson beforehand was that the paper’s distribution had long been controlled by the Mafia. As well as taking a rake-off from sales, they also used its vans to deliver drugs to outlying areas. Over glasses of Chivas Regal, the three men had what Watson considered to be a perfectly amicable conversation about the necessity of accepting staff cuts.

  ‘I said to them, “Look gentlemen, we’re running out of time here. This paper will close in ten days’ time unless we get a deal with you guys. We’re the last hope you have.”

  ‘When I had finished, neither of them spoke for a while, and then one asked, “Have you ever been to New York before, Mr Watson?”’

  Watson said that he had, but not very often.

  ‘He said, “You’ve been extremely generous to us this evening, Mr Watson. Very generous indeed. And I want to return the favour. If you continue to put pressure like that on us, you and your fat boss will find yourself floating down the Hudson River with your fucking throats cut.’ ”

  They then stood up and left.

  Two days later, undeterred by Watson’s warnings, Maxwell made his carefully stage-managed entry into New York. The next morning Hoge had his first meeting with Maxwell in the headquarters of the publishers Macmillan on Fifth Avenue – Maxwell had bought the company at the end of 1988 for 2.6 billion dollars.

  Whatever Hoge had been expecting, it was not this. “I remember at one point a butler came in with a silver tray with Maxwell’s lunch on it. The butler put the tray down in front of him and went out. The next thing I know, I heard a loud crash. I looked up from whatever I was doing and Maxwell had picked up the tray and just dropped it on the floor. The butler came back in and said, “Yes sir?” And Maxwell said, “It’s cold. Bring me something else.” He then carried on working while the butler started picking everything off the floor. What struck me most was the fact that neither of them acted as if anything remotely unusual had happened.’

  To help him in his negotiations, Maxwell summoned a number of people from London. Among them was Richard Stott, the Editor of the Daily Mirror. When their flight landed, they went straight to Maxwell’s yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – named after his youngest daughter. There, Stott noticed something that made a big impression on him. Something that only lasted a fraction of a second, but which he found himself thinking about more and more in the months to come.

  ‘As we arrived, Maxwell was show
ing a group of schoolchildren around. When he saw us a sense of relief and almost pleasure came across his face for an instant, and then the mask was back. I don’t think it was because he was delighted to see us especially: it was because we were faces he knew. Just for a moment the loneliness of a man who delighted in meeting everyone and knowing no one showed through. It was the uncertainty and deep insecurity of the true outsider, a man who feels he has been precluded from the world of others and had therefore determined to build his own, with his own rules for his own game.’

  The next morning, when negotiations began in earnest, Maxwell took over the top floor of Macmillan and gave each union leader his own office. For the next four days, he scarcely slept, moving constantly from one office to another, subjecting the occupants to a barrage of threats, promises and flattery. The New York Times noted nervously that Maxwell had brought ‘a dash of British pomp and even a touch of Broadway showmanship’ to negotiations. The union leaders seemed just as bemused as Hoge. ‘He’s certainly got charisma,’ said one as he reeled out for a brief respite. ‘He’s like an English nobleman.’

  While no one could doubt how far Maxwell had climbed, there was a good deal of mystery about how he had got there. How had someone from his background developed such a lordly manner and plummy voice? Perhaps inevitably, not all the descriptions were complimentary. Some said he was a terrible bully with the hide of a rhinoceros. There were even rumours that his empire might not be in such blooming good health as he liked to make out, but these too were swept aside in the furore.

  At 4.22 p.m. on 14 March, with less than twenty-four hours to go before Hoge’s deadline expired, Maxwell emerged from the Macmillan entrance to Macmillan in his shirtsleeves.

  ‘We have a deal!’ he announced.

  The news galvanized the city. Outside the paper’s offices on 42nd Street, people on the picket lines broke into spontaneous dancing. Cardinal O’Connor offered prayers of thanks, while the Republican Senator for New York, Alfonse D’Amato, chimed in with a biblical analogy of his own. Nothing quite like it had been seen since Lazarus had been raised from the dead, he claimed.