Fall Page 6

  And then, on its way to Canada, the freighter carrying the concrete sprang a leak. Seawater flooded the hold, the cement set rock-hard, the freighter barely made it into harbour and the entire consignment was lost.

  Maxwell’s business career had begun modestly enough. Four years earlier, he had bought ninety shares in a company called Low-Bell, set up the previous year by another Czech émigré, called Arnos Lobl. Low-Bell traded in an extensive range of goods, including caustic soda, Turkish carpets, deer skins, eucalyptus oil and dried sardines.

  Lobl left soon afterwards and the company became Low-Bell & Maxwell.

  It may have had a grand address at 133 Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square, but the office consisted of a single room, whose only window was obscured by a large billboard for Ivor Novello’s new musical, Perchance to Dream. It was also the headquarters of EPPAC – the European Periodicals Publicity and Advertising Company Ltd – which was both the British agent for Springer-Verlag and the supplier of German newspapers to the few German prisoners of war left in the country.

  In order to distribute the scientific journals he’d imported from Germany, Maxwell realized that he needed to join forces with an established publisher. He approached a company called Butterworth & Co., publishers of medical and legal textbooks, whose Managing Director – a man called Major John Whitlock – had also been an Intelligence Officer. Whitlock suggested that Maxwell should go and see their financial advisers, Hambros Bank.

  Sir Charles Hambro, the Chairman of Hambros Bank, had been an original member of the Special Operations Executive, SOE, forerunners of the modern SAS. He too had close links to British Intelligence. Hambro took an immediate shine to Maxwell. After just twenty minutes of listening to him outline his plans, he took the remarkable decision to issue him with a chequebook, telling him he could draw up to £25,000 with it – more than £350,000 today.

  Would Hambro have been so eager to help someone who didn’t share his and Whitlock’s Intelligence background? It seems unlikely.

  In April 1949, Maxwell became the Managing Director of Butterworth’s new subsidiary, Butterworth–Springer Ltd. Six months later he set up another new company, Lange, Maxwell & Springer, to be the sole UK distributor for Butterworth–Springer. In 1950, LM&S had a turnover of £250,000. By 1951, it had gone up to £600,000. The same year, Maxwell changed the name of Butterworth–Springer to Pergamon, the town in Asia Minor whose legendary altar is believed to have served as the model for ‘the seat of Satan’ in the Book of Revelations.

  It’s hard to exaggerate the impact that Maxwell had on the tweedy, genteel, hopelessly antiquated world of British publishers. While there were a number of Jewish émigrés who would transform British publishing after the war, none of them were like Maxwell. With his blustery manner, his electric ties, his newly grown pencil moustache and what one employee called his ‘sledgehammer personality’, he made an unforgettable impression.

  At the same time, darkness – and the whiff of chicanery – was never far away. According to Desmond Bristow, Maxwell continued working for British Intelligence throughout the 1950s, collecting useful information from the scientific conferences he went to, as well as passing on misinformation that MI6 had provided him with. ‘He started supplying, from our point of view, pretty spurious stuff to the Russians.’

  Meanwhile Sir Charles Hambro continued to take a close interest in Maxwell’s activities. One of his associates at Hambros Bank was yet another former spy, called Count Vanden Heuvel. Popularly known as ‘Fanny the Fixer’, Heuvel had been MI6’s wartime Station Chief in Berne.

  In early 1951, Maxwell, Fanny the Fixer and Arthur Coleridge, the Managing Director of a once-prosperous book wholesaler called Simpkin Marshall, met up for a drink in the Savoy Hotel.

  Although Simpkin Marshall had 125,000 books in print and an annual turnover of a million pounds, its glory days were long gone. Now it was slipping towards bankruptcy and frantically casting around for a buyer. By the end of the evening, Maxwell had agreed to pay £50,000 of the company’s debts, with another £110,000 to come over the next nine years. In return, he took over as Managing Director.

  For Maxwell, it was an astonishingly good deal. For Simpkin Marshall, it would quickly turn into a disaster. Just like Butterworth’s, they had no idea what had hit them. Immediately, Maxwell moved the company’s stock to 242–244 Marylebone Road and rechristened the building Maxwell House. No one knew what to make of this. Was it a joke? If so, it was a very un-English sort of joke, being both absurdly self-aggrandizing and calculated to annoy the manufacturers of Maxwell House coffee – then the biggest selling brand of instant coffee in America.

  Where had the money to buy Simpkin Marshall come from? Not from MI6 this time, but almost entirely from Kurt Wallersteiner, who agreed to lend Maxwell £50,000. A year later, in 1952, Maxwell asked him for another loan – this time for £100,000. Wallersteiner, whose willingness to do business with Maxwell doesn’t appear to have been adversely affected by their difficulties with the condemned pork, was happy to oblige.

  In return, he received a block of shares in Simpkin Marshall – shares which, Maxwell assured him, would soon be yielding a healthy dividend. Business appeared to be booming. By now Maxwell had become a major figure in British publishing. Everywhere, he was founding companies and doing deals – deals to sell books, deals to buy books, deals to open up new markets. One of his great coups was persuading the Russians to take large quantities of medical and scientific periodicals; hitherto the Russians had been staunchly resistant to doing business with the West.

  Amid this whirl of activity, it would be easy to imagine that Maxwell didn’t care much, if at all, about what he was publishing, that he would have been equally at home selling Turkish carpets, or dried sardines. But the truth was more complicated. Although Maxwell always had one eye fixed on his profit margins, every so often the other would give off an unexpectedly idealistic gleam. Later in life, he would tell his official biographer, Joe Haines, that it was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that made him aware of the role science was going to play in the modern age. As a result, he came to see that, properly harnessed, science could benefit the world instead of bringing it to the edge of destruction.

  Although this may sound suspiciously like something dreamed up for a corporate brochure, it’s quite possible that Maxwell was being sincere. Even his swelling band of detractors would have to admit that he effectively invented modern scientific publishing in Britain. By giving scientists a far bigger platform to disseminate their research than they’d ever had before, Maxwell completely changed the way in which science was conducted, both in Britain and around the world. This in turn would pave the way for a number of key breakthroughs in physics and medicine.

  But while idealism was one thing, business was quite another. In October 1953, Wallersteiner had what proved to be a nasty shock. When he asked for his £100,000 back, Maxwell offered him more shares in Simpkin Marshall. These shares, Maxwell told him, would give Wallersteiner 20 per cent of Simpkin’s profits. Another few months would go by before it dawned on Wallersteiner that there never were going to be any profits. Far from thriving, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

  Wallersteiner had another shock when he announced that he intended to call a creditors’ meeting to get to the bottom of the matter: Maxwell slapped an injunction on him. Under the terms of the injunction, Wallersteiner was forbidden from contacting any other Simpkin Marshall creditors. However, Maxwell could do nothing to stop him from engaging a firm of City accountants – Peat Marwick – to examine Simpkin Marshall’s books.

  Peat Marwick’s report made grim reading. It concluded that the company was even more deeply in debt than Wallersteiner had suspected. What’s more, it turned out Maxwell had used money borrowed on behalf of Simpkin Marshall to shore up his other concerns – essentially, he’d been asset-stripping the main business while switching the loans about from one company to another to make them appear more successful. This ma
y have been the first time that Maxwell had used such a ploy, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  The news soon leaked out. In June 1955, 200 creditors voted to bring in the Official Receiver to wind up Simpkin Marshall. ‘It appears doubtful whether the company was at any time solvent,’ the Receiver declared.

  An unabashed Maxwell took it on the chin. ‘I’ve come down flat on my arse,’ he said. ‘But I’m going back up again. And I’ll stay up.’

  The affair not only sharpened his determination to prove himself; it left him with a deep-seated loathing of the British Establishment. With their snobbery and their petty-mindedness, their ways were never going to be his ways. In part, this was because they tended to abide by the rules while he ignored them, but, typically, Maxwell didn’t see it like that. ‘If a gentleman of the Establishment offers you his word or his bond,’ he was fond of saying, ‘always go for his bond.’

  Never slow to nurse a grievance, he became convinced that the Establishment was out to thwart him. In one sense, of course, he was right. However much he longed to be an English gentleman, it must have dawned on Maxwell by now that he would never be allowed to join the club. He could change his name, his accent and his religion, but ultimately it made no difference. Always, he would be on the outside, both hammering on the glass trying to get in, and determined to make mincemeat of everyone behind it.

  As for Kurt Wallersteiner – possibly wiser and certainly poorer than before – he returned to what he knew best. The next year he attracted the attention of the US Justice Department for trying to organize the importation into the USA of ‘a quantity’ of gallnuts from communist China, something that put him in violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act. Gallnuts are swellings on the bark of trees caused by particular types of parasite. They are mainly used in the manufacture of clothing dyes.

  5.

  Mortality

  By the time Kurt Wallersteiner came to the notice of the US Justice Department, Robert Maxwell had learned he was dying. One day in September 1955, Betty had found him sitting at his desk in the house they had recently bought in Esher, racked by pains in his chest. X-rays revealed malignant tumours in both lungs. The specialist told him that he had no more than four weeks to live.

  As he faced the prospect of imminent death, Maxwell cast around for any crumbs of comfort that religion could provide. He talked to a Christian Scientist, the Chief Rabbi, a Roman Catholic priest and a Church of England vicar, but none of them were able to convince him that God existed, still less that there might be an afterlife. Instead, he spent hours lying in his hospital bed gazing at a Chinese picture of a prancing horse which Betty had hung on the wall.

  ‘That picture now came to signify life itself and Bob would look at it with tears in his eyes.’

  Maxwell was now the father of six children: Michael, Anne, Philip, twin girls Christine and Isabel, and Karine. As he told Betty, he hoped to have the same number of children as his parents – nine – thereby re-creating the family he had lost. But it looked as if this ambition, along with all his others, was about to be thwarted. Allowed out of hospital for a final weekend, Maxwell spent it making plans for the childrens’ education and organizing the future of Pergamon. Among the visitors that weekend was Pat Savage, a master at Summer Fields school where Maxwell’s older son, Michael, then nine years old, had recently started. Before lunch Maxwell took Savage for a walk round the grounds of their house.

  ‘He then confided to me the shattering news that he had cancer in both his lungs. As we walked around the house, Bob pointed to the tennis courts. “It is quite incredible,” he said, “that a month or so ago I was playing on that court – and in another month I shall be dead.”’

  When Maxwell returned to hospital, his children were brought to his bedside to say their farewells. ‘We had decided to tell the children only that daddy needed an operation and had to go back to hospital,’ Betty recalled. ‘But I saw the agony in Bob’s eyes as he said goodbye to all the little ones for what he really thought might be the last time.’ His daughter Isabel, then aged four, remembers being taken to the hospital. ‘I had no idea I was supposed to say goodbye – my mother hadn’t said anything about his being ill beforehand. I can remember him being in bed and my saying “Hello, Daddy”, but that’s all.’

  At first neither Maxwell nor Betty thought to question the specialist’s diagnosis. It was only a week after Pat Savage’s visit that Betty decided to seek a second opinion: she asked the radiologist who had treated George VI, Peter Kerley, to take new X-rays. While these revealed a tumour in one lung, the other turned out to be a false alarm – nothing more than ‘the shadow of an excrescence’ on his rib. Kerley recommended that the tumour be removed for a biopsy, along with the tissue surrounding it. In all, Maxwell lost half a lung. The operation was followed by a nine-day wait for the results: ‘Bob, now mentally alert and in dreadful pain, became despondent and just did not seem to recover the will to live.’

  When the results eventually came through, the tumour turned out to be benign.

  Maxwell’s brush with mortality left him with an enduring sense of living on borrowed time, and prompted him to bang his own drum even more forcefully than before. He also gave up smoking cigarettes – previously he’d been a sixty-a-day man.

  In 1956, hoping to announce himself to the world as a cultural grandee, Maxwell put up the money for a filmed production of Giselle by the Bolshoi Ballet starring the world’s leading ballerina, Galina Ulanova. It was filmed over two nights at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, but as Maxwell didn’t have enough money to pay for an orchestra, the dancers had to dance to taped music while the conductor was filmed waving his arms about in an empty orchestra pit. In the event, filming overran by several hours – mainly because Maxwell kept clambering up on stage and telling an increasingly infuriated Ulanova what to do.

  Then came an even more devastating blow. In January 1957, Maxwell and Betty were on holiday in Barbados when they received a telegram telling them that their three-year-old daughter, Karine, had developed a high temperature and been taken to hospital. Immediately they caught a plane back to London. When they arrived, they learned that Karine had been diagnosed with leukaemia.

  In the hope of finding a cure, Maxwell wrote letters to all the world’s leading leukaemia specialists, including one to a Swedish doctor: ‘Quite recently my little daughter has been stricken with leukaemia. I am sending you a copy of the report of her case, as well as some slides, and ask you to let me know whether you, or anyone else whom you know, have anything “in the works” of an experimental nature which could be tried to save or to prolong her life. In the hope that you or your colleagues may soon come up with an answer to this terrible scourge, I, as her father, thank you in advance on her behalf, as well as mine, for whatever you might be able to do.’

  Maxwell must have thought there was a chance that such a direct approach might work; after all, it had done before. When Isabel and Christine had been born in Paris in 1950, both of them contracted infantile cholera. Neither was expected to survive. Maxwell, who was in Berlin at the time, managed to obtain supplies of an experimental drug which had never been used on humans before. Driving through the night, he headed for Paris. When he arrived, he drove his car straight through the security barrier at the hospital. The girls were then given injections of the drug directly into their heads. Within a few days they had recovered. Subsequently all the children at the hospital who were suffering from cholera were given the drug and it later became the standard treatment.

  But this time there was to be no last-minute reprieve. Before Karine could be moved to a hospital in Boston for treatment, she died in her father’s arms. Isabel Maxwell remembers her and her twin sister, Christine, being told of her death: ‘There seemed to be a great commotion in the house. We went to our parents’ bedroom door, but it was closed. My mother opened it and her eyes were red with tears. Somebody said, or she said, that Karine had died. Although I can remember hearing the words, we
didn’t really understand anything – we were only six years old. We couldn’t cry or anything like that. Instead we just went back upstairs and carried on playing with some dolls. But I do remember feeling very strange as we sat there playing.’

  Karine’s death shattered Bob and Betty Maxwell. ‘My heart was torn apart,’ Betty wrote later. But while she was prostrate with grief, Maxwell, she noticed, kept his feelings carefully stoppered up. ‘Bob did not express his sadness openly; he seemed to contain it within himself.’

  Fiercely resistant to any glimmer of introspection, Maxwell’s response to misfortune was to immerse himself in activity. Over the next year he travelled so much that he became the British airline BOAC’s first passenger to fly one million miles. Karine’s death changed him in other ways too. Now there was an emotional distance to him too, Betty noticed. ‘In the normal course of events, we barely saw each other at all.’

  It’s possible that Maxwell had other reasons for his emotional reserve. Not long before Karine fell ill, Betty had begun to suspect he was having an affair with his PA, Anne Dove. Just like Sir Charles Hambro, Dove had been in SOE during the war. Whether or not Hambro had a hand in her appointment, he was certainly happy about it: ‘Charles told me that he was pleased I was with Maxwell looking after things,’ Dove recalled.

  When interviewed for the job, Dove had been greatly taken by Maxwell’s ‘tremendous life-force’. Since then, Betty realized that ‘relations had certainly gone beyond those of employer and personal assistant – much to my dismay’. Meeting them both off a plane from Moscow, ‘I sensed with the unerring instinct of a wife in love, that I had to fight back to oust an intruder from my patch.’

  Betty decided to write her husband a letter in which she ‘poured out all my pent-up sorrow at the way he had shattered my blind faith in him’. Maxwell’s reply managed to combine contrition, self-pity and denial to a masterly degree: ‘I have been suffering terribly and have tortured myself into a stupor because of the terrible pain and unhappiness that I have caused you. I do not say this because I want you to lavish any sympathy on me, but so as to show you how deeply sensitive and affected I am whenever anything seriously happens to cause you misery or harm . . . I swear I love you and only you. I have not betrayed you. I love you, believe me, please.’