Fall

The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron

John Preston

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062997517
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

Costa Prize Winner: The "best biography yet" of notorious media mogul Robert Maxwell, "by turns engrossing, amusing, and appalling" ( Sunday Times ). In February 1991, Robert Maxwell triumphantly sailed into New York Harbor on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to buy the ailing Daily News. Taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand, children asked for his autograph, and patrons of the hottest restaurant in Manhattan gave him a standing ovation while he dined. Ten months later, Maxwell disappeared off that same yacht in the middle of the night and was later found dead in the water. As John Preston, author of A Very English Scandal, reveals in this biography, Maxwell's death was as mysterious as his remarkable life. A tightly paced, addictive saga of ambition, hubris, narcissism, greed, power, and intrigue, this book recounts Maxwell's rise and fall and rise and fall again. Preston moves backward and forward in time to examine the forces that shaped Maxwell, from his Jewish childhood in occupied Eastern Europe to his failed political ambitions in the 1960s that ended in accusations of financial double-dealing to his resurrection as a media mogul—and the family legacy he left behind, including his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell. Preston chronicles Maxwell's all-encompassing rivalry with Rupert Murdoch—a battle that ruined Maxwell financially, threatened his sanity, and led, indirectly, to his death. Did Maxwell have a heart attack and fall overboard? Was his death suicide? Or was he murdered—possibly by Mossad or the KGB? Few in the twentieth century journeyed as far from his roots as Robert Maxwell. Yet, as Fall reveals, no one, however rich and powerful, can entirely escape their past. "Preston tells [the story] with great verve and the benefit of extensive interviews." — The Economist "The mystery of this larger-than-life figure is perplexing—true crime aficionados will be absorbed." — Library Journal "One of the most enigmatic figures in the annals of white-collar crime... well-researched, compelling." — Kirkus Reviews

1.

The Salt Mine

In the early 1920s, the Czechoslovak government, hoping to lure visitors to a remote province in the east of the country called Ruthenia, published a slim pamphlet listing the area’s attractions. There wasn’t a lot to see, the pamphlet admitted: ‘The very best thing here is fresh air.’ If you were very lucky, you might spot a wolf, or a wild boar, in the forest.

As for the people, there wasn’t much to recommend them either. According to the pamphlet, they were not only unusually thick, but apt to be surly with it: ‘The rather unintelligent Ruthenians, whose expression is almost blank-stare, sit in the market-place, side by side, gazing at the distance, seldom speaking a word or moving a muscle.’ A far better bet was Ruthenia’s large population of Jews, who were generally better-looking, more sophisticated and less grumpy.

In later life, Robert Maxwell seldom talked about his childhood, and what snippets of information he did provide tended to come richly coated in myth. Among the few things not in doubt are his date and place of birth: he was born on 10 June 1923 in a small town in Ruthenia called Solotvino, to a Jewish couple, Mehel and Chanca Hoch, and given – so he believed – the name Jan.

Just as Maxwell would go on to change his name four times by the age of twenty-three, so Solotvino too seemed unsure of its own identity. Originally on the southern edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the town became part of Czechoslovakia following the First World War. In the 1930s, it was reclaimed by Hungary before being absorbed into the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War.

It wasn’t so much that anyone particularly coveted Solotvino, simply that it stood on the border between two warring superpowers, right at the geographical centre of Europe. Then, as now, it was a bleak, isolated place, surrounded by thick pine forests and fields of sugar beet. In the winter, it was bitterly cold, in the summer swelteringly hot. The one thing that Solotvino did have was a salt mine. Unlike the rest of the town, this was a remarkable sight. An American visitor in 1938 wrote of standing on a little wooden catwalk watching the miners at work: ‘Below us yawned a gulf so profound that workers loading salt blocks looked as small as mice . . . Crystalline walls reflected twinkling lights. Around us, like the roar of a far-off waterfall, rumbled the echoes of pneumatic chisels, cutting this titanic temple vaster still.’

The salt mine was by far the largest employer in the area. But, when Solotvino was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jews were forbidden to work there. Although this rule was relaxed later, only six Jews ever found jobs in the mine. Even by Solotvino standards, the Hochs were desperately poor. Maxwell’s father earned a living, of sorts, buying animal skins from local butchers and selling them on to leather merchants, travelling from town to town with a mule laden with pelts.

At six foot five, he was known as ‘Mehel the Tall’. Unlike most of Solotvino’s inhabitants, who seem to have been involved in smuggling of one kind or another, Mehel was considered to be doggedly law-abiding. The family lived in a two-room wooden shack with earth floors. In one room, there were a couple of beds, where the family slept. Once a year, as soon as the harvest was gathered in, all the mattress stuffing would be taken outside and burned. Then the mattresses would be restuffed with fresh straw.

The Hochs would eventually have nine children and, as the family grew, newborn babies and toddlers slept in cots suspended on ropes from the ceiling. At night, they must have looked like a flotilla of little boats sailing through the darkness. In the other room, the family cooked, ate and washed – water had to be drawn from a pump down the street. Around the back of the shack was a pit latrine, which would be emptied every few months by passing gypsies and the contents spread on the municipal flowerbeds.

When he was eight days old, Maxwell was circumcised. To celebrate the event, his father decided the family should have a fish supper. Lacking a fishing rod, Mehel tossed a homemade Molotov cocktail into the river. Possibly he overdid the explosive; so many fish were killed in the ensuing blast that half of Solotvino reputedly gorged themselves as a result.

Maxwell was the Hochs’ third child, and first-born son. Their oldest daughter had died in infancy, and their oldest surviving son aged two, of diphtheria. From the moment Maxwell was born, his mother doted on him. She fed him titbits from her plate at mealtimes and, when he was six, sold her only pillow to pay for a sleigh to take him to the nearest hospital after he’d been kicked in the head by a horse. As he grew older, she passed on her interest in politics to him – she was an enthusiastic member of the Czechoslovakian Social Democratic Party.

Sometimes Maxwell would claim that he’d never really had a childhood: ‘I was never young. I never had that privilege.’ But there were three things above all he recalled about life in Solotvino: ‘I remember how cold I was, how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.’

For her part, Chanca Hoch was convinced that her son had been blessed with extraordinary gifts and was destined to make an impact on the world: ‘My boy will be famous one day,’ she repeatedly told a neighbour. ‘I just feel it and know it.’ This was such a ludicrous idea that it made even the normally dead-eyed Ruthenians fall about laughing.

If Maxwell adored his mother, he was terrified of his father. Mehel Hoch beat his son on a regular basis – often so hard that he broke his skin. On one occasion the young Maxwell threw up in the street. Grabbing him by the hair, his father rubbed his face in his vomit while passers-by looked on. The fear that his father engendered would never leave him, and nor would the shame he felt at being so frightened.

During the summer, the Hoch children ran around barefoot. In winter, two children would share one pair of shoes. Once a year a goose would be ceremonially slaughtered, but most of the time the family existed on a diet of maize, potatoes and watered-down milk. At home, the Hochs talked Yiddish, but, like most of the Jews in Solotvino, they also spoke another three languages – Hungarian, Czech and Romanian.

The teenage Maxwell was remembered later as being able ‘to take care of himself’ – and, by implication, anyone foolish enough to cross him – and ‘mischievous’. On the football pitch, he was described simply as ‘aggressive’. Already, it seems, Maxwell was learning to throw his weight around. As he would tell a family friend years later, ‘When in doubt, be brash like myself.’

Naturally left-handed, he was forced to write with his right hand at school as left-handedness was considered to be a sure sign of moral degeneracy. If Maxwell’s writing was – and would always remain – a barely legible scrawl, he was a keen reader with a remarkably retentive memory.

At eleven, his mother sent him to a yeshiva – a Jewish Orthodox free school – where he studied rabbinical literature for a year before moving on to a larger yeshiva in Bratislava. But he seems to have lost his appetite for rabbinical literature pretty quickly and gravitated instead to selling trinkets – mainly bead necklaces.

On 15 March 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. The next day Hungary formally annexed Ruthenia. In Bratislava, the fifteen-year-old Maxwell cut off his long sidelocks – payot – to make himself look less Jewish, then caught the train back to Solotvino. His sister Sylvia, six years his junior, recalled meeting him off the train: ‘We could barely recognize you. Instead of the shy yeshivabucher [Talmudic scholar] we expected, we saw in front of us a flashy young chap, the pre-war central European equivalent of a teddy boy.’

In Solotvino, the newly flash Maxwell found life suffocatingly dull. Just after his sixteenth birthday in June 1939 he decided to go to Budapest. The only time Maxwell ever talked about leaving his home town was in an interview he gave to Playboy magazine that appeared a month before his death: ‘The Hungarians were taking over that part of Czechoslovakia and I said to my parents, “I’m leaving because I want to go and fight.” They didn’t want me to go, but I went anyway.’

He would never see his mother, his father, his grandfather, three of his sisters or his younger brother again.

According to Maxwell’s account, he walked the 275 miles to Budapest, sleeping in haystacks and foraging food from hedgerows. Once there, he joined the Hungarian underground helping Czech exiles to escape to the West. In September, Hitler invaded Poland and war was declared.

Three months later, Maxwell was arrested at the Hungarian border and accused of spying – he’d been betrayed by the guide who was meant to be helping the Czechs escape. Brought back to Budapest, he spent the next four months manacled hand and foot in a windowless cell, being interrogated and beaten by the guards with rubber truncheons and bicycle chains. One blow across the face broke his nose.

Still Maxwell refused to talk. A few days later he was told that he’d been sentenced to death. At this point the French embassy took an interest – in the absence of a Czech embassy, the French had assumed responsibility for Czech citizens in Budapest. They protested that as Maxwell was still under eighteen he couldn’t be executed without being found guilty of something. Unwilling to provoke a diplomatic incident, the Hungarians hurriedly arranged a trial.

In January 1940, he was loaded into the back of a van and driven off to the courthouse. Nearly fifty years later, Maxwell was a guest on the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs. The presenter, Michael Parkinson, introduced him by saying, ‘If our castaway needed the money, which he doesn’t, he could sell his life story to Hollywood . . . It supports the theory that often truth is more exotic than fiction.’

Parkinson went on to ask Maxwell about being taken off to be tried back in 1940. ‘Because I was a youngster, I was only sent to the court with one guard instead of two,’ Maxwell told him. ‘He had lost an arm in the First World War. I escaped relatively easily and made my way into Yugoslavia.’

He went into more detail when talking to his official biographer, Joe Haines. In this version, Maxwell brought down his manacles on the guard’s head, knocking him unconscious, or possibly even killing him. Jumping out of the moving van, he hid under a bridge, where his handcuffs were removed by a ‘gypsy lady’.

Free at last, Maxwell hitched a train ride to Belgrade and met up with another group of young Czechs determined to join the War. From Belgrade, they went overland to Beirut, where they were put up in a Foreign Legion camp before boarding a ship for Marseilles.

Intriguing though this story is, it does beg a number of questions. However stretched the Hungarian prison service may have been at the time, it seems odd that they couldn’t rustle up a single two-armed guard to take him to court. In earlier versions of the story, Maxwell didn’t say anything about hitting the guard with his manacles – he claimed to have used a stick.

Nor did he say anything about a mysterious gypsy lady. Why hadn’t he thought her worth mentioning before? Had she simply slipped his mind? Then there’s the question of what was she doing under the bridge in the first place? Did she live there, or just conveniently happen to be passing with a lock-pick? Or could there be another explanation? Had she crept onstage at a later date from some colourful corner of Maxwell’s imagination?

Doubts have also been raised about other parts of his story. Two hundred and seventy-five miles is an awfully long way to walk, even for an energetic teenager. His cousin, Alex Pearl, insisted the two of them had gone together by train – with the tickets bought by their respective parents. Pearl remembered how excited they had both been by Budapest: ‘We had never seen paved roads, street cars, big houses or anything like it.’ The two of them had spent several days together before Maxwell, without warning or explanation, abruptly disappeared.

What does this prove? Only that Maxwell, for all his youthful heroism, had no qualms about embellishing the truth in order to paint himself in a more dashing light. There also seems something apt about such a keen self-mythologizer disappearing into the fog of war. Embracing the opportunities it offered for re-invention. By the time he emerged eighteen months later, he would have changed his religion, his age, his nationality and his name.

2.

Out of the Darkness

Before Robert Maxwell became Robert Maxwell, he was ‘Lance-Corporal Leslie Smith’. Before he was Lance-Corporal Leslie Smith, he was ‘Private Leslie Jones’, and before that he was ‘Ivan du Maurier’. He would also – for a brief period – be known as ‘Captain Stone’. Then, far in the distance, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, comes Jan Hoch.

There were good reasons for Maxwell to hide behind so many aliases: the German High Command had declared that any Czechs captured while fighting for the Allies would be shot. As for any captured Czechs who were found to be Jewish, they would be handed over to the Gestapo. Even so, the frequency with which Maxwell chopped and changed his name suggests that he rather liked slipping from one identity to another.

In April 1940, Hoch arrived in Marseilles. Along with several other Czech exiles who had been on the same train, he went straight to the recruiting office and joined the French Foreign Legion. This involved having to lie about his age, claiming to be seventeen when he was still two months short of his birthday. In June, all the Czech forces in France – there were around 10,000 of them – were formed into the 1st Czech Division and incorporated into the French army.

But by now the French were crumbling under the German advance, and after a few weeks the 1st Czechoslovak Division was told to retreat to the port of Sète on the southern French coast. Winston Churchill had promised the leader of the Czech Government in exile that any of his countrymen who wanted to carry on fighting for the Allies would be evacuated.

Arriving in Sète, the remnants of the 1st Czech Division (only 4000 of them made it) saw four Royal Naval destroyers waiting offshore. Anchored alongside them were three Egyptian transport ships. Two weeks later, in late July 1940, dressed in French army uniform, carrying a rifle in his hand and unable to speak a word of English, the yet-to-be Robert Maxwell stepped off the Mohamed Ali el-Kebir on to the dock at Liverpool.

Maxwell always claimed to have learned English in six weeks, from a woman who owned a tobacconist’s shop in Sutton Coldfield. But this doesn’t explain how he came to talk with such an extraordinarily plummy accent. It was only when he was uttering one of his characteristic Maxwellisms – somewhere between a proverb and a malapropism – that the mask would slip and it would become clear that English wasn’t his first language.

‘You can’t change toads in midstream,’ he would say gravely. Or, even more bafflingly, ‘They have locked the stable horse after the door has bolted.’

By the time he arrived in Liverpool, Maxwell had already listened to several of Winston Churchill’s speeches on the radio. It was this, he maintained later, that first inspired him to become British – despite his not being able to understand a word of English: ‘I could tell from the tone of his voice what he was saying.’ As far as his own accent was concerned, Maxwell seems to have taken Churchill’s rumbling cadences, then added an extra helping of treacle.

Certainly he had no compunction about yoking himself and Churchill together – ‘Like Winston, I wanted to fight on.’ But the chances of this happening looked extremely remote. To begin with, Maxwell and his fellow Czech exiles were housed in some hurriedl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 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