Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, by John Preston Peter Mckay

PETER MCKAY Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell

This account of the extraordinary life and mysterious death at sea of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, in November 1991, opens with Jazz Age novelist F Scott Fitzgerald’s elegiac description of his social-climbing anti-hero Jay Gatsby:

‘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.’

Born on 10th June 1923 in Solotvino, Ruthenia, in what was then Czechoslovakia, ‘Robert Maxwell’ was actually called Ján Ludvík by his parents, Mebel and Chanca Hoch, Jewish peasants who occupied an earthenfloored, two-room wooden shack with their nine children. Teenager Jan escaped to France after the Nazis closed in. Most of his family died in Auschwitz.

Having changed his name four times by the time he was 23, he denied he was Jewish until close to the end. Wife Betty, a French Protestant with whom he had nine children – two of them died – believed that a visit they both made to Solotvino altered his feelings for ever.

‘He was convinced that, had he stayed at home, he could have saved the lives of his parents and younger siblings. Nothing he had achieved in life would ever compensate for what he had not been able to accomplish – the rescue of his family.’

Near the end of his life, Maxwell visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Tearfully, the ‘billionaire’ said there, ‘We were very poor. We didn’t have the things that other people had. They had shoes and food and we didn’t. At the end of the war, I discovered the fate of my parents and my sisters and brothers, relatives and neighbours. I don’t know what went through their minds as they realised they had been tricked into a gas chamber.’

He had once told his sensitive eldest son, Philip, ‘Unlike you, I keep the door to my haunted inner chamber firmly closed.’

Preston is unsparing in his account of Maxwell’s megalomania, greed, commercial duplicity and general grossness. We are told that he once ate half of his family’s 40-pound Christmas turkey, drove a car at 90mph while shaving and was described by Clive James as looking like ‘a ton and a half of half-cured ham wrapped in a white tuxedo’.

The Savoy’s chief barber dyed his hair and eyebrows coal-black once a week and on one occasion he sent a lackey to London on Concorde to pick up medals he wanted to wear at a New York dinner.

He ritually ‘peed over the side of the building’ before departing the Mirror’s Holborn HQ by private helicopter, disallowed the paper’s prize-winners for being ‘too middle class’ and, after being put in charge of House of Commons catering, shipped the best wines to the cellar of his rented Oxford mansion.

The bigger sins seem greatly to overwhelm his virtues. He won a Military Cross for bravery under fire in the Second World War, but he was known as ‘Killer Maxwell’ for the alleged pleasure he took in murdering captured Germans. He was praised for revolutionising academic publishing with his Pergamon Press.

It is suggested this was based on texts he looted from postwar Germany, with the connivance of our own MI6, with whom he was in cahoots. Hailed after his death as ‘The Man Who Saved the Mirror’, he had in fact used it