Maxwell, The Outsider

by Tom Bower

  At six minutes past noon on 17 June 1987, on the first floor of the red-topped Mirror building in Holborn, central London, Robert Maxwell began squeezing behind a row of sober-suited men who nodded their welcome as he took his place in their midst. Quietly, he called to order the twenty-fourth annual general meeting of the British Printing and Publishing Corporation. In his lifetime, Maxwell chaired hundreds of similar meetings and followed the routine as prescribed by law. The accounts are 'read' and approved, directors are recommended and re-elected and questions can be asked. On some notable occasions, in the more turbulent episodes of his career, the timetable was delayed by outbursts of enmity and screams of abuse. But on this occasion, the smooth, genial but slightly impatient chairman has no fear of interruption or of embarrassment. As befits the hailed saviour of Europe's biggest printing company, he exudes the self-confidence of a man convinced that his manifest destiny is to command one of the world's biggest communications corporations.

  The highlight on this occasion was Maxwell's announcement that in the course of the previous year the corporation had passed important milestones on its way to becoming 1 a global information communications company before the end of the decade, with annual revenues of £3-5 billion and earnings per share to match'. For a company which was bankrupt five years earlier, Maxwell's ambitions were audacious. He was promising nothing less than an eleven- to eighteen-fold rate of expansion in just four years. In the past, he was officially censured for his reckless optimism but he never conceded any wrongdoing. On the contrary, he always pleaded that he has been the victim of wilful misunderstanding and much worse. It is a measure of his defiance that his accusers never enjoyed long-lasting satisfaction. Nevertheless, on this occasion from the audience one shareholder was sufficiently bold to challenge his latest prophecy. To the laymen, the shareholder's query was technical but the cognoscenti gathered in the room immediately recognised its pertinence. Would Maxwell actually promise, he asked, that the share earnings would increase eleven-fold? Maxwell began to answer when a young lawyer interrupted and there were whispered consultations. Maxwell's eyes were suddenly covered by a sheen: ‘I’m afraid that I cannot give any assurances because it would be in breach of the law.' The shareholder was puzzled because he had just read that very assurance on the first page of the corporation's glossy annual report. But he found no sympathy among others in the audience. No one present would dare to challenge the chairman. 'Next business,' smiled Maxwell.

  A clutch of directors was re-elected and the meeting was drawing to a close when from the edge of the room a stocky, bespectacled, grey-suited middle-aged man interrupted. It was Henry Poole, an analyst at the broking firm of Alexanders, Laing and Cruickshank who, as an expert on the printing industry and BPPC's broker, had recently written laudatory reports about the publisher's 'sense of vision'. His opening remarks made it clear that the intervention had in fact been carefully planned. 'Mr Maxwell', said Poole, 'had given me some notes of what to say but I threw them away.' Alternating his gaze between his client and their audience, Poole then uttered the most grievous heresy: 'Sixteen years ago the chairman was judged to be a man who was unfit to be the steward of a public company . . .' A ripple of embarrassment extended across the room as eyes darted from Poole to Maxwell and back again. Maxwell's eyes were covered again by a sheen as he feared that something untoward was occurring which was beyond his control. It seems that Robert Maxwell has borne every accusation, apart from being drunk in the House of Commons, that was borne by Mr Melmotte.' The silence intensified. Melmotte is described as a 'horrid big rich scoundrel ... a bloated swindler ... a vile city ruffian' who came from a mysterious background to make a fortune in the City from dealing which included Russia. Melmotte had been destroyed by a financial scandal. The tension had increased. 'Mr Maxwell is not a Melmotte.' Whatever eulogy he had intended could not have surpassed what followed. 'But I say to those who are here today who manage the pension and investment funds that they are unfit to be the managers of those funds if they do not recognise the achievements of Mr Maxwell and invest in this company.' Relief and a weak smile from the publisher. The embarrassment was neatly averted and the tension passed. The homage was over. Fifteen minutes later, at the lunch, Poole would sit on the publisher's right hand as the honoured guest.

  This is a story about a man who used and abused people, -who aroused fervent loyalty, fear and disdain among otherwise rational and strong human beings, and whose reputation suffered the misfortune of his best attempts to offer his truth. His impatience for reform was matched by his aggressive search for the power to dictate the pace of an erratic agenda for change. Unlike in the United States, the trail in modern Britain from log cabin to mansion is a perilous saga. The Isles' ruling gentry look askance at brazen ambition and uninherited wealth. They loathe immodesty more than dishonesty. Robert Maxwell's story is about the tenacity of a man who not long ago approved the superimposition of a halo highlight upon an old photo-portrait of himself for a magazine. The caption beneath read, 'Multi-faceted talent'. Maxwell courted publicity too eagerly to be of profound interest to independently thinking men. His earnest desire to sit in the eye of the world tickles the media's interest but suggests an empire built upon sand. Even the most robust qualities of the most upright citizen are eventually eroded by vanity. Twice

  in his career Maxwell's vainglory consigned him to commercial oblivion but the same vanity propelled his recovery. Throughout his life the pattern remained consistent. His personality and methods never changed. The portents for his last dash for glory were both favourable and ominous.

  1

  Robert Maxwell was born on 10 June 1923 in Slatinske Doly (or Aknazlatina), a small Ruthenian village in the midst of extensive, dark forests wedged between the jagged Carpathian mountains and the River Tisza, which marked the Czech-Romanian border. The region of his birthplace was probably the most primitive and impoverished on the whole European continent. According to legend, the six thousand inhabitants of Slatinske Doly could not even afford a cemetery - either they emigrated or the birds ate their corpses from the gallows. Life for these people resembled that of villagers in western Europe a century before. In 1923, Slatinske Doly was part of the new Czechoslovakian state, but to the Prague government the citizens eking a meagre existence in Carpo-Ruthenia were little better than serfs or vagabonds. Spiritually, however, the region was unique. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, there had grown up a thriving Jewish community, whose attitudes and instincts were inherited by Maxwell and were to propel him through life.

  Most of the two thousand Jews who lived in Slatinske Doly, a quarter of the population, were docile and uncommercial, simple peasants who were castigated by the more entrepreneurial Jews in the neighbouring town of Sziget as Luftmenschen - people who live on air. Most of the villagers failed to earn a regular income but somehow found ways to survive. Among the poorest was Maxwell's own father, Mechel Hoch, a tall, hard-working peasant who earned a pittance buying cattle from farmers for resale to local butchers and later selling the hides to leather-workers. When times were hard, he supplemented his income by casual work as a woodcutter or a farm labourer especially at harvest time. Mechel was religious though not ultra-Orthodox; occasionally he taught the Talmud to local children and served as an official in one of the village's wooden synagogues. Maxwell's relationship with his father was not particularly close, partly because Mechel spent much of his time travelling around the countryside looking for cattle deals and partly because he was very attached to his mother and her father.

  Mechel's wife Hannah Schlomovitch was the classic Jewish mother, managing and ruling the household. Undaunted by the struggle that was her daily life, she was fiercely ambitious for her two sons and five daughters and was renowned for her enormous curiosity. Her nephew Alex Pearl remembers that 'She picked up every piece of newspaper in the street to discover what was going on. She was always interested in everything.' Her cousin Lazar Schlomovitch, now a professor in Los Angele
s, recalls that she was 'an exception in the village because she read books. She was almost an intellectual.' Like all wives in the Orthodox Jewish community, Hannah cooked only kosher food and ensured that her children regularly attended the local religious school and went daily to the synagogue.

  The Hochs and their seven children lived in two rooms in a rented house. During the winter their staple diet was potatoes but in summer there were other vegetables from the garden, a monotony that was lightened on Saturdays and religious holidays by meat and occasionally gefillte fish. In summer all the children walked barefoot. In winter, the shoes were normally shared: one child would wear a pair to school in the morning while another wore the same shoes in the afternoon. 'We didn't understand "happiness",' says Pearl, 'except on Saturdays when there was different food on our plates.' Maxwell's childhood was dominated by the poverty and by the ineradicable conditioning of purist Judaism.

  The genesis of the family name Hoch is characteristic of the culture which surrounded Maxwell. The leading Jewish families of Slatinske Doly bore classic names like Schlomovitch, Shaiovitch and Kra'ama'are. The poor families, especially the new arrivals, were usually nameless. Before 1914, that defect was remedied at regular intervals by Hungarian officials who visited isolated communities to complete a census. For one whole day, the villagers had to remain inside their houses while officials interviewed each family. Invariably among the arrivals were Jews who bore no family name recognisable to the Hungarians. Accordingly, the officials assigned the family a 'name' prompted by the Jew's trade or by any remarkable peculiarity. According to legend, one census in the region was executed on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays. That evening in synagogue, the village discovered that those families 'named' at the end of the day were all called Weiss (white): the census officials had noted that those Jews, already dressed for the evening service, were wearing their long, white tallis and named them accordingly. In the case of Maxwell's forefathers, the census officials noticed that the head of the family was tall or (in German) hoch.

  Carpo-Ruthenia's change of nationality in 1919 from Hungarian to Czech directly affected Maxwell's forename. At birth, his father called him Abraham Lajbi but on registration at the local town hall the Czech government official insisted that the birth certificate record a Czech name. Hence Lajbi became Ludvik and the name 'Jan' was added to establish that the newborn boy was a true Czech citizen.

  Although Jan Ludvik Hoch personally lived amid gross material poverty, throughout his short childhood he witnessed his isolated community undergoing the most dramatic changes: the Jews were winning their struggle to survive; the hitherto close-knit Orthodox community was bitterly divided by political and religious disagreements; and some Jews in the locality were enjoying an unexpected windfall from smuggling, which earned the village the title of klein Amerika. So Maxwell experienced a century's evolution compressed into half a generation. His attitudes towards people, business, authority and family life were all fashioned by the revolution which was affecting the Jews in that remote strip of Ruthenia.

  The first Jewish settlers had arrived in the area in 1526 as refugees from the Turkish invasion of Hungary but the bedrock of the community were those who fled Polish Galicia in 1648 to escape the vicious pogroms provoked by the Chmielnicki revolt. Although Slatinske Doly was a refuge, they were still subject to rigid anti-Jewish laws. Maxwell's family, like most of his neighbours, were Maramaros Jews who, according to an historical survey, are distinguished by their particularly 'conservative, strongly Jewish character, strong physique, and their sane though simple viewpoint, as well as their ability and willingness to work'. Jacob Taba became the first Jew to be registered in the village in 1728 after renting a smallholding from an absent landowner. One hundred years later, the registered Jewish community had grown to forty-three families (218 people), most of whom worked for local farmers and owned privately one cow and one horse. United by their religion and by their common language, Yiddish, they lived apart from the indigenous and equally poverty-stricken Russian Orthodox Ruthenian peasants.

  Life began to change during the nineteenth century when the huge saltmines in the neighbouring village were expanded to supply the mineral to most of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Jews were banned by law from working in the mines, but they could service the workers who were pouring into the area. Three well-established families in Slatinske Doly were permitted to open a salt mill, a flour mill and a lumber mill. Selected Jews were licensed to sell alcohol and meat while others supplemented their income by selling groceries, household goods and clothes. All of them subsisted on bread made of oats and maize, except on the Sabbath when they ate white challah bread, with meat and geflllte fish on holidays. The peasants' diet hardly changed over two centuries.

  Despite its economic deprivations, the region enjoyed a diversity of cultures from the steady flow of transients. Over the centuries, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Hungarians and Jews settled amid the Ruthenians and were ruled in turn by the Russians and the Hungarians. Hence Maxwell was born into a world where languages were not a barrier and living among different nationalities was normal. But his religion was quite special.

  Endemic anti-semitism pervaded the whole of central Europe, but the Jews in Slatinske Doly led relatively peaceful lives except when Russian Orthodox priests delivered Easter sermons attacking the murderers of Christ. At the time of Maxwell's birth, most of Slatinske Doly's Jews were devoutly religious Hassidim who had abandoned their peasant clothes for long beards, frock coats and the large, round Shtreimel hat which is edged with pieces of fur. The Hochs were not Hassidic Jews but, like all the boys in the village, Maxwell wore a black skull cap day and night, with long ringlets of hair dangling in front of his ears. Under the disciplined leadership of the rabbis, Maxwell grew up amid the distinctive rituals of an Orthodox sect. With his parents and friends, he spoke Yiddish; at the daily religious classes, he learned Hebrew; and he duly learned a smattering of Hungarian and Ruthenian to converse with the neighbouring goyim and some Czech in his teens.

  The village's life had been abruptly changed in 1919, four years before Maxwell's birth, by the Allied leaders at the Versailles peace conference redrawing the map of Europe. Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's founding father, had arrived in France to negotiate the creation of the new state without contemplating the inclusion of Carpo-Ruthenia because its inhabitants were neither Czechs nor Slovaks. But, to his surprise, lobbyists representing the Carpo-Ruthenians who had recently emigrated to America pressured his delegation to embrace their homeland. Masaryk calculated that there were considerable advantages in pleasing the new Americans and agreed to their demands. Ninety thousand Jews who thought they were to become nationals of the Autonomous Soviet Republic of Pedkarpatska Rus, or Sub-Carpathian Russia, became instead citizens of the federal state of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia within Czechoslovakia's stable democracy. The effect on Slatinske Doly's Jews was considerable. Suddenly, they were cut off from their neighbours in Sziget on the other side of the River Tisza and they had to shift their focus from Budapest to Bratislava and Prague. Slovaks and Czechs, eager for business, quickly began to search for opportunities, and the Jews, especially those in Slatinske Doly, soon suffered from the influx of investment.

  Overnight, the Jews also experienced a fundamental change in their status. To avoid nationalistic tensions and remove any sense of allegiance towards Hungary, Masaryk's government granted the Jews Czech nationality but also allowed them to register as Jewish nationals. The recognition of Jews as a separate nationality coincided with an outburst of Zionism in eastern Europe by which Slatinske Doly, a transit centre for Ukrainian and Polish refugees en route to Palestine, was particularly affected. The new Zionists, who were often also Communists, clashed passionately with Slatinske Doly's Jews. Maxwell grew up amid this unprecedented upheaval among the faithful.

  The education of one's children, regardless of poverty, is an important pillar of Jewish tradition; although
Maxwell maintained that he was 'self-educated', he, like all the children of the village, received seven years' schooling albeit of a kind unlike any present-day model. To the irritation of the Jews, the Ruthenian schools in Slatinske Doly emphasised Christianity and the indigenous culture, so, since the village was too small to attract government funds, the Jewish community organised its own education. Accordingly, unlike the Ruthenians, Maxwell was literate by the age of eight, initially in the Hebrew alphabet only. Throughout his life, he found handwriting difficult and his efforts were practically illegible. Children attended the village school only up to the age of eleven; thereafter most families sent their children to secondary religious schools known as Yeshivos in the larger towns. Mechel Hoch could not afford to send his son to the towns nor was he prepared to accept charity of another Jewish household. Maxwell was sent to an inferior Yeshivo in the village, where he is remembered by his friends as precocious, energetic and intelligent. But during the holidays, because the family was so big, Maxwell was sent to stay with relatives in nearby Kosice who worked in the timber business. Occasionally he remained in Kosice beyond the holidays and attended the local Hebrew school. The pressure for self-improvement, characteristic enough of Jewish families, had become more intense as a result of the village's birth-rate explosion coupled with a lower incidence of infant mortality. For Maxwell, one of seven children, it was obvious that he would need to make his own way since there was no family business. 'We always knew that he would leave and make his fortune somewhere else,' says Pearl. 'He would have probably gone to his uncle in America because we all knew that there was no future in the village.'