Maxwell, The Outsider

by Tom Bower

  Bill Keyes believed that Maxwell was serious. After their violent stand-up rows about the closure of Park Royal, which the union had lost, Keyes had won a notable victory over Maxwell in their last dispute in April 1984. Printers had occupied the computer floor at Maxwell House. In retaliation, Maxwell issued a writ claiming damages from the union under the 1982 Employment Act. Keyes had been appalled that a socialist should use Tory legislation and was even more so when the Court imposed a £75,000 fine. ‘I told Maxwell that we weren't going to pay,' says Keyes, 'and we'd never meet him again.' Keyes was 'shocked' that Maxwell could claim to be a member of the Labour Party. On a Sunday night, Maxwell phoned Keyes, Dubbins and Brenda Dean, the general secretary of SOGAT, and asked them to come to Oxford the following day to negotiate a settlement. All three arrived in adamant mood. 'If you don't pay the fine,' said Keyes, 'we'll go for broke and close down everything.' Maxwell refused. 'It was the same old Maxwell,' recalls Keyes, 'He'd say one thing and then change his mind.' All three walked out. Hie following day, Keyes travelled to Ayr in Scotland: 'That day, he and his lawyers phoned me seventeen times. We finally agreed a settlement which included Maxwell paying our fine.' They arranged to meet the following day at noon after the union's appearance in the High Court. At breakfast time Maxwell telephoned. 'I'm not paying,' he told Keyes.

  'Then there's no deal,' answered the union leader.

  At 11.40, Maxwell, according to Keyes, 'caved in'.

  'Why did you do it?' Keyes asked his old adversary when he later collected the cheque.

  'Because I'm a good socialist,' replied Maxwell smiling. 'Everyone's entitled to second thoughts.'

  'It's like Russian roulette with you, Bob,' said Keyes, delighted to have won. 'You're an out-and-out bully.'

  Yet when Keyes faced Maxwell about the future of the Mirror in August, the conditions had changed: 'Normally, his tactics were to never let us know where we stood. The sands were always shifting.' This time, Keyes did not think Maxwell was bluffing. 'We thought that he could recoup his investment by selling the Mirror building and do an Eddie Shah with the papers.'

  The confrontation and shut-down coincided with the TUC conference in Blackpool. The unions wanted to talk and Maxwell agreed. He booked a suite of rooms and began non-stop negotiations. The very future of the Mirror Group depended upon Maxwell's tactics and personality. Although he had failed to organise alternative printing in Manchester, he was, Bill Miles noticed, unconciliatory about the Sporting Life: 'He said there was nothing to talk about. It was gone. Then he presented his "survival plan" for the rest.' For two days it was 'constant aggression, constant attack. It was exhausting. He would have closed the papers down.'

  By 3 September, Maxwell's energy and tactics had won an agreement embracing the sale of the Sporting Life and the removal of some 'old Spanish customs', including the non-automatic replacement of the three hundred Sporting Life staff. The Mirror began publication the following day. Over the following eight weeks, there were isolated disputes and copies were lost. On 1 November, Maxwell claimed that the September agreement for uninterrupted production had been broken and announced that unless the unions agreed to an immediate cut of 2,000 out of the 6,500 jobs, of whom 1,100 were over sixty years old, the Mirror would close. Every employee was issued a dismissal notice. To take advantage of the new Employment Act, Maxwell 'awarded' the contract for the printing of the Mirror newspapers in Holborn after 31 December to a subsidiary of BPCC. Future disputes would therefore be hindered by the laws against secondary action. Combined with the constant reporting of the 'Shah revolution', the union leaders began to cower.

  Maxwell imposed a deadline of 10 December and again, after a series of tempestuous conversations with the union leaders, corralled all the negotiators into a number of rooms to discuss how they would achieve his demands. By the final day, he had achieved an overwhelming victory. Most of the overmanning and excesses would disappear; 2,100 employees were made redundant and their payments would be largely funded from the surplus in their pension fund. The annual saving was £40 million. Maxwell's triumph was accompanied by the announcement that Mike Molloy was to be promoted and replaced by Richard Stott. Some Mirror staff believe that Stott made it a condition of his appointment that Maxwell would no longer interfere in the editorial process. Others believe it was Maxwell who proposed his own departure because he was bored with his toy. Although the centre of his operations was now on the ninth floor, his new ambitions precluded any interest in the daily management of a mere newspaper because he was now determined that BPCC would become one of the world's ten largest communications organisations and the Mirror would be just a small part of the Maxwell empire.

  Those successes, which realised the possibility of enormous opportunities, caused Maxwell to reflect upon his past, his relationship with his family and especially about his life in Britain. Like so many overt bullies, Maxwell's aggression concealed genuine tenderness and a propensity of offering charity towards those who were less fortunate. It was Maxwell's misfortune that his sentiment to help would so often provoke suspicion rather than gratitude among Britons. Partly, he was to blame. His desire to be a topic of public interest invariably caused him to make comments which were either ridiculed or misunderstood. Among the latter was his quip, ‘I never had the privilege of youth.'

  The mark of a true human being is one who, reflecting upon his material success, seeks at some stage an explanation and a focus for gratitude. Undoubtedly, the trigger for that search is the realisation of mortality. In 1985, aged sixty-two, surrounded by the material wealth which, despite the prejudice of the British, he had finally amassed, Maxwell was wearied by his status as the outsider. Driven by an anxiety which he could never explain to himself, he decided to visit Israel, a country which he had ignored and which represented the religion which he had publicly abandoned.

  Only the victim of persecution can understand that survival can provoke a trauma which continues until death. Most Jews who survived the Holocaust and prospered in their adopted refuges, clung on to their emotional memories of their homes and families which had been abandoned in central and eastern Europe. Reminiscing about those times with fellow sufferers was a unique anchor in the painful and rootless struggle to survive. Until 1985, Maxwell had denied himself that palliative. That changed when he arrived in Israel.

  Among those whom he met was Yehuda Bauer who specialised in Holocaust studies. With Bauer, Maxwell visited for the first time the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem which commemorates the Nazis' murder of six million Jews. As they walked through the darkened, austere rooms where the flickering memorial flame illuminated the names of the extermination camps and the towns from which their victims had been plucked, Bauer watched with surprise as this huge man began to weep. 'He had never thought about the Holocaust before,' observed Bauer, 'because he was scared of it and couldn't understand it.' As Maxwell's emotions uncoiled Bauer recognised the familiar signs of guilt. 'He suddenly felt sorrow for his parents and guilty that he had not been beside them when it happened.' Forty-seven years after he had bid his parents farewell, Maxwell had found their grave.

  Israel arouses extreme emotions but for Jews it is the guarantee of their survival and rights of individuality. As Maxwell left the memorial and walked through Jerusalem, he suddenly recognised that, after forty-seven years of travel, having covered

  literally millions of miles, the wandering Jew had found a place which might be called home.

  Over the following years, encouraged by his wife, Maxwell became a frequent visitor to Israel. Together, they financed Bauer's magazine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and organised a week's seminar in Oxford on the same theme where Maxwell gave an emotional account of his own suffering. Maxwell had recognised that among his fellow Jews he was relieved of the pressures and discrimination which he otherwise suffered in Britain. Israel offered a path to rediscover his roots and a congenial environment where he was, like in Russia, not a stranger. In Israel the outsider could be an
insider.

  14

  On a warm June night in 1985, the concentric spheres of Maxwell's life gathered at Headington Hall to celebrate his fortieth wedding anniversary. Inside the floodlit mansion, with the strains of the Salon Orchestra of the Royal Air Force playing in the background, Robert, Elisabeth and their seven children stood in a reception line to welcome five hundred guests to a gargantuan display of the family's wealth and happiness. Maxwell the celebrity was also a collector of celebrities and as he shook hands with dinner-jacketed politicians, bankers, businessmen, scientists, journalists, lawyers, trade union leaders, footballers and showbiz personalities, it was evident that their host had overcome his adversaries and fulfilled the ambitions which he had confided to Betty during their courtship in Paris. Clasping glasses of champagne, Harold Wilson, David Frost, Sir Robin Day, Ludovic Kennedy, Lord Rothermere, Lord Sieff, Hugh Scanlon, Ray Buckton and many other household names mingled to the beaming appreciation of their generous and good-humoured host as they awaited the year's most expensive dinner party. 'Many were his friends but the others came because they knew that everyone would be there,' says Richard Marsh, the former Labour minister and currently the chairman of the Newspaper Publishers Association. Displays of wealth are often vulgar but the natural vulnerability of a close family celebrating an admirable anniversary tempered the ostentation.

  Just before 8 p.m., as the laughter and conversation reached a crescendo, the multitude were invited to enter a vast marquee which covered the swimming pool and a dance floor, to seek their places at one of the forty-four tastefully decorated tables. Each guest had been provided with a table plan and among the silver cutlery they each found a present from 'Bob and Betty' - an expensive leather toilet case. All agreed that it was a generous start to an unforgettable evening. As their hosts took their seats at the two main tables in the centre of the marquee, Robert Maxwell was pleased to reflect that the seating sensitively accommodated his guests' common interests and the perfection of compartmentalisation.

  At a neighbouring table on his right was Jean Baddeley, his faithful assistant who had recently been appointed a director of Pergamon Holdings, with Detlev Raymond and Laszlo Straka, his close lieutenants from New York. Together, these three knew more of his secrets than the remaining guests combined although even their knowledge was strictly limited. Close by on his left was one of his brokers, Jonathan Bevan, his lawyer John Silkin and his old banking friend Charles Williams. They had laid the foundations for his BPC coup five years earlier. At his own table sat Sir Robert Clark of Hill Samuel, and Lord Kearton, to whom he was equally grateful for his recent successes, and, for sentimental reasons, Charles Hambro. Scattered through the rest of the marquee, his children were hosting tables which appropriately reflected their personal interests. His son Kevin, at twenty-four already the heir apparent, entertained the chairman of Pergamon's first merchant bankers, Lord Spens of Ansbachers, and its current analyst, Henry Poole. Maxwell's youngest daughter Ghislaine, twenty-two, who had ambitions to manage the Mirror Group, sat with journalists; similarly, his twin daughters Christine and Isabel, thirty-three, and his son Ian, twenty-seven, who all worked for BPCC, hosted tables of media stars; his eldest daughter Anne, thirty-eight, who had been an actress and was now a teacher, sat with educationalists; while his eldest son Philip, thirty-four, who is interested in science, sat with editors of Pergamon journals. If ever the constellations could be momentarily fixed in place around their sun, that moment was Friday 7 June 1985.

  After four courses, there were the speeches. Elisabeth spoke movingly about her husband's achievements and of her suffering during the lonely years as he shuttled frenziedly across the world to build his fortune. All seven children stood, one on a table, as their own successes - 'O' levels, 'A' levels, university degrees -were recited for the guests to appreciate. Philip recounted his father's life story in a style which some thought faintly reminiscent of an impassive company report. (All the children, it was said, displayed an automaton loyalty to their father.) Harold Wilson, no longer in the best of health, praised the institution of marriage and his host, although he had personally denied his subject the prize he had most earnestly sought. Then Maxwell rose and spoke as a man who harboured no doubts that, after fighting a tough battle, he had won against all the odds. His words were unmemorable but the image was indelible. A huge man, in physique and personality, tinged with mystery, beaming in self-congratulation, but unable to conceal his impatience in the face of the elusiveness of the international status of Armand Hammer, Aristotle Onassis or William Hearst. His destiny -to become a national powerbroker and an international star -remained on the distant horizon, and he was sixty-three years old. Aristotle Onassis had died aged sixty-nine. Time was limited if he was to be more than a footnote in history. His large family would ensure that he was not forgotten but he wanted to enjoy his success before it was inherited. Those who were close and loyal understood his vision but only he could realise his desires. He wanted the world to forget his defeats and admire his empire. It was all implicit in his speech that night. After polite applause, the toasts were made, the champagne was drunk and everyone could dance to the music of Joe Loss's Ambassadors.

  His guests began drifting away after midnight. Few could deny, even those glitterati who attend innumerable functions, that this occasion was memorable. 'A collector's item,' says one. 'Unbelievable,' opines another. There were comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, especially that immortal phrase, 'I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited - they went there.' Everyone had of course been invited to Headington Hall but who, some wondered, had refused invitations?

  Three years earlier, for Maxwell's sixtieth birthday, he had hosted another lavish party. In preparation, Betty had sent hundreds of letters asking for contributions to a Festschrift, a collection of individual recollections about Maxwell's life collected in a book. The responses could be divided into four. Those who wrote a testimony and went to the party; those who wrote but declined the invitation to the party; or went to the party but did not want their name to appear in the Festschrift; and those who refused both to write and to attend the celebration. Two years later, many of those who had refused invitations to the birthday party were now quite prepared to be seen with Maxwell, since his aspirations and achievements had become impossible to ignore. The trappings of empire were being fast accumulated.

  By this time, Maxwell had gathered close to him on the ninth floor of the Mirror building a diverse retinue reflecting his multifarious activities; they included several former Labour government luminaries whose past proximity to power appealed to him. Among them was Sir Thomas McCaffrey, an ex-Labour MP and formerly the press spokesman for James Callaghan at Downing Street, who had been appointed to perform the same function for Maxwell. There was Peter Jay, Callaghan's son-in-law and the last Labour government's ambassador in Washington who was Maxwell's chief of staff. After a costly debacle at Ansbachers, Charles Williams, who had become a Labour peer, was employed as a financial adviser to the Mirror Group. And there was Joe Haines. Although others in the original politburo found their influence had waned, Haines had been elevated from leader writer and political editor to become one of Maxwell's most trusted lieutenants with a clutch of directorships of Mirror Group subsidiaries. Haines's friends explain the conversion from arch-critic to idolater as consistent with the character they recall working for Harold Wilson: 'Joe needs to worship somebody and gratefully devotes himself to a powerbroker. He just convinced himself that Maxwell was right on every issue.' When McCaffrey resigned in anger about Maxwell's treatment of employees, Haines arranged for another former Downing Street press officer, Janet Hewlett-Davies, to replace him. She too would resign after one year. The frequent turnover of staff was a clear sign of an unsatisfactory working environment. Everyone was expected to adhere to the pub-Usher's eighteen-hour working day, although the demarcation between sleeping and waking hours was never established. At al
l times, they were on call through the omnipresent communications network which each senior staffer accepts as a condition of service. There was no management structure. Everything revolved around and depended upon the emperor. ‘It resembles more a communist rather than a capitalist bureaucracy,' suggested one insider. In the outer office for the inner staff, his personal secretary Debbie Dynes had a list of those telephoners who could be connected to her boss irrespective of whether there was a meeting in progress. Telephone calls interrupted everything, including meals in his private dining room.

  Eating had become one of Maxwell's preoccupations. There was a constant supply of lobster, salmon, caviar and other expensive dishes with the best wines and champagnes. His kitchen had a list of graduated menus, where the quality of the meal depended upon the importance of the guests. Those invited had no doubts about who ranked as the most important. Their host was always the first to be served by the liveried waiter, and he always received the biggest portion. At large parties, by the time the waiter had arrived to serve the guest on Maxwell's right, the host had already finished eating and was pushing his plate forward to demand attention for the discussion. Everyone thereafter ate in suspended animation. Maxwell's table talk varied between stimulating banter and heavy pontification. The latter predominated at the twice-monthly editors' lunches, at which policy was enunciated. Smoking was not allowed in Maxwell's presence, although he enjoyed Cuban cigars and, disconcertingly for some, habitually dipped the end into a glass of brandy. If the cigar plopped accidentally into his neighbour's glass, nothing would be said. Occasionally, as the meal ended, departing guests watched as the debris of salmon and champagne was swiftly removed to be replaced by beer and sandwiches, because a trade union delegation was about to be ushered in. The graduated menu was part of the performance.