He even missed his own party. Traditionally, Maxwell had hosted a Christmas dinner and dance for senior executives at Oxford. One hundred had been invited on Saturday, 15 December, but despite all the enthusiasm for dispensing hospitality he had shown in previous years, he now felt drained, having exhausted himself that afternoon in meetings with Israelis, Mongolians and Italians. The prospect of smiling at those with their noses in his trough was too much. At the last moment, Betty whispered to the guests, ‘Bob’s sick,’ and the seating arrangements were changed. ‘I bet he’s up there in his room,’ quipped Ernest Burrington, the Mirror Group’s new managing director. ‘He’s in a huff with his family.’ Maxwell was in fact consuming his second bottle of champagne. In the hall at the end of a high-spirited evening, most agreed the party had gone better in the absence of the host.
Everyone, Maxwell told himself, was oblivious to his depression, even his children. Over the following days, his sons and daughters celebrated Ghislaine’s birthday, partied at Joe’s Café in Draycott Avenue and split off to various festivities. There was no plan for the family to gather for a Christmas meal. Maxwell was alone and estranged. Even his youngest son’s Christmas card, a tasteless photograph of anonymous racing horses, was signed with an unemotional message: ‘Bob, many thanks for all your help and kindness – Kevin and Pandora.’ The parents had not bothered to list his four grandchildren. Needless to say, there was no hint of love. The awareness of fractured relationships was painful.
At 7 a.m. on Friday, 21 December, he was seated in his kitchen, switching between the morning television breakfast shows and drinking coffee from a large mug while George Wheeler, his hairdresser for the past twenty-one years, was applying L’Oréal No. 7 to dye his hair black. ‘Have you checked all the roots?’ asked Maxwell as he grabbed for a telephone. ‘Don’t worry,’ laughed Wheeler, well aware of his client’s obsession with banishing the slightest hint of age. ‘A phobia about grey hair’ was the hairdresser’s explanation. ‘Even if he saw a grey eyebrow, he would go berserk.’
His time was ebbing and his failure to own a share of Britain’s growing television industry had come to seem a depressing indictment of his career. Poor finances had compelled the premature sale of a 13.8 per cent stake in Central Television, losing him over £20 million in extra profits, and had prevented him bidding for the licence for Britain’s first satellite channel. Murdoch had now cleaned up on that gravy train. All Maxwell owned in the world of broadcast television was an unprofitable stake in French television and 51 per cent of MTV in Europe, the pop station. MTV was an inspired investment, but it was still losing money. Everything was losing money, and there seemed no respite.
As Wheeler waited for the dye to dry, he hoped that he would be spared a repetition of a previous calamity when the Publisher’s hair had turned the wrong colour. Fraught hours had been spent washing the hair back to its natural grey and reapplying the dye. The sight of Maxwell’s vast, naked girth quivering in underpants had amused some eyewitnesses among his personal staff. ‘How can anyone fear that man?’ thought his valet. Once dressed, Maxwell had resumed his hectoring.
‘Have a good Christmas,’ Maxwell joked to the hairdresser. Ever since Wheeler had complained of not being given a seasonal tip, he had been listed to receive a bottle of Scotch and another of gin. Now an ordeal lay before his employer, his hair freshly blackened. At lunchtime there were Christmas drinks for staff on the tenth floor. Maxwell made a brief appearance, oppressed by the evident happiness of others. The prospect of the holidays was awful.
His delight would have been to rest and recover on the Lady Ghislaine, anchored and awaiting his arrival in the sunshine of the US Virgin Islands. Sleek and towering five decks high, the 155-foot, 430-ton yacht had been designed by Jon Bannenberg for the brother of Adnan Kashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer. The Arab had commissioned a gin palace with maximum internal luxury and volume for pottering around off the South of France rather than a craft suitable for crossing the Atlantic. Visitors to the Lady Ghislaine could only be awed by the sumptuous, white-carpeted state room; the comfortable dining room, the bathrooms with gold-plated fittings, the elaborate kitchen and the sheer scale of private luxury. Maxwell regarded the craft as a most precious possession, one which he was unwilling to share. Yet fearing loneliness, he had impulsively agreed that Betty should join him. The opportunity would be used to complete a chore.
That summer, when relations had collapsed beyond recall, Betty had delivered in writing her terms for a final separation. Her husband was to provide sufficient money to complete her house in Fraytet, in the Dordogne, France, to buy a pied-à-terre in London, to meet her removal expenses, to pay her debts and to transfer a capital sum which would provide her with ‘an adequate income’ for life. Her final request was that they spend eight days together, alone, to discuss the ‘separation in a civilized manner, as two people who have loved each other very much and spent forty-six years together’. They had barely spoken or met since July, yet, lonely and exhausted as Maxwell now was, Betty was better than nothing. He had instructed her to fly to St Thomas.
Maxwell arrived on the islands in the Gulfstream on Christmas Eve. He had not bothered to consider that the aircraft’s crew would be separated from their families over the holiday. That inconvenience was part of the deal, although it would contribute to Captain Hull’s eventual divorce. After all, Maxwell was also missing the wedding of Isabel, his daughter, in San Francisco. ‘It’s her second,’ he had snapped. The news awaiting him at the airport from the Lady Ghislaine’s captain, Stephen Taylor, was infuriating. While the yacht was being manoeuvred into the harbour, a wind had swept the craft on to an uncharted sandbank, damaging her rudder. Hull was dispatched to Miami to fetch an engineer, while the Publisher went on board. But the expert’s verdict was miserable. Without a spare, the Lady Ghislaine could not sail. ‘Maxwell’s upset,’ Hull told his co-pilot with studied understatement.
Stuck motionless on a sandbank watching videos with Betty would not have amused Maxwell at the best of times. He was renowned for having once, in a fit of contemptuous pique, ordered his chauffeur to drive off from a London hotel, abandoning his wife, although she could be seen in the entrance hall. On Boxing Day, he fled from the imprisonment and flew to New York, leaving Betty to open Christmas presents, still wrapped, with the crew. Captain Taylor was fired shortly afterwards.
Maxwell’s depression did not lift in New York, which was disagreeably cold and still attuned to seasonal cheer. Worse, however he looked at the accounts, he could not see an easy escape into profit. The remedy, he decided, was to sell more of the empire and seek temporary relief by raising further loans to buy MCC shares. His telephone call to Kevin at Hailey was calculated to interrupt his son’s holiday. While the father remained in New York, his son would organize the finances.
On 28 December, after spending the morning with Trachtenberg discussing the finances, Kevin lunched with Basil Brookes, Albert Fuller and Robert Bunn at Chez Gerard in Chancery Lane. Their discussion about the group’s finances was for once uninterrupted by telephone calls since Kevin had left his portable in the car. Even so, with so little candour, their conversation produced no result. Three days later, before leaving the office to celebrate the New Year, Kevin and Bunn signed transfers for two more Berlitz share certificates. Both were handed to Lehmans, in exchange for $29.7 million. The Maxwells’ total debt to Lehmans had soared to $113.6 million.
The holiday mood had been forgotten when Robert Maxwell met his son in his penthouse at seven o’clock on Sunday morning, 6 January 1991. Over the previous two weeks, Kevin seemed to Andrew Capitman, the banker, to have matured from gofer into joint manager. In his conversations with bankers, he was giving the impression that his was a major corporation suffering only