The flight from Holborn to Farnborough lasted fifteen minutes. As they flew that November afternoon, Maxwell could reflect on his growing disenchantment with the technicalities of finance. The excitement had long disappeared; indeed, in recent months his usual exhausting long hours running the empire had become positively unpleasant. Those financial chores he was pleased to delegate to Kevin, who, despite their past quarrels and the estrangement when Kevin decided to marry Pandora Warnford-Davis, he could now trust more than any other person. Father and son were working jointly to overcome their temporary difficulties. As the helicopter whirred down to the airport the strain of the past days was dissolving. Kevin could look after the business problems while his father embarked upon what he enjoyed most – powerbroking among the world’s leaders.
No sooner had he been deposited alongside his new $24 million Gulfstream 4 executive jet, codenamed VR-BOB (Very Rich Bob), than Maxwell was bustling up the steps shedding the last of his tribulations. Captain Brian Hull, the pilot, welcomed his passenger, aware that ‘he always became happy after he boarded. He saw me as home.’ Minutes later, they were flying at 500 m.p.h. towards Israel, a three-and-a-half-hour journey costing £14,000 in each direction.
Few things gave Maxwell more pleasure than his new Gulfstream, capable of flying the Atlantic without refuelling (unlike his Gulfstream 2, which he nevertheless retained in event of emergencies). For hours he had discussed the G4’s interior design with Captain Hull. In the end, he had settled upon a light-cream carpet, six seats covered in light-brown leather and six in cream cloth. The brown suede walls offset the gold fittings. Flying at 35,000 feet, the passenger relished the pampering he received from Carina Hall, the stewardess, and Simon Grigg, his valet. At the merest intimation that his finger might flick, he could be assured of instant service. The food in the plane’s kitchen – cheddar cheese, smoked salmon, caviar and chicken – had been sent ahead by Martin Cheeseman. Krug and pink champagne were in the fridge. Thoughtfully, Hull always provided a selection of new video films – his employer especially liked adventure stories such as The Hunt for Red October. Sometimes, Maxwell would read biographies or work through a case of papers. Music was rarely played. Facing him on this occasion was the empty place where Andrea had sat in the past, her feet often resting on his seat, tucked under one of his massive thighs. Beyond was where the divan could be set up for him to sleep. Captain Hull had noticed on flights across the Atlantic that sometimes both Maxwell and Andrea slept on it – quite innocently, he stressed.
The new Gulfstream was more than a toy. It was a testament to Maxwell’s importance and wealth. The telephone was fixed next to his seat. One night he telephoned Roy Greenslade, then the editor of the Daily Mirror. ‘Where am I?’ he boomed.
‘I don’t know, Bob. Israel? Russia …?’
‘I’m above you!’ Greenslade looked up at the ceiling. ‘I left Montreal this morning. I was in New York this afternoon. Now I’m going to Hungary. Not bad for a pensioner, eh?’
Constant travel was Maxwell’s way of escaping from reality. Over the following twelve months, the Gulfstream would fly 800 hours, more than double an average pilot’s duties. Other than New York, no other destination was more welcoming than Jerusalem’s small airport surrounded by the Judaean hills.
Ever since Gerald Ronson, the British businessman, had taken the Publisher on Maxwell’s own private jet to Israel in 1985 to reintroduce him to his origins, the erstwhile Orthodox Jew had abandoned his repeated, vociferous denial of his religion, which had even prompted him in the 1950s to read the Sunday lesson at an Anglican church in Esher. Considering the anti-semitism still lingering among Britons after the war, that denial had seemed a natural ploy for an ambitious foreigner, dishonest about so much else. But with his recent achievement of financial security and the decline in overt anti-semitism, Maxwell had grown closer to London’s Jewish community.
Tears had welled in Maxwell’s eyes on that first trip with Ronson. ‘Thanks for bringing me here,’ he repeated as they toured the country, visiting the major powerbrokers, including Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister. ‘I want to do things and be helpful,’ Maxwell told Shamir as they posed for the photographer accompanying him. ‘I’m going to be a big investor.’ Ronson smiled at the prospect of collecting millions for charity, ‘I want to be buried here,’ Maxwell confided that night over dinner in the King David Hotel.
Thereafter on Friday nights, Maxwell occasionally travelled to Ronson’s home in north-west London to eat the Sabbath dinner or celebrate Jewish holidays. Gail Ronson, Maxwell acknowledged, cooked like his mother, especially chopped liver. He also appeared at Jewish charity functions, mixing with Trevor Chinn, Cyril Stein and Lord Young, the politician, who had invited Maxwell to his daughter’s wedding. His presence in that community had been welcomed, although some feared that his financing of a Holocaust conference in 1989 signalled an attempted take-over. After all, his urge to dominate was indiscriminate.
The interest in his Jewish background had been encouraged by his wife Betty. Together in Israel they had met Chanan Taub, a childhood friend from Solotvino, Maxwell’s impoverished birthplace on Czechoslovakia’s eastern border with Russia and Romania. ‘Poor, hungry and unmemorable’ was the Publisher’s emotional recollection of the muddy pathways, ramshackle, overcrowded dwellings and suffocating destitution there. Sixty years earlier, he reflected, he had shared a solitary pair of shoes with a sister. In 1939 Taub had swum illegally from a ship ashore to Palestine as a penniless Zionist – unlike Maxwell, who had escaped from his homeland, on the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion, to make his way overland through Hungary and the Balkans to Palestine and then by sea to Britain as a member of the Free Czech Army. When they met again nearly fifty years later, Taub had become one of Israel’s richest diamond dealers. Yet the contrast between the two former Orthodox Jews was striking. While Maxwell boasted of wealth he did not possess, Taub concealed his enormous bank balance beneath dishevelled clothes and a twenty-six-year-old, dented and dirty Chevrolet. Ever since their first reunion, Taub had been mesmerized by Maxwell’s extraordinary transformation from the thin, small boy with pious ringlets swinging along his cheeks who uniquely arrived at Zionist classes in their village clutching a book and stuttering Yiddish phrases. Now Maxwell was ein Mensch, possessed of riches, power, influence and a large family.
Their childhood reminiscences helped to fill a void in Maxwell’s life. Israel further calmed his turbulent emotions, enabling the refugee to put down roots of a kind. In particular, he would become transformed when he entered the presidential suite of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. Throwing open his windows, he would gaze at the old city of Jerusalem, mentioned so long ago in his itinerant father’s daily prayers at home in Ruthenia. The serenity evoked by the sunlight glinting from the Dome of the Rock above the Wailing Wall, that sacred shrine for Jews through two millennia, seemed to testify to the historic endurance of the Jews. Even he, the bulldozer, would tremble with emotion as the spectacle reawakened memories of his Orthodox childhood, the history of the diaspora, and stirred the survivor’s guilt for escaping the gas chambers.
That evening, 7 November, Maxwell dined with Ariel and Lily Sharon, the former military commander, minister and leading right-wing member of the Israeli parliament. To Sharon, as to so many other Israelis, Maxwell was ‘a friend – a Jew who had finally come home’. Their conversation concentrated upon politics, especially the question of Israel’s relations with the Arabs. The visitor glowed with pride that his opinions should be taken seriously.
Maxwell’s schedule the following day confirmed his importance in