By 1990, the pressure of his continuing deceit had made the demands of marriage intolerable. Effectively, he had separated from Betty. On her visits to London, she would sleep either in a hotel or with friends. Other than his occasional return on a Friday night to Headington Hill Hall, the Oxford mansion he had leased in 1959 from the council for a fixed £2,000 per annum and used as an office and family home, he barely lived under the same roof as his wife. Typically, on Saturday, 10 November, after sleeping one night in his own bedroom in Oxford, he summoned Captain Cowley to fly him back to Holborn.
For the following day, Maxwell had invited Professor Fedor Burlatsky, a well-connected Russian historian, and his wife Kira Vladina, a journalist, to lunch. To impress the couple, he sent his maroon Rolls-Royce to collect them from the Waldorf. The gesture was more rewarding than he could have anticipated.
As usual, he kept his guests waiting. His eventual appearance was dramatic: ‘If only I’d known it was you waiting for me, I wouldn’t have taken such a long time getting here.’ Maxwell was staring at Kira Vladina, a shapely forty-seven-year-old blonde. For her part, already awed by the display of wealth, Vladina was struck by the giant figure which was apparently filling an enormous living room.
Over lunch, Maxwell could hardly take his eyes off the woman. At the end of the meal, they agreed to continue their conversation, because she wished to interview him for a Moscow newspaper. Professor Burlatsky departed, Maxwell cancelled his other appointments and Vladina, accustomed to her small, sparsely furnished apartment in Moscow, relaxed in the company of the noticeably admiring billionaire. Their conversation soon switched from Maxwell’s customary bombast and inventions about his wartime heroism – ‘I escaped from Czechoslovakia on a raft at dawn with German bullets flying over me,’ he claimed, forgetting that he had simply boarded a train in peacetime – to an intimate outpouring of his misery, his loneliness and his forlorn search for affection. ‘I love the dawn,’ he murmured in Russian, correctly guessing that his listener would be impressed by sensitivity.
‘You have everything in life,’ said Kira.
‘Not love,’ replied Maxwell.
‘But everyone loves you.’
There was a long pause. ‘I don’t believe that. It’s my money they love.’ Maxwell paused again and moved closer to the Slav, so different from the women he usually met. ‘I absolutely adored my mother. With all my heart. And that’s why I always dreamt of loving and being loved in return.’
‘Are you happily married?’
‘Well, she’s French. You know how the French are. What they love more than anything is money. I never sensed any of the warmth or affection I got from my mother in my own family and which I gave to the world around me.’
Kira moved closer, responding to and even sharing Maxwell’s emotion. The man was ‘sad and lonely’, she realized, ‘even within his family’. Yet she was unable to change anything.
Maxwell continued talking about Betty: ‘She’s so calculating. A calculating Frenchwoman, putting up a good front, but she gives me no love. Not the love I got from my mother.’
Naturally, Kira knew nothing of the tempestuous rows which took place between Maxwell and Betty. Instead she noticed only the Publisher’s vulnerability: ‘His big, piercing, fatal wound’. It was already nightfall. Kira felt an intimacy towards a man who was ‘overweight, old and plain’. He spoke of his love for Russia and the culture which was his own. ‘I sympathize,’ she whispered. ‘I understand.’ Letting his imagination run wild, Maxwell had become infatuated with the woman.
Some time later that evening, he spoke of his children. ‘They’re very good at spending the money I earn. They’re not like me. They don’t work hard and take risks.’ Maxwell was clearly bothered by his seven surviving children. His favourite, Michael, he confessed, had died in 1968 after being kept alive for seven years on a support system following a motor accident. His new favourite was his son Ian, conceived in 1955 when Maxwell had been mistakenly told by a doctor that he was dying of cancer. ‘I adore him. He’s a bit like me.’ Pause. ‘But not in work. And I love my youngest daughter, Ghislaine. The rest are a cold lot. Like their mother; and they want to live off what others earn.’
Kira returned late to her hotel and her husband. Maxwell’s last words had been memorable: ‘Kira, I would so like to be in your suit of clothes or, even better, your skin.’ He had been, she thought, so tender, so trusting. The whole intimate experience had been ‘a fantasy which took hold of our hearts’.
Alone once again in his penthouse, Maxwell might have reconsidered his description of his children. He unashamedly doted upon Ghislaine, his youngest daughter, naming his luxury yacht after her and financing her unprofitable corporate-gifts business, though he would not tolerate the presence of her boyfriends, whom he suspected were hoping to benefit from a piece of the action. His relationship with Ghislaine was becoming increasingly intense, some would say indulgent. He no longer had much interest in his twin daughters, Isabel and Christine, born in 1950. Of Anne, his daughter born in 1948, he had quipped to colleagues, ‘What have Anne and Pope John Paul in common? Both are ugly and both are failed actors!’ His eldest son Philip, born in 1947, a donnish, decent man, disliked his father, and the sentiment was reciprocated. When he married in South America, his father refused to attend the ceremony. Some suspected that Maxwell had always resented the death of his elder son Michael and the survival of Philip.
Maxwell often spoke to Ian, a joint managing director of MCC and a director of over eighty private companies, but he permitted him few responsibilities, despite his annual income of £262,000 plus practically unlimited expenses. Ian, it was agreed by most, was a charming, easygoing playboy, sought by many young, attractive women, whom he tended to address as ‘princess’. But there was also an arrogance. On one occasion, Ian had told Bob Cole, Maxwell’s spokesman, to collect a suit from his London flat. Cole arrived to find the chaotic evidence of the previous night’s revelry. Scattered on the bedroom floor lay several used condoms. Ian clearly expected his Filipina maid to clear everything. A similarly casual attitude affected Ian’s responsibilities to work. Educated at Marlborough College and at Balliol College, Oxford, he understood the legal requirements expected of directors of companies but adopted his father’s cavalier attitude towards those laws, smoothing things over with a modicum of charm.
Robert Maxwell, however, noting that Ian lacked an astute appreciation of finance, engaged in the real conversations with Kevin. As the empire’s finances became perilous, it was Kevin whom he increasingly trusted. But there was little intimacy, and frequently, as in the past, he ignored his son’s advice, not least when Kevin urged that they renegotiate all their loans with the banks. ‘They’ll eat us alive,’ snapped Maxwell each time he raised the issue. All those bankers, lawyers and other professionals visiting the Publisher were appalled by the father’s treatment of his son. ‘Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Maxwell would yell. The eyewitnesses to those humiliating outbursts, admirers of Kevin’s talent, would gaze stupefied as his father ‘treated him like dirt’. None was more surprised than Bill Harry, Macmillan’s tax adviser. At a celebratory party on board the Lady Ghislaine in July 1989, Harry was explaining the tax implications of the company’s recent merger with McGraw-Hill when Kevin asked a question. His father exploded: ‘Don’t ever interrupt a tax expert!’ A chastened Kevin fell silent, while the others present stared at their shoes.
Yet at 7 a.m. most days during 1990, Robert Maxwell was ensconced alone in his office with Kevin, taking the place of his son’s early-morning German lessons. Dignified with the label ‘prayer meetings’, their encounters allowed them to plot and plan their agenda.
So much in Kevin’s life had changed in the last months. In 1988, his father had dispatched him to New York to manage Macmillan and their new American empire. There, to Robert Maxwell’s irritation, he had been joined by Pandora Warnford-Davis, his tall, thin, toothy, aggressive, thirty-year-old wife, whom he had met at Oxford and whose assertions of independence