When Robert Maxwell paid for my kitchen
Not the nicest billionaire I ever met. Also, not a billionaire
Driving up the PCH, a few hours south of Carmel, I stopped to look at the ocean. My senses were overwhelmed, not by the beauty, but the seals. Dozens of them. Huge, fat, appallingly smelly, their black shiny bodies glistening in the sun, the air was filled with the sound of their low, guttural, noisy barking. And I thought ‘good God, they’re just like Robert Maxwell’.
In case you are fortunate enough not to know, this was a businessman known by Private Eye as ‘the bouncing Czech’, with good reason, as it turned out. Owner of the Daily Mirror and lots of other media things, ‘Captain Bob’ was a Concorde-and-helicopter kind of guy, desperately trying to outwit Rupert Murdoch, normally failing. When negotiating to buy the New York Daily News, he sailed his yacht up the East River and the paper – which really did not want to be owned by him - ran a front page headline: ‘the ego has landed’. Nice line. They’ve used it again since then.
In 1990, when he sailed into my life, I had a weird bipartite existence, sometimes making TV shows for the British networks through my own production company, the rest of the time freelancing, doing whatever turned up. Since Commissioning Editors were better at lunch than decisions, this meant some journalism, some radio presenting, and a lot of producing and directing things that seemed like fun; TV, commercials, corporate films – whatever. My biggest client was Crown Communications, a public company, the owner of LBC Radio and a major supplier to the newfangled satellite TV. I did so much work for them they made me their Creative Director, even though I was only a freelance. And their biggest client? Robert Maxwell.
When the production manager called and said ‘we want you to work for Maxwell’, I was reluctant. ‘He’s a bully’. ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘but you’re our best Director. And he’s fired all the others’. High praise.
It was true that people did not last long. I spoke to the ex-Directors, who had horrendous stories of unreasonable behaviour, delays, and swearing. Lots of swearing. The last incumbent said ‘we waited four days with a film crew for him to record a ninety second piece to camera. When he finally turned up, he looked at the script, and said ‘who wrote this fxxxing crap?’. My colleague made the mistake of saying ‘you did’. Exit stage left. So now it was my turn.
I went to meet the self-identified great man in his penthouse apartment on top of the hilariously-named ‘Maxwell House’, home of the Daily Mirror. You will know Maxwell House as a rather tasteless brand of instant coffee. London taxi drivers, showing marvelous bilingual wit, used to call Maxwell HQ ‘the café’. ‘Take me to the café’, I said, and duly arrived at ego central.
He sat there, corpulent and glistening like those seals, his hair implausibly black, his voice booming throughout the building. He used it as a weapon of attack, to shut down anyone by shouting in any one of the seven languages he actually did speak fluently. Physically, he was so huge, he looked like he had been pumped up to 150% of life size. He was intelligent, monstrously egotistical, and (as it later turned out) staggeringly corrupt.
I made myself a promise that if he ever started with the shouting and screaming, I‘d say nothing, and just get up and leave. So, given how bullies work, he never did. Instead, for a rather bewildering period I was his favourite film maker. It started with an awful corporate video about Maxwell Communications Corporation, which had a ludicrously amateurish logo designed by Maxwell himself. Because obviously there were no talented graphic designers in London in those days.
He was raising investment for some new self-aggrandising thing or other. I traipsed around the City of London with a film crew, interviewing rather harried-looking senior people from investment banks and law firms, who all basically said ‘Robert Maxwell is God’. Their contributions were labelled ‘independent opinion’, which was a hoot given how much money he paid them. There’s City ethics for you. I packaged it together with a glowing voiceover and some stirring classical music – Enigma Variations, I seem to recall – and took the rough cut to show to him.
Naturally, the VHS machine didn’t work. So he shouted and swore at his benighted sons Kevin and Ian and a few flunkies, including his Chief of Staff, who was clearly expected to be a video technician too. His name was Peter Jay, formerly the youngest-ever British Ambassador to Washington, a political megastar, married to a Prime Minister’s daughter. They all squatted down in fear behind the TV, trying to work out which cable went where. It was fascinating and horrifying to watch. Why do monstrous business bullies attract otherwise smart, successful men and women? Why do the victims tolerate the perpetual abuse? Money, obviously; but do they seriously think they can win them over, or beat them at their own unreasonable game?
At the end of the viewing, as Elgar trailed away and the animation resolved to a rotating globe with ‘MCC’ bestriding it like a colossus, ‘the Chairman’ as he liked to be called, positively glowed. He addressed me with the portentous air of an oracle. ‘You have made,’ he intoned in his basso profundo, ‘an excellent film. This is because, as well as being a global statesman, entrepreneur, billionaire, philanthropist, writer and publisher, I am also an award-winning film maker. And I have inspired you’. Those were his exact words.
‘Thank you Chairman’, I said, and skedaddled. I managed to get out of the penthouse and into the lift before falling about laughing.
I then discovered that the only thing worse than being verbally abused and fired by Maxwell was being loved by him. Suddenly, he wanted stuff all the time, and always last minute. Usually this meant a call on a Friday afternoon: ‘can you do another job for Maxwell by Monday morning, please?’ I had one weekend to make the launch commercial for The European newspaper, a cascading sequence of still images showing all of European history in thirty seconds, cut very fast to a percussive soundtrack. It was quite good, actually. (He had obviously inspired me).
Another time I had to fly to Dublin at short notice to organise live coverage of a football game between the Republic of Ireland and the Soviet team. It was to be shown on Russian TV, ‘a gift to the Soviet people’ from Maxwell to sweeten a deal he was trying to do with Gorbachev. We drove a five camera outside broadcast truck over from London and some bloke turned up who spoke no English, allegedly a Russian football commentator, although as my Russian is as capacious as Maxwell’s humility, he could have been reading the Moscow telephone directory for all I knew. The game was tedious, final score nil nil. In a spirit of glasnost I should reveal that the coverage cost fifty grand. Pounds. That was a lot of money in 1990.
Later, we learned that Moscow neglected to broadcast it. Nobody saw it.
Maxwell was always throwing money away like that. I heard of an incident at Pergamon Press, the original basis for his alleged wealth. He walked round a corner, not looking where he was going, and bumped into someone, almost knocking him over. Maxwell swore at him (obviously), and demanded to know his name and what he earned in a year. Then he took out a chequebook, wrote him a cheque and said ‘you’re fired’. The man walked off, prudently neglecting to reveal that he was just a visitor. He did not work for Maxwell.
Another Friday. The phone rang again. Captain Bob had been awarded an honorary degree by the University of Chicago. He could not be bothered to go, sent his wife on Concorde to accept on his behalf, but did not want to miss being praised. So I had to organise a 2-way satellite link for the next evening. Maxwell was to be in his penthouse speaking to camera, whose output would be shown on a huge screen in Chicago. There, a 3-camera outside broadcast unit and ‘reverse vision’ to a tiny video monitor back in London allowed him to watch the crowd of dignitaries staring up at him, in Big Brother-esque admiration. Watching them, watching himself; the very definition of narcissism. Today it would be a Zoom call. Then, it was like televising the Olympics, with dozens of people and truck-fulls of gear. Two-way broadcast quality satellite links did not come cheap. The only purpose was to pump his ego.
I had plans and really did not want to do the job, but I was the only person who knew how. The same production manager negotiated the fee. ‘Look Paul, your usual daily rate is £350. We’ll pay you more’. I sighed. ‘How about £500? ‘No’, she said, doubtless mindful of their 100% markup, ‘let’s make it £5,000 a day’.
The whole nonsense lasted fifteen minutes and cost forty-five thousand pounds. I bought a Bulthaup kitchen with my fee. It was sleek, elegant, and understated. How very unlike the man who paid for it. I kept an unopened tin of Maxwell House on a shelf in gratitude.
A year later, when I finally had a ‘yes’ from the BBC for a TV series and stopped working for Crown, Maxwell fell off the side of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. It was named after his daughter, the only person he never shouted at. When his body was found off the Canary Islands, the extent of his venality suddenly became clear. He had been stealing from pension funds to keep alive the illusion of success. In a few short weeks, everything collapsed. The Maxwell Communications Corporation globe abruptly stopped turning. His sons took the fall for him (no pun intended). Kevin, always nervy and anxious, was made the biggest personal bankrupt in British history, with debts of £406m. Ghislaine went on to have a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and is now in prison for twenty years. Children of Maxwell: quite an inheritance.
When he died, friends who knew I had worked for him asked if I thought he committed suicide, knowing what was coming, how things were unravelling. I don’t think so. He was so preternaturally sure of himself, he would always imagine he could evade accountability. The most unpleasant human being I have ever met, he would never admit defeat, never be wrong. He was massive, hugely unfit, and drank enormous amounts; I think he just fell.
Hmm. Tall, overweight, implausible hair; arrogant, egotistical, and narcissistic; a domineering bully who was nowhere near as rich as he wanted you to think. Remind you of anyone?
If you like the things I write, please tell your friends. If you hate them, please tell your enemies. And please subscribe to receive them, as if by magic, to your inbox. Thank you kindly. And the seals were quite cute, by the way. In comparison.
