This confidently told documentary on Robert and
Ghislaine Maxwell’s relationship feels like HBO drama Succession at times – but
far, far grislier
Stuart
Jeffries
Stuart
Jeffries
Mon 4 Apr
2022 22.00 BST
‘Miaow,”
says Robert Maxwell. “Miaow,” replies Ghislaine. “Miaow,” says daddy. “Miaow,”
says daughter. Maxwell’s longsuffering secretary, Carol Bragoli, typing nearby,
hears both sides of this conversation as Robert, being a master of the
universe, always had his phone on loudspeaker so lickspittles could savour
every blah. The miaowing went on for minutes and, so far as I could tell,
Bragoli didn’t have a sick bucket.
It’s almost
impossible not to see this vignette through the prism of Succession, with
Ghislaine as a precursor of Siobhan Roy, decorous daughter with no evident
business skills, swanning around as though she owns the place and yearning for
daddy’s validation; while daddy, when not peeing from the top-floor office of
his lamestream media business on to the peasants below, barks at jellyfish
underlings in his wake.
There are
differences. Logan Roy never had Rupert Murdoch as his nemesis, nor did he have
himself memorialised vaingloriously in stained glass as Samson bringing down
the walls of Gaza in the 51-bedroom mansion he rented from the council. Nor did
he arrive in Britain as a refugee in 1940, work for the KGB and MI5, and serve
as a Labour MP before amassing a multimillion-pound fortune.
Most of
all, Roy didn’t have a favourite child; still less did he name his mid-life
crisis yacht after his daughter.
The opening
episode of The House of Maxwell (BBC Two) tacks efficiently between the night
in November 1991, in waters off the Canary Islands, when Maxwell was seen alive
for the last time on the Lady Ghislaine, and various key moments in his career.
This documentary
doesn’t test Ghislaine’s theory that her father was murdered, but rather
assumes that Robert, disgrace closing in, slipped overboard, avoiding the shame
of being found out to be, not a latter-day Samson, but a thief whose leveraged
business empire was about to crumble.
Maxwell
House was once an unspeakable instant coffee in the UK; now the house of
Maxwell is an unspeakable if more successful brand, whose every cough, spit and
miaow is to be plundered in the way Robert did with the Mirror Group pension
fund. I’m not sure this series adds much to the story set out in John Sweeney’s
excellent podcast, Hunting Ghislaine, other than audio recordings of panicked
lackeys wondering what will happen when their master’s body is recovered. But
its confident retelling of the grisly family saga makes one wonder if daddy’s
example showed his children that morality is for little people. Certainly, the
tale told here of how Maxwell stymied publication of Tom Bower’s disobliging
biography, which dared to depict Maxwell as a black marketeer profiting from
shortages in postwar Berlin, suggests how ruthless in protecting the gilded lie
Ghislaine’s father was.
The series
takes us from the Carpathian shtetl, in Ukraine, where Robert was born in 1923
to the Brooklyn detention centre in early 2022, where Ghislaine awaits
sentencing for sex trafficking underage girls for her former boyfriend Jeffrey
Epstein, and for others devoid of moral sense – although not Prince Andrew.
Heavens, no.
Eve Pollard
intriguingly suggests one reason Maxwell appointed her as the Sunday Mirror’s
first female editor: not out of any feminist conviction, but because she was,
by definition, no threat to his dreary view of life as a competition between
men.
At only one
moment in this opening episode does Robert Maxwell resemble a human being.
Documentary film-maker Ray Errol Fox recalls interviewing Maxwell at the Yad
Vashem memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem. Maxwell spotted the
name of his birthplace, Solotvina, on a wall memorialising places whose Jewish
populations were murdered by the Nazis. Years before his death, Maxwell told
Fox, he returned to Solotvina with his wife, Betty. “Not a single Jew was
left,” Robert told Fox, as he welled up. “It was as if we never existed.”
Did his
epiphany in Jerusalem prompt Maxwell to take his own life? That may seem a
stretch, but Fox certainly thought it significant that Maxwell was not seen in
public again after attending the New York premiere of his film. Perhaps seeing
himself on screen, for once shorn of pomp and sobbing with genuine emotion,
made Maxwell realise that the way he had led his life was shameful. It remains
a tantalising suggestion, but the likelihood of Maxwell being unable to bear being
exposed as a thief and a fraud is surely the decisive factor in explaining his
death.
The key
moments of Maxwell’s rise and fall seem inconceivable today. No oligarch now
follows his business model of buying up newspapers from London to New York to
Jerusalem. The establishment doesn’t ritually abase itself before moneyed
moguls, as it did at Maxwell’s 65th birthday party, held at his rented mansion.
Or maybe
I’m being naive. The ennoblement of the oligarch press baron Evgeny Lebedev by
grateful Conservative grandees suggests that the spirit of Maxwell lives on.
House of Maxwell review: how one family sank under 50
years of scandal
This gripping new docuseries draws a thread from the
corrupt business practices of Robert Maxwell to the conviction last year of his
daughter Ghislaine
By Nick
Curtis@nickcurtis
There is a
world in which the rich and powerful operate and it is a different world,” says
producer Colin Barr and after watching his three-part BBC documentary House of
Maxwell it’s hard to disagree. The series draws a thread from the schmoozing
and corrupt business practices of media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who drowned in
1991, to the conviction last year of his socialite daughter Ghislaine for
recruiting and grooming women and girls on behalf of her former lover, the
billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
These
people socialised with Prime Ministers, presidents and, notoriously, Prince
Andrew, and they operated outside the bounds of decency. With the central
programme dedicated to the collapse of the sprawling, impoverished empire
inherited by sons Ian and Kevin Maxwell on their father’s death, it’s almost a
classic three-act tragedy, of a dynasty brought down by hubris, greed and sex.
“The Maxwell story falls into the shape of many Greek or Shakespearean myths,”
Barr agrees.
If you
think you already know everything there is to know about Ghislaine and her
gross father, you’re wrong. In a north London garage, the film-makers found
lost footage of the man Private Eye named Cap’n Bob, bobbing in a rubber ring
(and apparently without trunks on) in the Atlantic near the yacht he named
after his daughter, hours before his death. There are tapes from Maxwell’s own
bugging system on which executives fret about the black hole in the empire’s
finances. Former employees, former friends, and journalists – including my old
Evening Standard colleague Nigel Rosser, who exposed Ghislaine as Andrew’s
social ‘fixer’ – shine new light on the story.
Most
shocking is the testimony of two of Epstein’s victims, Teresa Helm and Juliette
Bryant. The latter, speaking publicly for the first time, talks about being
repeatedly abused at the age of 20 by the financier on his private island. “His
bedroom was always pitch dark and cold,” she says. “I just checked out of my
body and let him do what he wanted.” She was terrified throughout: “There was
something about the energy of a girl being scared that he liked.” Helm says the
network of abuse was “like a factory”, with Ghislaine recruiting women and
girls from around the world and feeing them to Epstein: “She did it very well.”
“We wanted
to get across the vastness and complexity of the sex trafficking operation,”
says series producer Ceri Isfryn. She was instrumental in gaining the trust of
Helm and Bryant and their lawyers Sigrid McCawley and David Boies. The women
only felt confident going public after Epstein’s death in prison – ruled as
suicide – in 2019.
The series
suggests that Epstein knew Robert Maxwell and was possibly helping him squirrel
away funds before his death, and that his acquaintance with Ghislaine therefore
began earlier than previously believed. Two questions go conclusively
unanswered. One is the correct pronunciation of Ghislaine’s name, which is
variously rendered as GILL-on, Gill-AYN or ZHIS-lun. The other is what led her
down the path that led to a prison cell. “30-year-old women don’t just
arbitrarily start abusing girls,” Isfryn says.
In these
days of wastage and fraud costing many billions, Robert Maxwell’s pillaging of
£426m from the pension funds of Mirror Group Newspapers and other companies
sounds almost quaint (it was anything but for the victims of course: the
grandfather of Dan Vernon, series director of House of Maxwell, was night
editor on the Mirror and went on to work at The People, and though his pension
was safe, many of his friends were rendered destitute). Similarly, Maxwell’s
tabloid rivalry with Rupert Murdoch now looks almost small-time. But in the
Britain of the 80s he cut a huge, if always somewhat absurd, figure.
House of
Maxwell briskly mentions his birth in 1923 into a poor Jewish family - his
parents and six siblings were later murdered by the Nazis - in a part of
Czechoslovakia that is now in Ukraine; his wartime heroism and black market
activities in the British Army; and his alleged spying for both MI6 and the
KGB. The foundation of Pergamon Press after the war and his time as a Labour MP
in the 60s are not covered. The deaths of two of his nine children with his
wife Betty are briefly alluded to, his many infidelities not at all.
His rivalry
with Rupert Murdoch is the spur, if not the subject of the first programme.
Murdoch pipped Maxwell to ownership of The News of the World in 1969 and bought
The Sun later that year. Maxwell’s acquisition of the Mirror Group in 1984 was
a direct challenge. “I’m not on some ego trip,” he lied. In 1987 – the same
year he launched the London Daily News, an extremely short-lived competitor to
the Standard - he streamlined several publishing enterprises into the Maxwell
Communication Corporation in a bid to rival Murdoch’s global media
organization.
When I left
journalism school in 1989, Maxwell’s appetite for acquiring businesses and for
self-promotion were already legendary. One of my contemporaries got a job for a
specialist architectural magazine that was bought as part of a deal by Maxwell,
the wider purchase celebrated by a party at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square,
compered by Bob Monkhouse. Maxwell dabbled in early satellite TV and became
Chairman of Oxford United football club in 1983. Months before he drowned in
1991 he paid $60m for the New York Daily News. Bronwen Maddox, who dug into his
financial wrongdoing at the FT, says his empire included 800 public companies,
their ownership structures chaotically obscure.
Unlike the
limelight-shunning Murdoch, Maxwell was all over the TV and his own tabloids,
the familiar, slab-like face with its black widow’s peak and cork-smudge
eyebrows above a bow tie and a suit flaring over the pear-shaped body. House of
Maxwell shows him boasting about the purchase of a Bulgarian media group to a
painfully young Jonathan Ross and chuckling as Paul Daniels warning him not to
pinch the £1m prize in a TV magic show.
The
documentary takes you behind the public smile. We see the lizard stare Maxwell
directed at his personal film crew, the dismissal of someone who strays into a
meeting: “Unwelcome intruder: f*** off!” He bugged the mansion, Headington Hill
Hall, that he rented for 32 years from Oxford Council, his offices; and the
garden of his unauthorised biographer, Tom Bower. An employee was scared to
paint the fifth floor ladies loos at MGN unless Maxwell approved the colour.
To his
family, according to one of his former editors, Eve Pollard, he demonstrated
“the kind of love that could get you by the throat as well as the heart”. His
secretary, Carol Bragoli, recalls him and his favourite child, Ghislaine,
making miaowing noises to one another over the phone. Ian and Kevin are very
much in his shadow, even as a jury acquits them of fraud after his death.
In the
third episode, damning evidence stacks up against Ghislaine, the glamorous,
vivacious fixer who surfed New York society with ease though her job and income
remained murky. Former friend Christopher Mason recalls her asking him to
compose a song for Epstein’s 40th birthday “roast”, celebrating him as “the
subject of many schoolgirl crushes” who has “24-hour erections”. Gossip
columnist turned reputation manager Couri Hay says Prince Andrew was “her big
card… a rare bird in New York City”. Excerpts from Andrew’s disastrous
Newsnight interview with Emily Mailtis play alongside testimony from Virginia
Roberts, the woman he denies assaulting but to whom he has paid an alleged
£12m.
The horror
isn’t over for the survivors of Epstein’s sexual predations. Ghislaine’s
siblings emerged from obscurity to paint her as a victim too, and her legal
team sought a retrial on the grounds that one of the original jurors neglected
to mention his own experience of sexual abuse (though this has since been
denied). Meanwhile, the disgraced Prince Andrew walked the Queen into Prince
Philip’s memorial service, further evidence that the rich and powerful play by
different rules. Thirty years after debate raged over whether Robert Maxwell
died by accident, suicide, or assassination, the makers of this latest
documentary know they haven’t had the final word. “More will come out in the
next couple of years,” says Colin Barr. “I have no idea where this story will
go.”
House of
Maxwell begins 9pm Mon on BBC2, with all episodes then available on iPlayer
.webp)
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