Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

Author:John Preston [Preston, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, True Crime, White Collar Crime
ISBN: 9780062997494
Google: X-N5zQEACAAJ
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-02-09T20:31:20.817402+00:00

20.

The Party of the Decade

The dinner-dances hosted by Robert and Betty Maxwell at Headington Hill Hall were considered, even by hardened partygoers, to be in a class of their own. The house itself was an ideal venue for a party. It had been built in the early nineteenth century by a culture-loving family of brewers, the Morrells. They too had been keen party-givers. In 1878, Oscar Wilde was among the 300 guests at one of their fancy-dress balls. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he chose to come dressed as Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

Ever since the Maxwells had moved into Headington Hill Hall, they had continued the tradition of throwing grand parties. But, as guests soon discovered, Maxwell had his own distinctive way of doing things. The writer and future Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth was a guest at one of their parties in the 1970s. At first nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. ‘It was only when I went up to Maxwell that I realized he had this apparatus on. There was an old-fashioned microphone attached to the lapel of his jacket with a wind-shield on it. And on his belt was this large box, the size of a hard-back book with a dial in the middle. This was somehow connected to speakers in each of the rooms.’

Maxwell, Brandreth realized, was wearing his own personal PA system, enabling him to address people no matter how far away they were. ‘He’d turn the dial down when he was talking to you. Then, as soon as he saw someone he wanted to talk to on the other side of the room he’d turn it up again and this disembodied voice would come booming out of the speakers.’

For all the splendour of his parties, Maxwell himself remained an oddly elusive figure. ‘It was as if there was a kind of invisible moat around Maxwell,’ Brandreth recalls. ‘He was definitely a presence, but whenever he came into a room, instead of the room being more crowded, it always seemed slightly emptier than before.’

As Maxwell’s fortune grew, the larger and grander their parties became. Cabinet ministers would rub shoulders with captains of industry, leading scientists with newspaper editors. But the joint party to celebrate Maxwell’s sixty-fifth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of his company, Pergamon Press, in June 1988, was confidently predicted to outdo them all, in terms of both opulence and pomp.

No one, not even his many critics, could deny that Maxwell was on a colossal roll: from Oxford to Osaka, his empire was booming. As he had boasted just a few weeks earlier, ‘The banks owe us money; we have so much on deposit.’ At the same time, academic institutions were queuing up to bestow honours upon him: Maxwell had just been given a doctorate of law by Aberdeen University as well as honorary life membership of the University of London’s Institute of Philosophy.

So many guests had been invited – around 3000 – that it had been decided to hold the party over three consecutive nights.

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