Maxwell. Том Боуэр

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 the country. After breakfast with Ehoud Olmert, the health minister and a friend with whom he shared a passion for football, he spent half an hour with Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister. Their regular meetings were welcomed by the diminutive former terrorist. Maxwell had not only committed himself to substantial investments in Israeli industry, newspapers and football, but he had established a direct link between Shamir and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. The benefit to Israel had been considerable. Through Maxwell’s efforts, 300,000 Soviet Jews had been allowed to emigrate to Israel. He had also flown dozens of Soviet children afflicted by Chernobyl’s 1986 radioactive blast to Israel for treatment. In 1990, he had stood among the guests of honour at a solemn reunion of 1,000 Czech Jews, blessed by the presence of Václav Havel, the Czech president, and senior Israeli politicians.

      That morning, at Shamir’s request, Maxwell had telephoned Gorbachev’s direct number in the Kremlin from the prime minister’s office. Speaking in halting Russian, he had passed on Shamir’s greetings and his request that the Soviet leader should remove an obstacle in Soviet – Israeli relations. The warmth of the conversation reconvinced Shamir of Maxwell’s importance. Emerging into the sunlight, the Publisher returned to a hectic schedule of meetings with his employees and advisers, interrupted only by lunch with David Levy, the junior foreign minister, and dinner with Yitzhak Modai, the finance minister. That night, as he lay in his room reflecting upon his importance, his financial troubles in London appeared thankfully remote. In one of those characteristic moments of rashness, he pondered first whether to buy El Al, Israel’s beleaguered national airline, or the Israeli Discount Bank, and even about bidding $11 billion for Paramount film studios.

      After a short nap, at 4 a.m. on 9 November Maxwell flew to Frankfurt. There he lunched with George Shultz, the former US secretary of state whose memoirs Macmillan had published at enormous financial loss and whose company Maxwell often sought. He also met Ulrike Pöhl, the wife of the German central banker, a woman upon whom Maxwell was able to unburden his emotions and whose company he eagerly sought.

      By nightfall, Maxwell had returned to London for dinner with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister. The two men, with a common ancestry in Eastern Europe, had deepened their bond when, with Peres’s approval, Alisa Eshed, his vivacious personal assistant for twenty-two years, had been appointed Maxwell’s coordinator and representative in Israel. These were the close relationships to which Maxwell had long aspired in Britain. But other than the occasional meeting with Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, an occasional lunch with Norman Lamont, or conversations with other government ministers at charity parties, Maxwell could satisfy his frustrated political ambitions only by meeting leaders of the Labour Party.

      Overcoming their antipathy, both Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley, Labour’s leader and deputy leader, accepted Maxwell’s invitations to meetings and meals in order to secure the continuing support for their beleaguered party of the Mirror Group’s newspapers – the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People. In Maxwell’s dining room, the entertainment manager, Douglas Harrod, would overhear both of them seriously seeking his advice and on one occasion listening to his request for a peerage. ‘It’s normal for a newspaper owner,’ Maxwell urged, expecting a positive response. Both visitors had smiled benignly, without committing themselves.

      The delivery of the proofs of that night’s Daily Mirror interrupted the dinner СКАЧАТЬ