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Cc: "Lesley Groff" 1=1Mi
>
Rob,
Resend this to me and lesley.
David
Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry
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your pals
Whatever Happened to the Maxwells?
2011-03-11 20:16:45.70 GMT
Peter Stanford
March 11 (Telegraph) -- After their father's death, the
children of the disgraced publisher closed ranks. Will that same
solidarity will save Ghislaine from the taint of scandal?
It was the widow and seven children of Robert Maxwell who
were left to face the music following the media mogul's
mysterious death on his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the
Canaries in 1991. "The fat fraudster", as his daughter-in-law
Pandora still refers to him, left the family's reputation in
tatters and its coffers empty. There was a £460 million "black
hole" in the pension fund of Maxwell's Mirror Group Newspapers,
and two of his sons most closely involved in the family firm,
Kevin and Ian, stood trial for their part in the fraud.
They were acquitted - though a subsequent Whitehall report
concluded Kevin bore a "heavy responsibility" for what had
happened - but, 20 years on, the Maxwell name remains mud, with
the power to damn by association, even where there are no
similarities. When the Serious Fraud Office this week arrested
the property tycoons Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz, it was widely
noted that they shared a Park Lane office with Kevin Maxwell, now
working in the same industry.
But the most spectacular demonstration of the curse of the
Maxwell legacy has come in the controversy surrounding the Duke
of York's friendship with the American billionaire Jeffrey
Epstein, who was convicted in 2008 for soliciting an under-age
girl for prostitution. Epstein's close friend - and according to
some accounts former partner - is 49-year-old Ghislaine Maxwell,
the publisher's youngest child. Debate about her role in the
whole imbroglio has caused her to issue a lawyer's letter this
week, threatening legal action if unspecified allegations are
repeated.
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The seven surviving Maxwell siblings (a brother, Michael,
died in 1969, at 23, eight years after being seriously injured in
a car crash; and a sister, Karine, fell victim to leukaemia at
three years old in 1957) are reported to be very close. Shared
tragedy sometimes has a way of doing that. "They pull together.
They really are this extraordinary family," says Pandora Maxwell,
Kevin's wife for 23 years.
But if there was ever a competition to determine who had
suffered most at the hands of their overbearing father, several
would have a strong claim. The eldest daughter, Anne, now 62, for
instance, was apparently told by him when she embarked on a
(failed) career on the stage: "What have you and Pope John Paul
II got in common? You're both ugly and you're both failed
actors." She is now said to be a hypnotherapist in Surrey,
practising under another name.
Then there is Philip, 61, who fled to Argentina to escape
his father's bullying, and was last heard of living in a small
flat in London trying to be a writer. And Ian, 54, is reported by
those present at the time to have been mercilessly taunted by his
father when he joined the family business and was regularly
subjected to unflattering comparisons with his younger brother
Kevin.
But Ghislaine was widely acknowledged as Maxwell's favourite
- he named his £15 million yacht after her - and his death hit
her hard. As well as the emotional pain, there was the loss of
the money that had sustained the Maxwell children's paths through
top-notch private schools, into Oxford, and, in the case of
Ghislaine, into London's fast, rich crowd. "She was very
beautiful, very confident, very clever," remembers one friend
from those days, "but she could also be quite a piece of work.
You didn't want to cross her."
To escape the emerging scandal of her father's crimes, she
went to New York - she was pictured boarding Concorde, which
outraged those Mirror pensioners who were facing an impoverished
retirement - and started all over again on the Manhattan social
scene. But that requires money and, according to her mother,
Betty Maxwell, it had all gone, leaving the publisher's widow, by
her account, dependent on the charity of friends.
Soon after her arrival in New York, Ghislaine Maxwell - who
has never married - started to appear on the arm of the immensely
wealthy Epstein. Their friendship has proved enduring. She was
alongside him on his private jet when he flew in to RAF Markham
in 2000 to visit Prince Andrew at Sandringham, and she is there,
too, hovering, slightly uneasily, in the background of a by-now
familiar photograph of the Queen's second son with his arm around
the waist of a 17-year-old, allegedly hired as a masseuse for
Epstein.
Is history about to repeat itself? Will Ghislaine again face
another ruin because of the frailty of the rich man in her life?
In the face of this threat, the fabled family solidarity appears
to be kicking in. Her siblings, well-accustomed after 20 years to
keeping stum, have closed ranks.
Isabel Maxwell is one of the few who even responds when
contacted, though as she runs Maxwell Communications (a name that
is one step from her father's prime vehicle, the Maxwell
Communications Corporation), her politeness should come as no
surprise. "I make it a rule," she replies, en route to a meeting
of the Israel Venture Network, an association for "hands-on
venture philanthropists" in the US and Israel, "not to
participate in this type of general Maxwell family catch up."
Even the usually garrulous Pandora Maxwell - who famously
appeared at a window of her Chelsea home in 1992 to shout "p---
off or I'll call the police", only to discover that her unwelcome
early-morning callers were members of the constabulary, come to
arrest her husband Kevin - is unwilling to talk about Ghislaine's
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current crisis. "I always put my foot in it," she demurs, after
consulting her former husband, "and I have to think about the
effect on my [seven] children."
Robert Maxwell was famously good at covering his tracks -
and not just when he was stealing from the company pension fund.
He told a different story about his own emergence from the ruins
of post-war central Europe every time a reporter asked him. So it
is hardly surprising his family has grown so skilled over the
past two decades at simply disappearing. Indeed, they are a
perpetual reproach to anyone who claims that it is impossible to
erase all trace of yourself in the technological age.
Christine Maxwell, for example, is thought to be based in
either the United States or France and works as an internet
entrepreneur. In a rare 1998 interview about her then-role on the
Internet Society Board of Trustees, she recalled her years
working in her father's publishing business. "Both of my
parents," she said, "had a strong work ethic, which they
instilled in me and my brothers and sisters when we were very
young. They also communicated a very clear understanding that
advantages always come with responsibilities - that there was no
such thing as a free ride." Except, presumably, on the backs of
Mirror Group pensioners.
And it is that lack of remorse that partly fuels the
on-going fascination with the Maxwells, rather as it does with
bankers. Only Kevin, once Britain's biggest ever bankrupt, has
made reference to the "moral burden...I will bear for the rest of
my life" as a result of his father's crimes.
His mother and siblings would probably object that they were
not as close to Robert Maxwell's financial dodgy dealings, but
they undeniably enjoyed the money and the opportunities it gave
them to the full when it was there.
Ultimately, though, guilt-by-association is an unjust
burden. It is as absurd as blaming every German alive today for
the Second World War. Other celebrated families who have had the
same fate - for example, the Astors in the wake of the Profumo
Scandal - have successfully managed to cast off the shadow.
Perhaps it is simply too soon for the Maxwells, even now. Or
it may be that the damage done to them - and others - by the
whole affair goes too deep. But, whatever their vigorous efforts
to be forgotten, memories - as Ghislaine Maxwell is currently
finding - are long, and forgiveness slow to be conceded.
-0- Mar/11/2011 20:16 GMT
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