By the time of his death, this debonair war hero had turned into a bloated, cigar-chomping, 22-stone fraudster. The other shows Maxwell and Betty shortly after their wedding, in which the elegant, bow-tied, moustachioed figure with a cigarette – probably a Du Maurier, as “Ivan du Maurier” was, like Robert Maxwell, one of his many invented personas – could easily be mistaken for Errol Flynn.
“The day before, he had learned that his mother and one of his sisters had been murdered by the Nazis”, reads the brief caption. One shows Maxwell receiving the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery in 1945 for his part in a heroic rescue of fellow soldiers in the final stages of the war. There are two particularly striking photos in this book. Preston comes to his subject with the advantage both of hindsight and his great skill at exposing hypocrisy and subterfuge, as he demonstrated with A Very English Scandal, about another high-profile chancer, Jeremy Thorpe. There have been more than a dozen books about Maxwell, mainly published in the 90s, including a rather touching memoir, A Mind of My Own, by his long-suffering widow, Betty, who died in 2013. Within a year Maxwell would be dead, and three decades later his daughter, after whom the yacht was named, would herself be in a very different kind of dock in the same city. It would shortly host a party to celebrate Maxwell’s purchase of the New York Daily News, and guests would be given blue bootees to wear so as not to soil the cream, deep-pile carpets. In February 1991 it docked in New York as a four-storey, floating symbol of its owner: outlandish, brash and attention-seeking. T he yacht that features on the front cover of Fall, John Preston’s very entertaining account of the extraordinary life and death of Robert Maxwell, is called the Lady Ghislaine.
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