Remembering Ghislaine Maxwell’s Father
A Petty, Penny-Pinching Tyrant
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert, a master networker like Jeffrey Epstein, often took her on his arm to events for the wealthy and powerful. Behind the myth of brilliant entrepreneurship there was a bully who often humiliated and manipulated his staff.
This November marks not only the 30th anniversary of the suspicious death of British media mogul Robert Maxwell, but also the scheduled start of his daughter Ghislaine’s trial on charges of sex trafficking, enticing a minor to engage in illegal sex acts, and conspiracy. Robert Maxwell fell to his death from the yacht he named after Ghislaine, his ninth and most treasured child, in what was either a suicide or accidental drowning.
Ghislaine Maxwell faces trial without Jeffrey Epstein, her co-conspirator, whose demise in federal custody in August 2019 is equally suspicious. Conspiracy theories abound, including, that, like Robert Maxwell, Epstein was involved in espionage. The similarities of both men don’t end there — both were master networkers, manipulators, and, ultimately, the most powerful figures in Ghislaine Maxwell’s life.
In teaming up with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell sought to revive the lavish lifestyle she enjoyed from birth until her father’s death.
Robert Maxwell and Epstein thrived on humiliating others, and often acted with impunity (rules were for other people, not them). That Ghislaine Maxwell would attach herself to someone like Epstein after her father’s death was perhaps as predictable as it was tragic for the young women they are accused of preying upon. Each man left behind survivors — in Epstein’s case, the women he sexually assaulted. In Robert Maxwell’s case, it was the pensioners who had to accept a 50% cut in their payments after it was discovered he had plundered £440 million from the Mirror Group’s pension fund.
In teaming up with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell sought to revive the lavish lifestyle she enjoyed from birth until her father’s death. How Robert Maxwell financed that lifestyle is a story in itself. Most remember Maxwell as the high-profile owner of media properties such as the UK’s Daily Mirror and New York’s Daily News. Few will have heard of one of the most lucrative properties in the Maxwell publishing empire — Pergamon Press, its decidedly unsexy crown jewel. The company published highly profitable science and medical journals, which generated the heaps of cash that kept Maxwell’s empire afloat until it spectacularly capsized.
I worked at the company’s American office in Westchester County, New York in the 1980s. Having moved on to more flamboyant business activities, Maxwell never visited Pergamon USA during the two years I managed and acquired medical research journals there. Yet his presence loomed everywhere.
Except for a five-year period when Maxwell temporarily lost full control, Pergamon was Maxwell’s primary cash cow. The beauty of the business model was that the product was paid for upfront, providing a steady stream of cash. The company reliably generated high-margin profits from its creation through an acquisition in 1951, until an over-leveraged Maxwell had to sell Pergamon eight months before his death in 1991.
While at the company, I had a front-row seat to the pettiness, extreme penny-pinching, and other indignities his employees experienced at the business which financed so many of Maxwell’s ambitions and extravagances. After I left the company, I went to work for the staid outfit that eventually bought Pergamon. At a budget meeting, a financial executive studied a spreadsheet and asked why the profitability of an obscure organic chemistry journal, Tetrahedron, had had a big, one-year dip in profit while in Maxwell’s ownership.
It turns out that in the year in question, Maxwell threw a party on the Lady Ghislaine, invited a few Tetrahedron editors, and then charged the whole event against the journal’s account.
A tightfisted titan
The bosses at Pergamon USA presented new staff with a copy of the “Management and Operations Manual,” a 50-page guide we were told to read carefully and follow. There was a particular obsession with “money-eating telephones,” including a four-page, single-spaced section called “Making Effective Use of the Telephone,” which covered everything from where a phone should be placed on a desk to one’s relationship with the switchboard operator (who snitched on you if you came back late from lunch). “If a further phone call with a customer or author is necessary, invite them to call back,” the manual advised, so the company could save the cost of an outgoing call. We were warned against “unnecessarily long telephone calls.” “One executive we know keeps an egg-timer on his desk; it has become a matter of personal pride to get through his calls before the sand runs through….” Personal phone calls were forbidden, of course, except for emergencies, but “in the case of emergency long-distance calls, you are required to pay for them.” Overseas calls needed the approval of the president; higher-level managers had to sign off on the sending of telexes, faxes, or overnight mail.
In the Oxford office, Maxwell himself had to sign off on the travel forms, and he liked to wait until the last possible moment to do so.
For a business that generated so much money, Maxwell saw to it that remarkably little was put back into it. Upper-level managers excused Maxwell’s profligate spending with a shrug and a comment that it was “Bob being Bob,” while they enforced draconian cost control in the office. If a letter had to be restarted, for instance, we were admonished to cut off the unused portion of the sheet and reuse it as scrap. It hardly mattered; the letterhead changed frequently as Maxwell shuttled his assets from one holding company to another.
Though Maxwell went first class, often with a butler, the travel budget was second only to the telephone in scrutiny. We required formal permission to travel, and the cost of the airline tickets had to be approved. Only one staffer was permitted to call the travel agent the company used, and she purchased all airline tickets. The president of the company had to sign a special form which indicated how much money was being saved on coach fare by our making connections or flying over a Saturday night.
In the Oxford office, Maxwell himself had to sign off on the travel forms, and he liked to wait until the last possible moment to do so. I remember talking to British colleagues, trying to nail them down regarding dates of their travel to medical and scientific meetings in the United States. “I really can’t say,” was the usual response, even three days before the expected departure date. “Maxwell hasn’t signed my bloody travel form yet.”
In the warehouse, she met a weeping man who had been with the company more than 20 years…
Once we needed to send a car to Kennedy Airport to pick up a newly hired Oxford-based director I was to work with. She faced the usual 11th-hour frenzy trying to get her permission slip signed by Maxwell. Her schedule was very tight, and she would be arriving at Kennedy airport on a Thursday afternoon at 1:00 PM and had only until Friday evening to get her Elmsford-based business accomplished before moving on to her next appointment. My boss wanted her to take public transportation, a process known to take 4–6 hours. He finally relented; we were allowed to hire a car to pick her up.
Upon arrival, the director was given a tour of the Elmsford facilities. Several dozen employees had just been fired from the book division of the company so it could be made to look more profitable and then moved to another Maxwell holding company. In the warehouse, she met a weeping man who had been with the company more than 20 years who had just been informed he was losing his job.
To save money, Pergamon wouldn’t put up its visiting staff in the Ramada Inn 100 yards up the road. Instead, employees from other offices generally slept in rooms on the third floor of the Elmsford office. That night, in one of those rooms, our exhausted British executive found herself. She tried to draw the curtains, and they came down upon her head in a dusty heap.
Lavish lifestyle, neglected company
Those collapsing curtains weren’t unusual in the Elmsford office building, which was in a state of rapid decay. Built as an estate, the building later became a country club. It was already falling apart when it was bought by Pergamon. From a distance it appeared stately and academic, a perfect headquarters for a research publisher. When one got closer, one saw the peeling paint on the exposed beams of the faux Tudor-style building. Once a stately, imposing mansion of large rooms with high ceilings, it was now a hodgepodge of incomprehensible architecture and interior decorating.
One of my first official acts of employment was to sign a series of legal forms…it was like being presented with a prenuptial agreement during the wedding reception.
My boss’ office had a mural of a Greek beach scene leftover from the country club, and the other rooms were constructed of whatever was on sale at the home improvement store the week before the work was done. At least one bat and countless wasps and flies flew out of the air conditioning ducts. Maxwell could throw himself exorbitant parties, but his charges in New York seemed to be afraid to spend a $100 to get a decent ventilating fan for the perennially smelly men’s room. Once there was an electrical fire in the basement. The maintenance staff managed to extinguish it, but fear of the building inspector ensured no one called the fire department. All in the service of keeping Maxwell in caviar.
Such conditions contributed to the company’s excessive fear of being sued by a disgruntled employee. Although it’s standard now in many companies, back then it was unusual when one of my first official acts of employment was to sign a series of legal forms swearing I would not sue the company, and that Pergamon could fire me without cause or notice (though my notice to the company was one month). It was like being presented with a prenuptial agreement during the wedding reception. Upon arrival at my first company softball game, a personnel manager, with a very earnest look on his face, came bounding up to me with a form to sign — this one stating that the company was not liable for any injury I might sustain in the game.
That night he broke a rib attempting to slide into third base.
Secrets and security
Secrecy and information security were critical at Pergamon. My job entailed managing existing journals and acquiring or starting new ones, as well as responsibility for their profitability. I negotiated editorial budgets, acted as a diplomat to medical and professional societies whose journals we published or sought to publish, and contracted subscriptions and sales in deals that at times reached $100,000. Yet, it was nearly impossible for me to get up-to-date subscription information.
The key tenet about information at Pergamon was to make it difficult for any one person to ever develop a clear idea of even one product’s performance. Though I was making management decisions about the journals on my list every day, if I wanted complete circulation figures for a particular title, I had to request them from the Oxford office. These figures would be supplied about a week later, if at all.
One would think this sort of office secrecy and security would extend to all areas of the operation, but it didn’t. The litmus test was simple — the security had to be perceived as protecting us from competitors or, at times, our editors and authors. The parking lots around the building were poorly lit, for example.
The fixation with secrecy played out in other ways, as well. Despite his embrace of the mantle of “newspaper magnate,” Maxwell seemed to dislike talking to the press. “Never confirm or comment,” the operations manual advised if ever we received a call from a reporter. “The gentlemen (or ladies) of the press are very persistent people and often give the impression that they are authorized to ask questions, or already know information.”
A cult of personality (not)
The Lady Ghislaine, the parties, and relentless public relations were designed to venerate Maxwell and further swell his boundless ego. In the Maxwell Communication Corporation’s first issue, Maxwell was pictured five times in an eight-page broadsheet. He appeared with all sorts of dignitaries — Henry Kissinger, the prime minister of Portugal, the editor-in-chief of Pravda, the governor of Macao, Japan’s vice-premier, the “head of government” of the People’s Republic of Outer Mongolia. It was akin to an art collector assembling any piece from any period of any value.
There was a large photographic portrait of Maxwell in the reception of the Elmsford office. His eyes had a Mona Lisa-like quality. They seemed to follow employees across the room as they passed through.
Pergamon’s logo reproduced a coin minted around 400 BC with an image of Athena. The logo was pretentious, designed to give the company some class and history where none existed. The coin’s once round shape survived more as an oval and when reproduced, as it was on the cover of Pergamon books and journals, it looked like the artist couldn’t quite draw a circle. On the cover of the 888-page Festshrift for Maxwell’s 65th birthday, there was a photograph of the original coin and a circular portrait of Maxwell adjacent to it. The message was clear: Here were both an ancient deity and a contemporary one.
Top executives had at least one portrait of Maxwell in their offices and there was another of him in the main conference room. There was a large color photographic portrait of Maxwell in the reception of the Elmsford office. The soft, ethereal lighting around his head gave him a sort of halo. The irony was not lost on us, given Maxwell’s propensity for firing people on a whim. In the portrait his eyes had a Mona Lisa-like quality. They seemed to follow employees across the room as they passed through.
If the images of Maxwell in the office were an attempt to foment a cult of personality, it failed miserably. Once during my time in Elmsford, the reception portrait mysteriously disappeared. The president of the Elmsford office immediately got on the loudspeaker and announced if the portrait were not returned by the following business day, he would track down the culprit and fire him/her/them.
Some company acquisitions specialists, who had space in our building but worked for another of Maxwell’s companies, were prime suspects (they presumably knew Maxwell better than we did, and while familiarity may not have bred contempt, it certainly did irreverence). Several administrative assistants were frightened they might find the portrait in their cars, put there by the thief — how to explain that? The portrait did reappear on the wall by the next day. Nothing more was said about it, but we all made sure we locked our cars thereafter.
The quarterly distribution of the “Management Roster” took place with the solemnity of a papal bull and was as revelatory as the line-up of dignitaries at a Soviet-era May Day parade.
The class system
Despite Maxwell’s purported socialist leanings, the corporate culture modeled the British class system. We saw this hierarchy in the bimonthly circulation of the phone list and the quarterly distribution of the “Management Roster,” which took place with the solemnity of a papal bull and was as revelatory as the line-up of dignitaries at a Soviet-era May Day parade. While some study and interpretation were necessary, these documents showed who was in and who was out (literally and figuratively). The Management Roster listed people in descending order of their importance; on the phone list, the names of more important staff were bolded.
Petty indignities related to one’s status were common. When I arrived at “Maxwell House” after I was hired, I was shown to my new quarters. It was a small office on the south side of the building, with two narrow windows that looked out on a scummy empty swimming pool, a remnant from the country club.
“Only vice presidents get these tables,” he told me, “and Mr. Y needs one.”
One entered my office through a doorway that had hinges, but no door. Later I would learn that the previous evening, after work hours, two maintenance men had removed a thick pane of glass from the large inside window and my door from its hinges. They had left the hardware on my desk. It was all very amusing to my colleagues who pointed at the holes where the window and door had been and giggled.
When I asked my boss why, he explained that I was not a vice president — as my predecessor had been — and only vice presidents got inside windows and doors. During my first week a personnel manager, who also served as the office manager, announced he would be taking a small table from my office. “Only vice presidents get these tables,” he told me, “and Mr. Y [a vice president] needs one.” He never did come back and filch the table, but he later asked me about a half dozen times over the next two years whether I didn’t want to give up my “executive” chair. I told him “No” and dodged him in the office.
Ever-shifting assets
While I was employed there, Pergamon USA was split into two companies, then put back together again. It certainly kept the presses running at the letterhead printer. We struggled to adapt to Maxwell’s latest decisions, and my impression was the management neither knew much about nor cared about what we were publishing. I recall a heated discussion with one of my bosses regarding whether journal X published papers in a particular field. He finally got a copy off a shelf, opened it, and saw that indeed journal X did publish articles in that field. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he mused, “what you find when you open up one of these things.”
By then it was clear that Maxwell’s ostentatiousness was repelling some of the established scientists that mattered so much to our business. At times, when talking to potential editors who raised questions about Maxwell, I felt like a father trying to explain away the behavior of an errant teenage son. The Maxwellian dictum, “If you cannot convince them, confuse them” (also in the operations manual) wasn’t working for me. Just short of two years with the company, I had had enough and decided to look for a new job.
“There’s one thing I have to tell you. While we’re over there — no resignations!”
As the time of Maxwell’s 65th birthday approached, there was much speculation about who would be selected from our office to attend the extravagant, three-day-long festivities. The occasion was also being used to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Pergamon. Some of us had our suspicions that the founding date of Pergamon had been altered to coincide with Maxwell 65th birthday (if you believe you are making history, it’s easy enough to change it.)
Five of us middle managers were summoned to the president’s office and told we were being sent to Oxford for Maxwell’s birthday bash, primarily to babysit the outside journal editors who had been invited. I was finally going to meet the man and his children, including the glamorous Ghislaine. “You all know how Maxwell is,” my boss said, referring to Maxwell’s well-earned reputation for abuse of his employees. “There’s one thing I have to tell you. While we’re over there — no resignations!” We all shook our heads solemnly in agreement. I was true to my word. The next day I cancelled my flight and typed up my letter of notice on newly issued company letterhead.
Early one morning I had arrived to find Kevin Maxwell, Robert’s eighth child, sitting outside my doorless office preparing a memo. He brushed me off when I inquired about his need for secretarial help. Later that day another batch of staff were fired. Kevin was typically sent to deal with the unpleasant business, while Ghislaine was assigned the sexier businesses like the Oxford football team.
Time was already running out on Maxwell’s rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul approach to managing his growing debt. Just over three years later, we’d see Ghislaine on the deck of her namesake after her father’s death. I felt some sympathy for her, though little for her brothers Kevin and Ian, who were acquitted of fraud after a lengthy trial. That sympathy for Ghislaine would transform to revulsion as news broke about how she put the social and political network her father had brought her into at the service of Jeffrey Epstein, helping to enlarge and legitimize his reputation. Like Robert Maxwell, he, too, would have his fall. This time, though, Ghislaine faces the consequences.
This article is based on my experiences working at Pergamon Press and an unpublished piece I wrote in the 1990s.
