Ghislaine Maxwell holds the secrets of two men who died under mysterious circumstances: her father, Robert Maxwell, and her companion, Jeffrey Epstein. 

Both men were fabulously wealthy, both wrapped themselves in the trappings of power, both had rumored ties to intelligence services, and both of their lives ended in disgrace. Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail cell remains a source of speculation and allegations of conspiracy. Robert Maxwell’s fall from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, is no less shrouded in mystery.

And at the center sits Ghislaine — the connective tissue between these two disgraced moguls. Once celebrated as a socialite, she is now a convicted felon, a kind of modern-day Mata Hari whose knowledge of Epstein, Trump, her father, and their networks of power and corruption could rewrite history if ever fully revealed.

While the world continues to ponder the full extent of Epstein’s crimes, it’s worth asking what role Robert Maxwell’s story plays in shaping his daughter’s choices — and perhaps even Epstein’s rise. 

Maxwell was a Holocaust survivor who reinvented himself as a British publishing baron, a member of Parliament, and an alleged intelligence asset. He built empires on knowledge and vanity, only to destroy himself by looting his employees’ pension funds to cover his mounting business debts; the full extent of his financial crimes only emerged after his body was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991.

A couple of years ago, I spoke with British author John Preston about Robert Maxwell. His book, Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s Most Notorious Media Baron, captures a man whose life was a study in hubris, ambition, and deceit. Today, revisiting that conversation sheds light not only on Ghislaine’s inheritance but on the larger web of power and predation that continues to haunt us — linking Maxwell, Epstein, and the whole bloody mess in between.

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[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We’re always drawn to scoundrels, men who build empires, command attention, bend rules, and then just as inevitably implode under the weight of their own hubris. Robert Maxwell was one of those men, a larger than life publisher, politician, and spy. He ended up not in triumph, but floating lifeless off the deck of his yacht under circumstances that still defy explanation. Decades later, his daughter Ghislaine would orbit another criminal, Jeffrey Epstein, a man whose own death in a New York jail cell remains as murky as Maxwell’s plunge into the Atlantic. Both men wielded wealth and influence to mask depravity. Both exited the stage in ways that left more questions than answered. And Ghislaine, the connective tissue between the two, has become the embodiment of that dark inheritance, which is why this conversation about Robert Maxwell from three years ago feels so current. In an era when Epstein’s crimes are once again under the microscope, when Trump’s ties to him are back in the headlines, and when Ghislaine herself sits in prison holding the secrets of two dead men, she is kind of a modern-day Mata Hari, the missing link in mysteries that still haunt us. My conversation with John Preston is a story that is worthy of cinematic treatment, a story that John tells in his recent book, Fall, the mysterious life and death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s most notorious media baron. It is my pleasure to once again share this conversation with John Preston with all of you. First of all, talk a little bit about why Robert Maxwell is any different than any other mogul that flew too close to the sun and was taken down by greed and arrogance.

[00:02:07] John Preston: I think one of the fascinating things about Robert Maxwell is that it’s very hard to think of anybody in the 20th century who traveled quite as far from his origins as Maxwell did. He was born in a little town in the east of what was then Czechoslovakia. There was a large Jewish population in the town. Maxwell himself was Jewish. And he left when he was 15, 16 in 1939, essentially to find his fortune and to fight in the war. And then whilst he was away, three of his siblings, both his parents and his grandfather died in Auschwitz. And that’s really the kind of prism that you go and look at Maxwell through. And he eventually comes to England. He tries to become an English squire and a gentleman, although it becomes very obvious that the English establishment doesn’t really want to kind of admit him at all. And so he kind of ends up playing their own game. And he becomes determined to kind of bring down the British establishment from the inside. He becomes a Labour MP. As you say, he was a very, very successful publisher of scientific books. And then things start to go awry, as it happens in many cases when people, invariably men, always men actually, decide they want to own a newspaper. That’s where the rot really sets in.

[00:03:34] Jeff Schechtman: And in many ways, it was a classic story of, I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member, because no matter how much he got, no matter how successful he became, there was still this sense of being an outsider.

[00:03:49] John Preston: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that Maxwell had, I don’t know if you call it, kind of like a particular complaint, and I feel it’s very prevalent in English life, where you kind of simultaneously want to sit at the top table and kill everyone else who’s sitting at the top table. So Maxwell had enormous kind of envy and jealousy of the establishment. And he wanted to bring them down and join them.

[00:04:18] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that you talk about is that this upbringing that he had really left huge gaps with him, that he was always trying to fill those gaps and really never was able to.

[00:04:33] John Preston: I think that is true. I mean, he changed his name four times by the time he was 23. And there is a sense, in a way, Maxwell never quite knew who he was. And, you know, he was a man of enormous vanity. And when he, the Daily Mirror, which is Britain’s biggest left-leaning tabloid in 1984, he invited enormous ridicule by plastering his face all over his paper. You know, of course, you can see that as just another symptom of his vanity. But I wonder if perhaps there was an element of trying to kind of get external validation that he was who he claimed to be.

[00:05:20] Jeff Schechtman: In what ways did that also drive his success? I mean, to your point earlier about how far he had come from his roots, what drove his success? What was the skill that made him successful initially?

[00:05:36] John Preston: Well, I think he was touched by genius, actually, in this respect. I mean, you know, he basically came from an absolutely dirt-tall family. He had to share a pair of shoes in the winter with one of his siblings, and in the summer they’d all run around barefoot. And during the war, he joined up with the British forces. He actually fights with great distinction, and he’s awarded the Military Cross, which is the second highest medal for gallantry. But he’d come dreaming all the time of finding this commodity, which you get for next to no money in a scientific journal. In Germany, he says, I’ve got a terrible problem. Can you help me? And essentially no scientific research had been published in Germany throughout the war, as a result of which this man had an enormous backlog of material. And Maxwell suddenly thinks, my God, maybe this is the commodity I’d been dreaming. And it’s knowledge. And the great beauty of it, from his point of view, is that none of the academics and the scientists who’d written these papers really expected to be paid for them. They were just thrilled to see them in print. So he basically used this. He gets all this stuff out from Germany, with the help of British intelligence, who paid to set him up in London. And it becomes the cornerstone of his publishing empire. So I mean, I think that was an absolutely brilliant idea. And yes, very easy to feel Maxwell, particularly in retrospect, as someone who was a creature driven entirely by expediency. But actually, he always had one eye fixed on his profit margins. The other one would periodically give an unexpectedly idealistic glint. And I think, actually, he really did believe that science was a great force for good in the world. And there’s no doubt that by giving all these scientists a platform to disseminate their latest research, he paved the way for a lot of the advances in chemistry, physics, medicine, biology. So I mean, there was that, you know, there it is. Questionably, the kind of greedy flying element to Maxwell.

[00:08:03] Jeff Schechtman: But there is another side as well. Did he really believe that? Or did he convince himself of that as a way to kind of justify what he was doing?

[00:08:12] John Preston: No, I think he really believed it. And of course, not until really until the 1960s that the greed starts to get the upper hand. Throughout the 50s, you know, yes, he’s making a lot of money. And by the end of the 50s, he’s the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world. But, you know, if only he could have wished it there. I think that, you know, there’s no doubt that he liked the trappings of wealth and craved them. But I think that, you know, as you said earlier, you know, one has this kind of strange sense throughout Maxwell’s life, that he’s constantly grasping to this indefinable thing that will bring him a measure of fulfillment and satisfaction. And he never quite gets it.

[00:09:11] Jeff Schechtman: He becomes a member of parliament in 64. What was that period like for him?

[00:09:16] John Preston: Well, Maxwell typically decided he was going to be prime minister before he actually became a member of parliament. And yeah, he was duly elected MP, Labour MP for a constituency called Buckingham. And he gets to the House of Commons, and he thinks people are going to kind of treat him like this conquering hero. And actually, they just kind of laugh at him. And he makes so many speeches that you follow MPs would kind of tug on his jacket to try and get him to sit down. And in most cases, no success whatsoever. And he had no real, he didn’t get anywhere as an MP. The only position of responsibility he’s ever given is to be put in charge of the House of Commons catering commissions. So it was quite a rude awakening for him. So having kind of been thwarted on that avenue to power, he then becomes fixated on owning a newspaper as kind of the next best thing.

[00:10:16] Jeff Schechtman: I want to come back to what you were talking about before in terms of British intelligence helping setting him up in business. What did British intelligence get in return? What did they expect in return?

[00:10:29] John Preston: Well, Maxwell, I mean, Berlin at the end of the war was divided into four zones. And Maxwell, who had this enormous ability to kind of assimilate languages, was fluent in at least certain languages by then. So he could pass, as it were, as a native from one occupied zone to the other. And he was a great asset to British intelligence. He loved subterfuge. And, you know, he was good at staying below the radar. He was a kind of, he was sort of like Harry Lyme in The Thrill of the Sir. And he made himself very, very useful to British intelligence, which, I mean, he had been British intelligence at the time was a kind of rather gentlemanly club. And Maxwell was someone I just had never come across anyone like Maxwell before, who was from a completely different background. And he was a real operator. And he made him look like a kind of bundling amateur. And they did think to themselves, my God, this man is streets ahead of us in many respects. Let, you know, let’s back this horse as they were happy.

[00:11:43] Jeff Schechtman: Was there a fear that somehow he could turn on them or he could do something that would embarrass them? I think that came later, really.

[00:11:52] John Preston: I think that at the time they saw him as a useful asset. And he was still, you know, he was still a young man. He was only in his early 20s. And they just thought, well, you know, we’ll give him some money and feed money, essentially, to start up his, his business, his publishing business and see what happened. And he goes and makes a roaring success of it.

[00:12:20] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about his quest to own a newspaper and the route that that took.

[00:12:27] John Preston: Well, this quest to have a newspaper really goes back to 1963. Maxwell was in Australia. He’d got his fixation with selling encyclopedias, which had rather kind of taken over from scientific journals. And the very beauty of encyclopedias, the price he’s concerned is that if you if you buy a subscription to an encyclopedia, you are locked in for kind of years, in some cases, decades. So it was a great cash cow for him. And he’s in Australia. And he said, someone says to him, oh, you know, you really ought to meet this young man. He’s in the same business as you, called Ruth, but Murdoch. So the two of them have supper together. And as Murdoch admitted, he was really pretty spellbound by Maxwell. And they agreed to go in business together, selling these encyclopedias. And Maxwell persuades Murdoch to stump up on these Australian dollars, and he’s going to become his equal partner. But before the deal can go through, Murdoch has lunch with a friend of his, who’s a publisher. He starts telling him all about this fantastic man, this great deal he’s going to have, and so on and so forth. And the friend starts laughing. And Murdoch goes, why are you laughing? And the friend goes, don’t have anything to do with this man, Maxwell, and explains that the encyclopedias are actually bankrupt stock, which the publisher is offloaded onto Maxwell for nothing, that Maxwell is trying to get Murdoch to stump up a million Australian dollars for. And from that moment on, Murdoch thought it was quite funny, and thought that really, you know, that was it. Thou would never have anything more to do with it. But actually, they were to remain entwined, their faith were to remain entwined for the next 30 years. And essentially, every time that Maxwell tried to buy a newspaper, Murdoch would snatch it from underneath his nose. And it happened with the News of the World in 1966. It happened again and again and again. And it kind of drove Maxwell nuts when he came to see Murdoch as his arch nemesis, who was out to thwart him at every turn. I don’t think Murdoch saw Maxwell like that. As far as Murdoch was concerned, Maxwell was this kind of perpetual irritant that he could never quite manage to brush off. And it used to infuriate Murdoch that people would mention their names in the same breath. And they shared the same initials as well, made it even worse. Maxwell saw a newspaper, and quite rightly saw it as being a position of enormous power and influence. And indeed, when Maxwell finally succeeds in buying the Daily Mirror in 1984, which, not entirely coincidentally, Murdoch doesn’t want because he’s already got The Sun, which is the bike-kneeling tabloid. The two of them, once Maxwell gets the Mirror, Maxwell and Murdoch are the two biggest power brokers in British politics. The Conservative Party know that they need a bit of support if they’re going to be elected, and the Labour Party know that they’re going to need Robert Maxwell’s support. So, you know, the way in which to power for ages now has changed enormously in the last kind of 30, 40 years, but they were hugely, hugely powerful figures then.

[00:16:09] Jeff Schechtman: In many ways, it does seem like a lot of Maxwell’s fame and notoriety, particularly in this newspaper and media world, came about because he was always chasing Murdoch in a way. That Murdoch, even though Maxwell lost out on all these deals, the fact that Maxwell was competing gave him credibility on a par with Murdoch that he didn’t really deserve early on.

[00:16:35] John Preston: Well, I think he, I mean, Maxwell was a very successful businessman at one stage, and he spent the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, and he was denounced by the Department of Trade and Industry in the UK as a person who wasn’t fit to be in charge of a public company. But he then basically fought his way back, got his company back again. So he wasn’t just a kind of perpetual ortho-ran to Rupert Murdoch. You know, he was, I mean, in proud stature and right, but he had this fixation that he had to do in equal terms with, or kind of to best Murdoch. And it really, in seeking to prove that he belonged in the same arena as Rupert Murdoch, Maxwell set in chain a train of events, which led to his emotional and mental and physical breakdown, the collapse of his financial empire, and eventually, ultimately his death.

[00:18:04] Jeff Schechtman: What was it that brought his company down, that brought him down back in the late 60s, early 70s?

[00:18:11] John Preston: I can’t tell you, but it had been dogging him off and on for the last, you know, 20 years, which is that he was artificially inflating the profits of his company. So he was about to sell to an American called Saul Steinberg. Steinberg’s accountants went through the books and went, hold on a minute, this is pretty… And that’s where, you know, the House of Cards fell apart.

[00:18:40] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about his purchase of the New York Daily News, because that really was the penultimate moment in his career.

[00:18:48] John Preston: Yeah. I mean, you know, when he buys, when Maxwell bought the New York Daily News, beginning of 1991, the extraordinary thing, he sailed into Manhattan aboard his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, named after his youngest daughter and favorite child. And the New York Daily News had been embroiled in this extremely acrimonious industrial dispute for a month. And Maxwell is seen as this figure who’s come to almost kind of save New York. And when the purchase goes through, people literally break into spontaneous dancing on the street. The Cardinal Archbishop of New York offers prayers of thanks. And Maxwell walks into the most fashionable Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, and all the diners stand up and applaud him as he walks to his table. And yet only nine months late, he falls off the door. Well, he disappears off the back of the same yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, in very mysterious circumstances. And by then, everything had fallen apart. But even then, even when Maxwell is making his triumphant entry into New York, the cracks are already beginning to widen. And Maxwell needed this kind of cosmetic exercise of buying the New York Daily News and all the with it, to really try and convince other people, and indeed himself, that things were in better financial help than they appeared to be.

[00:20:28] Jeff Schechtman: And he wasn’t really able to do that. He really wasn’t able to use all the accolades that he got and all the recognition that he got to effectively cover up what he had been doing.

[00:20:41] John Preston: But by then, it was really too late, and the cracks beginning to widen. I mean, what he’d essentially done for the last four or five years, he’d been churning money around in ever-decreasing circles. So he would take money from one bit of his empire that was in comparatively good shape and use it to shore up another bit that was in bad shape. But the difficulty was, he was perpetually robbing Peter to pay Paul, and he couldn’t keep up. And the banks, who’d been pulling over themselves to lend him money a few years earlier, were starting to kind of, you know, smell a rat and call in the debt, and Maxwell couldn’t pay.

[00:21:25] Jeff Schechtman: What do we know about his death? What do we know and what do we speculate?

[00:21:30] John Preston: Well, we know that at the end of October 1991, Maxwell went up on the Lady Ghislaine, and he’d never been on board the yacht on his own before. I mean, the staff were there, but normally he would go in this kind of retinue of people that would be kind of executives in the mirror or another part of his empire. But on this occasion, uniquely, he was alone, and they cruised around rather aimlessly around the Canary Isles for a few days. And Maxwell was due to fly back to London on the morning of November the 5th, 1991, and he knew that he was going to be affectionately facing three firing squads, because the police were after him, the fraud squad were after him, the banks were after him, and the mirror pensioners had realised there was a gaping hole in the pension fund. And he disappears off the back of the Lady Ghislaine at about around three o’clock in the morning of the 5th of November. The big question, of course, is, well, did he jump or was he pushed? And one of the reasons why 30 years on, speculation is as rife as it is, is because there was a curiously botched autopsy by a Spanish pathologist, which essentially failed to determine the cause of death, and made it a mess of the body that no subsequent pathologist could actually work out what happened either. I mean, I have unquestionably loads of people who are happy to have bumped off Maxwell by this stage. There’s no convincing evidence that, um, anyone knew that he was murdered, they just can’t actually, it simply doesn’t stack up in terms of credibility. In terms of, you know, did he jump or did he fall? Strangely, the people I interviewed for this book bled almost exactly 50-50 down the middle, I mean, route of murder, for instance, remained absolutely convinced that Maxwell committed suicide. My own feeling is that really, as it were, the dividing line between suicide and an accident may be a lot less clear-cut than is generally assumed, and my suspicion is that the answer lies somewhere along that line.

[00:24:27] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about his family. First of all, his sons, how did they fit into his empire?

[00:24:32] John Preston: Well, Maxwell had nine children, um, two of whom died. There was a daughter who died very young, um, towards the end of the 50s, and then Maxwell’s oldest son, Michael, who was the heir apparent, um, was being driven back from, uh, a party, back to his, um, family home in Oxford when he was a teenager, and the car collided with the lorry, and Michael’s very badly injured, and was in a cone for the next seven years, and died. And at that point, that what has, given the two being quite a happy family, albeit with certain provisos, the, the, the family dynamic really starts to fall apart, and the mood becomes markedly darker. Maxwell becomes, with all his company of a tyrannical father, but becomes more so. Uh, I think, Evan and Ian, who, the ones who worked most closely with their father, bore the brunt of that, um, and I think it was extremely difficult for them, um, because Maxwell was, at this stage, a kind of angry, unhappy man, who turned against his extremely loyal wife, um, and he didn’t, he didn’t have any friends at all, really, because he was potentially incapable of relating to someone on a kind of equal level. Um, so he, he does persecute his, his children, um, uh, and I think probably Kevin and Ian more than the others. Um, Ghislaine was the youngest, and, uh, she was born at exactly the same time as, as Michael’s car accident, and indeed, her early years were overshadowed by a pool of grief that over the family. But she then did become her father’s favourite, and of course he named his yacht after her, and I think she was probably less scared of him than her other siblings, and she was better at, uh, diffusing his anger and charming him, I think, from the other.

[00:27:05] Jeff Schechtman: And yet she, more than the others, kind of became her father’s daughter.

[00:27:10] John Preston: Yes, I mean, to some extent, that’s true. I mean, perhaps she was more like her father in terms of character than, than her other siblings. I mean, you know, there’s been a lot of attempts to draw comparisons between her father and Jeffrey Epstein, um, but they didn’t particularly stack up. I mean, you know, I’m questioning, they’re both very, they’re both extremely rich men, um, but Maxwell was the man who had to dominate any road that she, uh, walked into, whereas Epstein was a much, much more kind of shadowy, behind-the-curtain figure. Um, but yet, I mean, you know, mainly, uh, the kind of ignominy of the Maxwell family name has rather settled on the house, I mean, for the time being.

[00:28:03] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about his business legacy. I mean, aside from the fact that, that he moved all this money around, he stole all this money, was he or wasn’t he successful in running his businesses? Ah, yes.

[00:28:18] John Preston: I mean, it’s a tricky question because the answer is kind of yes and kind of no. I mean, he was successful. He made the Mirror more profitable than it had been, um, and he actually kind of paved the way for Rupert Murdoch to take on the, the print union and essentially to break their stranglehold. Um, the difficulty was that he, you know, as one person said to me, you know, Maxwell wasn’t so much amoral as pre-moral, uh, you know, that he was this great kind of jungle beast who just kind of blundered through the undergrowth with no sense of right and wrong at all. I mean, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but he would always fly very close to the wind in terms of his business dealings. Um, and so everything, everything that he touched was tinged with a degree of suspicion. Uh, I mean, I think the legacy of his business dealings, people’s subsequent, uh, less trusting than they had been in Maxwell’s day. I mean, one of the, you know, absolutely bizarre things about Maxwell was that he made a lot of money in the early eighties and, um, and, I mean, and, you know, banks were queuing up to lend him more. And when on the very rare occasions, whenever people would question that he was as rich as he claimed to be, Maxwell would just blithely say, well, a billion dashed away. And Lichtenstein, Lichtenstein is this tiny tap haven. Um, and, um, you know, the great virtue of it as far as he was concerned is that no one could actually be what he did or didn’t credit there. So they were forced to take it with his word. They basically go, oh yeah, it’s all in Lichtenstein. They go, fine, fine, fine. I’ll have some more money. Well, actually, as it turned out, there was no, I mean, there had been money in Lichtenstein, but by the time he died, there was nothing left at all. It had all been, you know, the, everything had been drained.

[00:30:36] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other things that’s so interesting is, is when he died, how vilified he was. The people that had been nice to him and cordial to him for so long. I mean, he was just totally vilified after his death.

[00:30:50] John Preston: He was totally vilified. New Ireland’s extraordinary situation where, when Maxwell died, there’s this enormous view of world leaders, you know, saying what a fantastic person he was with great, you know, force for good, he was great humanitarian and so on. And it really only three weeks later, when it became apparent that in all over 750 million pounds was missing and 350 million pounds was missing from the Maxwell, the Mirror pension funds. So everybody turned on him with terrible ferocity and said, no, no, no, no, no. We always knew there was something dodgy about it. And, and, and, you know, now, 30 years later, he’s still seen in the UK as the embodiment of corporate villainy. And, you know, it’s interesting because there are serial killers who’ve had a better practice than Robert Maxwell. And Billy Worthy, who really adored him in history, has painted him. I’m not so sure. He unquestionably did a very wicked thing in looting the pension funds. But he was the kind of Bernie Madoff figure who was totally trying to kind of line his own pocket. I mean, I think if he’d been able to, he would have paid the money back into the pension funds. I mean, I’ve all sort of had a private theory that one of the people turned on him with such ferocity. More than anything else, journalists hate to miss out on a good story. And at the Mirror, they realised that the two were sitting on this fantastic story unwittingly for years, as Maxwell was plundering their pension funds. And they’d missed it. But when they belatedly, you know, found out what had happened, their ferocity knew no bound. And he was subjected to this kind of, you know, surge of posthumous revenge. You know, it’s one of the kind of things that still has fascinated me throughout writing this book, and it still fascinates me, was trying to, as it were, quantify Maxwell’s moral qualities. You know, yes, he wanted many mistakes, a dreadful man. But, you know, let’s just say hypothetically, he died in 1961 instead of 1991. He would be remembered as this great force for good in the world.

[00:33:42] Jeff Schechtman: So I mean, you know, as we come back again, there was another side. The villainous side, aside from the money, there’s a story you tell about when he was negotiating with James Hoge to buy the Daily News. Talk about that.

[00:33:57] John Preston: Yes. So essentially, Maxwell comes into New York to try and buy the New York Daily News, which is such an appalling finance that they’re happy to give it, basically give it to anyone who’s prepared to take it off their hands. And Maxwell is negotiating with James Hoge, who’s the proprietor of the Daily News, and they’re having lunch. Maxwell’s butler comes in and serves lunch to him in the middle of these negotiations. And to end it, there’s this enormous crash. And he turns back and Maxwell’s picked up this tray with the plates and cutlery and everything on it and wine glasses. And it’s just dropped it on the floor. And, you know, food goes everywhere. There’s broken crockery and everything. And the butler comes back in. He goes, yes, sir. And Maxwell goes, it’s cold. Bring me something else. And what makes the most impression on Jim Hoge is that neither Maxwell nor the butler behaved as if anything remotely untoward has gone on.

[00:35:06] Jeff Schechtman: Finally, what did Murdoch really think of Maxwell?

[00:35:10] John Preston: I think Murdoch despised Maxwell, frankly. I think he thought he was a buffoon and an egomaniac. I mean, when I was interviewing Murdoch, he said, you know, Maxwell was plastering his face over a paper. You never see my face in any of my papers, which, of course, is true. And I think he did feel that his face was in some awful way entwined with that of Maxwell. And it was a source of enormous, I’m not sure he might be pushing it, but I mean, yeah, certainly extreme irritation. And his attitude towards Maxwell plainly had not softened at all in 30 years when I went to theatre.

[00:36:15] Jeff Schechtman: Interesting how many demons Maxwell had.

[00:36:18] John Preston: Yes. I mean, you know, really, you feel, you know, I said at the beginning, it’s hard to think of anyone in the 20th century who journeyed as far from his origins as Maxwell did. And yet you do have this sense that the older he becomes, it’s almost this kind of sense of the other part snapping at his heel and saying to him, you know, almost mockingly, you can’t escape where you came from. And I think that he was increasingly haunted by what happened to his family. And I think he had terrible survivor guilt. I mean, his son, Ian, told me a story about towards the end of his father’s life, he’d gone into his father’s gudger and his father had kind of early flat screen television. It’s an enormous thing mounted on the wall. And Ian walks into the room and his father is standing with his nose pressed up against the glass of the TV screen. And on the television is a documentary which shows people being unloaded which shows people being unloaded from trains, Jews being unloaded from trains. And Ian says, what are you doing? And Maxwell straightens up and turns around and says, I’m looking to see if I can spot my parents. And whatever you think, that is a desperately poignant story.

[00:37:53] Jeff Schechtman: John Preston. The book is Fall. The mysterious life and death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s most notorious media baron. John, I thank you so much for spending time with us. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.