At the age of 18, in 1939 as World War I broke out, Betty began her studies at the Sorbonne. Established in the 13th century, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. During the war the male student population shrunk as many joined the armed services and lost their lives. This had no impact on the male instructors as they were considered too old to enlist. At one point female students made up over 40% of the total population.
Among the courses she took was the Cordon Blue cooking class. It was a class also attended by Parisian hostesses and society women who wanted to improve their skills. Betty does not appear to have had a passion for any role. She began her studies at the Sorbonne with the idea of getting a degree in philosophy, however, when her father took up studying the law, he persuaded her to do the same because it was much more practical.
The wife of Robert Maxwell
Betty is usually described as the “long-suffering, loyal and innocent wife” of ruthless crook Maxwell. However, that may not be an accurate description of the woman he considered his equal.
While still using the alias Leslie Du Maurier, he proposed marriage during their first lunch. This is something men with an agenda, not based on love, appear to do. Before becoming Robert Maxwell he obtained a wife who could guarantee his entrance into the world of high society in England. And, to top it off, she was a descendant of kings. Throughout his life he never tired of having himself photographed with members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Family. These photos were prominently displayed in his offices and throughout his home.
It was the French-born Betty’s good manners and refinement that helped the ruffian Maxwell pass himself off socially. She constantly reminded him that “manners maketh man” even though, as the years flew by, he became less and less concerned of how he appeared to anyone.
Betty was a virgin when they shared their first sexual encounter. Of that memorable event she writes:
“Although he was ablaze with desire, he did not rush me. I was ready for love, eager to be at one with him ... But despite my readiness, it was a painful first experience. He was in tears at the thought of having hurt me. Nothing was ever to move me more than my husband’s tears.”
She complained that every time he looked at her she got pregnant. Her sister, Vonnie, who became a gynecologist, delivered all her children in Maisons-Laffitte, France. The couple would eventually have nine children – two died early. Karine, born in 1954, died at age three of leukemia and their eldest, Michael, born in 1946 died in 1969. Michael had been in terrible car crash at the age of 15 leaving him in a coma for seven years. Three days before the accident she had given birth to their youngest child whom they named Ghislaine. At the age of 23, still lying on a hospital bed, he died without ever regaining consciousness.
An interesting insight into their marriage can be gleaned from Michael’s hospitalization. Betty believed the only person to visit him was herself. Her husband never accompanied her. Long after Michael’s death Betty learned that Bob, on occasion, would instruct his driver to stop by the hospital where he would sit for hours with his firstborn son. Why he never shared this with his wife may be interpreted as him not wanting to show signs of weakness—especially to her. Having a ‘stiff upper lip’ is a particularly English trait. It was not socially acceptable to show one’s feelings when distraught. The origins of this concept go back to the Spartans in Ancient Greece—who believed in stoicism, discipline and self-sacrifice. The writer Edward Morgan Forster famously bemoaned his fellow Englishmen as having “well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts”.
In her memoir, Betty pretends to gives us a glimpse into her private life with her ever-demanding husband. The book, frankly, has less to do with her life than it is a tribute to Maxwell—who ironically she was ready to divorce just before his death. It is alsoo, in this writer’s opinion, her chance to re-write her own history. About her husband not being a spy. About not knowing anything with regard to the complicated financial frauds. Her blithe passages where she doesn’t even condone her parents for their obvious antisemitism literally left me stunned. This is an example of gaslighting in its finest. On the other hand, Betty Maxwell’s so-called memoir would have been a wonderful story if she had written about making the best of an unhappy marriage and her struggle to become known for her own accomplishments—but, as I stated, that was not its purpose.
I do not buy that Betty Maxwell did not know. She knew about the other women. She knew when he was lying. She knew about it all. Denial, however, doesn’t change facts. From their earliest days together, he added her as a partner in enterprises that were clearly bankruptcy scams. What Betty does, on occasion, is launch into a sermon bemoaning the decline of her marriage and the abuse she tolerated in order to elicit sympathy from both her family and the reader.
For example, she writes, “He would constantly revert to the same old theme—that I did not look after his material needs to a standard he considered acceptable and was therefore incapable of ensuring his happiness. Sometimes there would be a button missing on a shirt, or I would forget his evening shirt studs or black tie when I packed his bag. He would complain that his cupboards were not impeccably tidy or that I hadn’t got his summer clothes out early enough ... What he wanted me to do was assist, bolster and serve him and the children.”
The letters from him reinforce his expectation of her as his wife.
“Betuska my love,
You most certainly have made big strides towards becoming the perfect partner though the things you have done like washing my clothes, or darning my socks … Although by themselves they may seem trivial and matter-of-fact, do not be deceived by that because they constitute the demonstration of the love we have for each other, and to me they are of the highest value, for without them our love could not live.”
Her letters to him show she is willing to do anything he asks. Some are difficult to read because she is groveling for his attention and already fleeing affection:
“I want to live for you, I want to drown my soul in your desires. This requires all my attention and all my strength, there is no time to do anything else. You will only need to say what you want and it will be done, or to express a desire and I will satisfy it. Perhaps you will discover that the half-flayed creature you have stripped naked still deserves to be loved.”
Out of their nine children—seven survived—which kept Betty busy while her husband pressed on with his life. His dreams. When he needed her to campaign with him during his Parliamentary period in the 1960s she dutifully packed them off to their grandparents in France. They remained there for six long months during which she devoted all her time to his effort. In 1964 representing the Labour Party, Maxwell was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Buckingham and re-elected in 1966. He served until 1970.
The fact that Robert Maxwell was Jewish was not a problem for anyone except for Betty. It gnawed on her that he’d married outside of his faith. This, despite the fact that Robert Maxwell married her because she wasn’t Jewish. For many years he followed the advice his mother had given to him in his young teens: “to behave and act like an Englishman is to be successful”. Maxwell was also a social climber and it’s likely Betty snagged herself a husband by simply proclaiming she was a descendant of French Kings. The sex-addicted braggart, whose physique grew larger with each passing year, could not have been what the virginal Betty planned when she agreed to marry a man whose name wasn’t really his and who hid behind his movie star good looks while pretending to be a gentleman.
Betty, the hostess
Betty Maxwell thoroughly enjoyed being the wife of a tycoon and everything it afforded her. The clothing, the travel, the entertaining. She reveled in the praise bestowed upon her as a hostess, “People tell me that my dining room was rather like one of those celebrated Parisian salons.” She prided herself in receiving London’s upper class and politicians into their grand estate.
Gyles Brandreth, an English writer and politician, was a guest at one of their parties in the 1970s. Nothing struck him out of the ordinary at first. “It was only when I went up to Maxwell that I realized he had this apparatus on. There was an old-fashioned microphone attached to the lapel of his jacket with a windshield on it. And on his belt was this large box, the size of a hardback book with a dial in the middle. This was somehow connected to speakers in each of the rooms.” Brandreth realized that Maxwell was wearing his personal PA system. It enabled him to address people from anywhere. “He’d turn the dial down when he was talking to you. Then, as soon as he saw someone he wanted to talk to on the other side of the room, he’d turn it up again, and this disembodied voice would come booming out of the speakers.”
Betty ran Headington Hill Hall like a hotel for his business interests which is similar to how Ghislaine Maxwell ran Jeffrey Epstein’s homes. She kept hundreds of scrap books with her husband’s press cuttings. And for his birthday, every year, they had grand parties. Captains of industry and the social set descended upon their house on the hill to enjoy the opulent and pompous extravaganzas.
Peter Mandelson, a British Labor politician, was among the many people who attended their parties. “It’s very strange because you’d simultaneously want to be at Maxwell’s parties and at the same time shrink away from him,” he said. “Because he was such a bully and so unpredictable. To be honest, I was frightened of his company. He had that ability to make you feel completely small and inadequate, and that just scrambled my head.”
The other women
During their entire married life Betty ignored the revolving door of women that ended up in his bed while neglecting her completely.
When she discovered he was having an affair with his young personal assistant she comforts herself with her own faithfulness. In her book she writes, “Nor could I understand how a girl would allow herself to fall in love with the father of six children under the age of eight, whatever the circumstances. It was not the kind of moral code I had been brought up on, and I can say in all honesty that I have never allowed myself to fall in love with a married man.”
According to the book Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy one of Maxwell’s lovers was an MI6 spy. She labeled him a sexual predator adding, “He had those eyes which would undress me from across a crowded room. Once he had me through the bedroom door, he was all over me. The result was he usually came to orgasm during our foreplay. But he was always very generous in his gifts. He gave me expensive jewelry at Christmas and on my birthday. Only after our affair had ended did I discover he had given other women the same gifts. After he had sex, he was gone in minutes. Looking back, he regarded a woman as little more than someone to satisfy his physical demands. He would often call me at all hours to come to the penthouse.”
Was Betty truly the martyr she painted herself to be in her one-sided marriage to Robert Maxwell or had she become too accustomed to the chauffer driven Rolls Royce, exotic trips, and life of privilege to leave?
Maxwell often said, “I can’t get along with men. I tried having male assistants at first, but it didn’t work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss.”
Throughout her description of their marriage one cannot miss the sensual tension of the dominant partner Robert was and the submissive that Betty was. Of her having to do things in a certain way to please him and never properly getting it done to his exact liking so that it evoked from him a reprimand.
Their marriage seems like a prequel to the erotic romance novel Fifty Shades of Grey by British author E.L. James published in 2011—many years after their life together was over.
Beating of the children
The mental abuse and punishment was not restricted to Betty. It seeped into the next generation. Their children were an extension of themselves and as such, they too, were subjected to beatings when they misbehaved.
She wrote in her book after his death, “Bob would threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp.” The Times in London reported, “At mealtimes in Oxford, Maxwell questioned his children about world affairs. In the event of a mistake, the meal was interrupted while Maxwell physically beat the child in front of the others. If a comment in a school report was not perfect, Maxwell caned the child. If the meal was brief, he would make one child the scapegoat of his anger.”
Although Betty claimed in her book that she might have “gone too far” when he “persecuted his children, as he did every Sunday, reducing them to tears, each in turn, week by week” – she claims it was important for her to maintain a unified front before the children.
At one time, when Ian was 15 she gave him the option of waiting for his father to come home or getting “disciplined” by her. She writes, “After a moment of reflection, he decided to take the beating from me…I hated doing it and needed all the courage I could muster to perform such a hated punishment with the twins’ riding crop.”
Only Ghislaine, many said, escaped the full wrath Robert Maxwell’s twisted perversion.
After 20 years of marriage, Robert took Betty to Africa on a safari. She thought it would be a romantic holiday for the two of them until her husband, anxious to be back in his world, returned to London leaving her alone.
She wrote to him the next day:
“For some years now, I have realized, at first with bellicose sadness, then with hurt pride and at last with victorious serenity, that my usefulness to you has come to an end…As a supreme act of my love for you, I will make no more demands on your physical and mental love and I relieve you as of now of any sense of guilt that might creep in.”
Betty could not have been unaware of the fact that since the beginning of their marriage, her husband had been having one affair after the other. While he might have been more discreet in the beginning of their marriage he became less so as one child after the other was born.
Nor could the refined Betty claim to be oblivious to his ill manners and crudeness.
Robert Maxwell regularly soiled his silk bed sheets at night, shit with the door open, never flushed the toilet and used flannel towels to wipe leaving them strewn on the floor. He let his Filipino maids, Julia and Elsa, take care of the soiled towels and sheets without a thought as to how utterly disgusting it was for another human to wash off his excrement.
He was also known to drop the silver trays where his meals were delivered to him by his butler on the floor if the food was cold or if he’d changed his mind and wanted to eat something else. The butlers would pick up the discarded food quietly so as not to disturb him. Maxwell also fired people at whim. Just before Christmas one year he fired an employee after accusing him of stealing fifty cents. And one time, Ian, his son was late to a meeting and he, too, was fired. Psychiatrists would later say Robert Maxwell most likely suffered from bipolar mental disorder.
Neil Kinnock, a member of the Labour Party, said of him, “I was in this constant dilemma of not wanting to lose his support. How do you deal with this extremely capricious man with an overwhelming sense of his own power? While I knew I couldn’t afford to lose his support I knew too that he could change in an instance; it was like walking on eggshells.”
In 1984 after Robert Maxwell purchased The Mirror Kinnock and his wife invited the Maxwells to an informal dinner at their local Italian restaurant. They were astonished to see Maxwell and Betty arrive in separate Rolls-Royces, walk in and pretend all was normal. Fact is—it was normal for them.
Semion Mogilevich | Samuel Pisar
In 1988 when Robert Maxwell was obtaining an Israeli passport for Semion Mogilevich along with another 23 for his associates, Betty introduced him to Samuel Pisar.
“I had originally introduced Sam to Bob after the unforgettable impression he made on me when I went to ask him to address a conference I was chairing on the Holocaust in 1988. His famous book, “Of Blood and Hope, in which he relates his experiences as a youngster in a Nazi death camp, had touched me profoundly.”
In the 1980s Maxwell was helping to launder money for the Mossad. Mogilevich, at this time, was stealing from Jewish refugees who were emigrating to Israel and the United States from the Soviet Union. Pretending to help them by buying their assets, telling them he would sell these at market value and then send them the proceeds after they were settled—he kept the money. In Craig Unger’s book, American Kompromat, he writes: “Maxwell became a bagman of sorts who moved millions of dollars around at the toss of a hat. He became very close to the Politburo. The information he provided was priceless. He began sharing valuable Western technology with Moscow—stealing it, really—and worked every side of the fence, spending one day in the White House with Reagan, the next in the Kremlin, and then, perhaps off to Israel.”
At precisely the same time that Maxwell is helping Mogilevich fleece Jewish refugees, Betty, has established herself as an expert on the Holocaust. She even organizes a conference called “Remembering for the Future.” When writing about who helped her in the aftermath of Maxwell’s death, she states:
“The arrival of Sam and Judith Pisar was a great solace. I had originally introduced Sam to Bob after the unforgettable impression he made on me when I went to ask him to address a conference I was chairing on the Holocaust in 1988. His famous book, Of Blood and Hope, in which he relates his experience as a youngster in a Nazi death camp, had also touched me profoundly. I remember returning from Paris and saying to Bob that I had just met a man who had made the strongest impression on me since I met him, Bob, all those years ago. I also remember his answer: Then I must meet that man too.”
Anyone who has examined the Maxwell family would be naïve not to wonder if Betty Maxwell’s work on the Holocaust was the equivalent of Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar non-profit. Non-profits and philanthropic work go hand in hand with not only the fleecing of the public but are also used to create a false public front.
The intentional buffoon?
As the years flew by Robert Maxwell became massively overweight, breathing garlic from the folds of his body. And when he spoke he was either shouting or cursing. Despite this, he continued to seduce women, was hugely charismatic and many of the people who worked with him were fiercely loyal.
As the Parisian daughter of an upper-class family Betty had to be aware of his boorish behavior in public. The once poor orphan had become one of Britain’s richest and most grandiose characters. His ego had become so monstrous that he was ridiculed behind his back. Even Queen Elizabeth had a laugh at his expense naming her spaniel dog after him.
Robert Maxwell bounded up the steps of the stage as the ballerina performed for London’s high society at a charity function. The grotesquely obese man interrupted her and began to demonstrate the proper way she should move. The audience whispered amongst themselves things they would not dare say to Maxwell’s face.
Everyone who knew him had an opinion.
And those who worked for him feared him.
No one was neutral about Captain Bob. Anyone who came into contact with him or observed him shared their disdain for his overbearing manner.
Even strangers.
Betty Maxwell appears to have been the only person who neither feared him nor hated him. Perhaps in her eyes he remained the young handsome soldier she met in Paris after the war. What she had to know with certainty was his belief that one was born either as a master or slave.
Years later, they stopped sharing a bedroom and both began to think about not just a separation but a divorce.
Robert Maxwell began to spend more time at an apartment he kept in London behaving as if he were a bachelor. He’d gorge on Chinese food, urinate off rooftops and appeared to be quite tired of family life.
1990
In July 1990 he told Betty he wanted a “legal separation and that it had to be advertised in the Times.” It wasn’t. “I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want you to phone me, I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I no longer love you.”
Robert Maxwell’s indifference to his wife was also observed by others. Nick Davies, who worked with Maxwell as his foreign editor on the Daily Mirror said, “He treated her quite disgracefully – he would be rude to her in front of people, say at official dinners. When she fussed over him, Maxwell would not hesitate to tell her to ‘fuck off’.”
Divorce was also on Betty’s mind. It was just a matter of how to approach him and ask for one that would be suitable for her. Before either one of the two could take a step into finalizing their marriage, Robert Maxwell drowned at sea on November 5, 1991.
It is worth noting that Jeffrey Epstein was considered a person of interest in the death of Robert Maxwell.
