Eleanor Berry is wearing red snakeskin stiletto boots and a grey V-neck jumper. 'Terribly uncomfortable,' she barks in her rasping, staccato voice which has, on her own account, been compared to that of an elderly transsexual. 'I don't know how I ever managed to walk in these. I did it just to please Bob. He liked me in leather.'
Bob is the late Robert Maxwell, former proprietor of the Daily Mirror. Miss Berry is the youngest of four children. Her father is the former owner of two national newspapers. She is the maternal granddaughter of the barrister and Lord Chancellor, F.E.Smith.
They first met at Maxwell's 43rd birthday party at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford in 1966. Miss Berry was 16 and fell instantly in love. 'I was smitten by his sexuality,' she says. 'I have never seen such a beautiful man in my life. I didn't look at him face on. The next time I saw him, I passed out.'
It was the start of a lifelong obsession. Miss Berry has devoted her life to pleasing Robert Maxwell. When he read aloud to her in Russian, she determined to learn the language to surprise him (it took her six months). When she campaigned for him in the 1974 election, she threatened potential Tory voters with a stick and after Maxwell lost his seat, she climbed up the town hall flagpole, only with a stupendous effort and replaced the Union Jack with the Red Flag.
To keep herself from harm, Miss Berry wears a locket containing Maxwell's picture around her neck at all times. "I've always been superstitous', she says.'
We are sitting in semi-darkness in Miss Berry's riverside flat in Victoria, southwest London, drinking vodka and coke from sherry glasses under a shelf crammed with the works of the Marquis de Sade. We are discussing Miss Berry's memoir: 'Robert Maxwell as I Knew Him', undoubtedly the most amusing book I have read all year. The mirrored walls are packed with pictures of the man she calls her 'god'; a set of his books line the shelves. 'If you had seen him you would have dropped dead,' she assures me.
The light is on in the kitchenette, illuminating the largest collection of pills this side of a Boots warehouse. On her bedroom door someone has written in a large scrawling hand: Codicil to Eleanor's Will in Kitchen - and indeed an envelope above the cooker pronounces 'Originals of codicil to will and other documents.'
'The only thing that frightens me is illness,' Miss Berry confides, dragging ambiguously on an ever present Consulate cigarette. In her teens she suffered from Valium addiction and schizophrenia and her book relates how she was eventually sectioned after she bit the ear of a man who spelt "steppe" as "step" on a cigarette case she had been given..
She suffers now from neither and despite an air of fragility behind the kohl-rimmed eyes, Miss Berry is in fighting form. 'I'm very happy being me,' she says, topping up her glass with a liberal slug of Smirnoff.
It's not as if recent weeks have been easy: she has spent the past month at Knightsbridge Crown Court listening to the trial of Gida Ratner, the 25-year-old widow of Dr Victor Ratner, who was accused of swindling £17,000 from Miss Berry. Dr Ratner was a dear friend of Miss Berry's - her book relates how the pair of them terrorised Ian Hislop after he insulted Maxwell in Private Eye.
On Friday Mrs Ratner, who alleged in the witness box that she had seen her husband and Miss Berry taking cocaine and morphine together, was cleared. Miss Berry responded by describing the widow as 'vile' and 'despicable'.
Miss Berry would love to talk about the trial but has been told to remain silent. 'You will print that won't you? Miss Berry has been forbidden by her father to talk about the Ratner trial and naturally she must obey him.'
Her father is the only man whom Miss Berry does seem prepared to obey. Normally she uses the precepts Maxwell taught her to full effect. 'He taught me how to terrify people. Not that there was any bullying in his house, in fact he was the kindest man that I ever met.'
She admits, however, that he had mismanaged his pension fund. 'The man might have lost his marbles. He probably thought he was playing with skittles instead of people's money. He had only one lung so no blood was getting to the brain.' Maxwell, Miss Berry is adamant, died accidentally. 'He went out the back of the boat to be sick and fell overboard.'
Despite her long proximity to Maxwell (she lived at Headington Hill Hall for a year after her landlady in Oxford, where she was studying for A levels, threw her out) Miss Berry refuses to reveal whether or not she had an affair with him.
She says she speaks to Betty about once a week and occasionally sees Ian whom she prefers to Kevin. 'Recently I got very, very drunk and mistook Ian for his father and there was a rather embarrassing incident.'
Miss Berry reels off incidences of Maxwell's kindness to her with dizzying speed. Why did he like you so much, I ask. She replies with habitual honesty. 'Maybe because he saw a reflection of himself in me: the vanity, avarice, ambition, not taking any stick from anybody. He said to me one day "I have come to love you as if you were my daughter."'
How did that make you feel? Pause for effect. 'It was as if I had had a heroin injection.'
'I would not like to have been his wife,' she says. 'I always want to wear the trousers in a relationship, I don't want to be dominated.'
We are talking in lowered voices now, because Miss Berry's 'friend' has come in and is sitting next to a life-size toy leopard in the bedroom. Doesn't he mind the pictures of Maxwell, I ask. 'Yes, but I say you wouldn't mind if I had pictures of Christ everywhere. Bob is God. My man next door who looks after me is more important.'
Like a true believer, Miss Berry is quick to attack those who besmirch Bob's memory. 'If anyone says anything, I say "your opinions are based on despicable ignorance. If you ever mention his name deprecatingly in front of me, be sure to get the worst."'
What do you mean by the worst, I ask nervously. Slowly, theatrically, Miss Berry rolls her eyes and points a long fingernail at a picture of the Kray twins on the wall. There is a silence and then she lets out a blood-chilling cackle and leans back in her chair in luxuriant delight.
