Robert Maxwell kept some intriguing company at his sumptuous Headington Hill home but few guests can have been quite as strange as Miss Eleanor Berry.
Miss Berry , who hails from a Welsh newspaper family, has just completed her own outrageous account of life at the Maxwell court.
She funded the printing of her book 'Robert Maxwell As I Knew Him' (Merlin Books £5.95) herself, so keen was she to see it in the shops. The publishers cautiously added the subtitle 'A Black Comedy', presumably out of terror that some poor innocent might take the whole thing a little too seriously.
After all, there cannot be many authors who reckon to have taken the drug speed under the Maxwell table before insulting one of his guests for revealing too much leg.
The book contains the most bizarre description yet of Maxwell's final months, in which he is bedridden and barely capable of holding a pen. 'The affair regarding the Mirror pensioners could be another example of the disorderly side of his personality and indeed his rapidly progressive terminal illness, dramatically hastened by the lethal sedative, Halcion, now removed from the market,' she writes. Indeed his speech was distorted towards the end of his life. He had been on this drug for insomnia for decades at a colossal dosage.'
She goes on 'The emphysema in his remaining lung was so severe that he could hardly breathe. His thinking processes were so diminished to the extent that he was almost a vegetable. His behaviour had become distinctly bizarre and some instances of this were so extreme that it would be grossly unkind to list them.
'He was bedridden most of the time with an oxygen mask on his face, and if he had been capable of holding a pen and signing any documents, he would not have known what he was writing on.'
Miss Berry's remarkable account begins with her first visit to Headington Hill Hall with her journalist brother Nicholas. Within minutes of being introduced to the publisher she is in his arms on the dance floor.
From then on the grand-daughter of the famous F.E. Smith, is smitten. 'A feeble March sun shone through the trees, making his jet black eyes look hazel,' she writes of Maxwell, then still a Labour MP. 'His face was the most beautiful face I have ever seen, radiant, god-like and essentially masculine. His facial muscles creased into a smile, and shone more gloriously than the sun itself.'
Maxwell is enchanted with her Communist politics and her love of opera but her happiness is briefly interrupted when she is hospitalised with schizophrenia.
She comes to feel that she is one of the few to really understand the man. 'I had noted over the years that Bob saved all his charms and flirtatious chivalry for female company, which is why women found him irresistible. However this pattern of social conduct was rarely directed towards members of his own sex which is why men very frequently disliked him.
Contrary to superficial and indeed much exaggerated reports, there was not an ounce of cruelty in his being. He was honourable and fair and had a heart of gold, but because of the unusual nature of his voice, the amount of noise he made, his sudden and overpowering demeanour and the sheer robustness of his build, he had an ability to frighten others.'
But what about the pensioners? 'I don't think he had an entirely mature understanding of money once he had made it, what to use it for or where to put it. This is not an uncommon trait in individuals who have raised themselves unaided from dire poverty to riches.'
Whether the Maxwell family appreciates such devoted loyalty is doubtful. As a black comedy, it's unlikely to have too many of Oxford's Maxwell pensioner's crying - as a result of laughter at least.
Reg Little
