Western Daily Press Thursday August 17 2000.
Novelist recreates her ‘sweet’ hero.
Maxwell is still my ideal of a man
(Eleanor Berry says that she did not utter the above words)
By Roger Taverner
It is one of the few sunny summer days this year, so the chance to sit on the Avon Gorge Terrace over-looking the Clifton Suspension Bridge is too good to miss.
Not, however, if you happen to be a vampire, or indeed the largely nocturnal author Eleanor Berry. I didn’t get a chance to check out her reflection in a mirror but the darkly eccentric writer, famed for her black attire and leopardskin scarf, does have an aversion to sunlight.
The writer, daughter of former telegraph owner Lord Hartwell, also likes to indulge her imagination in a bit of death and gore and does her best work at night. There the similarities end.
I accede to her request to put up the table umbrella so we can shelter from the rays.
Eleanor gained much notoriety for her intriguing study 'Robert Maxwell As I Knew Him' — the Mirror magnate was a very close friend — and was deeply affected when he came to a sudden dramatic end in 1991.
Ironically Maxwell’s mysterious fall from his boat near Tenerife was much like life imitating Ms Berry's art. Her novels are famed for their death and destruction. No-one gets out of them alive.
One would imagine that once she got over the grieth of losing Maxwell — "a hulk of a man who looked like a beautiful black labrador and generated a vivid, brutal and overpowering sexuality" — she would have appreciated the mysterious finale to his life, shrouded as it was in scandal and conspiracy.
Indeed, as she says of her 17 books: "I like them to end on a sad note. I think it is a dull book if it has a happy ending."
Her latest novel, 'The Rendon Boy To The Grave is Gone', is no exception to her rule. Grimly humorous, it opens with a young Ephraim Rendon being orphaned when his mother perishes in a fire attempting to save a manuscript.
Along comes the story’s tall, dark, dominant hero, bounding in like some out-of-control labrador. Sound familiar? Well, Yes, this is Robert Maxwell coming to life on the pages.
No matter.
"I lung-cancered him and that was that," says the author with God-like finality. "That’ll teach him."
It doesn’t have a very nice ending either. One of her friends was so distraught when she read it, she immediately downed a bottle of Eleanor's best scotch. "Cost me a fortune," she moans.
It also robbed her of the most important of her creative juices. She writes only at night, in long-hand, with a bottle of whisky nearby. She finds it helps immensely, especially when she is concocting the sex passages which punctuate the storylines and the psychological terrors she inflicts on her suffering characters.
Eleanor, who is in her forties, inherited a cottage in Clifton, Bristol, and splits her time between the city and London. She said: "I only write at night and most of the things are out of my imagination, rather than my experience.The sex, like the people having it off in the back of the chauffered Rolls Royce, is made up. There are quite a few shockers in the book.
"But sex does sell, and people do like to read about it. It is easier to imagine it after a few whiskies."
Eleanor features on television’s The Index, HTV’s what’s on-in-the-West show, this lunchtime although she can often be found on late night programmes involved in more risque debate.
"A while ago I was on one caught between a male stripper and Gillian Taylforth, so the conversation was always going to be involving sex. I really enjoyed it," she laughs. The conversation always inevitably leads to the libidinous late Mr Maxwell too.
They met at his 43rd birthday when she was just 16. Later, when her university landlady threw her out of her digs, he allowed her to stay at his home, Headington Hall, in Oxford.
She became a close friend of all the family and is still in touch with his relatives, including his widow, Betty. But Eleanor has never confirmed that she and Maxwell were lovers.
Teasingly she says through a cloud of cigarette smoke: "We had an electric relationship and occasionally he would kiss me on the mouth. What happened after that I cannot say."
It has been said she has a penchant for unwashed men, who are slightly overweight and wear their ties loosened at the neck. She admits she would not argue with that description.
She confesses she went on a bender after Maxwell’s shock death and remains one of his staunchest defenders, believing he would have paid back the pension funds which he raided. She knew a different man from the public image.
"Underneath that peculiar exterior, there was a sweet vulnerable creature of immense sensitivity," she muses.
"I still feel his presence everywhere I go and I find that terribly comforting. Perhaps he's here now," she adds, chillingly. His death, she says, was purely accidental.
Her hero in the Rendon Boy, Ian Rosen, was becoming Robert Maxwell, so she had to kill him. Subconsciously she was recreating her dead friend.
"It was terribly painful because I had created Maxwell on paper and fell in love with Ian Rosen. People told me I had created another Maxwell stereotype and they were right. I had to rewrite the book twelve times to change Rosen. He had loose ties.
"I had created my ideal man, but the fact that I wouldn't be able to find him in real life made me feel ill. He existed on paper and in my head, but he wasn't real, so I had to kill him off."
No happy ending there, then.
'The Rendon Boy To The Grave Is Gone', costing £9.99, and other Eleanor Berry novels are available through Amazon via the Internet. More about the author and her works can be found on her website, www.eleanorberry.net
