“Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were locked in this Titanic struggle for almost 30 years to essentially become the world’s biggest media baron… Murdoch won every round… that led to Maxwell’s own mental and physical destruction.”
John Preston is a scholar, journalist and author of many books including A Very English Scandal, and most recently, Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell. Preston was also former Arts and Television Editor at The Sunday Times.
Robert Maxwell left Czechoslovakia in pursuit of fortune at a young age, leaving behind a family, many of whom perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were famous rivals in their respective quests to become the world’s biggest media baron. Murdoch triumphed at every stage and ultimately led to Maxwell’s mental and physical decline. Maxwell suffered a mysterious death that has led to wide-ranging conspiracy theories. “Maxwell disappeared off the back of his yacht named after his youngest daughter and favorite child, Lady Ghislaine… there are a lot of people that would tell you that he was bumped off, usually by Mossad, but there’s no evidence at all he was murdered.”
Maxwell’s youngest and favorite child is Ghislaine. Infamously, she is the alleged co-conspirator with Jeffrey Epstein who was accused of sex trafficking before his death while in jail. Naturally, this has led to even further conspiratorial speculation.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
John Preston
Author
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darcie: (00:07)
Hello everyone. And welcome back to salt talks. My name is John Darcie. I'm the managing director of salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance technology and public policy. Salt talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators, and thinkers. And our goal on these salt talks the same as our goal at our salt conferences, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big and interesting ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome, uh, an author and scholar to salt talks, uh, by the name of John Preston, he's the author of many books. He's also the former arts editor and television critic of the Sunday Telegraph. As I mentioned, he's the author of six highly acclaimed books, including a very English scandal, which is now a BBC and Amazon prime TV series, starring Hugh grant and Ben Whishaw and the dig, which has recently been filmed, starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, and the Lily James and his most recent book is called fall. Uh, and it's about the life and death of Robert Maxwell, who was, it was been in the news because of his daughter's travails as well recently, but hosting today's talk is a big fan of Mr. Preston and reader of his books, Anthony Scaramucci, who is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of salt and I'll turn it over to Anthony
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:32)
To begin the end. I am loving this right now because I'm almost a hundred percent confident that you mispronounced Ralph finds. His name is correct. Mr. Preston,
John Preston: (01:43)
I'll tell you, take this badly. You both brisk pronounced it. It's all Ray fines.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:49)
See that. I love that. That why obviously, cause I'm an Italian American from long island. I'm like an S pronounced every word that I utter in the English language, but the fact that you Darcie mispronounced it is giving me joy beyond comprehension. So I'm entering this salt talk, Mr. Preston in a very good mood right now. Excellent. But, but sorry, you wrote a phenomenal book about, uh, Mr. Maxwell, the fall is the it's called fall, the mysterious life and death of Robert Maxwell. Um, I want to start out though with how you became an author, your Odyssey, I think is an interesting one to, uh, beginning of the process of writing these books. Uh, take us through that arc of your career, sir.
John Preston: (02:36)
Well, I was a journalist for a long time and I wrote a few novels. Uh, I'd get up very early in the morning and run right for a couple of hours before I went into the office and the novels did okay. I mean, you know, hardly set the world on fire in terms of, uh, sales and then like a lot of print journalists, you know, particularly in the UK, but also in the U S things started to get bad and then they got worse and I began to think, Hmm, hold on. I got to find something else to do. So I thought, wow, you know, I can't really do anything else apart from right. So I sat down and I wrote a very English scandal, which was about the Jeremy Thor puffer, which is a big scandal in the 1970s where this man who was the leader of the liberal party, uh, was accused of, um, diverting liberal party funds to pay Hitman, to bump off his gay lover.
John Preston: (03:33)
And it really kind of went on from there. And I, I kind of toyed with the idea of Maxwell for a bit, and I couldn't kind of find a way in, and then it just seemed to me that, you know, in the UK, 30 years after his death, he's still seen as the, as the kind of embodiment of corporate villainy. And I really just wanted to look at him again and see if he was quite as black as he's been painted as, and if so, why, and whether he was perhaps a more kind of nuanced, complex figure than people have on the whole given him credit for.
Speaker 4: (04:17)
So
Anthony Scaramucci: (04:18)
Let's go into that because I think that this is one of the more fascinating things who is for our, we have lots of young viewers, uh, lots of young listeners, uh, who is Robert Maxwell, John Preston, who is Robert Maxwell. Well,
John Preston: (04:35)
Robert Maxwell set out to become the greatest media Baron in the world and he very nerdy succeeded. But in fact it was, it all went horribly wrong. But one of the extraordinary things about Maxwell is that it's hard to think of anyone in the 20th century who journeyed as far from his roots as Maxwell did, he was born in a small town in what was then Czechoslovakia. His, uh, his family was Jewish. There was a large Jewish population in this, um, in this town and the age of 15 or 16 Maxwell goes off essentially to seek his fortune. And whilst he's away, it's during the war, um, his parents, three of his siblings and his grandfather all die in Auschwitz. And that's really the prison that you have to look at Maxwell's life through. Um, would it have been very different? Had that not have happened to him almost certainly. Would he have been a better person who knows, but essentially there was a very, very dark cloud hanging over him from a young age.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:58)
So I have the book here, uh, it's uh, it's called fall, the mysterious life and death of Robert Maxwell. Britain's most notorious media barren. There's another media Baron that is celebrating his 90th birthday and Dave, where they were, they rivals John. And if so, of course, they were described that rivalry to us.
John Preston: (06:20)
They were Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:23)
And indeed,
John Preston: (06:25)
Um, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch were locked in this Titanic struggle for almost 30 years essentially to become the world's biggest media Baron. And as Maxwell son, Ian said to me, when I was researching the book, he said, you know, one of the things you have to remember is that there was a time when, uh, my father and I, my father-in-law and Rupert Mudder were the only two people on the planet breathing the same air. And it was as if the two of them were kind of slugging it out, uh, on the top of Mount Everest, uh, to become, you know, the greatest, um, media figure in the world and, and Murdoch won every round essentially. But in seeking to prove that he belonged in the same arena as Murdoch Maxwell set in chain set in train a chain of events that led to his own kind of physical and mental destruction, his downfall, and ultimately his death.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:35)
So let's go back for a second because, uh, Mr. Murdoch, uh, his father was a print media Maven in Australia. He was already starting to reach out away from Australia, into other English speaking countries. Uh, and so I'll say something somewhat English, hopefully won't be too offensive, but you guys sort of have this aristocracy. It seems like Murdoch started from a starting block. That was well ahead of Mr. Maxwell. Is that fair to say? Yeah,
John Preston: (08:06)
I think that's true, but they were both outsiders and they both were not members of the British establishment, uh, Murdoch wasn't Jewish, which probably helped him. And although Maxwell had changed his name to something that sounded not remotely Jewish. I think there was quite a lot of antisemitism there, particularly in the city of London at the time, but Maxwell and Murdoch had first met in 1963 in Australia. And when I went to see Murdoch for the book use, it was very obliging, uh, great to see me. And, uh, he said that he'd first met, um, Maxwell and Maxwell comes to Australia and he's got this plan that he wants to sell encyclopedias in Australia all over in Southeast Asia. And he's looking for a business partner and, uh, and Murdoch, uh, as he admitted was kind of spell bound by Maxwell. He's got the gift of the gab.
John Preston: (09:10)
He's very charismatic murder cause just starting out and he agrees to become Maxwell's business partner. He's going to pay a million Australian dollars and together they're going to sell these encyclopedias all over Southeast Asia. And the plan is that Murdoch is going to come to London, they'll sign the contract and then it'll start. But before he has a chance to come to London, Murdoch has lunch with a friend of his, who's a publisher in Australia and he's telling him all about this great plan he's got with this extraordinary man Maxwell he's met and the publisher starts laughing and murder cause kind of bemused and go well, what's so funny. And it turns out that Maxwell had actually got the encyclopedias were bankrupt stock that the publisher given to Maxwell for free. And he was trying to flog them on to murder for a million dollars.
John Preston: (10:01)
And as Murdoch said, yeah, he was obviously trying to con me and he was a crook. And as far as mass murder was concerned that, you know, he decided he didn't want any more, anything more to do with Maxwell and that was going to be it. And you never expected to see him again. But in fact, their faiths were entwined from that moment on and it used to drive Murdoch nuts that they were always being mentioned in the same breath. And the fact that their initials were the same as well added to kind of, you know, another squeeze of poison as far as he was concerned
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:36)
Is, you know, it's fascinating. There's a picture in the book. I'm going to hold it up here because this is, um, an interesting picture. It is a picture of Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Maxwell together. And as you point out in the book, that is a rare occurrence for the two of them to be in the same room together, uh, after that, uh, sequence of events that you're describing, um, was he a crook, was Mr. Maxwell a crook, uh, according to your research, I think it's a very
John Preston: (11:08)
Difficult question to answer in a way I, if you look at what happened to Maxwell in his, the early part of his business career, he winds up in Berlin in 1946, he's helping to run an allied newspaper in, in Berlin designed to kind of, uh, re-introduce Germans to the joys of democracy. And this man walks in one day and says, can you help me? And he turns out to be the biggest publisher of scientific journals in Germany, and nobody has published any scientific research in Germany during the war. And this man has a vast backlog of stuff that you can't get anyone to publish. And Maxwell's first instinct is to kick him out because that's basically was always max Maxwell's first instinct and anybody, and any, thanks, hold on a moment. And for years, as a young man, he's dreamt of getting hold of this commodity, that's going to be an enormous demand after the war. He can get for next to no money. And he suddenly realized my God, you know, the answers just landed in my lap. And the commodity was knowledge and Maxwell becomes during the 1950s, the world's biggest publisher of scientific journals. And
Speaker 4: (12:27)
He always
John Preston: (12:29)
Flew pretty close to the wind in terms of, uh, his business career. But I think he was, you know, he was, uh, he w he, well, one, I was always sort of, as it were fixed on his profit margins, the other could occasionally give off an unexpectedly idealistic glimpse. And I think he did strongly believe in the importance of scientific research. It's when he becomes obsessed with owning a newspaper and with going toe to toe with Rupert Murdoch, that things really start to go haywire. And the rot sets in
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:10)
Is this, uh, the classic Greek story of someone that is overreaching, is this uberous, is this a lack of self awareness? Is this just a twist of fate that leads to accidental tragedy? How do you, how do you, uh, how would you frame this narrative of Mr. Maxwell's wife?
John Preston: (13:31)
I think it's a classic story of hubris. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a terrible morality tale in a way of someone for whom nothing was ever enough. Um, and as Maxwell becomes older it's as if he's constantly trying to grasp this indefinable something, that's going to give him a sense of completion and fulfillment. And of course it always eludes him and money doesn't do it. And, um, and, and there always is this kind of constantly receding horizon. And the more desperate he becomes, the more he overreaches himself and the more he gets into terrible financial trouble. And, uh, and the more the cracks start to appear.
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:27)
Do you think that, uh, uh, that was a suicide, his death,
John Preston: (14:35)
Well, Maxwell disappeared off the back of his yachts named after his youngest daughter and favorite child. The lady Gillan in the early hours of the 5th of November, 19
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:50)
Minutes. How he pronounced that? I just want to make sure you get that right, John, when you come in with questions. Okay. I know that the lane, I know that one you were saying just lane for like, it's fine. Go ahead. Let's go to Galane he's off the back of the boat that he's jumped the boat. Yep.
John Preston: (15:10)
No, I think basically that morning, he's due to fly back to London where he's essentially going to be facing the equivalent of three firing squads. He knows by this point that the police are after him, the bankers are after him and the mirror pensioners know that he's been looting the pension funds. So there are three possible scenarios. Was he pushed? Did he jump, did he fall? Now, there are a lot of people who will tell you, um, without any kind of tremor of doubt that he was bumped off, usually by Mossad, always the kind of front runners in the queue here. Well, it's, although it's quite a long queue. I mean, there are, there are certainly a lot of people who would be very happy to bump Maxwell off, but there's no evidence at all that he was murdered. And if it doesn't really make sense, I mean, why go to the trouble of sending a team of amphibious Hitman after the middle of the middle of the Atlantic to tip him into the sea when Maxwell was so addicted to self publicity, that he practically walked around with a target pin to his forehead anyway.
John Preston: (16:23)
So I think we can safely dismiss murder if it was an accident in many respects, it was an astonishingly fortuitous accident given that he knew what was going to happen to him. Um, did he commit suicide? We'll certainly, I mean, interestingly, about kind of the people I interviewed for the book pretty much split down the middle Rupert Murdoch, for instance, absolutely convinced no doubt whatsoever that Maxwell committed suicide. My own suspicion is that the line between an accident and suicide might be more blurred than we tend to assume. And I suspect that the answer lies somewhere along that line.
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:19)
Okay. So, so you're not in Rupert Murdoch's camp, but you're not fully convinced, but there's a lot of speculation around him being a Moussad agent, a potential double agent or an agent of the KGB. Uh, why did people believe that to be the case? And is there any truth to those rumors? Well,
John Preston: (17:39)
There was, I mean, Maxwell was certainly a spy, um, and, uh, he was aspired for British intelligence during the war and he had this astonishing capacity to pick up languages. He spoke, I think, seven languages. So when he is in Berlin at the end of the war, Berlin is that time divided into four zones, the French zone, the American zone, the Russian zone and the British zone, I think. Yeah. So Maxwell can move from zone to zone and pass himself off as a native. So it's very, very useful. The British intelligence like that. And indeed the British intelligence set him up in business when he comes to England at the end of the war. Um, I think he probably stopped being a spy sometime in the fifties, but he carried on. He loved, um,
Speaker 4: (18:31)
Being
John Preston: (18:33)
A networker. He loved feeling important and conveying bits and pieces of information from one government to another. He was incredibly well connected. He had fantastically good contacts behind what was then the iron curtain, because he was doing a lot of business in Russia at a time when virtually no other Western business people were doing any business at all. Uh, he had very good contacts with the Israeli government. Um, so he was, there was no doubt that he was a very kind of useful pipe through which to pass information, but I don't believe that he was a double agent for anybody. And I don't believe that he was a fully paid up agent for anybody either. I mean, indeed, you know, I mean, if given them, you know, what are the kind of prime qualifications I'm aspiring is normally something that takes place behind the curtain as it were Maxwell was the complete opposite of that. He had to dominate any room that he set foot in. So he would have in many respects, been a terrible liability to any government that employed him as a spy. So I think he was used by people to pass information back and forth, but that was pretty much as far as it went.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:59)
So no, no reason for them then too often then. Yeah,
John Preston: (20:03)
No, no, really not. And you know, and there's, you know, there's stories that he was trying to blackmail the Israeli government, um, and into kind of bailing him out at a time when everything was going down the pan. But again, absolutely no evidence to suggest that at all. And indeed the fact that the Israeli, the Israelis pretty much gave him a state funeral when he died and buried him on the Mount of olives, seems a kind of odd thing to do if they've just bumped him off.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:39)
So fat, fascinating stuff, but he looms large even today. Uh, his daughter is now in jail. She was a close friend of alleged conspirator, Jeffrey Epstein was their upbringing. What was her upbringing like? And how did that association come about? Well, I think, I think it was
John Preston: (21:05)
The strange thing is that actually family life with the Maxwells, uh, for quite a long time was perfectly happy. They lived in this enormous house, um, on just outside Oxford looking out over the dreaming spires of Oxford university. The Maxwell's had nine children, two of whom died and Galane is born in pretty much the same week as Maxwell's oldest child oldest son. Who's the ad designate. Michael is very badly injured in a car crash. Uh he's in his teens and he lies in a coma for the next seven years and then dies. And that cast this terrible black cloud over the Maxwell's family life and just as Maxwell himself had to be, it had been brought up under this terrible cloud of what had happened to his own family. I think Elaine was brought up under a similarly black cloud, um, and like all the Maxwell children at one time or another, she worked for his father. She was, she was, she was his father's favorite. I think she was the one who could charm him more easily than the others and possibly was less intimidated by him. The Maxwells would have these kind of
Speaker 4: (22:41)
Pretty
John Preston: (22:42)
Grim Sunday lunches where they would have to each child would have to give a little talk about what they'd accomplished that week and what they hope to accomplish in the week to come. And sometimes there'd be asked about kind of current affairs and another of Maxwell's daughter. Describe to me the kind of fare of watching her, the sort of Searchlight beam of her father's gaze move around the table towards her. Uh, and I don't think Elaine suffered as badly from that perhaps as the others. Um, and then when her father died, she was absolutely grief-stricken possibly even more so than any of her siblings. Uh, I think she absolutely adored her father. Um, and she found herself in New York. How, I mean, people have tried to draw analogies between Jeffrey Epstein and her father, but they don't really stack up apart from the fact they were both extremely wealthy men at one stage.
John Preston: (23:55)
Uh, I mean, Epstein was a much more shadowy figure than Maxwell. I mean, Maxwell really was this tremendous egomaniac. Whereas you feel with Epstein Epstein kind of was happier operating underneath the radar. Um, and you know, how she came into Epstein's orbit. Well, obviously there's been a lot written about that, but you know, I'm, uh, one of the people who think that it's entirely possible that Galane yeah, she seems to have been tried and found guilty by the media on both sides of the Atlantic before she's stood trial. And I believe possibly in a rather old fashioned way that she, uh, deserves a fair trial and who knows she may well get off.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:56)
Yeah, well, we'll have to, we'll have to see, I don't know a lot about her. Um, as I like to tell my friends in New York, I didn't start making any money until well after Jeff Epsteins career was exposed and over. So I don't have any, any relationship there, but it does. It did seem to be that anybody of any profile or wealth was somehow ensnared in his web. Uh, do you think she wasn't snared in his web or do you think that she was a quote unquote co-conspirator of his,
John Preston: (25:28)
I th the short answer is, I don't know. And my book, I very carefully stopped, um, before any of that happened, because I feel it is a different story.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:43)
Yeah, no. And that's why I'm asking the question, because I, I noticed the stoppage here. I turned it over to the millennial. You and I are, uh, are baby boomers, the millennials dying to ask questions, tell the truth before the book came out, did you have any idea who Robert Maxwell was? W I was probably your, I was probably your age on the Goldman Sachs trading desk, where we had done several secondary offerings for him. And Goldman actually had to pay a settlement to those pensioners, John. I know John Preston. I know. Absolutely. Yeah, indeed. And so I remember that day vividly because there was a dark Pauler over the trading desk, the day that Mr. Maxwell died, did you know who he was Dorsey?
John Darcie: (26:28)
I did because as, as any millennial would do, I've gone down the entire, you know, he's a foreign intelligence agent rabbit hole, and Jeff Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were part of some, uh, honeypot scheme to powerful people around the world, uh, and blackmail them, which we're not going to get deep into those conspiratorial rabbit holes. But I knew about him because of the whole Galane Maxwell thing and, and, uh, read up on him. But obviously you got more background through this wonderful book, but, um, yeah. Thank you, Anthony, for passing the Baton. So one of the things that I found fascinating about Robert Maxwell, uh, was the similarities he has to, to other schemers that have existed throughout history. Whether it be Frank Abignail catch me if you can, um, or, or others, Bernie Madoff, or the one MDB scandal, uh, where people are able to trick financial institutions, wealthy investors through just, uh, sheer force of will. What about his personality and his skill set allowed them to do that?
John Preston: (27:36)
I think, well, Maxwell was a tremendously charismatic man. Uh, he was also very intimidating. Um, so very few people in the UK genuinely stood up to him. A lot of people claim to have stood up to him, uh, and said that, you know, I would have no track whatsoever with Maxwell and his disgraceful ways. A lot of them, when you were just rolled over, like, you know, complete dummies when Maxwell was actually in their company, the extraordinary thing about one of the, maybe many things about Maxwell's financial affairs is that throughout the 1980s, he's a kind of, you know, he's because he's a very successful businessman. He has, he genuinely has money, um, in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1980s. But as things go on and as he overreaches himself, very few people ever say, well, hold on a minute. You know, where is this money?
John Preston: (28:48)
And if they ever did say it, Maxwell would go, well, it's all sorted away in Lichtenstein. And Lichtenstein is this tiny kind of quasi country, which is essentially a tax Haven. So you put money in lectern Stein, and nobody can get at it. So all he ever did was to say, well, I've got billion stashed away in Lichtenstein. And they all believed him. I mean, it was astonishing, but I think that, you know, there is a big difference between someone like Maxwell and someone like Bernie Madoff in the Bernie Madoff was solely interested in lining his own pockets Maxwell weirdly.
John Preston: (29:33)
I mean, I think he would have actually did lose money from the para the pension funds of the, of the mirror of mirror newspapers. But I think he would have paid it back if been able to, he wasn't particularly interested in money for the sake of money. He liked to wield power and influence, but he had virtually no interest in possessions, apart from his yacht, the lady gala in which she, he was very fond of. Um, but he, he's a kind of, you know, he's a man without a center in a funny sort of way, what did he want? You know, and you feel that Maxwell himself didn't really know, and he's just constantly trying to find out is
John Darcie: (30:18)
It, is it like a Robert Moses situation, the power broker, great Robert Carroll book where a man maybe starts his life with a certain ideological bent, but then he tastes power and, and it becomes a pursuit of power and influence for the sake of it. I think with Maxwell
John Preston: (30:37)
Idealism and expediency were always running along parallel tracks. So I don't think it was necessarily that one took over from the other, although one certainly did become, um, you know, Supreme as it were. Um, I mean, I remember when I was, when I started researching the book and when I started writing it, someone asked me how I was going to do it. And I said, it's like a build your own citizen Kane kit. And it really is a bit like that. And, uh, and if you Chuck in bits of the great Gatsby, you pretty much got it. You know, you have this extraordinary vivid Technicolor, mythological life. Um, and as I said, you know, as I said to Anthony, yeah, it is very hard to think of anyone in the trench, essentially who journeyed is far from his roots as Maxwell. And you have this strange feeling, the older he becomes it's as if the past is kind of constantly snapping at his heels, almost mocking him for what he's achieved. And basically saying you can never escape who you were.
John Darcie: (31:45)
Yep. So is this going to be turned into a Netflix series or a movie or both? What's the future of this story? Because it's too interesting to not be adapted to the screen?
John Preston: (31:56)
Well, it's been bought by a UK company working title and they plan to turn it into, uh, a TV series. So there's some discussion at the moment, whether you could have one actor playing the young Rowan Maxwell who is incredibly good looking, I mean, it looked kind of like Clark Gable and max row, the older, he got the bigger he got. And I mean really to the point where you would need someone in the mother of all fat suits to be able to play him. Um, so, but I'm delighted to say, that's not going to be my
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:38)
Problem. [inaudible] Anthony has this, John, you start, I'm cutting you Mike, John. Okay. He was trying to suggest that I could play him without the fat suit. If you start John, I'm cutting you mic. I saw where you were going with that. Okay. Friday's Maximilian, paranoia, this depressing. Did you hear what he said? He said I had a screen actors Guild card. He was already started. I had to get in there. Jack, keep going, Darcie, go ahead. He
John Darcie: (33:11)
Had already started to respond before I even said anything. Uh, John, so your, your comment about the paranoia is correct, but, um, yeah, no, that's fascinating stuff. And we look forward to watching that
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:22)
And hopefully the paranoia, if people are after you just remember that. Okay.
John Darcie: (33:28)
Well, we look forward to watching it on screen and hope they remain true to your wonderful book. Uh, before we let you go, is there anything else interesting that we didn't cover related to his life that you think, uh, was interesting as you did your research?
John Preston: (33:43)
I think he's a kind of figure
Speaker 4: (33:47)
Who foreshadows
John Preston: (33:50)
Donald Trump in a way because they, both of them have similar kind of crazed self aggrandizement and Maxwell. Um, as soon as he buys the daily mirror in the mid 1980s, um, he rechristened it, uh, ma his headquarters Maxwell house. So you can see Mac there. There's a pretty short line between Maxwell house and Trump tower and Trump, uh, Maxwell buys the New York daily news at the beginning of 1991. And Trump has indeed tried to buy the New York daily news on several occasions during the 1980s, um, as a springboard for his political career. And Trump was kind of fascinated by Maxwell. And there's a kind of, I remember I talked to Maxwell's valet who said that Maxima once had a party on board, the lady Galane and all these kinds of the great and good of New York without including Donald Trump. And because Maxwell was very proud of his, um, this was a cream shag pile carpets. All the guests had to take their shoes off and putting these little kind of blue plastic booties on, and it would protect the carpet. And Maxwell's valet told me that, you know, Maxwell very reluctant that Trump very reluctantly removed his shoes, but he looked round the yards with this expression of kind of, or an envy on his face as if Maxwell had something that Trump lusted after. But at the time hadn't quite got his hands on.
John Darcie: (35:27)
Yes, he eventually got his hands on it for at least four years. And daddy did all right. Well, John, it's fascinating to have you on, it's a great book fall about the life and mysterious death of Robert Maxwell. Anthony want to hold it up one more time, the American
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:43)
Version of the UK and the American version, but this was a, a great read and reads like a thriller John, uh, congratulations on your, uh, golden global winning, uh, television series as well. And, uh, we look forward to your future works. Thank you again for all thoughts.
John Preston: (36:04)
Thank you very much, indeed.
John Darcie: (36:07)
And thank you everybody for tuning in to today's salt. Talk with author, John Preston, just a reminder. If you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous salt talks, you can access them on our website@salt.org backslash talks or on our YouTube channel, which is called salt tube. You can also interact with us on social media. We're most active on Twitter at salt conference, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. And please spread the word to your friends about these salt talks. We love educating our community and growing our audience as well. And on behalf of Anthony and the entire salt team, this is John Darcie signing off from salt talks for today. We hope to see you back here soon.