THE SINKING OF CAPTAIN BOB

Did the same furies that drove Holocaust refugee Robert Maxwell to build a high-stakes media empire play a role in his demise? EDWARD KLEIN reports in exclusive interviews with Maxwell's widow and daughter—and with his business associates in London and New York—on the final mystery of the press baron who died a death as paradoxical as the life he led

March 1992

excerpt:

The one hit hardest by his death was Ghislaine, who recently turned thirty. I visited her in her New York apartment shortly before Christmas. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a loose shirt, and she wasn't wearing any makeup. The floor was strewn with newspaper clippings about her father. Hundreds of letters of condolence lay on her desk, along with boxes of cards of acknowledgment waiting to be sent in reply.

I did not recognize in Ghislaine Maxwell the young woman her friends had described to me—the racy, glamorous social flibbertigibbet whom George Hamilton had escorted to the Ever Ready Derby in England and skied with in Aspen, who had attended the Kerry Kennedy-Andrew Cuomo wedding, and who had once instructed her father's pilot to put his helicopter into a free-fall to scare her fellow passenger.

"He wasn't a crook," she told me. "A thief to me is somebody who steals money. Do I think that my father did that? No. I don't know what he did. Obviously, something happened. Did he put it in his own pocket? Did he run off with the money? No. And that's my definition of a crook.

"I'm surviving—just," she went on. "But I can't just die quietly in a comer. I have to believe that something good will come out of this mess. It's sad for my mother. It's sad to have lost my dad. It's sad for my brothers. But I would say we'll be back. Watch this space."

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1992/3/the-sinking-of-captain-bob