Married to a "Monster" - by Susan Poizner
Jerusalem Report, March 9, 1995

He told their children she was a "poison well," but Robert Maxwell's widow still loves him.

On the Mount of Olives, facing the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, some of Israel's greatest heroes are entombed, amongst thousands of ordinary Jews. This ancient cemetery is also the burial site of a man born as Abraham Leib Hoch, a one-time yeshivah bokher from the small Czech village of Szlatina.

Hoch, the son of an impoverished butcher's assistant, was a man of many identities. In 1940, as a 17-year-old, he escaped the Nazi occupiers to England and joined the British Army. He changed his name to Leslie Ivan du Maurier and by 1945 he was a captain who had earned a Military Cross for bravery. Then Hoch redefined himself again and took on his final identity. As Robert Maxwell, he turned into a publisher, served a half-dozen years as a Labour MP, and became a media magnate and multimillionaire, who died in 1991 in the waters off the Canary Islands, under circumstances a mystery to this day. "He lost his breath in the vast sea, but not his soul. It will float above the waves as a marker to anyone believing that a man's life can be bigger than the cards he is dealt." So said Shimon Peres at Maxwell's funeral.

After the funeral a less flattering view of the man began to emerge. He was an intimidating, domineering autocrat who beat his children with a riding crop and cheated on his wife. He plundered 440 million pounds sterling from his employees' pension funds, leaving many Maxwell retirees with an uncertain future. Maxwell's empire collapsed and his family was caught in the rubble. Two of his sons are being tried for alleged involvement in their father's crimes. His wife says she has lost all her property, including, at the age of 73, her own pension.

Nonetheless, the image of Maxwell as a Monster is the image his widow, Elisabeth, hopes to change with her book, "A Mind of My Own" (Harper Collins: 288pp; $23). This fascinating account of their life together gives insight into Maxwell's history and his wife's baffling quest to earn the respect of her demanding and often unreasonable husband. "Betty" Maxwell, who grew up in a staunchly Protestant home in France, is a highly intelligent and literate woman. She retains her beauty and has a warm, friendly manner. Dressed in a modest flared skirt and pastel sweater, she toys with the plastic bead necklace that she wears while we speak about her life and her husband's mysterious death.

In was on November 5, 1991 that Robert Maxwell was lost at sea. At noon that day, the crew of his 150-foot yacht the Lady Ghislaine realized he was missing. Six hours later, his naked corpse was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean: autopsies in Spain and Israel were inconclusive about the cause of death. Perhaps Maxwell had a heart attack and fell off the ship. Perhaps he committed suicide. Or perhaps he was murdered; in one far fetched version, as alleged by Victor Ostrovsky in his latest book, "The Other Side of Deception," Maxwell had a long relationship with the Mossad, and was eliminated by the Israeli intelligence organization when he tried to extort funds for his ailing empire from it.

"That's complete rubbish," Elisabeth Maxwell says about the last possibility. "It was totally unnecessary for my husband to have been in the Mossad. He knew absolutely everybody in Israel. He didn't need to be in any form of agency to do anything or see anyone. And to put it crudely," she adds, clearly deeply offended by such an accusation regarding a country she herself adores, "I wouldn't have thought that the Israelis kill their friends."

In "A Mind of My Own," we follow the years during which the sheltered Elisabeth Meynard became a devoted wife, a mother of nine children (two of whom died young) and finally a scholar and a lecturer on the Holocaust. Her interest in the Holocaust stemmed from her husband's experiences: He lost most of his immediate family and hundreds of other relatives in the concentration camps, though he himself was spared imprisonment. "My first visit to Auschwitz was in the 1960s. That was traumatic, mostly because Bob's grief was so poignant. In those days you could put your hand in the dirt and you had bones in your hands. It was the first time I had a profound sensation of guilt. I suppose that guilt also reverberated from my husband. All of a sudden, I was really the enemy, the goy."

This feeling of guilt about the Holocaust later drew her to study the subject systematically. Her discoveries would shake her own faith. "Guilt is belonging to a religion which for centuries has really crucified again and again these millions of Jews," she says, with the conviction of an academic. Indeed, she became one in her 50s, receiving her BA in Modern Languages at Oxford and later doing her doctorate there by creating a history of her family based on several generations worth of letters. But it was her interest in the Holocaust that led her to trace the roots of her own religion. She decided that even as early as the time of the Apostles, Christianity had strayed too far from its Jewish roots, and hence she rejected any Christian principles that aim to supersede the Torah.

Maxwell was not terribly impressed by his wife's efforts to understand Judaism and the Holocaust. "At times he would say to the children that everything comes from the poison well, meaning me. Not meaning that I had poison in my, but that I was not educated in the proper way, the Jewish way. But I didn't resent it because I think he was right somehow," she says. Her words apparently reflect a message drummed into her over the years of a marriage in which nothing she did, nor the person she was, would ever be good enough for her husband. (The couple's children were all baptized, and raised as Christians.)

As we sit in the lounge of the London townhouse in the fashionable Pimlico district where this debt-ridden woman lives (it is "borrowed" from generous friends, she says), Betty continues to forgive her late husband's sins. When "Bob" asked for, and received, a legal separation from her in 1990, she explains, he had already begun to lose his sanity. "If I could believe that my husband was really in possession of all his faculties at the end of his life, I would be enormously angry. But I know he wasn't. He was a complete megalomaniac in the last few years of his life and that is really a disease." My eyes are drawn to a small, framed black-and-white photograph of the man, which mysteriously dominates the colourful room. His eyes look black and piercing.

"He was a totally extraordinary man," she continues. "Of course I would have preferred for it to not have finished this way. The price is very high to pay, but the rewards were very high too." Robert Maxwell may have been a megalomaniac, but his wife, evidently, was also afflicted. Her malady was her undoing. It was blind, deaf and often unrequited love.