Editor's Letter

The Maxwell Mysteries

Who was Robert Maxwell? The cartoon press baron, owner of Britain's Daily Mirror and Macmillan in the United States, was greeted as a hero in New York when he "saved" the Daily News last year. It was yet another act in his perpetual reinvention of himself from Holocaust refugee to British parliamentarian, from business failure to big-time player in the global media game.

The only consistent theme in Maxwell's life was mystery, and he perpetuated it even in death. Did he fall from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, or was he pushed? He was a bully and a blowhard, but could he have been so cruel as to commit suicide, leaving his sons Kevin and Ian to almost certain criminal indictment rather than face his own ruin? Was the man given a resplendent state burial in hallowed ground on the Mount of Olives a Mossad agent ? Was he a dedicated family man or a sexual ogre fixated on Filipino midgets?

At the center of the orgy of speculation and revelation there remains the anguished figure of "Captain Bob's" newly impoverished widow, Betty, a Frenchwoman of dignity and character. At the age of seventy, she is finally being forced to recognize that she did not know the man she was married to. In exclusive interviews with Betty and their daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, Edward Klein reports on page 180 on the private frustrations of the emigre Jew who felt he was never accepted by the British establishment. From the boardrooms of London and New York, former New York Times Magazine editor Klein pieces together the frantic machinations as the curtain came down on Maxwell's last charade.

Perhaps the real key to this character out of TrolI lope lies in the death camps of World War II. Having survived the extinction of his family, he may have felt he could survive thereafter only by being larger than life, borne along on a balloon of publicity and hype. Suicide with a web of mystery attached would therefore be the perfect Maxwellian solution. As Martin Amis suggested about Salman Rushdie, Maxwell has disappeared into the headlines.

This is the first-anniversary issue of Vanity Fair's debut in Britain and the ninth in the United States. It has been a year of extraordinary growth. It is pleasing to report that in the second half of 1991 the U.S. Vanity Fair gained 201,000 new readers and has a circulation of 991,000 copies. In Europe, we are proud that the British edition has a circulation of 63,500. Thanks for staying with us—and joining us—in these less than buoyant times.

Editor in chief